In Reality

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I'm your host, Eric Schurenberg, a longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.In previous episodes of In Reality, when we've talked about media, we've focused mostly on legacy outlets—and their simultaneous crises of evaporating trust and shrinking revenues. But that neglects the far healthier and arguably more influential part of today's national conversation—influencers. In terms of audience size and engagement, many influencers have eclipsed most legacy outlets, especially among younger audiences. Today, we'll correct that oversight. Recorded live at my University of Chicago class on the future of media, this conversation features three creators who've built large followings without the backing of legacy brands. Eric Newcomer left a cozy traditional journalism job at Bloomberg to create an eponymous Substack newsletter and launch the Cerebral Valley event series. David Pakman runs a multi-platform progressive political opinion shop with millions of followers. And Kate Bacon translated her pre-med degree into viral science videos on TikTok before stepping away to pursue an MBA.We talk about what makes their models work, how they build trust from scratch, and what guardrails exist in a world with no fact checkers, no editors, and no tradition of journalistic standards. We explore the tension between popularity and integrity, the business incentives that shape their content, and the lessons mainstream media might learn from the parasocial newsroom.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I'm Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.We talk a lot about the economic challenges, not to say cataclysm, that news media has been through in recent decades. Even the most storied brands have found themselves striking advertising deals they'd never have considered a decade before, or scrambling for scraps of revenue in dark corners like Award programs? Branded content?  Paywalls? Today's guest, Cindi Leive, former editor in chief of Glamour and Self has ridden the media revenue roller coaster from the big-spending peak of women's glossies through the grueling disruption of the digital era. Now she's starting over in this new environment leading The Meteor, a feminist-forward for-profit collective focused on storytelling for social change, where she needs every bit of her revenue gathering skills. In this interview, recorded live at the University of Chicago's Graham School, Cindi and Eric dive into the unraveling of legacy business models, the rise of programmatic advertising, and the existential question of who owns the future of journalism. As she jokes at the beginning of the session she expected to be talking about easy questions like freedom of expression and the First Amendment. Instead we're dealing with a much more wicked problem: How media companies can make money today.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media with Eric Schurenberg, a longtime journalist, now executive director of the Alliance for Trust in Media.Have you ever thought about what you are really doing when you scroll for news, or click on a headline that pops up in your feed? The quick answer is, “I want to know what's happening in the world.” Or, more pompously, I'm seeking the truth.Sure. But when you're honest you have to admit that you're mostly sucked in, like the rest of us, by unthinking instinct -- by news that lights up your emotions, that confirms your prior beliefs, or especially news that warns you of a threat. Today's guest has spent her research career trying to divine how our media affects our view on the world and vice versa. She's Dannagal Goldwaithe Young, Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Delaware, and author of Wrong: How Media, Politics and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation.She argues that much of modern media - sometimes deliberately more often unconsciously - reinforces political division and intensifies what she calls people's mega identities, the set of beliefs that define our political allegiance and our sense of who we are. There's a lot to unpack here about the perverse incentives in news media, about the differences in how conservatives and liberals consume news, and about the need for us news audience members to consume news consciously, deliberately, not instinctively. The conversation was recorded live in my class at the University of Chicago.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. I'm your host Eric Schurenberg, long time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in MediaThe news business has been in freefall, as every listener to In Reality is aware. The plunge has been steepest in local journalism. We lose two local news outlets a week, on average. Half the counties in America have only one news outlet or none at all. Dousing that five alarm fire is the mission of today's guest, Mackenzie Warren, director of the Local News Accelerator at Northwestern University's Medill School, hands down one of the premier journalism schools in the country. Mackenzie is a long-time local newspaper executive himself; at Medill, he now helps local newsrooms in Illinois discover innovations aimed at putting themselves on a path to sustainability. Mackenzie joined Eric recently at his class on the future of media at the University of Chicago. They discussed the role of local news in counteracting polarization, the incoming class of new journalists and how they view their careers, as well as a few bright stars in the local news firmament, like the Minnesota Star Tribune, Chicago's hyper-local Block Club and Atlanta Journal Constitution.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Americans have long had a conflicted attitude about political news. On the one hand, most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, see the press as an essential watchdog on government. This is not a new idea: The founders of the country singled out the press for protection from government interference for just that reason. At the same time,  sizable majorities of Republicans and independents today--and a good many Democrats besides--have little to no trust in professional media to report the news accurately. And audiences and advertisers are not willing to spend enough money to support it.Evaporating trust. Collapsing business models. Along with an ever more obvious need for an independent press. These are the existential contradictions facing journalism today, a topic that we come back to continually here on In Reality. However, we've never had a chance to discuss them with Norman Pearlstine, one of the most significant figures in institutional journalism of the past 50 years. Norm has crowned the editorial masthead at the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg News, Time Inc. with its hundreds of magazine titles and, most recently, the Los Angeles Times. He has been in the room where journalism happened.  Norm recently joined Eric as a guest speaker at his University of Chicago course on the Future of Media. This evening's class was called, Where We Are and How We Got Here.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.Among the many forces unravelling institutional media is the relatively recent ability of journalists to become mini-institutions on their own, thanks to social media and especially newsletter platforms like Substack and Ghost.  For journalists with a following or a novel approach, going indy can yield a much better living than they could earn in a traditional newsroom. Eric Newcomer was one of the early movers in this parallel media universe and has proven to be one of the most successful. Having cut his teeth as a tech writer for Bloomberg, he was one of the first writers to join the groundbreaking digital newsletter, The Information. Four years ago, he branched out on his own, and now has a newsletter and podcast, two million in revenue, employees, and a highly regarded tech conference, Cerebral Valley AI summit. Eric S met up with Eric N at the first HumanX conference in March. That's accounts for the background noise, if you hear it. Among other things, they covered how to build a one-man media empire in the modern era, the questions of building trust, and whether and how institutional newsrooms fit into the new media ecosystem. To join Eric's Substack: Newcomer.coWebsite - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

