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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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 Chicago

It’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/

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Find this week's episode description below...

Join Eric's 'Truth, Disinformation & The 2024 Election' Class at The University of Chicago

It’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 episode

Today’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.com

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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. 

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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...

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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. 

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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 Life

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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/

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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 Washington
Post, 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.

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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.

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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.

Topics

• The Murthy v. Missouri Case
• Implications of a Decision in Murthy v. Missouri
• Government Communication with Social Media Platforms
• Chilling Effect on Government Intervention
• Trump's Allies and the War on Disinformation
• The Decline in Trust in Media
• The Authoritarian Playbook
• Muzzling the Press
• Media Literacy and Critical Thinking
• Changes in Media Practices
• The Importance of Media Literacy Training
• Bringing Media Literacy Training to Adults
• Why Americans are Susceptible to Disinformation
• Stochastic Terrorism
• The Risk of Authoritarianism
• The Risks of Artificial Intelligence
• Amending Section 230
• Demand Side Solutions: Media Literacy and Civics Education
• Optimism for the Future

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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.

Topics

• Introduction and Background
• The Role of Information in Public Health
• Encouraging Collaboration and Cross-Disciplinary Work
• Community-Centered Approach to Addressing Misinformation
• The Role of Media in Information Pollution
• Journalism's Responsibility and Trust Decline
• Misinformation in Officialdom: Florida Surgeon General
• Undermining of Expertise and Trust in Science
• Individual Responsibility and Media Literacy
• The Need for Regulation and Oversight
• The Challenges of AI and Content Moderation
• The Role of Courts in Addressing Social Media Harms
• Hope for Regulation and Oversight
• The Importance of Curating Newsfeeds and Avoiding Information Bubble

Producer: Tom Platts

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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.
 

Topics

Origin Story of the News Literacy Project

Role of the Research and Design Team

Penetration of NLP's Curriculum in School Systems

Definition of News Literacy and Its Components

Evaluation of Non-Traditional Sources of News

Understanding Bias in News Coverage

Challenges Faced by Mainstream Media

Political Bias in News Coverage

Impact of Changing Business Models on News Coverage

Addressing Partisan Bias in News Literacy Education

Responsibility of News Consumers in Curating a Healthy News Diet

Discovering News Outside of Filter Bubbles

Peter Adams' News Sources

Overview of NLP's Products and Resources

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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.

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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.com


Topics

02:00
The Impact of Media on Democracy

03:11
The Challenge of Media Polarization

05:30
The Influence of Social Media Algorithms

08:28
Research Collaboration with Meta

11:29
The Effectiveness of Algorithm Changes

15:16
Promoting Civil Conversations on Social Media

19:16
The Role of Professional Journalism

24:41
The Business Model of News Organizations

29:55
Rebuilding Trust in Journalism

34:36
Understanding Election Misinformation


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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

00:00
Introduction and Background
01:06
Early Start in Journalism
02:25
Challenges in the Media Industry
08:29
Changes in Media Consumption
11:53
Impact of Media on Society
15:40
The Myth of Mainstream Media
17:15
Media Bias and Business Reporting
20:37
The Role of Media Literacy
25:43
Regulation and Media Responsibility
27:09
Social Media and Journalistic Standards
31:41
Future Plans and the Need for Quality Journalism
44:38
The Importance of Business Reporting
57:12
Stepping Down as CEO and Future Endeavors
58:00
Building Trust and Rapport
Conclusion

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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.


Topics

00:00
Introduction and Background
00:23
The Need for Trustworthy Journalism
01:12
The Problem of Identifying News Sources
02:10
The Role of Advertising in Misinformation
03:40
NewsGuard as a For-Profit Model
04:39
NewsGuard's Data and Reports
06:34
Ads Supporting Misinformation on Social Media
08:23
News Reliability Ratings and Misinformation Fingerprints
09:33
Examples of News Ratings
12:15
The Importance of Misinformation Fingerprints
16:55
Trust in Media and Political Bias
20:29
Challenges in Steering Ads to Reliable Sources
24:57
The State of Professional Journalism
29:56
Losing the Battle Against Misinformation
31:39
The Need for Regulation and Disclosure
35:50
Approaching Social Media Regulation
38:59
Gordon Crovitz's News Consumption Habits
44:24
Conclusion


This episode was produced by Tom Platts

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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.

