Best Pepperdine Universitys Podcasts (2024)

1
The Original Fact Checker: How To Know What's True with The Post's Glenn Kessler 40:05

10d ago40:05

40:05

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 …

1
The Lost Art of Civil Discourse with Clea Conner CEO of Open to Debate 45:51

21d ago45:51

45:51

Any institution that aspires to get at the truth needs a process for testing what it believes to be true. Central to the judicial system, for example, are lawyers challenging their opponents’ arguments. In science, claims must be peer-reviewed, and experiments have to be replicated. But in politics and culture, any kind of rule-based, civil testing…

1
The Logic Behind Illogical Ideologies: Pepperdine University's Jason Blakely 31:49

1M ago31:49

31:49

The political landscape in the US has fragmented into a handful of beliefs, the adherents to which have less and less in common, other than a profound inability to comprehend others’ beliefs. This, unfortunately, is not news. In a fascinating new book, today’s guest attempts to pierce the incomprehensibility cloak. The guest is Jason Blakely, an as…

1
Destroying The Internet In Order To Save It: Project Liberty's Frank McCourt 31:07

2M ago31:07

31:07

The guests who come on In Reality come prepared to talk about big issues. Truth, polarization, the information ecosystem: these are not exactly niche issues. Today’s guest though, may have the biggest embrace of anyone I’ve had on the show... You may know Frank McCourt as the billionaire real estate magnate and owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers base…

1
How Newsrooms Decide What's True: Former Editor of the Washington Post Martin Baron 49:11

2M ago49:11

49:11

To figure out what’s true and what’s not in today’s chaotic, fragmented, contradictory information environment, all of us news consumers have to think like journalists: is that story I’m seeing backed by evidence, is the headline fair, is the coverage biased? Well, we could do worse than to think like the journalist who is today’s guest. Until his …

1
The Saboteurs Within: University of Michigan's Barbara McQuade 47:15

3M ago47:15

47:15

For decades, America’s foreign adversaries have used disinformation to undermine American democracy, to sow division and create confusion about what is even true. But who needs foreign adversaries when so many Americans, for whatever reason, have embraced the same tactics and same apparent goal? Today’s guest, Barbara McQuade, is a professor at Uni…

1
Why We're Losing the Misinformation War: The Information Futures Lab's Claire Wardle 37:39

4M ago37:39

37:39

It was eight years ago, when Brexit and the US Presidential election showed how misinformation enables real-world damage. Since then, researchers, content managers, regulators, journalists and others sprang into action to counter misinformation and now misinformation pollutions is even worse. Why? Claire Wardle has some ideas. She’s been in the fig…

1
Stopping Misinformation At The Gate: News Literacy Project's Peter Adams 39:36

4M ago39:36

39:36

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media with Eric Schurenberg, a long time journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. There are two ways to fight misinformation: One is to debunk falsehoods after they have surfaced. The other is to help create media literate news audience…

1
Is News Negativity Driving Audiences Away? The Solutions Journalism Network's David Bornstein 49:54

5M ago49:54

49:54

Journalism’s problems today are legion: Collapsing business models, attacks from political partisans, divisions in the profession over basic questions like objectivity. But none of these is solvable until newsrooms address their troubled relationship with audiences: Too many people don’t believe journalists work in their interest. Many avoid news b…

1
Who Killed Trust? And What Can We Do About It? The Center for Media Engagement at UT Austin's Talia Stroud 39:27

6M ago39:27

39:27

A lot of people, Eric included, are working to figure out what exactly happened to facts, trust in institutions like science and the news, and to the shared reality we used to enjoy in this country. There is no shortage of research about the depth of the problem but very little about what really might reverse it. Which is where today’s guest comes …

1
Digital Disruption and the Myth of Mainstream Media: CEO of Fortune Media Alan Murray 59:04

6M ago59:04

59:04

In talking about the news today, it’s tempting to focus on the bad actors, the amplifiers of nonsense and the peddlers of outrage. It’s worth remembering, though, they’re not the only players. There are journalists who adhere to standards and have managed to thrive despite the seismic disruption of the industry. Today’s guest is one of those. Alan …

1
Can You Make A Profit Fighting Misinfo? NewsGuard's Gordon Crovitz 44:50

7M ago44:50

44:50

Disinformation is good business. Spreading lies and outrage tends to be profitable, thanks to programmatic advertising, which cares only about traffic, not truth, and funding by state actors like Russia, which pour money into narratives that undermine democracies. Supporting truth is a tougher commercial prospect, but today’s guest is giving it a c…