In this conversation, Jonathan Stray, Senior Scientist at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, explains to Eric Schurenberg the intersection of AI, media, and conflict, emphasizing the challenges of objectivity in journalism and the need for a new approach to reporting that embraces complexity and 'multipartiality'. He explores the role of AI in shaping social media narratives and the potential for algorithms to foster better understanding in political discourse. Stray also highlights reasons for hope in addressing political polarization and the importance of bridging divides through constructive dialogue.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation, and the Media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.Media overall is in dire straits financially, as In Reality listeners are well aware. Local journalism has been the hardest hit: We've lost a third of the papers we had twenty years ago and continue to lose, on average, two a week. Most of the rest have been hollowed out. Which makes today's guest particularly interesting. Andrew Morse is the president and publisher of the 150-year-old Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While the AJC is not immune to recent turbulence, it is expanding rather than contracting, going regional rather than doubling down on the Atlanta metro area.  What makes Morse even more intriguing to me is that he's not a local paper guy: He comes to the role as the former head of CNN digital, Bloomberg TV and ABC digital. Eric asks why he was attracted by the challenge of revitalizing a legacy institution like the AJC, what it takes to rebuild trust in a brand like that, and whether his digital subscription strategy could offer a blueprint for the future of local news. He's a persuasive guy. You'll like this one.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation and the Media with Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  In Reality is dedicated to the proposition that there is such a thing as objective truth and that the pursuit of it is a noble effort, one that over the centuries has increased human well being. Some objectively verifiable claims are the source of division in the US right now: the 2020 Presidential election was, in fact, legitimate. The covid pandemic was real, not a hoax. But that doesn't mean everyone accepts those facts. And if we are going to thrive as a democracy, if we are going to rebuild trust in the institutions crucial to that form of government, including media, we need to be able to get past differences. Not just on facts, but also on the matters of opinion, or faith, or moral judgment that divide us. That's where today's guest comes in.Monica Guzman is the senior fellow for public practice at Braver Angels, an organization devoted to sparking civil conversations across the political divide, also author of a book Eric enjoyed: I Never Thought of it That Way. How to Have Fearless Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. They talk about the search for commonality even in our most divisive issues and the power of curiosity. Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation, and the Media. I'm Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.Just when you thought it could not get harder to recognize truth in your newsfeed, along comes artificial intelligence. Now it's child's play for bad actors to create fake news, fake videos, fake pornography at digital scale and in quality all but impossible to detect. As deepfakes multiply, reality itself becomes just one of several options your algorithm can serve, and not necessarily the most convincing one. Our guest today leads a company that offers an intriguing defense to this dystopia. Ben Colman is CEO of Reality Defender, whose technology exposes deepfakes in real-time across voice, images and text. I've seen the demo, and it's impressive. Ben's background is in cybersecurity. We've seen this in other disinformation fighting technologies: Cybersecurity is a logical foundation in many ways for information security. Ben and Eric cover some chilling real-world examples of deepfakes, Ben explains how Reality Defender's technology works, and why usability is critical to scaling truth's defenses. They'll also discuss whether deepfake detection could strengthen trust in traditional media. Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth and the media with Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.It's not exactly news that the traditional news business is in decline. Most distressing to those of us who grew up in the profession: that audience levels of trust in the work we do has dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded. Today's guest, Julia Angwin, back for a second time on In Reality, is like Eric a product of the traditional news business. She worked at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and also founded startup newsrooms like the Markup and, most recently, Proof News. But that's not why she's here today though...Julia recently penned research for Harvard's Shorenstein Center about what traditional newsrooms can learn from online influencers about trust. According to her paper, you earn trust by convincing others that you are competent to do what you say; that you have integrity and that you have their best interests in mind. Julia and I discuss how influencers support those beliefs about themselves, without benefit of institutional brand names; how traditional newsrooms squandered trust; and ,what journalism needs to do about it.Read Julia's Paper! The Future of Trustworthy Information: Learning from Online Content Creators TakeawaysTrust in media has reached a historic low.The creator economy is significantly larger than traditional journalism.Content creators often have a closer relationship with their audience.Integrity and accountability are crucial for rebuilding trust.Journalism needs to engage more with its audience.The concept of objectivity in journalism is outdated.Benevolence is about serving the audience's needs.Transparency in journalism can enhance trust.The future of journalism may be more about practice than profession.Holding power to account is the core mission of journalism.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to in Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. I'm your host Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. On previous episodes, we discussed how you can distinguish between reliable news online and unreliable, story by story. An obvious shortcut is simply to only read or view stories from places that you know to be reliable in advance. But these days, how do you know who is reliable? Today's guest is long-time journalist, prolific media entrepreneur and author, Steven Brill, whose six-year-old company, NewsGuard, helps readers and advertisers identify trustworthy newsrooms, based on the newsrooms' adherence to sound journalistic practices. In addition to starting media brands like American Lawyer and Brill's Content, Brill has written numerous books on American culture—but the one that relates the most to NewsGuard is his most recent, the Death of Truth. Eric gets Brill's insights about how social media swamped truth with the unwitting help of respected advertisers and well-intentioned legislators; they talk about his proposed solutions to this mess; and also why non-partisan NewsGuard has suddenly, alarmingly, found itself in the crosshairs of the new Trump administration. The Death of Truth by Steven BrillNewsGuardWebsite - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media with your host Eric Schurenberg, a long time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. On In Reality, we talk a lot about the supply side of the information ecosystem, about journalism and social media and how disinformation gets spread. We talk less about the demand side—how we readers and viewers of news can trustworthy information. We'll fix that imbalance a bit today, with a special guest, Michael Caulfield. Caufield is a former professor at University of Washington and researcher at the Center for an Informed Public. He's the author with Sam Wineburg of Verified, a book with the highly explanatory subtitle How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online. The book introduces what I have found to be a highly useful, easy to remember and very quick way to quickly vet a claim you come across online. Caulfield and Wineburg call that technique by its acronym SIFT. I hope you'll find it as handy as Eric does.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast on truth, disinformation and the media. I'm your host Eric Schurenberg, a former journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.At the front lines of the battle for truth in the information ecosystem are the social media platforms' trust and safety teams. Trust and safety teams are the data-science professionals who make sure that social media content conforms to the platforms' standards. It's a finger-in-the-dike kind of task, because of both the volume of content—34 million videos uploaded on TikTok every day, for one example--and the judgment needed to distinguish merely obnoxious content from the truly harmful. And lately, the whole idea has run into significant headwinds, some political, from Republicans who say that trust and safety is just a code word for censorship; And some economic, from platforms leaders, who have been cutting back their trust and safety teams as cost centers and generally more trouble than they're worth. Today's guest, Jeff Allen, is very much part of this world. Jeff's a former trust and safety executive at Meta, now the founder of the Integrity Institute, which is both a community for trust and safety professionals and an advocacy group for a kinder gentler social internet. Jeff and I discuss what trust and safety professionals really think about free speech; why Instagram search tends to harm young people and Google's does not; why Mark Zuckerberg doesn't like trust and safety, in Zuck's own words; and where those hoping for an internet that does better at fostering human well-being, might find reason for optimism.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

