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 decline. Most distressing to those of us who grew up in the profession: that audience levels of trust in the work we do has dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded.

Today’s guest, Julia Angwin, back for a second time on In Reality, is like Eric a product of the traditional news business. She worked at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and also founded startup newsrooms like the Markup and, most recently, Proof News. But that’s not why she’s here today though...

Julia recently penned research for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center about what traditional newsrooms can learn from online influencers about trust. According to her paper, you earn trust by convincing others that you are competent to do what you say; that you have integrity and that you have their best interests in mind.

Julia and I discuss how influencers support those beliefs about themselves, without benefit of institutional brand names; how traditional newsrooms squandered trust; and ,what journalism needs to do about it.

Read Julia's Paper! The Future of Trustworthy Information: Learning from Online Content Creators

Takeaways

• Trust in media has reached a historic low.
• The creator economy is significantly larger than traditional journalism.
• Content creators often have a closer relationship with their audience.
• Integrity and accountability are crucial for rebuilding trust.
• Journalism needs to engage more with its audience.
• The concept of objectivity in journalism is outdated.
• Benevolence is about serving the audience's needs.
• Transparency in journalism can enhance trust.
• The future of journalism may be more about practice than profession.
• Holding power to account is the core mission of journalism.

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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. 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 discussed how you can distinguish between reliable news online and unreliable, story by story. An obvious shortcut is simply to only read or view stories from places that you know to be reliable in advance. But these days, how do you know who is reliable?

Today’s guest is long-time journalist, prolific media entrepreneur and author, Steven Brill, whose six-year-old company, NewsGuard, helps readers and advertisers identify trustworthy newsrooms, based on the newsrooms’ adherence to sound journalistic practices. In addition to starting media brands like American Lawyer and Brill’s Content, Brill has written numerous books on American culture—but the one that relates the most to NewsGuard is his most recent, the Death of Truth.

Eric gets Brill’s insights about how social media swamped truth with the unwitting help of respected advertisers and well-intentioned legislators; they talk about his proposed solutions to this mess; and also why non-partisan NewsGuard has suddenly, alarmingly, found itself in the crosshairs of the new Trump administration.

The Death of Truth by Steven Brill

NewsGuard

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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 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.

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

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

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.

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

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

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
www.in-reality.fm

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

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
soundsapien.com

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.

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

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

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?

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

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com