1
Polarization's Ground Zero: Author of 'Network of Lies' Brian Stelter 44:18

7M ago44:18

44:18

According to a Pew Research survey in 2021, almost three quarters of Americans consider Fox News to be part of the mainstream media, along with familiar brands like ABC News and the Wall Street Journal. That’s interesting because Fox is different in many ways. It’s not only easily the most profitable cable news network and the only one trusted by m…

1
How To Know If You Can Trust That Story: The Trust Project's Sally Lehrman 47:20

7M ago47:20

47:20

The information environment today has two broad problems: a supply side problem and a demand side problem. On the supply side, it is ridiculously easy for anyone to spread propaganda or outrage or lies online, and on the demand side, it is hard for audiences to distinguish manipulation from fact-based news. Today’s guest, Sally Lehrman, aims to tac…

1
How Fake History Ignites the Fake Present: Britain's Author of 'Fake History' and 'Fake Heroes' Otto English 35:29

8M ago35:29

35:29

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. I’m Eric Schurenberg, a long time journalist and media executive, now the executive director of the Alliance for Trust in Media. An awful lot of the heat in today’s polarized political landscape arises from vastly different interpretations of history. In the US, we fight …

1
Why Don't The Advocates of Truth Work Together? 42:53

8M ago42:53

42:53

A lot of academic researchers, journalists, NGOs, even a few tech firms--are working on the issue of disinformation. Some people are opposed to this work, especially on the political right, and have given this disparate group the ominous collective nickname of disinformation industrial complex, as if it were a monolith devoted single-mindedly to ce…

1
How To Make Advertising An Ally For Truth 47:34

9M ago47:34

47:34

One reason that falsehoods flourish online is that major advertisers fund them—but usually unwittingly. The opaque nature of automated online ad delivery means that advertisers don’t actually know where most of their digital ads appear. On a high-quality news site? Maybe. On a trashy clickbait farm? The ad-tech doesn’t care. Today’s In Reality gues…

1
Tech Led Us Into The Misinfo Mess. Can It Lead Us Out? 34:22

9M ago34:22

34:22

You can blame today’s chaotic information environment on many factors: digital inequality and the rise of populism, attention hijacking by social media, and the collapse of mainstream media business models. Wherever you point the finger, digital technology was either the root cause or an accelerant. Which is why today’s guest is particularly worth …

1
What We Really Look For When We Say We're Looking For Truth 42:42

10M ago42:42

42:42

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation and the media. I’m Eric Schurenberg, a longtime journalist, now executive director of the Alliance for Trust in Media. One of my long-held assumptions is that everyone seeks the truth. They may be derailed in that quest by false information, but the ultimate goal is factuality. Today’s …

1
Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson: What To Believe (or not) in the News 49:20

10M ago49:20

49:20

When I talk to people about the mission of In Reality, I frequently am told, “Media is so corrupt. Why do you bother.” In some circles, it seems that hating professional media is just a reflex, like saying “Bless you” when someone sneezes. Nothing personal. Today’s guest is one of the best living rebuttals I can think of to this kind of blanket con…

1
How to Get People to Believe in Science Again 36:44

11M ago36:44

36:44

In politics, you can understand why some voters align themselves with claims that don’t bear up under scrutiny. In politics, there are other forces at work than factuality, like tribal identity and moral narratives. But science is different—or ought to be. And yet trust in science has stumbled, along with media and government. So… why? And what’s t…

1
How to Build Immunity to Viral Misinformation 1:00:26

11M ago1:00:26

1:00:26

We in the media tend to be pretty good at admiring the problem of disinformation, not so good at countering it. So a plan for countering falsehoods in the public sphere is one of the things that makes today’s guest, Sander van der Linden, so intriguing. Van der Linden is a professor of Social Psychology in Society at the University of Cambridge and…

1
Dublin Tech Summit 2023 | What Does Generative AI Mean For The Information Landscape? 38:16

1y ago38:16

38:16

In this special episode, recorded at this years Dublin Tech Summit, Eric is joined by Sean O hEigeartaigh, acting director of the Centre for the study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University. For a dozen years, his research has focused on AI and other emerging technologies. Sean and Eric discuss what generative AI means for the information land…

1
What’s Really Behind the Collapse of Trust in the Media 39:34

1y ago39:34

39:34

When too many people believe in things that aren’t true, democracy suffers. Democracy also suffers when people refuse to believe what is true, just because it appeared in the mainstream media. For all its failings—the unacknowledged biases, the inevitable errors, the pandering—professional journalism serves a key role in a democracy, and so the ref…

1
Why Are Some Beliefs so Maddeningly Resistant to Evidence? 38:48

1y ago38:48

38:48

You don’t have to go too deep on the topic of disinformation before you stumble into a question that philosophers have wrestled with for centuries: How do we know what we know? That’s when it’s good to have a philosopher in the room, and we are lucky today to welcome Åsa Wikforss, a professor of theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University and th…