In our free-for-all information ecosystem, the liars have the inside track. It's much easier to make up outrageous claims about, say, migrants than it is to send reporters into the field and check facts. The more outrage a bogus claim generates and the more often it's repeated, the more widely it spreads. That's human nature. So it's encouraging to encounter a model that tilts back in favor of truth. Today's guest Peter Pomerantsev has identified one such model from history in his book How to Win an Information War. Peter is a British journalist, academic, book author and long-time anti-disinformation warrior. He also co-hosts a podcast at The Atlantic called Autocracy in America. The title tells you all you need to know about what worries Peter these days. Peter and Eric talked about Peter's book and how its hero, Sefton Delmer, countered Nazi propaganda, and a bunch of contemporary topics including: the insidious way autocrats take power; the lack of public service journalism in the US; and the true source of propaganda's psychological power.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

People say they long for that misty past when the news was just the facts, but that never was, of course. Newsrooms are human organizations and journalists are people and however they may strive for objectivity, they come with biases shaped by newsroom culture newsroom and audience expectations. The smart game isn't to avoid all bias; it's to recognize it and then broaden your news consumption beyond one perspective. Today's guest has for years been helping people do that.  He's John Gable, founder of AllSides, known for its media bias chart, which ranks well-known newsrooms by their perceived political leanings. All Sides also aggregates the most pressing news of the day linking to Right Left and Center takes on each headline. John and Eric discuss how the bias rankings are made and how they ought to be used. Eric's a user, because it gets me out of my echo chamber. You might consider doing the same...Topics00:00 The Origins of AllSides02:57 Understanding Bias Ratings06:05 The Business Model of AllSides09:03 The Question of Objectivity in News12:12 Bridging the Divide: Understanding Different Perspectives15:06 The Role of Technology in Polarization18:02 The Red-Blue Translator: Bridging Language Gaps20:50 Addressing Misinformation and Vaccine Hesitancy23:57 Rebuilding Trust in Journalism27:02 The Path to Societal Change30:02 The Future of Media and EngagementWebsite - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media, with Eric Schurenberg - the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. This week…Everyone with a keyboard and Internet access has weighed in with their opinion about why the Trump campaign won and Harris's lost. That's fine. But here at In Reality, we're not so interested in campaign strategy, but we really care about the role that disinformation and the media played in how people made up their minds. In a less polluted information environment, would there have been a different outcome? In Eric's class at the University of Chicago, he put that question to three highly regarded journalists from different corners of the media world who were good enough to show up as guest speakers. Paul Farhi, the award-winning former media reporter at the Washington Post; Nayeema Raza, co-host of the media podcast Mixed Signals at the innovative news site Semafor; and Isaac Saul, the political reporter and founder of the successful newsletter Tangle.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

The US election, which takes place the day after this episode releases, has been the most fact-challenged election in recent memory. Compared to, say, four years ago, truth is very much on the run.  Social media platforms, most people's source of information, have pulled back on flagging falsehoods. In the case of X, the platform's owner actively solicits and spreads them.But there are a few hardy organizations that remain dedicated to debunking the most damaging rumors in our civic conversation. One of the most determined is Politifact, run out of the journalism education and research center, Poynter Institute. Politifact's editor in chief Katie Sanders is a long-time journalist who took an evening away from stemming the tide of falsehood to address my University of Chicago class on disinformation and the election a couple days ago. One thing is sure: The election will end but the lies won't. You'll still need a strategy to find your way to the truth, and truth tellers like Politifact will be more needed than ever.QUESTIONS FOR KATIE SANDERSCould you say it's a truth o meter statement. The statement that Trump is a fascist. How about Trump shares many of the characteristics of a fascist leader. When do you permit your own team to use emotionally charged words like fascist. I noticed that Hincliffe's joke about Puerto Rico was called racist in the PoitiFact story.Origin story. Started well before the Trump era, when political lying was of the garden variety exaggerations and omissions. What was the fact-checking like in those days? How is this election different fom those days and even the more recent years of 2022 and 2020.  Russian interference? How do you decide what to cover. There's such a torrent of falsehoods to choose from. Take us through a fact check. Let's say, to consider one that passed through Politifact recently: FEMA gives only $750 to families affected by hurricane, but illegal migrants get credit cards loaded with $3,500. What was the rating on that and what does it mean?  How long does process this take? Can you use AI to expedite things? What's your agreement with Meta and TikTok. Have they pulled back on content moderation? Have you noticed that AI is increasing the degree of misinformation? What's the best advice for someone to navigate this information environment? SIFT? Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

We've seen social media disrupt elections before, but this time feels louder, angrier. Maybe it's the retreat of content moderators, maybe the metamorphosis of Twitter into X, and maybe the growing sophistication of adversaries from Russia, China and Iran. Today, we are lucky to have two key veterans of the social media battlescape join us on In Reality. They are Nina Jankowicz, the founder of the American Sunlight Project, an expert on Russian disinformation and the head of the Department of Homeland Security's short-lived Disinformation Governance Board. And Yoel Roth, now the VP of trust and safety at Match Group and the former head of content moderation at Twitter. We'll cover what makes social media in this election feel so disturbingly different; how foreign countries are trying to sow chaos; and why X in spite of Musk, is still culturally relevant.Like some previous episodes, Eric recorded this live in his class at the University of Chicago. It was October 14th, when the floods in North Carolina unleashed a dam break of rumor and lies on social media.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

