In Reality

New Thinking
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“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. 

  1. 15H AGO

    Big Tech VS Euro Regulators - Guess Who's Winning. With John O'Brennan from Maynooth University in Ireland

    Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  On In Reality, we spend most of our time on the media environment in the US. But information integrity is also under assault in Europe, where Russian propaganda efforts are, if anything, more pervasive than here. For example, late last year, Russia hit Poland with a wave of AI generated TikTok videos featuring attractive, but deep faked young women arguing that Poland should exit the EU... At last year's World Economic Forum in Davos, delegates named misinformation the leading threat to political cohesion and social trust. So hence today's guest, John O'Brennan, professor of European politics at Ireland's Maynooth University. John and Eric cover the information environment on his side of the Atlantic. They talk about the perverse incentives that have aligned big tech with the pollution of the information environment. We'll pivot to the role of media illiteracy and illiteracy in general in the erosion of social trust. As  we recorded this, the 2026 Davos Conference was unfolding against the inconceivable backdrop of the President of the United States, demanding his allies hand over Greenland. So they cover that too... Website - free episode transcripts www.in-reality.fm Alliance for Trust in Media alliancefortrust.com Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien soundsapien.com

    55 min

  2. JAN 10

    A Sheriff for the Digital Wild West with Top Digital Crime Fighter Carole House

    Welcome to In Reality—the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Most of the guests on In Reality come out of the information world: journalists, researchers, a few politicians, but mostly people trying to clean up our polluted news feed and dial down the heat in our polarized politics. Today’s guest is, if you will, upstream of that world. Carole House is a public servant who has spent her career trying to bring order to a world in which sophisticated technologies can be (and inevitably are) exploited by bad actors. Think cyberfraud, ransomware, digital money laundering, cryptocurrency and, of course, disinformation. She’ll go into detail about her remarkable career, but suffice it to say that if it involves digital technology and crime, Carole has fought it. It’s a very broad portfolio but Carole argues digital fraud is all the same at heart: online scams try to steal money; online disinformation aims to steal political power. What she calls the “fraud economy” is a trillion-dollar shadow GDP that erodes trust institution by institution and person by person. And AI is rapidly making it much worse.  So today we connect the dots within the fraud economy—where disinformation, social media, cryptocurrency and cybercrime all work together. And we do so with one of the highly necessary people fighting back... Website - free episode transcripts www.in-reality.fm Alliance for Trust in Media alliancefortrust.com Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien soundsapien.com

    52 min

  3. 12/10/2025

    How AI Changes Voters' Minds with Oxford University's Kobi Hackenburg

    Welcome to In Reality the podcast about truth disinformation and the media with Eric Schurenberg, long time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  Up to this point, Eric's assumption about artificial intelligence—and he's not alone in this—has been that it will only make the information environment worse. More chaotic, more polluted by mass produced slop that only reinforces our partisan belief bubbles.  Add to that the scary possibility is that AI would become a superhuman  tool of political manipulation, able to strike up one-on-one conversations with voters about whom the AI knows everything and win them over with subtle manipulation.   It so happens that three scientific papers have come out just last week that challenge this alarming scenario. All concluded that AI models in conversation are indeed much more persuasive than conventional methods used to sway voters—like, say, political ads. But they are most effective not because they are especially manipulative, but because they are better at marshalling facts to support their case. Today’s guest is Kobi Hackenburg, an Oxford University PhD candidate who authored one of the papers and who has long studied the question of AI’s power to change minds. Among other things, Kobi and Eric will dig deeper into why factuality works so well in these experiments and other, more insidious techniques, like microtargeting, don’t. We’ll speculate about how AI might be used by political campaigns in the future,   And whether we should be cheered ar that, at least in this experiment, people seemed surprisingly open to changing their minds when confronted with contrary facts. Website - free episode transcripts www.in-reality.fm Alliance for Trust in Media alliancefortrust.com Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien soundsapien.com

    37 min

  4. 11/21/2025

    We In The Press Could Do A Lot Of Things Better: Steve Peoples Chief Political Writer of The Associated Press

    Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, long-time business journalist and executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  What has it meant to be a professional news journalist during the past 10 years? In an era of gleeful hostility to the press, how do reporters cope? How do they avoid becoming the story? How do they handle unprecedented fear for their own safety, and the challenges of covering an administration that sometimes demands followers refuse to believe their own eyes? Our guest today is Steve Peoples, senior political writer for the Associated Press and a 14-year veteran of presidential campaigns. Few reporters have a clearer view of how the relationship between presidents and the press has transformed in these hyper-partisan years.  We recorded this live at a session of my virtual University of Chicago course, Presidents vs. the Press.  Our focus in this class was on the coverage of President Biden, which we are still processing 10 months after he left office, in particular how the press missed the signs of his cognitive decline. Steve is candid about the cause of that failure and about the job ahead for journalists in the age of Biden’s successor, Donald Trump: We cover the dangers of groupthink in the newsroom, the pressure journalists face to skew coverage to maintain access, and why fact-checking in real time is now a core responsibility of the press. We hope you enjoy the episode... Website - free episode transcripts www.in-reality.fm Alliance for Trust in Media alliancefortrust.com Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien soundsapien.com

