Original subtitles

This week on "VICE,"

the battle over what is and what isn't fake news.

Violence against Trump supporters

isn't being covered. Why is that?

- I am, madam. - You're like every other goddamn guy

who comes in with a fucking opinion.

"VICE" is fake news? What are you talking about?

We did allow the enemy into the house.

And then, unlocking the mysteries of human health

in our microbiome.

This is a medicine for headaches.

Whoa!

We've shifted too far away from the environments

which supported our health,

and now we need to move backwards a little.

Go, go, go!

We are not animals!

Since the last presidential election,

America has become increasingly divided.

If you want to discover the source

of the division in our country,

look no further

than the fake news and the crooked media.

So much so that today's political opponents

are not only arguing over the issues,

but also over what is actually considered a fact.

Facts really have no meaning.

Facts are only true to the progressives.

That's not what we do. We are in the business

of sussing out what is true and what is false.

The debate over what is or is not fake news

has become the latest partisan controversy

in the United States.

So we sent Isobel Yeung to Washington, D.C.,

the frontlines in this battle for the truth.

We're here at the White House,

about to head into the press room

for the media's daily briefing.

During the Trump administration,

there's been a lot of tensions playing out

between the mainstream media and alternative news sources

that have been spreading fake news,

and often that battle plays out inside this press room.

So, what's the goal?

You're going to be Periscoping the whole briefing?

Yeah, I'll see what the vibe is.

You want people to watch

what you do, as your own brand.

That's the key.

Can I ask you to move over to the left here a little bit?

Sorry.

Mike Cernovich is part of a new class

of conservative media personalities

who garnered huge popularity online

throughout the 2016 election,

and are now gaining access to the White House press room.

- _ - Hi, guys.

Uh, I hope you guys had a good weekend.

It was definitely a busy one for the Trump administration.

Over 27,000 people watched

as Mike Cernovich live-streamed the briefing.

Your questions. Jill.

John.

- Sarah. - Thanks, Sean.

- Zeke. - Thanks, Sean.

Margaret. Margaret, Margaret.

What about violence against Trump supporters?

The media endorses violence.

When you have been asked about, uh,

President Duterte and his human rights record...

Well, I think there's an economic piece to this as well.

What about violence against Trump supporters

that's happened at Berkeley?

And again, I'm just gonna let...

the President will have an opportunity

to speak with him about those objectives.

So, with that, I'll see you guys tomorrow.

Have a great day. Thank you.

What about violence against Trump supporters in Berkeley?

The violence against Trump supporters

isn't being covered. Why is that?

Why will nobody here cover

the violence against Trump supporters,

and why won't you demand that leaders of the Democrats

disavow the violence from Antifa,

the way you demanded Trump disavow

violence from his supporters?

- You have no answer? - _

I am, madam.

It is very important that this get out there. Thank you.

I didn't see actual, you know...

I didn't see any real journalism there.

A lot of high school kids in there.

I got to take you back behind the scenes

and... we'll talk soon.

_

_

_

I do. I want the violence

against Trump supporters to be...

I want to hold the Democrats to the fire.

And here's what I know... here's the way I know...

- Time out. It's the White House. - Yeah. Right.

You wanna hold the Democrats to the fire,

go to the Democrats.

You have a point of view, and I understand,

but you don't understand journalism.

You don't understand what we're really here for,

and that's what pisses me off.

You're like every other goddamn guy

that comes in with a fucking opinion,

and instead of listening,

instead of really finding out the issues,

you want to grandstand

at the end of a goddamn meeting.

I just want to see the violence

against Trump supporters, which is rampant...

I want to see some actual leadership from the media on that.

I wanna see them hold Democrats accountable.

We're not leaders! We're reporters!

Before Cernovich fancied himself

as a political reporter,

he was a little-known blogger

on the Internet's alt-right fringes.

We might have some breaking news...

During the 2016 election,

he began spreading pro-Trump propaganda

and conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton.

A lot of you don't have the trained eye,

so you might not be able to see this right away,

but she's doing Parkinson's shuffling.

He now has over half a million followers

across multiple platforms.

To get a better sense of his operation,

we went to his house slash headquarters in Orange County.

