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It will convene every Monday evening, Central US time, in the nine weeks leading up to the US election and one week afterwards. Don't miss out...

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This week's episode

Today’s chaotic information environment is so hard to understand, so fundamentally disrupted, that many thoughtful people spend energy coming up with metaphors for it. Just to get our arms around it. It’s the familiar old gossip mill gone viral, for example. It’s traditional propaganda supercharged by social media.

Annalee Newitz, today’s guest, is an award-winning journalist and science fiction novelist who introduces an intriguing analogy in a new book, Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

What we’re seeing, Annalee says, is a kind of psychological warfare operation, using the tools of military psyops in our culture wars, as a way to undermine the institutions of liberal democracy.

Annalee and Eric discuss the history of psyops and the stories that psyops weaponizes; the difference between Russian and American psyops; why flooding the zone with misinformation is so effective; how psychological disarmament can happen, and how creative visions of the future, including those expressed through science fiction, can help inspire positive change.

Let Eric know what you think of the episode at eric@ericschurenberg.com

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

Produced by Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Misinformation, rumor, psy-ops and propaganda--whatever you want to call the four horsemen of today’s media apocalypse—have been with us as long as the media itself. But you have to admit that the arrival of digital technology, led by social media, has given all of those forces outsized power. We still haven’t quite come to terms with how tech has shattered things like a shared reality, democracy, civil discourse.

That’s why today’s guest plays a key role in the journalism landscape. Julia Angwin majored in math at the University of Chicago before launching a remarkable career in investigative journalism. She’s a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times on topics of tech and society, a winner and two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory reporting. She’s also an entrepreneur, the founder of the Markup, an innovative data-first online newsroom and just this year, she founded Proof News, which builds on the computational techniques of the Markup to hold tech companies accountable.

Julia and Eric discuss how she uses the tools of technology to inform journalism; about why reporting is like finding mathematical proofs; how she hopes transparency at Proof will build trust in its journalism; about the role of independent creators in the news environment; and how to hold big tech accountable.

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

Produced by Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Finding your way to the truth is the informal job of the 21st-century citizen. All of us. Unless you want to be manipulated, you need some check on the claims you hear uttered by powerful people or repeated, innocently or not, by others.

For a few thousand people in this era, correcting the record is a profession, even a calling, and today’s guest was one of the first and maybe its most famous practitioner. He’s Glenn Kessler, better known as the creator of the Washingon Post’s Fact Checker column, and maybe even better known for his Pinocchio rating of truth or falsehood.

Glenn’s a veteran journalist who got into fact checking during what now seem the innocent 1990s. The need for his work—and for that of hundreds of fact-checking organizations that sprung up in his wake—has only become more urgent in the age of social media and AI.

Glenn and Eric discuss the nature of factuality, how he and his team choose which claims to chase down, the factuality of popular memes like Joe Biden’s supposed corruption, and the particular falsehoods most repeated by both current US Presidential candidates. The day we spoke, Glenn was investigating a video released by the Republican National Committee that had been misleadingly edited to appear to show President Joe Biden wandering away from a G-7 meeting. Glenn gave that Four Pinocchio’s...

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

Produced by Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com