In Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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