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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 transcripts
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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.
Website - free episode transcripts
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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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.Website - free episode transcripts
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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 EngagementWebsite - free episode transcripts
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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.Website - free episode transcripts
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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.
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. 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?
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 SANDERSWebsite - free episode transcripts
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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 transcripts
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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 transcripts
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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 transcripts
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The goal of modern disinformation campaigns is not necessarily to turn audiences into true believers but rather to turn them into cynics, to persuade them that you can’t trust anything said by any institution, whether media or science or government.
In this world view, there is no such thing as objective truth, everyone is biased or otherwise untrustworthy, so the conclusion is that you need a strong man—a Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, say—to lead you through.
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 transcripts
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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.Website - free episode transcripts
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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.Website - free episode transcripts
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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/Website - free episode transcripts
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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 [email protected]Website - free episode transcripts
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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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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.Website - free episode transcripts
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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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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...Website - free episode transcripts
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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.Website - free episode transcripts
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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 LifeWebsite - free episode transcripts
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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/Website - free episode transcripts
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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.Website - free episode transcripts
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