In Reality

Find this week's episode description below...Join Eric's 'Truth, Disinformation & The 2024 Election' Class at The University of ChicagoIt’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 episodeToday’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 eric@ericschurenberg.comWebsite - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

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 transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

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 transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

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 transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

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 transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

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 transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

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 WashingtonPost, 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 transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

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 served as vice chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and co-chaired its Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee. In her new book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, she makes it clear that then same kind of disinformation campaigns she saw originating in Russia or Iran are now homegrown. Barb and Eric talk about why Americans are particularly susceptible to disinformation; about the authoritarian playbook that leaders like Hungary’s Victor Orban or Donald Trump employ to seize power by ostensibly democratic means; about the right wing’s embrace of violent rhetoric and the dangers of stochastic terrorism; and the importance of media literacy in a chaotic information environment. This is not perhaps the most optimistic episode to air on In Reality, but stay with us. This needs to be heard.TopicsThe Murthy v. Missouri CaseImplications of a Decision in Murthy v. MissouriGovernment Communication with Social Media PlatformsChilling Effect on Government InterventionTrump's Allies and the War on DisinformationThe Decline in Trust in MediaThe Authoritarian PlaybookMuzzling the PressMedia Literacy and Critical ThinkingChanges in Media PracticesThe Importance of Media Literacy TrainingBringing Media Literacy Training to AdultsWhy Americans are Susceptible to DisinformationStochastic TerrorismThe Risk of AuthoritarianismThe Risks of Artificial IntelligenceAmending Section 230Demand Side Solutions: Media Literacy and Civics EducationOptimism for the FutureWebsite - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

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 founder of the pioneering research and training organization, First Draft News. She’s led teams on misinformation and verification at the BBC, Columbia Journalism School, and the UN among others. She’s now the co-founder of the Information Futures Lab at Brown University. Claire and Eric discuss the backlash against content moderation; the perverse incentives that work against collaboration against misinformation; the role of journalists in rising mistrust of media; artificial intelligence and falsehood; and everyone’s personal responsibility for standing up for truth.TopicsIntroduction and BackgroundThe Role of Information in Public HealthEncouraging Collaboration and Cross-Disciplinary WorkCommunity-Centered Approach to Addressing MisinformationThe Role of Media in Information PollutionJournalism's Responsibility and Trust DeclineMisinformation in Officialdom: Florida Surgeon GeneralUndermining of Expertise and Trust in ScienceIndividual Responsibility and Media LiteracyThe Need for Regulation and OversightThe Challenges of AI and Content ModerationThe Role of Courts in Addressing Social Media HarmsHope for Regulation and OversightThe Importance of Curating Newsfeeds and Avoiding Information BubbleProducer: Tom PlattsWebsite - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

Eric Schurenberg and Peter Adams discuss the importance of media literacy in combating misinformation, focusing on news literacy training, dealing with bias in news sources, collapsing media business models, and the responsibility of news consumers in curating their media diet.