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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.

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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

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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...

Topics

00:00 The Origins of AllSides
02:57 Understanding Bias Ratings
06:05 The Business Model of AllSides
09:03 The Question of Objectivity in News
12:12 Bridging the Divide: Understanding Different Perspectives
15:06 The Role of Technology in Polarization
18:02 The Red-Blue Translator: Bridging Language Gaps
20:50 Addressing Misinformation and Vaccine Hesitancy
23:57 Rebuilding Trust in Journalism
27:02 The Path to Societal Change
30:02 The Future of Media and Engagement

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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

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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/

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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.

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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 Goldthwaite 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.

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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 Thompson


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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.

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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)

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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. 

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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. 

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You don’t have to go too deep on the topic of disinformation before you stumble into a question that philosophers have wrestled with for centuries: How do we know what we know?  That’s when it’s good to have a philosopher in the room, and we are lucky today to welcome Åsa Wikforss, a professor of theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University and the leader of a multi-pronged international research effort called the Knowledge Resistance project. Åsa will be speaking in Washington from May 24th through to the 26th at a conference called Truth, Trust and Hope, put on by the Nobel Prize Summit series. It’ll be live-streamed, so check it out in the link below. 

In today’s conversation, Asa and I will explore why some people are more likely than others to resist available knowledge; we’ll cover the essential role of trust in how humans trade information; and we’ll discuss the difference between reality check dynamics and feedback loop dynamics as journalism models. 

Nobel Prize Summit 2023: Truth, Trust and Hope

Knowledge Resistance

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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.

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Social media platforms know a ton about who you are from your online behavior, but there’s one thing they can’t yet know: what you’re thinking at any given moment. That is the last stronghold of privacy in the digital age, except our next guest believes that could be about to fall, too. Nita Farahany is a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and a leading scholar on the social implications of new technologies. Her new book, The Battle for Your Brain, discusses rapid advances in neurotechnology, the marriage of brain science and AI and what it means for us all. In our conversation, Nita and I cover what exactly science can infer about your thoughts from brain data, about the risk that poses to mental privacy, and how we can avoid with this new technology the kinds of errors we made with social media.

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It’s received wisdom today that tribalism, confirmation bias and other mental
errors are deeply embedded in human nature. And once social media began 
exploiting these forces, truth didn’t stand a chance. Well, not so fast. Today’s
guest is David Rand, professor of management and brain and cognitive 
sciences at MIT. To cite a very incomplete list of his accolades, he has been 
recognized by the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarship; 
the Poynter Institute, which named him fact-checking researcher of the year,
and just this past fall by the Thinkers 50 Radar List. His research bridges 
cognitive science, behavioral economics and social psychology, and from 
that vantage, he argues that consumers of media have more free will than you 
might think and that there are ways out of our information dystopia. Dave 
and I will cover the role of distraction in the spread of misinformation, how 
fact-checking might actually scale, and why Americans are actually receptive
to other points of view, if you just give them a chance.

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The first casualty of polarization is not truth, perhaps, but rather empathy. Your opponent is not just wrong, but contemptible, their behavior not just troubling to you but beyond comprehension. These are earmarks of what today’s guest calls high conflict, and it characterizes much public discourse today. Amanda Ripley is a journalist who has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic, among other places, and is the author of the book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Can Get Out. She’s also the co-founder of Good Conflict, a non-profit that trains organizations to keep normal disagreement from turning toxic. Amanda and I talk about the difference between good conflict and high conflict, why anger is fine but contempt is not, why the apparent cause of high conflict is rarely the real story, and why journalists need help not just covering conflict but managing it in their own newsrooms. 

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At one point in the post-truth era, fact-checking seemed like the way back to a shared reality. Just get evidence-based truth out there, and disinformation would slink away in disgrace. Snopes, Kinzen, Meedan and others are built on that belief. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. Falsehood still seems to have the drop on truth. So, today’s guest joins me to help us understand why. Angie Drobnic Holan is a journalist and long-time editor-in-chief of Poltifact, one of the world’s premier fact-checkers. She was also recently named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard to examine the role of journalism in democracy. Angie and I will cover the role of fact-checking in social media today; the case for and limits of objective truth; and the practice of fact-checking when evidence is evolving, as in the case of the origins of Covid-19.