At this moment, weeks shy of the 2024 election, the polls are showing that the race between Trump and Harris is neck and neck. It's tight nationally. It's tight in all the swing states. If you think you know who's going to win, you're going on gut, not numbers.So what good are polls this year? In Eric's class at the University of Chicago, he put the question to guest speaker Jocelyn Kiley, senior associate director, US politics and public opinion at the Pew Research Center. It turns out that polls can tell you a lot, even now, if you know how to look. Jocelyn and I discuss the stability of poll results this year despite events like the assassination attempts and what that says about the information environment. We'll discuss how to tell trustworthy polls from slapdash ones; and we'll cover how you really should read polls, which is not to find out who's ahead in the horse race. This interview was recorded live in my class at the University of Chicago's Graham School on October 7th.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

It has become general wisdom in these polarized times that all the news you consume is slanted one way or another. The New York Times is not all the news that's fit to print and Fox News not fair and balanced, to quote mottoes those newsrooms used to use. Now, most would agree that the Times reports through a left-leaning lens, and Fox frankly calls itself an organ of the right. So where does that leave us news consumers? How do you avoid being drawn into a biased bubble? How do you distinguish between honest perspective and disregard of factuality? How do you find your way to the truth, especially in a contentious election period? Those are the questions I take up today with two distinguished journalists from opposite sides of the political spectrum. From the left, Brian Stelter, the chief media reporter for CNN, and vocal critic of the Trump Administration and its supporters in the press, especially Fox.  And from the right, Jonah Goldberg, co-founder of The Dispatch, which has stake out a thoughtful and respected stance on the conservative side of the ledger. The interview took place in my class at the University of Chicago on Truth, Disinformation and the Media on September 23rd. Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Today's guest has an antidote to this dysfunctional belief. He's Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of A Powerful Book called the Constitution of Knowledge. Rauch says there is objective truth, although he'd call it objective knowledge. What matters is not the claim itself, but how the claim was vetted. Reality is a collaboration of people who may disagree on everything else but agree on the rules of evidence, on the process of argumentation, and it's that process that eventually yields what is factual. Do listen. The conversation is bracing and really clarifying. Note: The conversation took place in my class on truth, disinformation and the media at the University of Chicago's Graham School on Monday, September 9th. Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

In Reality is taking a summer break, so this is an episode we've posted before, but I thought that in the middle of a US Presidential campaign, it might be a good idea to review my conversation with Glenn Kessler, editor of the Washington Post's Fact Checker column and arguably the creator of the fact checking industry. In the Post, Glenn and his team have been holding both campaigns to account with equal intensity. Thanks to them, Post readers are now aware, for example, of Tim Walz's exaggerations of his military record, as well as the barrage of conspiratorial falsehoods coming from the Trump campaign. In the conversation, Glenn makes the point that fact-checks can only take us so far. You the reader have to be willing to accept facts that don't conform to your beliefs. That last mile, if you will, of factuality, is not easy to travel. But it's our responsibility as voters in a consequential election, and ours alone. After all, one way to make your vote count—and the only way you control entirely—is to make sure it's based on truth. Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

People have a lot of complaints about media in these polarized times. Take your pick: The mainstream press is biased, elitist, sensationalistic, hyper-partisan. If you're on the right, you may believe that it deliberately enables falsehood. Today's guest is very much NOT on the right, but he agrees. Tom Johnson is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism and his book The Press and Democratic Backsliding makes the claim that media have failed democracy by losing control of the information landscape and allowing anti-democratic voices to thrive. In his view, the strength of the MAGA movement is not merely a cultural or political phenomenon. It's a failure of journalism. Those are fightin' words. Tom and I talk about the role of the press in spinelessly empowering authoritarianism, about the media's lopsided obsession with then-candidate Joe Biden's age, its bias towards conflict and negativity, and, finally, lest you entirely despair, what to do about it all. So there's hope.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Today's guest is Andy Norman, philosophy professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of a fascinating book, Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites and the Search for a Better way to Think. Andy argues that it's possible to immunize the mind against harmful beliefs, just as it's possible to immunize the body against germs. He and Eric discuss the evolutionary origins of skepticism, ideas that weaken the reasoned inquiry, how to decide whether a belief is reasonable, and applications of mental immunity in real life.Join Eric's 'Truth, Disinformation & The 2024 Election' Class at The University of ChicagoIt's open to everyone via Zoom. It will discuss what's going on in the coverage of the election, with a wonderful collection of guest speakers, educators, prominent political reporters and polling experts.It will convene every Monday evening, Central US time, in the nine weeks leading up to the US election and one week afterwards. Don't miss out...Register now: https://masterliberalarts.uchicago.edu/landing-page/noncredit/trust-and-media/Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Find this week's episode description below...Join Eric's 'Truth, Disinformation & The 2024 Election' Class at The University of ChicagoIt's open to everyone via Zoom. It will discuss what's going on in the coverage of the election, with a wonderful collection of guest speakers, educators, prominent political reporters and polling experts. It will convene every Monday evening, Central US time, in the nine weeks leading up to the US election and one week afterwards. Don't miss out... Register now: https://masterliberalarts.uchicago.edu/landing-page/noncredit/trust-and-media/This week's episodeToday's chaotic information environment is so hard to understand, so fundamentally disrupted, that many thoughtful people spend energy coming up with metaphors for it. Just to get our arms around it. It's the familiar old gossip mill gone viral, for example. It's traditional propaganda supercharged by social media.  Annalee Newitz, today's guest, is an award-winning journalist and science fiction novelist who introduces an intriguing analogy in a new book, Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. What we're seeing, Annalee says, is a kind of psychological warfare operation, using the tools of military psyops in our culture wars, as a way to undermine the institutions of liberal democracy. Annalee and Eric discuss the history of psyops and the stories that psyops weaponizes; the difference between Russian and American psyops; why flooding the zone with misinformation is so effective; how psychological disarmament can happen, and how creative visions of the future, including those expressed through science fiction, can help inspire positive change. Let Eric know what you think of the episode at eric@ericschurenberg.comWebsite - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Misinformation, rumor, psy-ops and propaganda--whatever you want to call the four horsemen of today's media apocalypse—have been with us as long as the media itself. But you have to admit that the arrival of digital technology, led by social media, has given all of those forces outsized power. We still haven't quite come to terms with how tech has shattered things like a shared reality, democracy, civil discourse. That's why today's guest plays a key role in the journalism landscape. Julia Angwin majored in math at the University of Chicago before launching a remarkable career in investigative journalism.  She's a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times on topics of tech and society, a winner and two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory reporting. She's also an entrepreneur, the founder of the Markup, an innovative data-first online newsroom and just this year, she founded Proof News, which builds on the computational techniques of the Markup to hold tech companies accountable. Julia and Eric discuss how she uses the tools of technology to inform journalism; about why reporting is like finding mathematical proofs; how she hopes transparency at Proof will build trust in its journalism; about the role of independent creators in the news environment; and how to hold big tech accountable. Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Finding your way to the truth is the informal job of the 21st-century citizen. All of us. Unless you want to be manipulated, you need some check on the claims you hear uttered by powerful people or repeated, innocently or not, by others.For a few thousand people in this era, correcting the record is a profession, even a calling, and today's guest was one of the first and maybe its most famous practitioner.  He's Glenn Kessler, better known as the creator of the Washingon Post's Fact Checker column, and maybe even better known for his Pinocchio rating of truth or falsehood.Glenn's a veteran journalist who got into fact checking during what now seem the innocent 1990s. The need for his work—and for that of hundreds of fact-checking organizations that sprung up in his wake—has only become more urgent in the age of social media and AI. Glenn and Eric discuss the nature of factuality, how he and his team choose which claims to chase down, the factuality of popular memes like Joe Biden's supposed corruption, and the particular falsehoods most repeated by both current US Presidential candidates. The day we spoke, Glenn was investigating a video released by the Republican National Committee that had been misleadingly edited to appear to show President Joe Biden wandering away from a G-7 meeting. Glenn gave that Four Pinocchio's...Websitewww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Any institution that aspires to get at the truth needs a process for testing what it believes to be true. Central to the judicial system, for example, are lawyers challenging their opponents' arguments. In science, claims must be peer-reviewed, and experiments have to be replicated. But in politics and culture, any kind of rule-based, civil testing of facts is a fading art. Debates are hostile, ideologies harden, and we kick up a lot of dust, in which the pursuit of truth gets lost. But there is one place where you can test your beliefs by witnessing civil discussion of the most controversial issues of our time. It's a program on radio and podcast called Open to Debate, and today we're pleased to introduce its CEO, Clea Conner. Clea is a veteran of public policy programming on TV, radio and podcasting and holds more than two dozen awards for excellence in such programming. She is also a classically trained flutist. We won't get into that today, but we will discuss how Open to Debate chooses topics for discussion, how they keep debates respectful and on topic, the salience of facturality, what it takes to change someone's mind—including your own--and how the rest of us can keep political disagreement around the dining room table respectful and productive. Websitewww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

