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Simon Adler takes us down a technological rabbit hole of strangely contorted faces and words made out of thin air. And a wonderland full of computer scientists, journalists, and digital detectives...
View ArticleFake News Network
NPR media correspondent, David Folkenflik talks about a lawsuit filed against Fox News that alleges the Fox News Channel and a wealthy Trump supporter concocted a story about a deceased Democratic...
View ArticleA Note From Jad About "Truth Trolls"
Radiolab has decided to take down our episode called "Truth Trolls." Some listeners called us out saying that in telling the capture the flag story in the way that we did, we essentially condoned some...
View ArticleTruth Trolls
EDITORIAL UPDATE: Radiolab has decided to take down this episode. Some listeners called us out saying that in telling the capture the flag story in the way that we did, we essentially condoned some...
View ArticleFake news reports are hindering the emergency response to Harvey
Bad information shared on social media is causing unnecessary panic among the public and costing first responders valuable time, Officer Haley Morrow of the Beaumont Police told PBS NewsHour’s Miles...
View ArticleWeekend: Melissa Clark, Activist Dolores Huerta, Becoming Fake News
New York Times food columnist and cookbook author Melissa Clark offers tips and recipes for making the most of all that corn! Director Peter Bratt joins us to discuss his documentary “Dolores” along...
View ArticleGoogle ‘Top stories’ featured false news about rumored Antifa civil war
A false rumor is currently circulating on conservative junk news web sites and social media warning that the loose knit movement of anti-fascist activists known as “Antifa” is planning to launch a...
View ArticleNyet Just a Conspiracy Theory?
During the presidential campaign, Daily Beast executive editor Noah Shachtman opened up Twitter, saw all the vitriol and fake news and conspiracy theories, and thought 'Man, is this really my country?'...
View ArticleSpy Terms of the Internyet
Russian spy tactics have gotten an upgrade since the Cold War. This week how they work now: bad actors, active measures, advanced persistent threats. Cyberwar has its own vocabulary. So we got...
View ArticleIt’s Not Over Nyet
When governments start pulling the strings of power with algorithms and bots... we ALL become political puppets. Listeners, it’s time to consider how online interference moves into the physical...
View ArticleHow WikiLeaks Got to Donald Trump, Jr.; Rep Lance on the GOP Tax Bill;...
Coming up on today's show:Julia Ioffe, covers national security and foreign policy topics for The Atlantic, talks about her reporting which revealed that throughout the 2016 campaign, all the way up...
View ArticleLyin' Don
In the past week President Trump has revived suspicions about President Obama’s birth place and asserted that the “Access Hollywood” tape was a fake. He also retweeted a series of graphic anti-Muslim...
View ArticleIn Praise of Radically Transparent Journalism
Since the dawn of their profession, journalists have mostly published their findings without focusing much on process – the idea being that nobody really wants to "see how the sausage gets made." But...
View ArticleAmerica's History of Hoaxes and Popular Delusion
From "fake news" to Twitter bots, it's easy to feel like we have suddenly become awash in hogwash. But according to Kevin Young, author of Bunk, “flimflammery is as American as Jazz.” Young traces our...
View ArticleUnlikely Stories
A film based on a true story about secrets, lies and Washington, D.C. is just about to open in select theaters. It has WNYC's Sara Fishko considering some other films, facts and fantasies that have...
View ArticleJon Stewart’s Children, and Trolling the Press Corps
In the years after September 11th, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” made political satire a central part of the media landscape. This hour, we hear from some of today’s leading practitioners: The New...
View ArticleAndy Borowitz Reports
Andy Borowitz has been writing political satire for The New Yorker for nearly twenty years. His Borowitz Report dispatches are so convincing that even his most imaginative pieces are sometimes cited as...
View ArticleJon Stewart’s Children
In the years after September 11th, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” made political satire a central part of the media landscape. This hour, we hear from some of today’s leading practitioners: The New...
View ArticleWords of the Year
In "Words of the Year," Louis Menand writes about the importance of words.
View ArticleTrolling the Press Corps
Lucian Wintrich, a young blogger, was recently appointed as the White House correspondent for the conservative political site Gateway Pundit. He has no professional experience as a reporter and doesn’t...
