In Reality

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Among the many forces unravelling institutional media is the relatively recent ability of journalists to become mini-institutions on their own, thanks to social media and especially newsletter platfo...

In this conversation, Jonathan Stray, Senior Scientist at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, explains to Eric Schurenberg the intersection of AI, media, and conflict, emphasizing the challenges of objectivity in journalism and the need for a new approach to reporting that embraces complexity and 'multipartiality'. He explores the role of AI in shaping social media narratives...

Welcome to In Reality , the podcast about Truth, Disinformation, and the Media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Media overall is in dire straits financially, as In Reality listeners are well aware. Local journalism has been the hardest hit: We’ve lost a third of the papers we had twenty years ago and continue to...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation and the Media with Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.   In Reality is dedicated to the proposition that there is such a thing as objective truth and that the pursuit of it is a noble effort, one that over the centuries has increased human well being. Some objecti...

Welcome to In Reality , the podcast about Truth, Disinformation, and the Media. I'm Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Just when you thought it could not get harder to recognize truth in your newsfeed, along comes artificial intelligence. Now it’s child’s play for bad actors to create fake news, fake videos, fake pornog...

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth and the media with Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. It’s not exactly news that the traditional news business is in decline. Most distressing to those of us who grew up in the profession: that audience levels of trust in the work we do has dropped to the lowest levels ever reco...

Welcome to in Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. I’m your host Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  On previous episodes, we discussed how you can distinguish between reliable news online and unreliable, story by story. An obvious shortcut is simply to only read or view stories from places th...

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...

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...

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 tr...

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 bey...

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 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 hard...

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 th...

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, s...

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 tha...

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 str...

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 w...

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 T...

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...

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 even...

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,...

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 pra...

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, id...

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 Pepperdi...