Every day I think, "How am I gonna build

a platform and make it bigger?"

The old days of, you know,

"I'm just one guy and I work for the whatever newspaper,"

that's how you become irrelevant, that's how you die.

To stay relevant,

Cernovich spends his days Periscoping to his followers

from a bedroom-cum-studio upstairs.

- So, here it is. - This is where... this is the office.

This is where the magic happens.

As you see, I just have things cobbled together here.

So, this computer here

will be my YouTube.

This one will be my Periscope.

These are my burner phones.

And I could do a lot more if I had more...

- stuff. - Yeah, you're good at making yourself

- sound bigger than you are. - Exactly.

Well, it depends on how you measure impact, right?

How many individual journalists

get more views than I do a month?

You know? Not many.

And... we're back.

Hottest story of the day, of course,

is that CNN staging the fake news media thing.

There's a camera guy in the background, by the way.

We did... we did allow the enemy into the house.

I met this person, Isobel... do you want to say hi, Isobel?

Hi, guys.

I'm Isobel Yeung, from "VICE."

I met Isabella... how do you say your last name?

Isobel Yeung.

"'VICE' is fake news." What are you talking about?

Here, you can sit down. They can't see you on YouTube.

"Fuck you. Fuck 'VICE."'

Some people are happy, some people are don't.

"Isobel, are you ISIS?"

Right, that's... that's the new thing.

CNN is ISIS. It's kind of like a new thing.

So, what are you trying to do here? What are you trying to achieve?

Just, like, hanging out, really.

So, when I... when I go live, I can actually

feel parts of my brain activated,

because I'm plugging out of...

this physical world,

and I'm plugging into this collective consciousness,

this collective matrix.

Anyway, I'll be coming back tonight

to do a live show, so like and subscribe.

Do you think that it's the failings

of the mainstream media

that has allowed for the rise of people like you?

Oh, for sure, because they didn't want to cover

the kind of stories we thought were important.

If you don't cover stories that a lot of people want to hear about,

then that's a market opportunity for other people

and that vacuum is going to be kind of filled.

I'm going to ask you a few questions, actually,

which will be "yes" or "no."

Do you believe that Hillary Clinton was involved

in a child pedophilia ring?

I believe... definitely that whole story...

Yes or no. Do you believe that Hillary Clinton

was involved in a child pedophilia ring?

Well, it depends on how you define it,

because there's multiple definitions of that.

On the 3rd of November... so five days before the election...

you tweeted...

"The Clintons were running a pedophile ring.

It's been in the emails all of the time.

We just weren't able to see the code.

- Yeah, I don't agree with that. - You don't agree with that?

I definitely don't think the Clintons are personally

running a pedophilia ring.

- So, why did you write it? - That was worded imprecisely.

- It was more that they... - Why did you write it then?

Well, Anthony Weiner is a pedophile and they're connected with him.

Bill Clinton officiated his wedding.

So, why did you say this if you know that it's not true?

Well, it's not that it's not true,

it's that it's worded improperly.

- So, now you take this back? - I would reword things

definitely more carefully on Twitter.

You pretty aggressively tweeted this.

You tweeted the idea that they were

very heavily involved in a pedophilia ring.

You also hash-tagged "Pizzagate" very aggressively,

which led to the shooting

- _ - in a Comet pizza restaurant in D.C.

Exclusive tonight on the conspiracy theory

that came to be known as "Pizzagate."

An armed gunman stormed a pizza place

in Washington, D.C., known as Comet Ping Pong.

Police say Welch drove six hours

from Salisbury, North Carolina,

to self-investigate a conspiracy

known online as "Pizzagate."

Do you understand, or if you acknowledge,

the dangers which are involved in spreading

this sort of false information?

Well, people spun that whole pizza thing out of...

completely away from what I was talking about.

But can you understand the connection between the two?

I definitely believe the Clintons

are connected with pedophiles and pedophilia,

- the pedophiles in Saudi... - Can you make the connection?

Do you understand that one is connected to the other,

and that you tweeting about Pizzagate

and you tweeting about the Clintons being involved in a pedophilia ring

led to this shooting in broad daylight

in a pizza restaurant in D.C.?

