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...

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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.

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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 Life

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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/

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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 Washington
Post, 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.

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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.

Topics

• The Murthy v. Missouri Case
• Implications of a Decision in Murthy v. Missouri
• Government Communication with Social Media Platforms
• Chilling Effect on Government Intervention
• Trump's Allies and the War on Disinformation
• The Decline in Trust in Media
• The Authoritarian Playbook
• Muzzling the Press
• Media Literacy and Critical Thinking
• Changes in Media Practices
• The Importance of Media Literacy Training
• Bringing Media Literacy Training to Adults
• Why Americans are Susceptible to Disinformation
• Stochastic Terrorism
• The Risk of Authoritarianism
• The Risks of Artificial Intelligence
• Amending Section 230
• Demand Side Solutions: Media Literacy and Civics Education
• Optimism for the Future

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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.

Topics

• Introduction and Background
• The Role of Information in Public Health
• Encouraging Collaboration and Cross-Disciplinary Work
• Community-Centered Approach to Addressing Misinformation
• The Role of Media in Information Pollution
• Journalism's Responsibility and Trust Decline
• Misinformation in Officialdom: Florida Surgeon General
• Undermining of Expertise and Trust in Science
• Individual Responsibility and Media Literacy
• The Need for Regulation and Oversight
• The Challenges of AI and Content Moderation
• The Role of Courts in Addressing Social Media Harms
• Hope for Regulation and Oversight
• The Importance of Curating Newsfeeds and Avoiding Information Bubble

Producer: Tom Platts

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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 root. Debunking, necessary though it is, inevitably hands the initiative to manipulators and propagandists. Media literacy, on the other hand, helps news consumers debunk their own news feed. It simply scales better.

Today’s guest has spent the past decade and a half engaged in the media literacy cause. A former educator, Peter Adams is the research director of the News Literacy Project, a 15-year-old non-profit that trains middle-school and high-school teachers to impart the media literacy and critical thinking skills their students need to navigate today’s incredibly challenging information ecosystem. Peter and Eric discuss the penetration of news literacy training in school systems, how to deal with bias in news sources, the impact of collapsing media business models on the news environment, and the responsibility of news consumers to curate their own media diet.


Topics

Origin Story of the News Literacy Project

Role of the Research and Design Team

Penetration of NLP's Curriculum in School Systems

Definition of News Literacy and Its Components

Evaluation of Non-Traditional Sources of News

Understanding Bias in News Coverage

Challenges Faced by Mainstream Media

Political Bias in News Coverage

Impact of Changing Business Models on News Coverage

Addressing Partisan Bias in News Literacy Education

Responsibility of News Consumers in Curating a Healthy News Diet

Discovering News Outside of Filter Bubbles

Peter Adams' News Sources

Overview of NLP's Products and Resources

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