    44 min

  5. 10/30/2025

    Without Federal Funding, What is Public Media Really? KCRW President Jennifer Ferro

    Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.  Two weeks ago, as we recorded this episode, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting closed its doors. As you no doubt know, Congress this summer voted to claw back money it had already approved to support the Corporation’s work. That work included, among other things, the distribution of federal funding to local public broadcasters, so the voiding of Congress’ promise leaves local stations to fend for themselves. Today’s guest stands at the center of this wrenching transition for public media. She’s Jennifer Ferro, the president of KCRW—Los Angeles’s flagship NPR affiliate—and the chair of National Public Radio’s board of directors.  Jennifer and Eric talk about how KCRW is reinventing itself for a generation that doesn’t own a radio, about the threats to public journalism that go beyond funding—from TikTok to political polarization—and why she believes her real competition isn’t commercial news but the erosion of trust in professional journalism itself.  We also discuss the accusations of political bias at NPR, the lawsuit between NPR and CPB, and what’s at stake when Americans live in separate, sealed information bubbles... Website - free episode transcripts www.in-reality.fm Alliance for Trust in Media alliancefortrust.com Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien soundsapien.com

    43 min

  6. 10/16/2025

    Courtney Radsch: Information is an Ecosystem. Without Journalism, It Collapses

    Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg—longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. On this show we often describe the news and information system as an ecosystem, and it’s a good metaphor. The media landscape is complex, interconnected, dynamic—and, right now, deeply out of balance. The guest today, Courtney Radsch, has spent her career studying the system from many angles: as a journalist, a scholar, and now as director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute. In ecological science, a keystone species is one on which other elements of the system depend. Courtney argues that in the information ecosystem, journalism is the keystone. Without trustworthy gatherers of news, the rest of the ecosystem—commentators, podcasters, social media influencers, informed citizens, ultimately democracy—can’t exist. Courtney and I will discuss why that is and why “information resilience” is the key measure of system health. We’ll also talk about where reform should begin—at the individual, institutional, or systemic level. Website - free episode transcripts www.in-reality.fm Alliance for Trust in Media alliancefortrust.com Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien soundsapien.com

    41 min

  7. 10/03/2025

    Understanding The Stories That Divide Us with Harmony Labs' Brian Waniewski

    Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. The cliche about disinformation is you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. What that formulation ignores though is that the facts that we regard as true, the opinions we hold as core beliefs are built on top of the stories we tell ourselves.  Stories are the way we humans make sense of the world we observe and always have been. And every group is entitled to its own stories. Actually, groups are defined by their stories. My guest today, Brian Wienyski, has made it his life's work to understand the stories we tell ourselves. He's the executive director of Harmony Labs, a nonprofit that maps how stories and media influence the ways Americans see the world, whether those stories are told on TikTok or the BBC or streaming media or movies or whatever.  In this episode, Brian and Eric talk about what his findings reveal about polarization, about how entertainment and news feed on each other and what strategies might actually help bridge divides. Website - free episode transcripts www.in-reality.fm Alliance for Trust in Media alliancefortrust.com Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien soundsapien.com

    39 min

  8. 09/19/2025

    How To Think Clearly About The News In Your Feed with 'Effective Thinking' Expert Michael Starbird

    Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with host, Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. One of the hard things to face about the news ecosystem in this country at this time is that no one is coming to rescue us. There will be no Clean Air Act to take the fabrications and misconceptions and provocations out of our tragically polluted newsfeeds. If you want to consume news in a healthy way, not be misled, not trap yourself in a bubble, better understand the world at this moment, you have to take the initiative. On your own. It’s up to you.  This is not, god forbid, an exhortation to “do your own research’ on social media. That will drive you deep down some rabbit holes. But it’s an exhortation to think clearly, effectively, scientifically about what you read, or watch, or listen to.  Michael Starbird is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, who realized that the best way to teach students but how to think. His book The Five Elements of Effective Thinking, is about developing the habits of mind that make you much harder to mislead. And believe us, there are lots of people who want, for all kinds of reasons, to mislead you.  Michael and Eric talk about how to judge scientific claims when you’re not a scientist, as most of us aren’t; how to separate evidence from noise, and why being open to change is not only a personal virtue but a civic necessity. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the flood of claims, counterclaims, and outrage in your news feed, this episode will help you see a way forward. Website - free episode transcripts www.in-reality.fm Alliance for Trust in Media alliancefortrust.com Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien soundsapien.com

    52 min
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About

“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. 

Information

  • Creator
    New Thinking
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    88
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 In Reality
  • Show Website
    In Reality