No, because I'm not connected

to what other people are saying on the Internet.

- On an given day on the Internet... - So you absolve

all responsibility when it goes out onto the Internet?

I'm responsible for what I talk about and what I say.

I'm not responsible for what other people talk about.

You think you're one of the best journalists in the country?

In Amer... Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure,

but the people who are gonna watch this on "VICE,"

or on HBO, are not my people.

So you guys could create this, like, caricature

of a madman and a monster,

and maybe two or three people

who follow me on Twitter will, like, even watch it.

So we live, now, in like parallel structures.

Right now there's no shared set of facts in the country.

We wanted to know how polarizing

America's media landscape has become.

So, we visited MIT's Media Lab,

where Eugene Yi and his team

analyzed millions of political tweets

throughout the 2016 presidential campaigns.

So, what are we actually seeing from this graph?

These are people on Twitter who are following each other.

The red indicates the Trump supporters,

the blue, the Clinton supporters,

and then the green, Sanders supporters.

Each tiny dot represents a user tweeting about politics,

with the fine lines showing shared Twitter connections between them,

clustering them into tribal networks.

There's very few connections, as you see.

It's very sparse.

Trump supporters are connected

and very tightly clustered

into their own information world.

Secondly, if you look at the pattern

of how these Trump supporters use Twitter,

they actually tweet four times more

than the average Clinton supporter.

So, did it not come as much of a surprise to you that Trump won,

with all this passion behind him here?

Well, more than the passion, I think.

Seeing where the journalists are located in this network

was way more indicative of some kind of missing feedback loop.

What you see here blinking in blue

are the verified journalists,

and the yellow represent unverified journalists.

So, both the verified and the unverified journalists

are all the way over here. There's no journalists

connecting to the Trump supporters at all.

Yeah, isn't that... isn't that very interesting?

So, I mean, Trump has a real point when he says

we're not listening to the people who really matter

because these people's views are not being represented.

At least on Twitter, we see that there is

a separation of where the journalists,

and who the journalists are following,

and no one is really listening

or plugged into, uh, this Trump-supporter graph.

This suggests that we are missing, fundamentally in society,

some of the voices that led to, um,

you know, Trump's success.

These voices included many

formerly fringe bloggers and alt-right personalities

who saw a golden opportunity

to speak directly to Trump supporters

and create a mass movement online

to elect him as president.

All of these false attacks

are absolutely beneficial. We're only bigger.

Social media feeds across the country

were flooded with their pro-Trump messaging,

along with highly-targeted adverts

fueled by mass amounts of personal information

mined from the Internet.

In the case of the Trump campaign,

the controversial data-targeting company,

Cambridge Analytica,

claimed to have been integral

to Trump's victory,

reportedly using an analytics technique

called psychometrics.

We were able to use data to identify

that there was very large quantities

of persuadable voters there

that could be influenced

to vote for the Trump campaign.

Psychologist Michal Kosinski

is not affiliated with Cambridge Analytica,

but he is an expert in the field of psychometrics.

Psychometrics aims at measuring

psychological traits.

A computer model, just by looking

at the books you're reading, movies that you're watching,

or websites that you're visiting,

would be able to infer your political views

with an accuracy that is not achievable to human judges.

Do you think that people realized, at the time,

that their own digital footprint, and that this big data was being used

to actually target them with personalized adverts?

I think that people do not realize

how much an algorithm can know about them.

The same algorithm can also be used

to reveal your intimate traits without your knowledge

and without your consent, which clearly

creates huge risks for the individuals

and for the society as a whole.

While Cambridge Analytica has denied any wrongdoing,

a UK regulatory authority has named them

as part of a widespread investigation

into the use of data analytics

for political purposes in that country.

Is there any proof at all of the effectiveness

of psychometrics in the most recent election?

One of the pieces of evidence

is to look at the amount of money that has been spent on it.

Politicians, very much like companies, are rational beings

and they won't throw money at something that doesn't work.

Cambridge Analytica has since backtracked,

claiming it never used psychometrics for the Trump campaign after all.

But political campaigns around the world

are pumping money into the use of big data for elections.

In fact, one of Trump's top donors,

billionaire computer scientist Robert Mercer,

invested millions of dollars

into Cambridge Analytica.