The political landscape in the US has fragmented into a handful of beliefs, the adherents to which have less and less in common, other than a profound inability to comprehend others' beliefs. This, unfortunately, is not news. In a fascinating new book, today's guest attempts to pierce the incomprehensibility cloak. The guest is Jason Blakely, an associate professor of political science at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California and the book is Lost in Ideology. In it, Jason explains the ideologies at large in our land as simply different answers to a common human urge to make meaning of the world. I found Jason's explanations fascinating—and potentially a first step towards seeking the common understanding our era desperately needs. Buy Jason's book: Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political LifeWebsitewww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

The guests who come on In Reality come prepared to talk about big issues. Truth, polarization, the information ecosystem: these are not exactly niche issues. Today's guest though, may have the biggest embrace of anyone I've had on the show... You may know Frank McCourt as the billionaire real estate magnate and owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. However, for the past few years he has turned his focus to running the non-profit Project Liberty, the enormously ambitious goal of which is to rebuild the internet with a new pro-social infrastructure. His new book, 'Our Biggest Fight', documents the dysfunctions of the current network—the spread of disinformation and polarization and the concentration of power in a few Big Tech Companies--and argues for a new blockchain based system that returns ownership of personal data to us.  Frank and Eric will discuss how the digital landscape got to this point, why it can't be sustained, his belief that change is urgent and why he is hopeful it's possible. Frank's book - 'Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age' - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743398/our-biggest-fight-by-frank-h-mccourt-jr-with-michael-j-casey/Websitewww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

To figure out what's true and what's not in today's chaotic, fragmented, contradictory information environment, all of us news consumers have to think like journalists: is that story I'm seeing backed by evidence, is the headline fair, is the coverage biased? Well, we could do worse than to think like the journalist who is today's guest.Until his retirement in February 2021, Martin Baron was the editor of the WashingtonPost, following remarkable stints leading the Boston Globe and Miami Herald. Altogether, teams under his editorship amassed more than two dozen Pulitzer prizes, including one story at the Globe that became the subject of an Oscar-winning movie, Spotlight. Marty and I will talk about that and other stories; we'll focus on what it was like covering the Trump administration, what the ownership of Jeff Bezos meant to the Washington Post's coverage, and how high-stake decisions are made in the newsroom of a national daily in this highly charged era. The first voice you'll hear is that of Seth Green, the Dean of the University of Chicago's Graham School, who will offer me a chance to introduce the Alliance for Trust in Media.Websitewww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

For decades, America's foreign adversaries have used disinformation to undermine American democracy, to sow division and create confusion about what is even true. But who needs foreign adversaries when so many Americans, for whatever reason, have embraced the same tactics and same apparent goal? Today's guest, Barbara McQuade, is a professor at University of Michigan Law School who previously served as vice chair of the Attorney General's Advisory Committee and co-chaired its Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee. In her new book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, she makes it clear that then same kind of disinformation campaigns she saw originating in Russia or Iran are now homegrown. Barb and Eric talk about why Americans are particularly susceptible to disinformation; about the authoritarian playbook that leaders like Hungary's Victor Orban or Donald Trump employ to seize power by ostensibly democratic means; about the right wing's embrace of violent rhetoric and the dangers of stochastic terrorism; and the importance of media literacy in a chaotic information environment. This is not perhaps the most optimistic episode to air on In Reality, but stay with us. This needs to be heard.TopicsThe Murthy v. Missouri CaseImplications of a Decision in Murthy v. MissouriGovernment Communication with Social Media PlatformsChilling Effect on Government InterventionTrump's Allies and the War on DisinformationThe Decline in Trust in MediaThe Authoritarian PlaybookMuzzling the PressMedia Literacy and Critical ThinkingChanges in Media PracticesThe Importance of Media Literacy TrainingBringing Media Literacy Training to AdultsWhy Americans are Susceptible to DisinformationStochastic TerrorismThe Risk of AuthoritarianismThe Risks of Artificial IntelligenceAmending Section 230Demand Side Solutions: Media Literacy and Civics EducationOptimism for the FutureWebsitewww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