1
What if AI Could Literally Read Your Mind? 42:06

1y ago42:06

42:06

Social media platforms know a ton about who you are from your online behavior, but there’s one thing they can’t yet know: what you’re thinking at any given moment. That is the last stronghold of privacy in the digital age, except our next guest believes that could be about to fall, too. Nita Farahany is a professor of law and philosophy at Duke Uni…

1
Why Good People Share Fake News — And How To Make Them Stop 53:04

1y ago53:04

53:04

It’s received wisdom today that tribalism, confirmation bias and other mental errors are deeply embedded in human nature. And once social media began exploiting these forces, truth didn’t stand a chance. Well, not so fast. Today’s guest is David Rand, professor of management and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. To cite a very incomplete list of…

1
Why Polarization Turns Toxic - And How To Stop It 46:02

1+ y ago46:02

46:02

The first casualty of polarization is not truth, perhaps, but rather empathy. Your opponent is not just wrong, but contemptible, their behavior not just troubling to you but beyond comprehension. These are earmarks of what today’s guest calls high conflict, and it characterizes much public discourse today. Amanda Ripley is a journalist who has writ…

1
The Lonely Pursuit of Facts in a Post-Truth World 43:49

1+ y ago43:49

43:49

At one point in the post-truth era, fact-checking seemed like the way back to a shared reality. Just get evidence-based truth out there, and disinformation would slink away in disgrace. Snopes, Kinzen, Meedan and others are built on that belief. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. Falsehood still seems to have the drop on truth. So, today’s…

1
Truth Decay: The Cause and The Treatment 32:15

1+ y ago32:15

32:15

Outside the friendly confines of this podcast, it’s hard to talk about truth and media without the discussion turning emotional. These are incendiary topics, which is why it’s especially useful to be able to draw on cool analysis. This is how many people characterize the work of this episode’s guest, Michael Rich, president emeritus of the think ta…

1
Why News Stopped Being “Just The Facts” (And Why That’s Good) 37:09

1+ y ago37:09

37:09

You can’t get more than a few minutes into any conversation about trust in media today before Walter Cronkite makes an appearance. People say they long for those days when everyone believed TV news, their hometown daily gave facts without slant, and CBS news reader Cronkite was the most trusted person in America. Well, to paraphrase Cronkite’s sign…

1
The Week the Trolls Stormed Homeland Security 46:35

1+ y ago46:35

46:35

One of the goals of In Reality is to introduce our listeners to people who are on the front lines of the battle against disinformation. But battles have casualties, and Nina Jankowicz is one of them. Nina is a highly respected expert on Russian disinformation strategies and the author of two books, How to Lose the Information War and How to Be a Wo…

1
Have We Been Wrong about What the Other Side Thinks? 38:27

1+ y ago38:27

38:27

Polarization has reached such a fever pitch in the United States that each side of the political divide sees the other as an existential threat to democracy. Partisans use the same pejoratives to describe the other’s beliefs: arrogant, uninformed, incomprehensible. But what if people are wrong about what the other side thinks? What if we’ve actuall…

1
The Real Reason Social Media Grabs Us 39:48

1+ y ago39:48

39:48

If social media platforms don’t directly cause polarization, they do, at least, give oxygen to smoldering divisions that can erupt into tragedies like the Myanmar genocide, Brexit, and January 6th. Why is social media so effective at unleashing the worst in us, and how do we break its hold? This episode’s guest, Christopher Bail, pursues those ques…

1
Defending Factuality in a World of Alternate Realities 39:07

1+ y ago39:07

39:07

At some point in conversations about the media, somebody inevitably says, “I just want a single source of true, instantaneous, and uplifting information so that I don't have to think about it.” The longing is understandable—but let's get real. In this era of unlimited and ungoverned information, you have to construct your own trusted news environme…

1
How to Market Chaos 41:38

1+ y ago41:38

41:38

A lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots. Everyone has heard that chestnut, but Sinan Aral has actually proved it. He was one of the first to warn about the corrosive effects of social media with a celebrated Science Magazine cover story, a seminal book, The Hype Machine, and a vast study showing that fak…

1
The Hidden World of Political Cults 32:20

1+ y ago32:20

32:20

It’s a feature of our polarized world today that each side of the political spectrum refers to the extremists on the other side as members of a cult. Those are fightin’ words, sure, but you can understand the feeling. People are going down rabbit holes of bizarre, sometimes apocalyptic beliefs; they are alienating themselves from family and from ev…

1
What if Polarization is Actually an Illusion? 35:56

2y ago35:56

35:56

If you are a Democrat, have you ever espoused the slogan “Defund the Police?” If you’re a Republican, do you agree with politicians who claim that 2020 presidential election was stolen? If you said yes, you may well be operating under a “collective illusion,” a widespread mental phenomenon in which people take positions in public they privately don…