Mercer did not respond to our requests for an interview,

But we spoke with David Magerman.

He was a key architect of Mercer's

billion-dollar hedge fund algorithms

for nearly 20 years.

Cambridge Analytica themselves have denied that they've

really had much impact at all on the elections.

Do you think that that could be the case?

I don't believe that's possible.

Bob Mercer is a lot of things. One thing he is, is brilliant.

If he invested the kind of money

that he invested in Cambridge Analytica,

and if he asked candidates that he wanted to win

to use Cambridge Analytica,

he's doing it because he knows it works.

Magerman is suing Mercer for wrongful termination,

claiming he was fired for speaking to the press

about Mercer's involvement with the Trump campaign.

Mercer's attorney has described

Magerman's allegations as meritless.

Wealthy people and businessmen have always given

sizable donations to politicians and to political campaigns.

What's so different about what Robert Mercer's done?

I think that there's a new wave

of political donors

that are buying overwhelming influence

over the views of the people who they're supporting.

One of Mercer's key collaborators

in obtaining that influence

has been Trump's former chief strategist,

and executive chairman of Breitbart News,

Steve Bannon.

Bannon also formerly served

as the vice president of Cambridge Analytica.

And Mercer pumped millions into Breitbart News,

which was used as a strategic

pro-Trump tool during the election.

Bob Mercer saw, before most people,

the impact that non-mainstream media could have

on manipulating voters

and on getting people to believe what he wanted them to believe.

And when the mainstream media

began reporting on false information

spread by these new alternative outlets,

a war over facts arose between the two sides.

Look, alternative facts are not facts.

They're falsehoods.

This has been fueled by the president's personal crusade

against the traditional press.

Media outlets

like CNN and MSNBC

are fake news.

We now live in a world where any facts

you disagree with can be labeled "fake,"

leading to a record low of only 32% of the population

now actually trusting the press.

No, not you. Not you.

- Your organization is terrible. - You are attacking our news organization.

Your organization is terrible. Let's go.

One of Trump's favorite targets

in his war on mainstream media is CNN

and their senior White House correspondent, Jim Acosta.

Aren't you concerned, sir, that you are undermining

the people's faith in the First Amendment, Freedom of the Press,

when you call stories you don't like "fake news"?

The public doesn't believe you people anymore.

Now, maybe I had something to do with that. I don't know.

We spoke to Acosta about reporting on the White House

in the fake news era.

Do you feel like this term, "fake news," has been

hijacked by the administration? Has been jumped on?

It's being exploited, no question about it.

They want to damage the credibility

of news organizations that are reporting

factual information

about things that are going on here at this White House.

And when he calls us fake news,

okay, let's... let's examine that.

I'm not the one who said

that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States.

That was fake news.

The President of the United States did not have a larger

inauguration crowd size than Barack Obama.

President Trump said that Barack Obama

was wiretapping him at Trump Tower.

That's fake news.

We're reporting on a president who...

has engaged, time and again,

in his own version of fake news.

Why is it, do you think,

that the American public is so divided right now

and that there is so much trust in what the president says?

You know, I think that bitter partisanship

is always going to exist in the United States.

The extreme left and right

squaring off in bloody demonstrations

in recent weeks.

These people, Antifa, are Neo-communists

and they need to be rejected by the Democratic party,

just like Republicans have rejected the Neo-Nazis.

The idea that a president of the United States

cannot unambiguously

denounce Nazism... is extraordinary.

It's time to expose

the crooked media deceptions,

and to challenge the media

for their role in fomenting divisions.

The danger becomes

when you have somebody

in the Oval Office

who is fomenting an atmosphere of division.

What's at stake is...

we get to a point in this country where...

half of the country only believes something because the president says

that's what the truth is.

Um, the president doesn't get to decide what the truth is.

In season three, we covered the search for new drugs

to combat powerful and sometimes incurable

bacterial infections known as superbugs.

We then followed up that story with our report

on the use of fecal transplants,

or injecting beneficial bacteria

from one person's gastric system into another's,

to actually treat these superbugs.

Who would have ever thought this was, like, the cure?

You just put other people's poop in you, and it works.

