In Reality

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, a longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Listeners to this podcast know that the local news in the US is in crisis. According to the latest State of Local News report from Northwestern University’s Medill School, almost 250 counties across Ameri...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I'm Eric Schoenberg, a longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Americans are heading into the 2026 midterm elections with an alarming lack of faith that journalists will tell them who won. These findings come from the new Alliance for Trust, Medill Trust Tracker....

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I'm Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  What does it mean to be media literate? It means being able to distinguish between opinion and news and being able to discern misinformation when you see it, knowing which news organizations to trust....

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schoenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. It's hard to imagine principles more foundational to American self-conception as a free people than the guarantees of free speech and a free press embedded in the First Amendment. Given their importance...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg—longtime journalist and media executive, now founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. When Eric started in journalism, the enforcer of accuracy was the newsroom. Editors questioned your work. Fact checkers combed through it for errors. The organization you worked for held you accountable for its...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media with host Eric Schurenberg, long time journalist, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Over the years, he's interviewed a number of people from the so- called bridge-building community. They’ve been researchers like Matt Levendusky of University of Pennsylvania, Journalists like Amanda Ripley, bridge b...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime media executive, and now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  If you've listened to this podcast more than once, you've likely heard a recurring question: What would it take to get Americans over their political alienation? Would it help to clean up and diversify our...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  When Eric interviewed Rob Sand last summer, his run for Iowa governor had more than a whiff of tilting at windmills. He remains the only Democrat to hold statewide elected office in a state that hasn’t elected...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  When we talk about the information ecosystem on this podcast, you tend to focus on its public-facing parts, so journalists, social media platforms, influencers. But there is another player, one that acts b...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  What happened to truth in the digital age and how will AI challenge it even further? Those are the questions at the heart of today's conversation. Steve Rosenbaum, Emmy award-winning filmmaker, founde...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. If you want to understand how we got to this moment, a moment in which most Americans say they can't tell what's true online anymore, when loud minorities can manufacture the appearance of mass co...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schoenberg, a longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Most people think of America's political divisions as based in political ideology, red versus blue, liberal versus conservative. But what if we're misunderstanding the fault lines? Today's g...

Welcome to In Reality—the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Here is the question of our information-saturated age:  Why, when they have access to more information than ever in history, do so many people believe things that are demonstrably untrue? This is not just t...

It’s pretty much a cliché to say that Americans live in two separate political realities. We shout at each other from our separate bunkers, unable to agree even on basic facts. One coping strategy—and maybe the default, given human nature—is to hunker down with our own tribe and demonize the other. But there are more constructive ways, and today’s guest makes a living examining those alternatives....

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  On In Reality, we spend most of our time on the media environment in the US. But information integrity is also under assault in Europe, where Russian propaganda efforts are, if anything, more pervasive than here. For example, late last year, Russia hit P...

Welcome to In Reality—the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Most of the guests on In Reality come out of the information world: journalists, researchers, a few politicians, but mostly people trying to clean up our polluted news feed and dial down the heat in our pol...

Welcome to In Reality the podcast about truth disinformation and the media with Eric Schurenberg, long time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  Up to this point, Eric's assumption about artificial intelligence—and he's not alone in this—has been that it will only make the information environment worse. More chaotic, more polluted by mass p...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, long-time business journalist and executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  What has it meant to be a professional news journalist during the past 10 years? In an era of gleeful hostility to the press, how do reporters cope? How do they avoid becoming the story? How do they ha...

Welcome to In Reality , the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  Two weeks ago, as we recorded this episode, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting closed its doors. As you no doubt know, Congress this summer voted to claw back money it had already approved to support...

Welcome to In Reality , the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg—longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. On this show we often describe the news and information system as an ecosystem, and it’s a good metaphor. The media landscape is complex, interconnected, dynamic—and, right now, deeply out of balance. The g...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. The cliche about disinformation is you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. What that formulation ignores though is that the facts that we regard as true, the opinions we hold as co...

Welcome to In Reality , the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with host, Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. One of the hard things to face about the news ecosystem in this country at this time is that no one is coming to rescue us. There will be no Clean Air Act to take the fabrications and misconceptions and...

Welcome to In Reality , the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Even in America, there is at least one sign that tribal loyalty doesn’t always dictate political outcomes. Kentucky, Kansas and North Carolina—Republican majority states all—have elected Democratic governors....

Welcome to In Reality , the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Any listener to In Reality is aware of the crisis in local news. It’s a five alarm fire. It’s the news desertification of rural America. And so, we can admire the problem forever. But one of the goals of...

Welcome to In Reality , the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. We’ve been trying to suss out the future of media for the past few weeks by talking about the present of it.  The rise of influencers, the decline of local media, the mercurial psyche of audiences. Okay....