It was eight years ago, when Brexit and the US Presidential election showed how misinformation enables real-world damage. Since then, researchers, content managers, regulators, journalists and others sprang into action to counter misinformation and now misinformation pollutions is even worse. Why? Claire Wardle has some ideas. She's been in the fight since the beginning. In 2015, she was the founder of the pioneering research and training organization, First Draft News. She's led teams on misinformation and verification at the BBC, Columbia Journalism School, and the UN among others. She's now the co-founder of the Information Futures Lab at Brown University. Claire and Eric discuss the backlash against content moderation; the perverse incentives that work against collaboration against misinformation; the role of journalists in rising mistrust of media; artificial intelligence and falsehood; and everyone's personal responsibility for standing up for truth.TopicsIntroduction and BackgroundThe Role of Information in Public HealthEncouraging Collaboration and Cross-Disciplinary WorkCommunity-Centered Approach to Addressing MisinformationThe Role of Media in Information PollutionJournalism's Responsibility and Trust DeclineMisinformation in Officialdom: Florida Surgeon GeneralUndermining of Expertise and Trust in ScienceIndividual Responsibility and Media LiteracyThe Need for Regulation and OversightThe Challenges of AI and Content ModerationThe Role of Courts in Addressing Social Media HarmsHope for Regulation and OversightThe Importance of Curating Newsfeeds and Avoiding Information BubbleProducer: Tom PlattsWebsitewww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media with Eric Schurenberg, a long time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. There are two ways to fight misinformation: One is to debunk falsehoods after they have surfaced. The other is to help create media literate news audiences, who can recognize false claims before they take root. Debunking, necessary though it is, inevitably hands the initiative to manipulators and propagandists. Media literacy, on the other hand, helps news consumers debunk their own news feed. It simply scales better. Today's guest has spent the past decade and a half engaged in the media literacy cause. A former educator, Peter Adams is the research director of the News Literacy Project, a 15-year-old non-profit that trains middle-school and high-school teachers to impart the media literacy and critical thinking skills their students need to navigate today's incredibly challenging information ecosystem. Peter and Eric discuss the penetration of news literacy training in school systems, how to deal with bias in news sources, the impact of collapsing media business models on the news environment, and the responsibility of news consumers to curate their own media diet. TopicsOrigin Story of the News Literacy ProjectRole of the Research and Design TeamPenetration of NLP's Curriculum in School SystemsDefinition of News Literacy and Its ComponentsEvaluation of Non-Traditional Sources of NewsUnderstanding Bias in News CoverageChallenges Faced by Mainstream MediaPolitical Bias in News CoverageImpact of Changing Business Models on News CoverageAddressing Partisan Bias in News Literacy EducationResponsibility of News Consumers in Curating a Healthy News DietDiscovering News Outside of Filter BubblesPeter Adams' News SourcesOverview of NLP's Products and ResourcesWebsitewww.in-reality.fmProduced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

Journalism's problems today are legion: Collapsing business models, attacks from political partisans, divisions in the profession over basic questions like objectivity. But none of these is solvable until newsrooms address their troubled relationship with audiences: Too many people don't believe journalists work in their interest. Many avoid news because they find it too pugilistic, too downbeat. Today's guest has spent the past decade and more addressing the all too real negativity bias in the news. He's David Bornstein, co-founder with Tina Rosenberg of the Solutions Journalism network. Solutions Journalism diverts the news media's relentless focus on conflict and turns a clear-eyed spotlight on people attempting to solve problems. David and Eric discuss the difference between solutions journalism and local-hero feel-good reporting; we cover the generational change drawing young journalists away from news organizations and into personal branding; our profession's addiction to covering politics like a horse race; and the role of solutions journalism in restoring trust in professional media. Produced by Tom Plattssoundsapien.comWebsite: www.in-reality.fm

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.A lot of people, Eric included, are working to figure out what exactly happened to facts, trust in institutions like science and the news, and to the shared reality we used to enjoy in this country. There is no shortage of research about the depth of the problem but very little about what really might reverse it. Which is where today's guest comes in. Talia Stroud is the director of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas. More than 10 years ago, she was one of the first to document how Americans were retreating to news that confirmed their pre-existing beliefs—now well known as the filter bubble phenomenon—and she has since gone on to bust popular myths about social media and to research practical actions that journalists can take to re-engage with audiences. Talia and I talk about recent medical misinformation emanating from, of all people, the surgeon general of Florida; about how newsrooms inadvertently feed polarization; about bringing audiences and newsrooms closer together; and why a popular silver bullet solution to algorithmic polarization won't work. Please reach out to let Eric know your thoughts on the episode at eric@alliancefortrust.comTopics02:00The Impact of Media on Democracy03:11The Challenge of Media Polarization05:30The Influence of Social Media Algorithms08:28Research Collaboration with Meta11:29The Effectiveness of Algorithm Changes15:16Promoting Civil Conversations on Social Media19:16The Role of Professional Journalism24:41The Business Model of News Organizations29:55Rebuilding Trust in Journalism34:36Understanding Election MisinformationThis episode was produced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comWebsite: www.in-reality.fm

In talking about the news today, it's tempting to focus on the bad actors, the amplifiers of nonsense and the peddlers of outrage. It's worth remembering, though, they're not the only players. There are journalists who adhere to standards and have managed to thrive despite the seismic disruption of the industry. Today's guest is one of those.  Alan Murray, the CEO of Fortune media, was a long-time Washington columnist for the Wall Street Journal before becoming editor and eventually CEO of Fortune, one of the most storied brands in business journalism. But Fortune, too, has had its share of disruption. Its former corporate owner, Time Inc., once one of the world's richest media companies, collapsed under the weight of digital competition; Fortune is now owned by a foreign billionaire, and its success in recent years has hinged on multiple lines of business, like events, not on old-fashioned reporting and writing. Alan and Eric discuss the economic changes that bedevil the news industry and what they mean to society; we talk about media bias and the myth of the mainstream media; the critical need for news literacy; and democracy's enduring reliance on quality journalism.Topics 00:00Introduction and Background01:06Early Start in Journalism02:25Challenges in the Media Industry08:29Changes in Media Consumption11:53Impact of Media on Society15:40The Myth of Mainstream Media17:15Media Bias and Business Reporting20:37The Role of Media Literacy25:43Regulation and Media Responsibility27:09Social Media and Journalistic Standards31:41Future Plans and the Need for Quality Journalism44:38The Importance of Business Reporting57:12Stepping Down as CEO and Future Endeavors58:00Building Trust and RapportConclusion This episode was produced by Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