Right.

As this previously-untapped scientific field

continues to evolve,

the possibilities for human health

could be limitless.

So we sent Thomas Morton to investigate the next steps

in this emerging field of medicine.

The lady I'm very carefully

trying not to infect with anything

has an aggressive form of bone marrow cancer.

Her doctors have put her in sterile isolation

following a massive dose of chemo

which has left her immune system practically nonexistent.

That chart up there, they'll start writing down

my red and white blood cells, my platelets,

and they'll keep track of it every day.

Today is zero, and then tomorrow will be, you know, plus one.

Okay.

To replenish her white blood cell count,

Anne's about to receive a routine stem cell transplant,

but to get her gut back in working order,

she'll have to undergo a slightly less routine procedure.

The chemotherapy, like, wipes out everything,

and not only does it wipe out your blood cells,

but everything in your GI tract.

All this natural flora that's growing there that protects you

and has things moving along,

is all wiped out as well.

- When did you submit your stool sample? - A couple of weeks ago.

- It's not fun, right? - No.

Especially, you know, 'cause I took the train in from Long Island,

so, I have my bag of poop

and there's just enough room for me

to squeeze in and get my bag of poop,

like, right up in everybody's faces.

So, you're banking your own bacteria?

And then once I have the red blood cells

and white blood cells building back up again,

then they would, like, re-inject them into me

- with, like, an enema. - Okay, yeah.

Dr. Ying Taur and his team

have found that a fecal transplant

can increase the odds of survival by restoring the diversity

of gut bacteria lost during chemo.

Is there a direct relationship between the diversity

of flora in the gut and immune health?

In terms of the microbiome,

if you look at a transplant patient's

diversity during their treatment,

if you had a low diversity,

then you were over five times more likely

to die of transplant-related causes,

compared to if you had a nice diversity

of healthy, health-promoting bacteria

in your gut.

There's this amazing set of creatures

living in all of us, working 24/7,

for mutual benefit.

And we're seeing links everywhere.

We're seeing links to prevention of infection,

to allergies,

autoimmune disorders,

mood, autism, depression.

All these creatures working inside us

are what scientists refer to as the human microbiome.

Now, this has opened

a whole new dimension in medicine.

You know, it's not science fiction anymore, as you can see,

it's out on the frontlines.

I don't... I don't recall any fecal transplants

in the science fiction I read or saw.

Since the 19th century, germ theory has been

the dominant model of medical thinking.

It holds that microorganisms like bacteria and viruses

are responsible for infecting our bodies and causing disease.

Therefore, the best way to avoid disease

is to cleanse our body and its surroundings of germs.

Unfortunately, this antibacterial dragnet

has not only helped eliminate dangerous pathogens from our environment,

it's also knocked out the good microorganisms that live in us

and are responsible for healthy digestion,

immune reaction, and, as researchers are learning,

an ever-widening number of vital roles.

We've done an awful lot of work

looking at how the built environment

that we've constructed around ourselves

affects how our microbes develop in our microbiome.

Dr. Jack Gilbert is the head of microbiome research

at Argonne National Labs.

He has found that living in areas with high microbial diversity

significantly reduces the occurrence of asthma and other diseases.

We've got places like Amish communities here in America,

whereby the children are exposed to animals

and dust and dirt environments

that their ancestors were exposed to on a regular basis.

And those children have very low levels of asthma,

very low levels of atopy,

so, you know, allergic disease,

and even lower levels of autism.

If we go into the developing world,

those children have many, many, many more

microbial exposures.

But there's a cost-benefit analysis there,

that they also have much higher levels

of infant mortality.

Because their access to medical prevention

for diseases and other complications

is much more limited.

Would the best of both worlds be to, you know,

grow up somewhere with the medicine available to you,

to you know, not die when you're sick, obviously,

but, um, nevertheless be exposed to much more bacteria than we are,

or much more microorganisms?

Absolutely, I mean, we've shifted too far away

from the environments which supported our health,

and now we need to move backwards a little bit.

This is why it's so important to go to Africa,

and study populations of people

which we wouldn't normally have access to in this community.

So, we did. We came to Africa.

