ANDERSON COOPER (HOST): You have the son of the future national security adviser, who has a role in the Trump transition, and was chief of staff to his father, talking about pizzagate.
DAVID CHALIAN: Yeah, that's not very far removed. And what that does, it takes a fringe story and brings it to the mainstream, because once somebody that close to the president-elect is tweeting about it, it enters the conversation in a way that it doesn't when it just lives on the right.
And so, there's some responsibility for those in positions of power to choke it off and really push it back to the fringe, to say that this -- there's no truth to this, because there's danger, potentially, involved here. And so, I think that's what happens when Mike Flynn's son does that, that all of a sudden -- I'm not saying the Trump campaign is responsible for this in any way. I'm just saying, now that Mike Flynn's son does that, somebody needs to say, this is totally false.
COOPER: Does someone from the Trump transition need to say so?
DAVID GREGORY: I think so. I think without a doubt. This is the incoming national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, who has experience in the world of gathering intelligence. You had Ali Soufan on this program earlier on, he personally interrogated people who felt that the zionists and the Jews were responsible for 9/11 and not Osama Bin Laden.
People died because of this crap that's out there, all over the world, and they can hurt Americans. Americans can die. People have a responsibility, including the incoming president of the United States, to say there's the truth-based world and other parts of the world. We better get right here if we want our democracy to keep moving forward.
[...]
BRIAN STELTER: To get serious, though, people in power benefit from confusion. We've seen that all around the world in authoritarian regimes. I think we have to wonder if when Donald Trump on the campaign trail would bring up conspiracy theories, if he, in power as president, will benefit from this kind of fake news confusion. And then you have to wonder, what can social media firms do? What can newsrooms do? And most importantly, what can individual users do, to refuse to be confused?