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Outside the friendly confines of this podcast, it’s hard to talk about truth and media without the discussion turning emotional. These are incendiary topics, which is why it’s especially useful to be able to draw on cool analysis. This is how many people characterize the work of this episode’s guest, Michael Rich, president emeritus of the think tank RAND Corporation and co-author of one of the seminal books on facts and media in American public discourse, written with fellow RAND analyst Jennifer Kavanaugh, Truth Decay. Truth Decay was published in 2019, and the analytical framework that it proposed still holds true four years later. In this episode, Michael and Eric discuss the four forces that he believes caused truth to decay in public life; why the current period of misinformation started much earlier than you think; and how media endured several earlier periods of mistrust and how it recovered each time.

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You can’t get more than a few minutes into any conversation about trust in media today before Walter Cronkite makes an appearance. People say they long for those days when everyone believed TV news, their hometown daily gave facts without slant, and CBS news reader Cronkite was the most trusted person in America. Well, to paraphrase Cronkite’s signature signoff, that’s not the way it was. He was never the most trusted man, just the facts news was almost never the profession’s default setting, and when it was, it made for pretty thin journalism. This episode’s guest, Professor Michael Schudson of Columbia Journalism School, has written or co-authored 15 books about the history and sociology of the American media landscape and he brings a historical lens to the question of what news was, is, and ought to aspire to be. In this episode, Eric and Michael cover the myth of news media’s golden age, the thorny question of objectivity, journalism as a check on tyranny, and what an informed citizen in a liberal democracy really needs to know.

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One of the goals of In Reality is to introduce our listeners to people who are on the front lines of the battle against disinformation. But battles have casualties, and Nina Jankowicz is one of them. Nina is a highly respected expert on Russian disinformation strategies and the author of two books, How to Lose the Information War and How to Be a Woman Online. In the spring of 2022, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of what it called the Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate the department’s defenses against networked propaganda, and named Nina as director. Disinformation forces attacked instantly. Social media was swamped by figures inside and outside of government  who deliberately mischaracterized the role of the board and Nina’s qualifications to run it. After two weeks of unrelenting attacks, the D.H.S. dissolved the board, and Nina resigned. In this episode, Eric and Nina talk about how it felt to go through that, why the D.H.S. was so helpless in the face of a homegrown disinformation attack, and about the personal attacks that besiege Nina to this day. They also cover the failures of the social media giants to police their own sites, the true meaning of free speech, and what the U.S. can learn from European democracies about countering disinformation.

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Polarization has reached such a fever pitch in the United States that each side of the political divide sees the other as an existential threat to democracy. Partisans use the same pejoratives to describe the other’s beliefs: arrogant, uninformed, incomprehensible. But what if people are wrong about what the other side thinks? What if we’ve actually got more in common? This idea has come up before on In Reality with the survey firm Populace, but its best-known support derives from work done by the global research firm, More in Common. Today, host Eric Schurenberg joins the co-founder and CEO of More in Common, Mathieu Lefevre, to discuss the gaps in perception between what people think the other side thinks and what they really do, why those gaps persist, whether More in Common is subject to its own confirmation bias, and why content moderation is a losing game.

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If social media platforms don’t directly cause polarization, they do, at least, give oxygen to smoldering divisions that can erupt into tragedies like the Myanmar genocide, Brexit, and January 6th. Why is social media so effective at unleashing the worst in us, and how do we break its hold? This episode’s guest, Christopher Bail, pursues those questions as the director of Duke University’s Polarization Lab. He’s also the author of Breaking the Social Media Prism, which was named one of the top five non-fiction books of 2021. Chris and host Eric Schurenberg discuss the role of status-seeking on social media, the personality types most susceptible to online radicalization, and an intriguing experimental platform his team designed that actually encouraged civil discourse.