We're in the Central African Republic right now

in a town called Bayanga,

smack in the heart of Africa.

We're following Dr. Andres Gomez,

who is a microbiome researcher.

When we talk about Westerners,

with our industrialized microbiomes,

we lack diversity.

To learn what's missing from the industrialized microbiome,

researchers like Dr. Gomez have turned to the planet's

few remaining pre-industrial societies,

to see what their guts have that our guts don't.

Dr. Gomez hit fecal pay dirt while looking at

the microbiome's Mountain Gorillas in Central Africa.

He realized that the stool samples he was taking from them

bore an uncanny resemblance to samples taken

from the people living in the surrounding forest,

called the BaAka.

I collected the samples,

sequenced their microbiomes, and that's where I discovered

this was something... this was something important here.

The BaAka are traditional hunter-gatherers

who live in the Dzanga-Sangha forest preserve.

Their lifestyle is not only pre-industrial,

but pre-agricultural.

The fact that the BaAka's microbial diversity

is closer to gorillas than industrialized people,

suggests that their environment and lifestyle

have an enormous effect on their microbiomes.

So, we hiked for two hours into the jungle

to see what both these things look like.

This is it. So, these are all their huts.

_

Everybody is now mobilizing to go hunting.

_

_

He's telling the animals to come into his net.

The BaAka hunt by stringing up nets in a large circle...

then flushing out animals from the encircled forest into said nets.

Which isn't always as cut and dry as it sounds.

That's, I guess, the fourth animal that's gotten through a net.

Yeah, today's really a gather day, for sure.

Part of what Andres is studying,

in terms of the microbiome,

a good deal of that relates to what we'll be gathering:

the foods that they eat,

and also the bark from trees and stuff they use as medicines.

But the environment itself has a major impact on your microbiome.

So, if you can't climb a tree and collect honey,

you're not man enough to have a wife.

Wow.

_

Ugh.

Oof.

- Is that shrimp? - Pull it. Keep pulling.

Whoa! I did not expect that to come out.

That's food, right?

The forest not only acts as the BaAka's live-in grocery store,

but also their pharmacy.

The barks and leaves the BaAka use as medicine

may seem primitive to the average CVS shopper,

but unlike modern antibiotics,

which don't always discriminate between good and bad bacteria,

they're a lot easier on the microbiome.

We're gonna scrape this bark.

_

Oh, you put your breast milk in it

and then you would use that and put it in your ear.

This is a medicine for headaches.

You rub it up in your hands.

Whoa!

Ah.

It burns a little bit.

Yeah, it does. It burns a lot.

- Well, headache gone. - Yeah.

Two foods that Dr. Gomez is particularly interested in,

due to their potential connection to the BaAka's microbiome,

are cocoa leaves and forest yams,

which have a much higher fiber content than their Western counterparts.

This is the thing, if we have the right microbiome,

- Right. - like these people have been adapted to for millennia,

those things are now gonna be detrimental for you.

Like how a cow can eat grass, but we can't.

Like how a cow can eat grass, but we can't, yeah.

The cocoa leaves the BaAka eat by the pile

are likewise ill-suited to our industrialized guts.

What role do these play in the microbiome?

Fermentation. I wouldn't be surprised

if the bloom of specific bacterial groups

is a response to this specific cocoa leaf.

The BaAka's fiber-rich diet

doesn't just make taking stool samples a lot easier,

the breakdown and fermentation of complex foods in their colon

helps populate the lower reaches of the GI tract

with a greater diversity of microbes.

_

_

_

Actually being able to see what the BaAka eat and how they get it,

helps explain some of the findings in Dr. Gomez's research

that lab science alone could not.

This basic anthropological observation,

combined with the fecal samples,

helps paint a complete picture

of the BaAka's microbial health,

which could, in turn,

help us restore or own depleted modern guts

to their original nature.

With every advance

comes a caveat, a sacrifice.

So, we were able to extend our lifespans,

but at the same time,

we have starved our microbiomes,

and depletion of diversity's correlated to...

weakened immune systems.

So, that's something we've lost then.

We've lost them, and the real question is,

"Are we able to recover them back?"

I think future generations are gonna be enjoying

the fruits of the things we're doing right now with the microbiome.