Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I'm Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

What does it mean to be media literate? It means being able to distinguish between opinion and news and being able to discern misinformation when you see it, knowing which news organizations to trust...

But my guest today argues that real media literacy, or as he sometimes prefers, being media savvy, goes deeper. It means understanding how information gets made and importantly, what likely motivates the people making any particular claim. It also means understanding how your own prior beliefs can shape your sense of what's true and false without your even being conscious of it.

Michael Spikes is an assistant professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and director of its Teach for Chicago journalism program. He spent most of his career understanding how to teach media literacy, this very 21st century skill, and advocating for it in education programs, which raises the harder question, is how do you make an entire country, an entire population more media literate?

So we'll talk about why teaching kids isn't enough, why adults need media literacy training just as much, why our decentralized education system makes population level change especially difficult here in the US, and perhaps most relevant to every one of us citizens, is how do you know what to believe?!

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

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schoenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. It's hard to imagine principles more foundational to American self-conception as a free people than the guarantees of free speech and a free press embedded in the First Amendment. Given their importance, it's strange to realize that these principles almost didn't become

Part of the Constitution. Rights, after all, already existed in state constitutions and centuries of English common law, so many framers didn't think it necessary to write them down. Given how frequently those rights have been challenged since, it's a good thing they did. So, what happened to change their minds? The guest today is Pulitzer Prize winning historian and Stanford Professor Emeritus Jack Rakove.

The episode is a distilled version of a longer interview covering the origins of the First Amendment, but for this episode, we'll leap right into its adoption into the Constitution. And then we'll take another great leap into whether that Constitution, for all its eighteenth century brilliance, is up to governing the country we have become today. Rakove has doubts.

It's a question Eric will explore further this fall when he teaches an online course on the First Amendment open to everyone at the University of Chicago's Gram School. You'll find the sign-up link below in the show notes. But now, first, here's Jack Rakove.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to the origins of the First Amendment
01:13 The absence of free speech in the original Constitution
02:24 State declarations of rights and their meanings
06:30 The political process behind adding the Bill of Rights
09:13 Madison's concerns and the drafting of amendments
17:00 Contemporary challenges to free expression and the First Amendment
20:39 The state of American constitutional norms today

Eric's University of Chicago Class https://graham.uchicago.edu/course/revolutionary-origins-of-the-first-amendment

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

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

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.

When Eric started in journalism, the enforcer of accuracy was the newsroom. Editors questioned your work. Fact checkers combed through it for errors. The organization you worked for held you accountable for its reputation.

But as everyone knows, fewer people today get their news from this kind of institutional journalism. The growth in news consumption comes from so-called independent journalists—social media influencers, podcasters and Substackers, many of whom never set foot in a newsroom. In this media environment, people trust individuals more than organizations to tell them the truth.

Rather than resisting this trend, today’s guest is trying to shape it. Rachel Lobdell is the executive director of News Creator Corps, which trains creators in the disciplines that professional reporters learned in the newsroom: sourcing, fact checking, public records, transparency, and ethics.

This raises all kinds of questions for an institutionalist like Eric. Can news integrity be repotted outside the newsroom? Can creators maintain audience trust without pandering? And what happens to news gathering when journalists backed by newsrooms are replaced by individuals?

So, let’s ask News Creator Corps’ Rachel Lobdell.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Rachel Labdell and News Creator Corps
02:01 Rachel's background in traditional journalism
03:30 What is News Creator Corps and its mission
04:48 Training creators with no journalism background
05:42 Impact of creator trust in underserved communities
07:34 Different types of creators and their roles
08:02 Why focus on creators without journalism training
09:25 The importance of mentorship and community
12:42 The NCC Collective and creator accreditation
13:59 Handling monetization and ethical standards
16:33 Dealing with sponsored content and disclosures
18:21 Guarding against sensationalism and algorithm influence
20:46 Sourcing and transparency in creator content
22:50 The future of creator-driven news ecosystems
27:34 Long-term vision for trustworthy information
28:30 Measuring impact and community engagement

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

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com