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At some point in conversations about the media, somebody inevitably says, “I just want a single source of true, instantaneous, and uplifting information so that I don't have to think about it.” The longing is understandable—but let's get real. In this era of unlimited and ungoverned information, you have to construct your own trusted news environment and weed out what is unreliable. Helping people do that is the mission of today’s guest, Alan Miller, the founder of The News Literacy Project. This 14-year-old non-partisan organization trains students and adults on how to tell fact from fiction in media. Together, Eric and Alan talk about standing up for factuality in a world of alternate realities, remaining non-partisan while defending truth, and how to have constructive conversations with those who disagree with you.

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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 SANDERS

1. Could 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. 
2. 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.
3. 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? 
4. How is this election different fom those days and even the more recent years of 2022 and 2020.  
   1. Russian interference? 
5. How do you decide what to cover. There’s such a torrent of falsehoods to choose from. 
6. Take us through a fact check. Let’s say, to consider one that passed through Politifact recently: 
   1. FEMA gives only $750 to families affected by hurricane, but illegal migrants get credit cards loaded with $3,500. 
   2. What was the rating on that and what does it mean?  
   3. How long does process this take? 
7. Can you use AI to expedite things? 
8. What’s your agreement with Meta and TikTok. Have they pulled back on content moderation? 
9. Have you noticed that AI is increasing the degree of misinformation? 
10. What’s the best advice for someone to navigate this information environment? SIFT? 

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A lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots. Everyone has heard that chestnut, but Sinan Aral has actually proved it. He was one of the first to warn about the corrosive effects of social media with a celebrated Science Magazine cover story, a seminal book, The Hype Machine, and a vast study showing that fake news spreads faster and farther than the truth. Sinan is a marketing, IT, and data science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so he sees disinformation through the lens of marketing. In this episode, we will also discuss what Sinan calls “the end of reality” in political discourse, the role of professional media in its own demise, and the strategies democracies need to take to defend the truth.

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It’s a feature of our polarized world today that each side of the political spectrum refers to the extremists on the other side as members of a cult. Those are fightin’ words, sure, but you can understand the feeling. People are going down rabbit holes of bizarre, sometimes apocalyptic beliefs; they are alienating themselves from family and from every source of information but other true believers. Today’s guest Steven Hassan, founder of the Freedom of Mind institute knows destructive cults when he sees them because he’s a cult survivor himself. He’s the author of several books on the topic, including his latest, called the Cult of Trump—just in case you wanted the reassurance of the relevance to today’s political scene. Dr. Hassan and I will talk about how cults recruit, why he believes Trump is an instinctive cult leader; the many sub-cults that he believes make up today’s political landscape, whether there are cults on the left as well, and how you can tell whether you are perhaps being subject to undue influence yourself.

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If you are a Democrat, have you ever espoused the slogan “Defund the Police?” If you’re a Republican, do you agree with politicians who claim that 2020 presidential election was stolen? If you said yes, you may well be operating under a “collective illusion,” a widespread mental phenomenon in which people take positions in public they privately don’t actually believe, because they think that everyone else in their group does believe it. The implications for the spread of disinformation these days are obvious. In this episode of In Reality, host Eric Schurenberg talks with Todd Rose, co-founder of the think tank Populace and the author of a fascinating book called ‘Collective Illusions.’ The conversation covers a mind-boggling range of common public beliefs that almost no one privately believes (who knew?). Todd also explains why it’s so important for your own mental health and the health of democracy to speak your own authentic truth – and how to do that without getting yourself shunned by your in-group.

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Check My Ads Institute is an organization that is taking aim at purveyors of conspiracy theories, hate speech and disinformation. The Institute describes itself as “an independent watchdog” whose goal is to prevent digital advertisers from inadvertently monetizing the spread of falsehoods.

In this episode of In Reality, host Eric Schurenberg sits down with the co-founder of Check My Ads Institute, Claire Atkin, to unpack how the digital advertising industry works to support disinformation and perpetuate ad fraud despite its claims to do the opposite. Claire delves into programmatic advertising and explains how third-party ad-serving companies keep brands unaware of where their digital ads are being placed, allowing propagandists to earn revenue from advertisers who would never intentionally support them. Finally, she specifies the steps that Check My Ads Institute is taking to hold the digital ad industry to account, as well as who the company is targeting next.

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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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