1
Dismantling the Disinformation Economy 30:11

2y ago30:11

30:11

Check My Ads Institute is an organization that is taking aim at purveyors of conspiracy theories, hate speech and disinformation. The Institute describes itself as “an independent watchdog” whose goal is to prevent digital advertisers from inadvertently monetizing the spread of falsehoods. In this episode of In Reality, host Eric Schurenberg sits d…

1
How Cambridge Analytica Opened the Pandora’s Box of Disinformation 48:07

2y ago48:07

48:07

In this episode of In Reality, Eric Schurenberg hosts Brittany Kaiser, best known as one of the whistleblowers at Cambridge Analytica, the British political consulting firm that worked on the disinformation-laden 2016 campaigns behind Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Having disavowed her former employer, she is now a much sought-after exper…

1
Combatting Domestic Terrorism with Melanie Smith 26:58

2y ago26:58

26:58

In this episode of In Reality, recorded at the Collision conference in Toronto, host Eric Schurenberg joins Melanie Smith, Head of the Digital Analysis Unit at the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue–an independent non-profit dedicated to reversing the tide of polarization, extremism, and disinformation worldwide. The topics in this episo…

1
The elite’s blind spots and the illusion of truth with Gillian Tett 39:28

2y ago39:28

39:28

In this episode of In Reality, host Eric Schurenberg sits down with Gillian Tett, Chair of the Editorial Board and Editor-at-Large for the Financial Times, US. Gillian is also trained as an anthropologist, which gives her a unique perspective on the tribal divides within American society. If you believe that your grasp of reality is the only legiti…

1
On the front lines of the disinformation fight with Áine Kerr 39:55

2y ago39:55

39:55

In the fight against disinformation, the last line of defense between audiences and malicious falsehoods are the “trust and safety” teams, also known as content moderators. Some of them are employed by social media platforms like Facebook and Spotify, but increasingly the platforms outsource the work of identifying and countering dangerous lies to …

1
How to Build True Public Spaces Online with Eli Pariser 57:10

2y ago57:10

57:10

In this episode of In Reality, co-hosts Eric Schurenberg and Joan Donovan are joined by Eli Pariser, co-director of New Public and former president of MoveOn.org. Pariser is a long-time advocate for creating healthy communities online, and he now advocates for reimagining the Internet as a trustworthy public space analogous to local parks or public…

1
Truth and Trade-offs amid a Polarized Pandemic with Dr Leana Wen 53:27

2y ago53:27

53:27

The covid pandemic has created the kind of situation in which misinformation thrives. Public health authorities met surging demand for knowledge about how to protect against covid with inconsistent or inadequate guidance. Misinformation rushed in to fill the gap. In this episode of In Reality, Dr Leana Wen, emergency physician & public health profe…

1
How We Know What’s True with Jonathan Rauch 1:02:41

2y ago1:02:41

1:02:41

Truth–and the institutions that defend it–are under attack. What can the rest of us do? In this episode of In Reality, co-hosts Eric Schurenberg and Joan Donovan are joined by Jonathan Rauch, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of ‘The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth’. In this captivating discussion, Jonathan unpac…

1
A new definition of making America great again with Kathleen Belew 41:15

2y ago41:15

41:15

In this episode of In Reality, Kathleen Belew, University of Chicago historian and author of ‘Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America’, joins co-hosts Eric Schurenberg and Joan Donovan. In a fascinating conversation, Belew outlines how social media and the tactics of disinformation energized the white power movement th…

1
From optimism to doubt (and back) at Facebook with Joaquin Quiñonero Candela 1:01:52

2y ago1:01:52

1:01:52

In this episode of In Reality, co-hosts Eric Schurenberg and Joan Donovan sit down with Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, technical fellow for AI at LinkedIn and a former distinguished technical lead for responsible AI at Facebook. Before this, Joaquin led the Applied Machine Learning team at Facebook, creating the algorithms that made Facebook advertisin…

1
The reboot that can save social media with Rob Reich 58:04

2y ago58:04

58:04

In the first episode of In Reality, co-hosts Eric Schurenberg and Joan Donovan are joined by Rob Reich, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Stanford University and Author of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot. At its birth, social media promised to be a tool to promote democracy. Instead, it has become the ac…

1
Episode 58 - Interview with Dennis Donohue 15:51

11y ago15:51

15:51

Dennis Donohue is the former three term Mayor of Salinas, California, and current President of Royal Rose LLC. He sat down with Pete Peterson, director of the School of Public Policy's Davenport Institute for Public Leadership and Civic Engagement, to talk about his work as a public figure and how California issues statewide can affect local govern…

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