In Reality

Dec 05 2024 62 ep. 42 mins 13

In Reality Podcast artwork

“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.

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One Way To Win An Information War with The Autocracy Expert Peter Pomerantsev

Dec 05 2024 51 mins

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 ti

How To Stop Worrying and Love Media Bias with AllSides Co-founder John Gable

Nov 21 2024 37 mins

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

In A Less Misinformed World, Would Harris Have Won? With Top Journalists Paul Farhi, Nayeema Raza, and Isaac Saul

Nov 14 2024 55 mins

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, bu

The Most Dishonest Campaign Ever? with Politifact's Katie Sanders

Nov 04 2024 36 mins

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 th

X, Lies, and Video Fakes in the 2024 Election with Nina Jankowicz and Yoel Roth

Oct 24 2024 40 mins

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

What The Polls Are Really Telling You with Pew Research Center's Jocelyn Kiley

Oct 17 2024 27 mins

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 speake

Media Bias: Left and Right with CNN's Brian Stelter and The Dispatch's Jonah Goldberg

Oct 03 2024 37 mins

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.

How Free Societies Decide What's Real with Brookings Institution's Jonathan Rauch

Sep 19 2024 50 mins

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 t

The Original Fact Checker: How To Know What's True with The Post's Glenn Kessler (Election Repost)

Sep 03 2024 39 mins

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’s Fact Checker column and arguably the creator of the fact checking industry. In the Post, Glenn and his team have been holding both cam

Is The Rise of MAGA a Failure of Journalism? The University of Texas at Austin's Tom Johnson

Aug 22 2024 36 mins

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. Today’s guest is very much NOT on the right, but he agrees. Tom Johnson is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journ