Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media with your host Eric Schurenberg, a long time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. 

On In Reality, we talk a lot about the supply side of the information ecosystem, about journalism and social media and how disinformation gets spread. We talk less about the demand side—how we readers and viewers of news can trustworthy information. We’ll fix that imbalance a bit today, with a special guest, Michael Caulfield. 

Caufield is a former professor at University of Washington and researcher at the Center for an Informed Public. He’s the author with Sam Wineburg of Verified, a book with the highly explanatory subtitle How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online. The book introduces what I have found to be a highly useful, easy to remember and very quick way to quickly vet a claim you come across online. Caulfield and Wineburg call that technique by its acronym SIFT. I hope you’ll find it as handy as Eric does.

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Alliance for Trust in Media
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Welcome to In Reality, the podcast on truth, disinformation and the media. I’m your host Eric Schurenberg, a former journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

At the front lines of the battle for truth in the information ecosystem are the social media platforms’ trust and safety teams. Trust and safety teams are the data-science professionals who make sure that social media content conforms to the platforms’ standards. It’s a finger-in-the-dike kind of task, because of both the volume of content—34 million videos uploaded on TikTok every day, for one example--and the judgment needed to distinguish merely obnoxious content from the truly harmful. 

And lately, the whole idea has run into significant headwinds, some political, from Republicans who say that trust and safety is just a code word for censorship; And some economic, from platforms leaders, who have been cutting back their trust and safety teams as cost centers and generally more trouble than they’re worth. 

Today’s guest, Jeff Allen, is very much part of this world. Jeff’s a former trust and safety executive at Meta, now the founder of the Integrity Institute, which is both a community for trust and safety professionals and an advocacy group for a kinder gentler social internet. Jeff and I discuss what trust and safety professionals really think about free speech; why Instagram search tends to harm young people and Google’s does not; why Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t like trust and safety, in Zuck’s own words; and where those hoping for an internet that does better at fostering human well-being, might find reason for optimism.

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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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In our free-for-all information ecosystem, the liars have the inside track. It’s much easier to make up outrageous claims about, say, migrants than it is to send reporters into the field and check facts. The more outrage a bogus claim generates and the more often it’s repeated, the more widely it spreads. That’s human nature. 

So it’s encouraging to encounter a model that tilts back in favor of truth. Today’s guest Peter Pomerantsev has identified one such model from history in his book How to Win an Information War. 

Peter is a British journalist, academic, book author and long-time anti-disinformation warrior. He also co-hosts a podcast at The Atlantic called Autocracy in America. The title tells you all you need to know about what worries Peter these days. Peter and Eric talked about Peter’s book and how its hero, Sefton Delmer, countered Nazi propaganda, and a bunch of contemporary topics including: the insidious way autocrats take power; the lack of public service journalism in the US; and the true source of propaganda’s psychological power.

Website - free episode transcripts
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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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People say they long for that misty past when the news was just the facts, but that never was, of course. Newsrooms are human organizations and journalists are people and however they may strive for objectivity, they come with biases shaped by newsroom culture newsroom and audience expectations. The smart game isn’t to avoid all bias; it’s to recognize it and then broaden your news consumption beyond one perspective.

Today’s guest has for years been helping people do that.  He’s John Gable, founder of AllSides, known for its media bias chart, which ranks well-known newsrooms by their perceived political leanings. All Sides also aggregates the most pressing news of the day linking to Right Left and Center takes on each headline. John and Eric discuss how the bias rankings are made and how they ought to be used. Eric's a user, because it gets me out of my echo chamber. You might consider doing the same...

Topics

00:00 The Origins of AllSides
02:57 Understanding Bias Ratings
06:05 The Business Model of AllSides
09:03 The Question of Objectivity in News
12:12 Bridging the Divide: Understanding Different Perspectives
15:06 The Role of Technology in Polarization
18:02 The Red-Blue Translator: Bridging Language Gaps
20:50 Addressing Misinformation and Vaccine Hesitancy
23:57 Rebuilding Trust in Journalism
27:02 The Path to Societal Change
30:02 The Future of Media and Engagement

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media, with Eric Schurenberg - the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

This week…

Everyone with a keyboard and Internet access has weighed in with their opinion about why the Trump campaign won and Harris’s lost. That’s fine. But here at In Reality, we’re not so interested in campaign strategy, but we really care about the role that disinformation and the media played in how people made up their minds. In a less polluted information environment, would there have been a different outcome? 

In Eric’s class at the University of Chicago, he put that question to three highly regarded journalists from different corners of the media world who were good enough to show up as guest speakers. 

Paul Farhi, the award-winning former media reporter at the Washington Post; Nayeema Raza, co-host of the media podcast Mixed Signals at the innovative news site Semafor; and Isaac Saul, the political reporter and founder of the successful newsletter Tangle.

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Alliance for Trust in Media
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The US election, which takes place the day after this episode releases, has been the most fact-challenged election in recent memory. Compared to, say, four years ago, truth is very much on the run.  Social media platforms, most people’s source of information, have pulled back on flagging falsehoods. In the case of X, the platform’s owner actively solicits and spreads them.

