In Reality

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...

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...

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 serv...

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 found...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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, wit...

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 l...

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. Sh...

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...

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...

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 tran...

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 spa...

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 i...

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...

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...

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 Infe...

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...

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....

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 researc...

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 implic...

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 A...

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, a...