Disinformation is good business. Spreading lies and outrage tends to be profitable, thanks to programmatic advertising, which cares only about traffic, not truth, and funding by state actors like Russia, which pour money into narratives that undermine democracies. Supporting truth is a tougher commercial prospect, but today's guest is giving it a credible run. Gordon Crovitz is the co-founder, with Steven Brill, of NewsGuard - a five-year-old for-profit enterprise that rates news sites for editorial integrity helping news consumers and advertisers avoid sites that spread toxic disinformation. Crovitz comes to NewsGuard after a distinguished career as a journalist and media entrepreneur. He was publisher of the Wall Street Journal, as well as an award-winning columnist for that paper.Before NewsGuard, he founded or cofounded Factiva and Online Journalism—so he's no stranger to media startups. Gordon and Eric discuss NewsGuard's business model, his decision to take up the cause of countering disinformation, the role of advertising in funding lies and the explosion of artificial intelligence in the information ecosystem and what seekers of truth can do about it.Topics00:00Introduction and Background00:23The Need for Trustworthy Journalism01:12The Problem of Identifying News Sources02:10The Role of Advertising in Misinformation03:40NewsGuard as a For-Profit Model04:39NewsGuard's Data and Reports06:34Ads Supporting Misinformation on Social Media08:23News Reliability Ratings and Misinformation Fingerprints09:33Examples of News Ratings12:15The Importance of Misinformation Fingerprints16:55Trust in Media and Political Bias20:29Challenges in Steering Ads to Reliable Sources24:57The State of Professional Journalism29:56Losing the Battle Against Misinformation31:39The Need for Regulation and Disclosure35:50Approaching Social Media Regulation38:59Gordon Crovitz's News Consumption Habits44:24ConclusionThis episode was produced by Tom Platts

According to a Pew Research survey in 2021, almost three quarters of Americans consider Fox News to be part of the mainstream media, along with familiar brands like ABC News and the Wall Street Journal. That's interesting because Fox is different in many ways. It's not only easily the most profitable cable news network and the only one trusted by most conservatives; it is also the only one whose leaders admitted, under oath, that the newsroom deliberately promoted a theory they knew to be false, namely that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.Brian Stelter has chronicled Fox News and its impact on political discourse for years. A media reporter for the New York Times and then CNN, his unrelenting criticism of the network on his own program, Reliable Sources, may have cost him his role at CNN, but it has not shut him up. In his latest book about Fox, Network of Lies, he goes deep into the revelations about Fox that showed up in the Dominion Voting Systems libel suit and in Congress's January 6th Committee hearings. Brian and I talk about journalists' role in today's polarized politics; about Fox's promotion of election lies; about Tucker Carlson's ouster; and about the challenge we all face in finding trustworthy news in a world of disinformation. This podcast was produced by Tom Platts

The information environment today has two broad problems:  a supply side problem and a demand side problem. On the supply side, it is ridiculously easy for anyone to spread propaganda or outrage or lies online, and on the demand side, it is hard for audiences to distinguish manipulation from fact-based news.Today's guest, Sally Lehrman, aims to tackle the problem from both sides of the ledger. She's a long-time journalist and founder of the Trust Project, an organization that evaluates newsrooms along eight standards of integrity, called trust indicators. Newsrooms that measure up display a “Trust Mark” on their sites to help distinguish them from less deserving sites, and audiences, including social media platforms, can thus make an informed judgment about that site's trustworthiness.Sally and I talk about what the trust indicators are and how they work and how everyday news consumers can use them. We'll also get into more philosophical questions: to what extent newsrooms are responsible for the distrust audiences feel; about audience's reactions to coverage of the war in Gaza; and whether media literacy training really works.This episode was produced by Tom Platts

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. I'm Eric Schurenberg, a long time journalist and media executive, now the executive director of the Alliance for Trust in Media. An awful lot of the heat in today's polarized political landscape arises from vastly different interpretations of history. In the US, we fight over how to deal with slavery in our history books. Donald Trump's Make America Great Again slogan is a shout-out to a historical golden era that may or may not have existed.  Today's In Reality guest, Otto English, is the pseudonymous author of the books Fake History and Fake Heroes. He has made a study of the gap between history as it was lived, and history as it was remanufactured by powerful people generations hence. Otto and I discuss the abiding attraction that authoritarian leaders from ancient Greece to modern Russia have for creating a mythical golden age in their past; the role that fake history played in Britain's economically disastrous Brexit vote; and how we remake the stories of politicians from Winston Churchill to Donald Trump to conform to archetypes, rather than reality. This episode was produced by Tom Platts

A lot of academic researchers, journalists, NGOs, even a few tech firms--are working on the issue of disinformation. Some people are opposed to this work, especially on the political right, and have given this disparate group the ominous collective nickname of disinformation industrial complex, as if it were a monolith devoted single-mindedly to censoring unpopular voices. The fact is, this is no monolith. The fragmented nature of the fight against disinformation weakens the effort, and that's what Phil Howard and Sheldon Himelfarb want to solve. Phil and Sheldon are the co-founders of the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), which was born to bring together the world's best scientific minds on the topic of information integrity and democracy. Phil is a professor at the University of Oxford, a global authority on technology and public policy, and author of 10 books and over 100 papers. Sheldon, in addition to being the IPIE's executive director, is also the CEO of PeaceTech Lab, which has won global praise for equipping peacemakers with tech and data tools. Sheldon, Phil and I discuss why citizens need to upskill their news literacy; whether social media or governments are the most toxic players in the ecosystem; the scarcity of data on disinformation solutions; where the trends are pointing and what it would take to turn them around. This episode was produced by Tom Platts

