In Reality
“In Reality” debunks fake news and elevates the innovative researchers, entrepreneurs, journalists and policymakers who are fighting back against toxic misinformation. Co-hosts Joan Donovan, research director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media and Public Policy, and Eric Schurenberg, an award-winning journalist and former CEO of Fast Company, engage guests in enlightening conversations about solutions to this scourge and the path back to a shared reality.
Episodes
71 episodes
The Rise of the Personal Media Brand with Eric Newcomer Founder of the Newcomer Media Outlet
Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.Among the many forces unravelling ins...
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28:20
In Democracy, You Can’t Avoid Conflicts. You Have To Just Do Them Better, with Human-Compatible AI Expert Jonathan Stray
In this conversation, Jonathan Stray, Senior Scientist at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, explains to Eric Schurenberg the intersection of AI, media, and conflict, emphasizing the challenges of objectivity in journalism and the ...
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37:37
One Man’s Plan To Rebuild Atlanta’s Hometown Newsroom: The AJC’s President Andrew Morse
Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation, and the Media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.Media overall is in dire straits...
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34:44
How To Talk With (& Listen To) The Other Side with 'The Fearless Conversationalist' Mónica Guzmán
Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation and the Media with Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. In Reality is dedicated to the propositi...
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40:17
The Other AI Arms Race: "Defender" AI vs Deepfakes - Reality Defender CEO Ben Colman
Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation, and the Media. I'm Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.Just when you thought it could not ge...
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27:00
Why Influencers Have Trust and Journalists Don’t with 'The Future of Trustworthy Information' Author Julia Angwin
Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth and the media with Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.It’s not exactly news that the traditional news business is in...
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41:53
Is Truth Dead? With Co-Founder of NewsGuard Steven Brill
Welcome to in Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. I’m your host Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. On previous episodes, we d...
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54:45
How To Judge The Truth of Any Claim in 30 Seconds with Top Critical Thinking Expert Mike Caulfield
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 ...
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55:19
Battered But Still Hopeful, The Guardians of a Civil Internet with Integrity Institute's Jeff Allen
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 ...
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44:35
One Way To Win An Information War with The Autocracy Expert Peter Pomerantsev
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...
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51:37
How To Stop Worrying and Love Media Bias with AllSides Co-founder John Gable
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 ...
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37:00
In A Less Misinformed World, Would Harris Have Won? With Top Journalists Paul Farhi, Nayeema Raza, and Isaac Saul
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 w...
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55:04
The Most Dishonest Campaign Ever? with Politifact's Katie Sanders
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 so...
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36:00
X, Lies, and Video Fakes in the 2024 Election with Nina Jankowicz and Yoel Roth
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, Chi...
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40:46
What The Polls Are Really Telling You with Pew Research Center's Jocelyn Kiley
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 ...
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27:43
Media Bias: Left and Right with CNN's Brian Stelter and The Dispatch's Jonah Goldberg
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 u...
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37:12
How Free Societies Decide What's Real with Brookings Institution's Jonathan Rauch
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 govern...
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50:26
The Original Fact Checker: How To Know What's True with The Post's Glenn Kessler (Election Repost)
In Reality is taking a summer break, so this is an episode we’ve posted before, but I thought that in the middle of a US Presidential campaign, it might be a good idea to review my conversation with Glenn Kessler, editor of the Washington Post’...
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39:46
Is The Rise of MAGA a Failure of Journalism? The University of Texas at Austin's Tom Johnson
People have a lot of complaints about media in these polarized times. Take your pick: The mainstream press is biased, elitist, sensationalistic, hyper-partisan. If you’re on the right, you may believe that it deliberately enables falsehood.
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36:13
How To Immunize Your Mind Against False Beliefs with Carnegie Mellon University's Andy Norman
Today's guest is Andy Norman, philosophy professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of a fascinating book, Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites and the Search for a Better way to Think. Andy argues...
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39:43
Want to Understand Today’s Political Debate? Study PsyOps: Sci-fi Author & Science Journalist Annalee Newitzs
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...
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41:13
Using the Tools of Tech to Hold Big Tech Accountable with Pulitzer-Winner & Proof News Founder Julia Angwin
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 me...
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40:11
The Original Fact Checker: How To Know What's True with The Post's Glenn Kessler
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.
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40:05
The Lost Art of Civil Discourse with Clea Conner CEO of Open to Debate
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,...
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45:51
The Logic Behind Illogical Ideologies: Pepperdine University's Jason Blakely
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 fasci...
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31:49