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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...
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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...
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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.
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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...
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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...
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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.
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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.
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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.
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.
Even in America, there is at least one sign that tribal loyalty doesn’t always dictate political outcomes. Kentucky, Kansas and North Carolina—Republican majority states all—have elected Democratic governors. For a healthy democracy, Eric think that’s a good thing.
Which is why Eric finds today’s guest so interesting. Rob Sand is the state auditor in Iowa, the only Democrat to hold statewide elected office in that state. He’s now running for governor. That ambition in that state requires him to run what must be one of the most bi-partisan campaigns now underway in the country. We’ll hear today how he plans to persuade Republicans to cross party lines and vote for him. We’ll hear what personal qualities he thinks can bridge political divides and how, in his own life, he manages to avoid being trapped in the filter bubbles that make the American media ecosystem so toxic to civilc discourse.
Rob’s campaign is a long shot, to be sure. But it’s an experiment worth running. Imagine an election in which the deciding principle wasn’t let’s choose the lesser of two evils, but rather, may the best man win. What a concept...
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.
Any listener to In Reality is aware of the crisis in local news. It’s a five alarm fire. It’s the news desertification of rural America. And so, we can admire the problem forever.
But one of the goals of this program is to highlight the people who are attacking journalism’s problems of trust and sustainability. So let’s do that. Eric's guest is Erin Millar, the journalist-turned-entrepreneur behind Indiegraf, equipping news entrepreneurs with the tools and services that media businesses need to grow and thrive, but that most startup newsrooms haven’t the time, money or expertise to assemble on their own. If you think of Indiegraf as a media business in a box, you’re not too far off.
In the process of building Indiegraf and its clients, Erin has some definite ideas about how local newsrooms can build trust, how advertising is an important part of not just revenue but also trust, and why reports of the death of local news are not just exaggerated, they are missing the trend.
We think you’ll get a lot out of this. Maybe even hope. Now here’s Erin Millar.
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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.
We’ve been trying to suss out the future of media for the past few weeks by talking about the present of it. The rise of influencers, the decline of local media, the mercurial psyche of audiences. Okay. So where does journalism go from here? How does it fulfill its role in a democracy rebuild trust and sustain itself economically—assuming it’s even possible to do all three at once. That’s the big topic for today’s guests, which is fine because they basically spend all their time pondering just those questions: Tom Rosenstiel, professor of journalism at the University of Maryland and co-author of the profession’s bible, The Elements of Journalism, and Richard Gingras, former head of Google’s Local News Initiative and now chair of Village Media.
They don’t spare journalism. They’ll discuss why the long, slow rebuild of trust depends not just on accuracy, but on empathy. Why reporters should start with human-centered design. And why local journalism, despite the current five-alarm fire in the category, may offer the most scalable model for renewal in the long run.
This episode was recorded live at Eric's University of Chicago class on the future of media. We hope you enjoy the episode!
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m your host, Eric Schurenberg, long-time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.
You cannot talk about the future of media, or the future of anything for that matter, without talking about AI. What generative AI does is pretty much exactly what journalism does: digest information, highlight what matters and render it to an audience in a fetching, attention grabbing way. For journalism, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, judging from history, it’s both or either: all depending on how it’s used. There’s already alarming evidence that Google’s pivot to AI summaries in its search, rather than links, is decimating referral traffic to newsrooms. It’s also undeniable that those same newsrooms are using AI to automate the grunt work of information gathering for journalism.
To explore both the peril and promise, I’m joined by two guests who approach this upheaval from opposite sides of the media-tech divide. Jessica Chan is head of publisher partnerships at Perplexity.ai, a rising player in AI-powered answer engines. Troy Thibodeaux leads AI strategy at the Associated Press, a legacy newsroom that’s long been a leader in automating journalism with integrity.
This conversation—recorded live at my University of Chicago class—dives into the licensing dilemmas facing publishers, the safeguards newsrooms are building around generative content, and the hopeful ways AI is being used to personalize, streamline, and even monetize trustworthy journalism.
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m your host, Eric Schurenberg, a longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.
In previous episodes of In Reality, when we’ve talked about media, we’ve focused mostly on legacy outlets—and their simultaneous crises of evaporating trust and shrinking revenues. But that neglects the far healthier and arguably more influential part of today’s national conversation—influencers. In terms of audience size and engagement, many influencers have eclipsed most legacy outlets, especially among younger audiences. Today, we’ll correct that oversight.
Recorded live at my University of Chicago class on the future of media, this conversation features three creators who’ve built large followings without the backing of legacy brands. Eric Newcomer left a cozy traditional journalism job at Bloomberg to create an eponymous Substack newsletter and launch the Cerebral Valley event series. David Pakman runs a multi-platform progressive political opinion shop with millions of followers. And Kate Bacon translated her pre-med degree into viral science videos on TikTok before stepping away to pursue an MBA.
We talk about what makes their models work, how they build trust from scratch, and what guardrails exist in a world with no fact checkers, no editors, and no tradition of journalistic standards. We explore the tension between popularity and integrity, the business incentives that shape their content, and the lessons mainstream media might learn from the parasocial newsroom.
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.
We talk a lot about the economic challenges, not to say cataclysm, that news media has been through in recent decades. Even the most storied brands have found themselves striking advertising deals they’d never have considered a decade before, or scrambling for scraps of revenue in dark corners like Award programs? Branded content? Paywalls? Today’s guest, Cindi Leive, former editor in chief of Glamour and Self has ridden the media revenue roller coaster from the big-spending peak of women’s glossies through the grueling disruption of the digital era. Now she’s starting over in this new environment leading The Meteor, a feminist-forward for-profit collective focused on storytelling for social change, where she needs every bit of her revenue gathering skills.