But there are a few hardy organizations that remain dedicated to debunking the most damaging rumors in our civic conversation. One of the most determined is Politifact, run out of the journalism education and research center, Poynter Institute. Politifact’s editor in chief Katie Sanders is a long-time journalist who took an evening away from stemming the tide of falsehood to address my University of Chicago class on disinformation and the election a couple days ago. One thing is sure: The election will end but the lies won’t. You’ll still need a strategy to find your way to the truth, and truth tellers like Politifact will be more needed than ever.

QUESTIONS FOR KATIE SANDERS

1. Could you say it’s a truth o meter statement. The statement that Trump is a fascist. How about Trump shares many of the characteristics of a fascist leader. 
2. When do you permit your own team to use emotionally charged words like fascist. I noticed that Hincliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico was called racist in the PoitiFact story.
3. Origin story. Started well before the Trump era, when political lying was of the garden variety exaggerations and omissions. What was the fact-checking like in those days? 
4. How is this election different fom those days and even the more recent years of 2022 and 2020.  
   1. Russian interference? 
5. How do you decide what to cover. There’s such a torrent of falsehoods to choose from. 
6. Take us through a fact check. Let’s say, to consider one that passed through Politifact recently: 
   1. FEMA gives only $750 to families affected by hurricane, but illegal migrants get credit cards loaded with $3,500. 
   2. What was the rating on that and what does it mean?  
   3. How long does process this take? 
7. Can you use AI to expedite things? 
8. What’s your agreement with Meta and TikTok. Have they pulled back on content moderation? 
9. Have you noticed that AI is increasing the degree of misinformation? 
10. What’s the best advice for someone to navigate this information environment? SIFT? 

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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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We’ve seen social media disrupt elections before, but this time feels louder, angrier. Maybe it’s the retreat of content moderators, maybe the metamorphosis of Twitter into X, and maybe the growing sophistication of adversaries from Russia, China and Iran. 

Today, we are lucky to have two key veterans of the social media battlescape join us on In Reality. They are Nina Jankowicz, the founder of the American Sunlight Project, an expert on Russian disinformation and the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board. And Yoel Roth, now the VP of trust and safety at Match Group and the former head of content moderation at Twitter. We’ll cover what makes social media in this election feel so disturbingly different; how foreign countries are trying to sow chaos; and why X in spite of Musk, is still culturally relevant.

Like some previous episodes, Eric recorded this live in his class at the University of Chicago. It was October 14th, when the floods in North Carolina unleashed a dam break of rumor and lies on social media.

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At this moment, weeks shy of the 2024 election, the polls are showing that the race between Trump and Harris is neck and neck. It’s tight nationally. It’s tight in all the swing states. If you think you know who’s going to win, you’re going on gut, not numbers.

So what good are polls this year? In Eric's class at the University of Chicago, he put the question to guest speaker Jocelyn Kiley, senior associate director, US politics and public opinion at the Pew Research Center. It turns out that polls can tell you a lot, even now, if you know how to look. Jocelyn and I discuss the stability of poll results this year despite events like the assassination attempts and what that says about the information environment. We’ll discuss how to tell trustworthy polls from slapdash ones; and we’ll cover how you really should read polls, which is not to find out who’s ahead in the horse race. 

This interview was recorded live in my class at the University of Chicago’s Graham School on October 7th.

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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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It has become general wisdom in these polarized times that all the news you consume is slanted one way or another. The New York Times is not all the news that’s fit to print and Fox News not fair and balanced, to quote mottoes those newsrooms used to use. 

Now, most would agree that the Times reports through a left-leaning lens, and Fox frankly calls itself an organ of the right. So where does that leave us news consumers? How do you avoid being drawn into a biased bubble? How do you distinguish between honest perspective and disregard of factuality? How do you find your way to the truth, especially in a contentious election period? 

Those are the questions I take up today with two distinguished journalists from opposite sides of the political spectrum. From the left, Brian Stelter, the chief media reporter for CNN, and vocal critic of the Trump Administration and its supporters in the press, especially Fox.  And from the right, Jonah Goldberg, co-founder of The Dispatch, which has stake out a thoughtful and respected stance on the conservative side of the ledger. 

The interview took place in my class at the University of Chicago on Truth, Disinformation and the Media on September 23rd. 

Website - free episode transcripts
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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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The goal of modern disinformation campaigns is not necessarily to turn audiences into true believers but rather to turn them into cynics, to persuade them that you can’t trust anything said by any institution, whether media or science or government.

In this world view, there is no such thing as objective truth, everyone is biased or otherwise untrustworthy, so the conclusion is that you need a strong man—a Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, say—to lead you through.

Today’s guest has an antidote to this dysfunctional belief. He’s Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of A Powerful Book called the Constitution of Knowledge. 

Rauch says there is objective truth, although he’d call it objective knowledge. What matters is not the claim itself, but how the claim was vetted. Reality is a collaboration of people who may disagree on everything else but agree on the rules of evidence, on the process of argumentation, and it’s that process that eventually yields what is factual. 

Do listen. The conversation is bracing and really clarifying. 

Note: The conversation took place in my class on truth, disinformation and the media at the University of Chicago’s Graham School on Monday, September 9th. 

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Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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