One reason that falsehoods flourish online is that major advertisers fund them—but usually unwittingly. The opaque nature of automated online ad delivery means that advertisers don't actually know where most of their digital ads appear. On a high-quality news site? Maybe. On a trashy clickbait farm? The ad-tech doesn't care. Today's In Reality guests argue that quality journalism needs a more transparent market to prosper, that's what they aim to provide. Vanessa Otero is an IP attorney turned entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Ad Fontes Media. In Latin, the name means “To the Source.” Vanessa is joined by her CSO Lou Paskalis, who among other roles was a senior VP of media investment at Bank of America. For the two, the work of steering ad dollars back to quality starts with a unique media bias chart, which ranks thousands of news sites, television, podcasts, and newsletters by quality of journalism and degree of political bias. Ad Fontes Media bias chart: https://adfontesmedia.com/This episode was produced by Tom Platts

You can blame today's chaotic information environment on many factors: digital inequality and the rise of populism, attention hijacking by social media, and the collapse of mainstream media business models. Wherever you point the finger, digital technology was either the root cause or an accelerant.  Which is why today's guest is particularly worth listening to. In a journalism career that has spanned 27 years, so far, Gideon Lichfield has been shaping our understanding of technology and its intersection with culture, politics and life—at the Economist, MIT Tech Review and most recently as the Global Editorial Director of Wired. He's just announced that he's on a mini-sabbatical, and from that perch he and I talked about the origins of mistrust in mainstream media, the role journalists have played in their own undoing, the friction between journalists and the tech industry, and, of course, how AI will upend truth and media even more. Gideon and I spoke at the packed Collision conference, so please bear with any background noise.

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. I'm Eric Schurenberg, a longtime journalist, now executive director of the Alliance for Trust in Media.One of my long-held assumptions is that everyone seeks the truth. They may be derailed in that quest by false information, but the ultimate goal is factuality. Today's guest begs to differ. Dannagal Goldwaithe Young is Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Delaware, a frequent voice in the poplar press, the author of scores of academic articles and two books, most recently Wrong: How Media, Politics and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation, available for pre-order on Amazon. Professor Young, who also goes by Danna, argues that people's goal in consuming media isn't understanding exactly, rather, it's feeling like we understand feeling like we are part of a like-minded community. We'll discuss that distinction, along with why our political and media institutions highlight outrage and division, about why Republicans are more susceptible to empirically inaccurate information, about the virtue of intellectual honesty, the role of trust, and what media and everyone else should do differently to get along in a diverse democracy. This episode was produced by Tom Platts

When I talk to people about the mission of In Reality, I frequently am told, “Media is so corrupt. Why do you bother.” In some circles, it seems that hating professional media is just a reflex, like saying “Bless you” when someone sneezes. Nothing personal.Today's guest is one of the best living rebuttals I can think of to this kind of blanket condemnation of the media.  He is Nick Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic and one of journalism's most distinguished practitioners. Before The Atlantic, he was the editor-in-chief of Wired, a writer and editor at The New Yorker, and co-founder of The Atavist, a digital magazine that told long-form stories in graphic formats. Publications under his leadership have won numerous National Magazine Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, and one Wired story that he edited was the basis for the movie Argo, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2012. Nick is now co-founder of a Saas company, Speakeasy AI, formerly Narwhal, a software platform designed to foster constructive online conversations about the world's most pressing problems.  Nick and I talk about truth and objectivity as a journalistic goal, about the gulf in background and worldview between journalists and some audiences, about how The Atlantic does its best to make sure its stories are fair, and about how Nick curates his own news feed and his own writing to minimize bias.  And now, here's Nick ThompsonThis episode was produced by Tom Platts

In politics, you can understand why some voters align themselves with claims that don't bear up under scrutiny. In politics, there are other forces at work than factuality, like tribal identity and moral narratives. But science is different—or ought to be. And yet trust in science has stumbled, along with media and government. So… why? And what's the fix? Today, I'll take that up with two eminent advocates of scientific truth: Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Vidar Helgesen, Executive Director of the Nobel Foundation. We cover the role of anti-vax dogma and climate denialism; whether science has oversold its ability to deliver answers; the fraught relationship between scientists and journalists; why Europeans trust science more than Americans do; and the reasons for hope. We spoke on the eve of a Nobel Summit on Truth, Trust and Hope, and I hope you'll enjoy it. If you share our concern for truth and democracy, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. It will help spread the message. And please give me feedback at eric@ericschurenberg.com. I'd love to hear from you, in truth. And in reality. This episode was produced by Tom Platts

We in the media tend to be pretty good at admiring the problem of disinformation, not so good at countering it.  So a plan for countering falsehoods in the public sphere is one of the things that makes today's guest, Sander van der Linden, so intriguing. Van der Linden is a professor of Social Psychology in Society at the University of Cambridge and the author of Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects our Minds and How to Build Immunity. The analogy of infection and its remedy through immunity recurs a lot in his research, and more important, it points a way towards making you and me and audiences resistant to manipulation. Sander and I talk about deconstructing conspiracy thinking; about recognizing the tools of information manipulation; about the power of pre-bunking vs. debunking; about how to talk with people of different political beliefs, and much more. If you enjoy the episode, please leave a review and a rating. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Eric.Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity (Hardback)This episode was produced by Tom Platts

In this special episode, recorded at this years Dublin Tech Summit, Eric is joined by Sean O hEigeartaigh, acting director of the Centre for the study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University. For a dozen years, his research has focused on AI and other emerging technologies. Sean and Eric discuss what generative AI means for the information landscape; how to react to the deep reservations that AI developers have expressed; the lessons we should take from the debacle of social media; and what life will be like in a future of ever more capable AI. 

When too many people believe in things that aren't true, democracy suffers. Democracy also suffers when people refuse to believe what is true, just because it appeared in the mainstream media. For all its failings—the unacknowledged biases, the inevitable errors, the pandering—professional journalism serves a key role in a democracy, and so the reflexive mistrust in the fourth estate is worrisome. Getting at the root cause of that mistrust has occupied today's guest, Benjamin Toff, for the better part of the past three years. Ben heads up the Trust in News Project, a global research effort funded by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. The project's reports have examined the issue from many different angles, most recently delving into the highly fragile relationship that marginalized communities around the world have with mainstream media. It is, let's just say, a complicated problem, but we unpack for you in this conversation.