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. This podcast was produced by Tom Platts

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.This episode was produced by Tom Platts

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

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

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/This episode was produced by Tom Platts

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.

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. This episode was produced by Tom Platts

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 ThompsonThis episode was produced by Tom Platts

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. This episode was produced by Tom Platts

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)This episode was produced by Tom Platts

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.

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.

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 HopeKnowledge ResistanceSign up to receive updates by email when a new episode drops at: www.notyourusualdoctor.fm Follow on Twitter: @notyourusualDrCreated & produced by Podcast Partners: www.podcastpartners.com

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.

It’s received wisdom today that tribalism, confirmation bias and other mentalerrors 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’sguest 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 receptiveto other points of view, if you just give them a chance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.