In Reality

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May 2026

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About the show

“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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May 29, 202622 min

The Delicate Art of Managing Reputation in the Age of AI with Featured's Brett Farmiloe

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. When we talk about the information ecosystem on this podcast, you tend to focus on its public-facing parts, so journalists, social media platforms, influencers. But there is another player, one that acts behind the scenes: public relations.Now, PR has always been kind of a wholesaler of information, connecting clients who can pay the PR firm to make them visible with journalists who need the content. Like everything else, PR has been turned upside down first by social media and now by AI. Today's guest is Brett Farmiloe, co-founder and CEO of Featured, which uses AI to help do what PR associates used to do and still do to some extent.Full disclosure, what brought Brett to my attention is that Featured is also the company that brought back Help A Reporter Out, known by its acronym HARO, the service that journalists of Eric's generation used religiously. Brett operates at a fascinating point in the evolution of the attention economy, where reputation once built by journalists and PR, then shaped by algorithms, is now increasingly at the mercy of what AI models say.01:40Introduction to Featured and HARO03:46Reviving HARO: Trust and Quality in PR07:11The Role of AI in PR and Media09:55Navigating Native Advertising and Content Creation12:46The Freemium Model and Revenue Generation15:39Legacy Media vs. New Media in the Information Ecosystem17:59The Importance of Sharing KnowledgeWebsite - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.comProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

May 12, 202638 min

The Way Back to Truth as We Once Knew It with 'The Future of Truth' Author Steven Rosenbaum

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. What happened to truth in the digital age and how will AI challenge it even further? Those are the questions at the heart of today's conversation. Steve Rosenbaum, Emmy award-winning filmmaker, founder of the Sustainable Media Center, and the author of the new book, The Future of Truth. The book runs through just about every institution that was once a pillar of what Jonathan Rauch calls the reality-based community. That is media, law, science, economics, medicine, and how AI is already reshaping it.Eric and Steve talk about why those institutions lost their authority and what fills the vacuum. They'll talk about a generation raised inside the social media feed on whom we've been conducting a society level experiment whose outcome we can't predict. And we'll talk about whether there is any path back to truth as we once knew it through regulation or technology or just old fashioned media literacy.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.comProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

May 1, 202658 min

12 Years at War Against Misinformation - Renée DiResta. Author of 'Invisible Rulers'

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.If you want to understand how we got to this moment, a moment in which most Americans say they can't tell what's true online anymore, when loud minorities can manufacture the appearance of mass consensus, when we have retreated from a shared sense of facts to our own bespoke realities, let me introduce you to Renée DiResta. Renée has been a warrior for truth in these polarized times longer than almost anyone. She mapped anti-vaccine networks on Facebook in 2013. At the Stanford Internet Observatory, she exposed state-sponsored influence operations and for her trouble, she has been slandered before Congress, subpoenaed and doxed and harassed. Her book, Invisible Rulers, is an encyclopedic account of what happened to us all when the ancient human rumor mill met the modern machinery of networked propaganda. She's now a professor at Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy and she's still very much in the fight. Renée and Eric talk about how ordinary people get pulled into false narratives, how it feels to be targeted by powerful people living out fake and cynical narratives, and how AI is rewriting the rules of influence. And why, despite everything, Renée hasn't given up the fight. And now here's Renée de Resta.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.comProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

April 16, 202632 min

The Kinds of Stories that Bridge Political Divides. Melody Mohebi (Democracy 2076) & Brian Waniewski (Harmony Labs)

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schoenberg, a longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Most people think of America's political divisions as based in political ideology, red versus blue, liberal versus conservative. But what if we're misunderstanding the fault lines?Today's guests, Brian Waniewski, the CEO of Harmony Labs and Melody Mohebi of Democracy 2076, have spent the past two years collaborating on a study of how to get Americans to engage with politics. The key lever they identified wasn't policy arguments, but rather stories. Their report, The Power of Story to Grow Democracy, and we'll link to it in the show notes, analyzes hundreds of popular films and shows.It runs dozens of randomized experiences with more than 10,000 participants and what they found was striking. Americans today may seem irreconcilable, and tend to converge on what they actually want from democracy. A system that is fair, representative and effective. Where they differ is the set of values that move them towards those goals. Values that are revealed by the stories that resonate with them. Americans that prioritize particular values tend to respond to particular narratives, particular kinds of heroes, particular story arcs, particular visions of change. Now, the conclusion of this report, which Eric found very interesting as a media guy, is how we frame the news, and how we frame our telling of American history can matter more in healing divisions than arguing over facts.Dig into this more in the conversation coming up with Brian Waniewski and Melody Mohebi.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.comProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

March 28, 202648 min

You Are Not Thinking As Clearly As You Think - with 'Good Thinking' Author David Robert Grimes

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.Here is the question of our information-saturated age: Why, when they have access to more information than ever in history, do so many people believe things that are demonstrably untrue? This is not just the gullible, not just “those people”—but also all of us who pride ourselves on thinking clearly. Today’s guest has spent his career trying to answer that question. David Robert Grimes earned his PhD as a physicist, but switched over to public health and is now an assistant professor at Trinity College School of Medicine in Dublin Ireland. But it’s his parallel career—as a science journalist and author—that brings him to In Reality.His book Good Thinking—published in the UK as The Irrational Ape—is one of the most readable guides at explaining why human reasoning fails us. In 2014 he won the John Maddox Prize for standing up for science in the face of adversity. In Grimes’ case, that included death threats and campaigns to have him fired from his university post. He kept writing anyway.In Grimes’ view the barrier is the cognitive architecture we all share—the confirmation biases, the motivated reasoning, the deep human need to protect our identity even at the cost of the truth. In this conversation we’ll dig into why people believe what they believe, what even the most respected journalism institutions get wrong, what AI means for the information ecosystem—and what we can do about it.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.comProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

February 26, 202638 min

In Democracy, You Can’t Avoid Conflicts. You Have To Just Do Them Better - Jonathan Stray

It’s pretty much a cliché to say that Americans live in two separate political realities. We shout at each other from our separate bunkers, unable to agree even on basic facts. One coping strategy—and maybe the default, given human nature—is to hunker down with our own tribe and demonize the other. But there are more constructive ways, and today’s guest makes a living examining those alternatives. He’s Jonathan Stray, senior scientist at University of California Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible AI and the creator of the excellent newsletter Better Conflict Bulletin. Jonathan studies the growing field of peace-building—that is, helping people from different factions work together. He’s involved in research about AI primed to unite people rather than divide them. Some things we learn from this conversation: About a journalistic standard called multi-partiality, a more attainable goal than impartiality. About how you might construct an algorithm that prioritizes reliable news over popular news. And why, despite the state of discord right now, there are reasons to be optimistic. Faithful listeners might recognize that we recorded this podcast about a year ago, but its relevance has only increased. We're re-posting this the day after the most divisive state of the union address Eric has ever heard. This administration will not last forever, and we will as a country need to find our way back to working together. And we can really use some of Jonathan’s optimism about our ability to do that.Website - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.comProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

January 22, 202654 min

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 transcriptswww.in-reality.fmAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.comProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

January 10, 202652 min

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 transcriptswww.in-reality.fmAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.comProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

December 10, 202536 min

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 transcriptswww.in-reality.fmAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.comProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com

November 21, 202544 min

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 transcriptswww.in-reality.fmAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.comProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com