In Reality

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

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

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

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

Polarization has reached such a fever pitch in the United States that each side of the political divide sees the other as an existential threat to democracy. Partisans use the same pejoratives to describe the other’s beliefs: arrogant, uninformed, incomprehensible. But what if people are wrong about what the other side thinks? What if we’ve actually got more in common? This idea has come up before on In Reality with the survey firm Populace, but its best-known support derives from work done by the global research firm, More in Common. Today, host Eric Schurenberg joins the co-founder and CEO of More in Common, Mathieu Lefevre, to discuss the gaps in perception between what people think the other side thinks and what they really do, why those gaps persist, whether More in Common is subject to its own confirmation bias, and why content moderation is a losing game.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

If social media platforms don’t directly cause polarization, they do, at least, give oxygen to smoldering divisions that can erupt into tragedies like the Myanmar genocide, Brexit, and January 6th. Why is social media so effective at unleashing the worst in us, and how do we break its hold? This episode’s guest, Christopher Bail, pursues those questions as the director of Duke University’s Polarization Lab. He’s also the author of Breaking the Social Media Prism, which was named one of the top five non-fiction books of 2021. Chris and host Eric Schurenberg discuss the role of status-seeking on social media, the personality types most susceptible to online radicalization, and an intriguing experimental platform his team designed that actually encouraged civil discourse.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

At some point in conversations about the media, somebody inevitably says, “I just want a single source of true, instantaneous, and uplifting information so that I don't have to think about it.” The longing is understandable—but let's get real. In this era of unlimited and ungoverned information, you have to construct your own trusted news environment and weed out what is unreliable. Helping people do that is the mission of today’s guest, Alan Miller, the founder of The News Literacy Project. This 14-year-old non-partisan organization trains students and adults on how to tell fact from fiction in media. Together, Eric and Alan talk about standing up for factuality in a world of alternate realities, remaining non-partisan while defending truth, and how to have constructive conversations with those who disagree with you.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

A lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots. Everyone has heard that chestnut, but Sinan Aral has actually proved it. He was one of the first to warn about the corrosive effects of social media with a celebrated Science Magazine cover story, a seminal book, The Hype Machine, and a vast study showing that fake news spreads faster and farther than the truth. Sinan is a marketing, IT, and data science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so he sees disinformation through the lens of marketing. In this episode, we will also discuss what Sinan calls “the end of reality” in political discourse, the role of professional media in its own demise, and the strategies democracies need to take to defend the truth.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

It’s a feature of our polarized world today that each side of the political spectrum refers to the extremists on the other side as members of a cult. Those are fightin’ words, sure, but you can understand the feeling. People are going down rabbit holes of bizarre, sometimes apocalyptic beliefs; they are alienating themselves from family and from every source of information but other true believers. Today’s guest Steven Hassan, founder of the Freedom of Mind institute knows destructive cults when he sees them because he’s a cult survivor himself. He’s the author of several books on the topic, including his latest, called the Cult of Trump—just in case you wanted the reassurance of the relevance to today’s political scene. Dr. Hassan and I will talk about how cults recruit, why he believes Trump is an instinctive cult leader; the many sub-cults that he believes make up today’s political landscape, whether there are cults on the left as well, and how you can tell whether you are perhaps being subject to undue influence yourself.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com

If you are a Democrat, have you ever espoused the slogan “Defund the Police?” If you’re a Republican, do you agree with politicians who claim that 2020 presidential election was stolen? If you said yes, you may well be operating under a “collective illusion,” a widespread mental phenomenon in which people take positions in public they privately don’t actually believe, because they think that everyone else in their group does believe it. The implications for the spread of disinformation these days are obvious. In this episode of In Reality, host Eric Schurenberg talks with Todd Rose, co-founder of the think tank Populace and the author of a fascinating book called ‘Collective Illusions.’ The conversation covers a mind-boggling range of common public beliefs that almost no one privately believes (who knew?). Todd also explains why it’s so important for your own mental health and the health of democracy to speak your own authentic truth – and how to do that without getting yourself shunned by your in-group.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.comAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.com