In this interview, recorded live at the University of Chicago’s Graham School, Cindi and Eric dive into the unraveling of legacy business models, the rise of programmatic advertising, and the existential question of who owns the future of journalism. As she jokes at the beginning of the session she expected to be talking about easy questions like freedom of expression and the First Amendment. Instead we’re dealing with a much more wicked problem: How media companies can make money today.
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media with Eric Schurenberg, a longtime journalist, now executive director of the Alliance for Trust in Media.
Have you ever thought about what you are really doing when you scroll for news, or click on a headline that pops up in your feed? The quick answer is, “I want to know what’s happening in the world.” Or, more pompously, I’m seeking the truth.
Sure. But when you’re honest you have to admit that you’re mostly sucked in, like the rest of us, by unthinking instinct -- by news that lights up your emotions, that confirms your prior beliefs, or especially news that warns you of a threat. Today’s guest has spent her research career trying to divine how our media affects our view on the world and vice versa. She’s Dannagal Goldwaithe Young, Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Delaware, and author of Wrong: How Media, Politics and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation.
She argues that much of modern media - sometimes deliberately more often unconsciously - reinforces political division and intensifies what she calls people’s mega identities, the set of beliefs that define our political allegiance and our sense of who we are. There’s a lot to unpack here about the perverse incentives in news media, about the differences in how conservatives and liberals consume news, and about the need for us news audience members to consume news consciously, deliberately, not instinctively. The conversation was recorded live in my class at the University of Chicago.
Website - free episode transcripts
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. I’m your host Eric Schurenberg, long time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media
The news business has been in freefall, as every listener to In Reality is aware. The plunge has been steepest in local journalism. We lose two local news outlets a week, on average. Half the counties in America have only one news outlet or none at all.
Dousing that five alarm fire is the mission of today’s guest, Mackenzie Warren, director of the Local News Accelerator at Northwestern University’s Medill School, hands down one of the premier journalism schools in the country. Mackenzie is a long-time local newspaper executive himself; at Medill, he now helps local newsrooms in Illinois discover innovations aimed at putting themselves on a path to sustainability. Mackenzie joined Eric recently at his class on the future of media at the University of Chicago.
They discussed the role of local news in counteracting polarization, the incoming class of new journalists and how they view their careers, as well as a few bright stars in the local news firmament, like the Minnesota Star Tribune, Chicago’s hyper-local Block Club and Atlanta Journal Constitution.
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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Americans have long had a conflicted attitude about political news. On the one hand, most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, see the press as an essential watchdog on government. This is not a new idea: The founders of the country singled out the press for protection from government interference for just that reason. At the same time, sizable majorities of Republicans and independents today--and a good many Democrats besides--have little to no trust in professional media to report the news accurately. And audiences and advertisers are not willing to spend enough money to support it.
Evaporating trust. Collapsing business models. Along with an ever more obvious need for an independent press. These are the existential contradictions facing journalism today, a topic that we come back to continually here on In Reality.
However, we’ve never had a chance to discuss them with Norman Pearlstine, one of the most significant figures in institutional journalism of the past 50 years. Norm has crowned the editorial masthead at the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg News, Time Inc. with its hundreds of magazine titles and, most recently, the Los Angeles Times. He has been in the room where journalism happened. Norm recently joined Eric as a guest speaker at his University of Chicago course on the Future of Media. This evening’s class was called, Where We Are and How We Got Here.
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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 institutional media is the relatively recent ability of journalists to become mini-institutions on their own, thanks to social media and especially newsletter platforms like Substack and Ghost. For journalists with a following or a novel approach, going indy can yield a much better living than they could earn in a traditional newsroom.
Eric Newcomer was one of the early movers in this parallel media universe and has proven to be one of the most successful. Having cut his teeth as a tech writer for Bloomberg, he was one of the first writers to join the groundbreaking digital newsletter, The Information. Four years ago, he branched out on his own, and now has a newsletter and podcast, two million in revenue, employees, and a highly regarded tech conference, Cerebral Valley AI summit.
Eric S met up with Eric N at the first HumanX conference in March. That’s accounts for the background noise, if you hear it. Among other things, they covered how to build a one-man media empire in the modern era, the questions of building trust, and whether and how institutional newsrooms fit into the new media ecosystem.
To join Eric’s Substack: Newcomer.coWebsite - free episode transcripts
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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 need for a new approach to reporting that embraces complexity and 'multipartiality'. He explores the role of AI in shaping social media narratives and the potential for algorithms to foster better understanding in political discourse. Stray also highlights reasons for hope in addressing political polarization and the importance of bridging divides through constructive dialogue.
Website - free episode transcripts
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Alliance for Trust in Media
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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 financially, as In Reality listeners are well aware. Local journalism has been the hardest hit: We’ve lost a third of the papers we had twenty years ago and continue to lose, on average, two a week. Most of the rest have been hollowed out.
Which makes today’s guest particularly interesting. Andrew Morse is the president and publisher of the 150-year-old Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While the AJC is not immune to recent turbulence, it is expanding rather than contracting, going regional rather than doubling down on the Atlanta metro area. What makes Morse even more intriguing to me is that he’s not a local paper guy: He comes to the role as the former head of CNN digital, Bloomberg TV and ABC digital.
Eric asks why he was attracted by the challenge of revitalizing a legacy institution like the AJC, what it takes to rebuild trust in a brand like that, and whether his digital subscription strategy could offer a blueprint for the future of local news.
He’s a persuasive guy. You’ll like this one.
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