View ArticleOutrage Machine
The book that took D.C. by storm; evaluating our first year under President Trump; the story of the Pentagon Papers, from someone who helped write them; and the latest scholarly research on "fake news"...
View ArticleThe Fake News Crisis That Wasn't
The media often attributes a portion of Donald Trump’s election to fake news — as in the vintage, original meaning of that term: Macedonian teens making bank on preposterous headlines; the Islamization...
View ArticleFacebook Mutes the News
Your Facebook News Feed is in the midst of an enormous overhaul. Late last week the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that the platform’s new algorithm would begin showing its two billion users...
View ArticleBots and The Battle for American Democracy
As concerns over Russian meddling in the 2018 midterms continue to mount, there's a new debate about how much of an impact fake news and bots really have on an election. Molly McKew is an expert on...
View ArticleWhy Trump Is Betting Big on Facebook Ads for 2020
Issie Lapowsky, Senior Writer for WIRED, discusses President Trump's recent appointment of Brad Parscale to run his 2020 reelection campaign. Parscale rose up through the ranks in 2016 to run the Trump...
View ArticleLost in the United States: From Teenage Migrants to Trafficking Victims
Here's what you'll find on today's show:— In Marion, Ohio, a city of about 35,000 people an hour north of Columbus, eight migrant teenagers from Guatemala found themselves trapped in a trafficking ring...
View ArticleMalaysian 'Fake News' Law Targets Government Critics
Malaysia has convicted the first person under a new law outlawing 'fake news.' Under Malaysia's Anti-Fake News Act, it is a crime to create or share fake news, and it carries a sentence of up to 10...
View ArticleWhose Bot Army Is Following Manoush?
Bot armies are taking over Twitter. But they’re not necessarily trying to advance a point of view, according to Phil Howard, a bot researcher. They’re aiming to sow chaos and make dialogue impossible....
View ArticleCan Democracy Survive Cyber Hackers?
Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent, discusses his new book, Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News. He dissects the...
View ArticleThe Reality Of Trump's America, Life In The Alaskan Wilderness, LBJ Creates A...
David Cay Johnston discusses how the Trump administration is remaking the government and undermining federal agencies. Zack McDermott talks about finding his way back to sanity from psychosis. Kristin...
View ArticleHow Do You Use Twitter?
We’ll open the phones to take listeners’ calls about how they use Twitter. Especially in the last two years, what’s changed since its inception and what has stayed the same? Since President Trump has...
View ArticleHow Fake News in India is Causing Real Violence
In recent months, nearly two dozen people in India have been killed by vigilante mobs. The hysteria driving these killings is originating in group chats on the country's most popular messaging...
View ArticleAn Ecosystem of Misinformation
Jonathan Albright is known for his ability to connect the dots between seemingly disparate stories about internet trolls and fake news. His work has led him to become America's pre-eminent expert on...
View ArticleThe Dissemination of Fake News, Smokey Joe's Cafe is Back, Native Women Under...
Jonathan Albright discusses his research methods for tracking connections between seemingly disparate stories about internet trolls and fake news, he'll by joined by Issie Lapowsky, who recently...
View ArticleThe Changing Face of Journalism
Michael Massing, a contributor to The Nation and the author of Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind, discusses his feature, “Journalism in the Age of Trump,” (online as...
View ArticleJournalism Under Trump, The Resurgence of Mead, 'Please Explain'...
Michael Massing discusses how journalism is being challenged under the Trump administration. Ashley Fure and César Alvarez talk about creating her most recent composition, "The Force of Things."...
View ArticleThe rise of the new German right
In just a few days, Germans will go to the polls to vote for a new government in an election that feels strangely familiar. For decades, Germany’s elections have been subdued and predictable, but this...
View ArticleNew Senate Reports Detail Extent of Russian Meddling Campaign
New Senate Reports Detail Extent of Russian Meddling Campaign The reports show that Russian meddlers took advantage of a deep knowledge of how to wedge American voters further apart. Budapest Erupts in...
View ArticleNew Senate Reports Detail Extent of Russian Meddling Campaign
On Monday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released two reports that examined the extent of the Russian disinformation campaign during the 2016 elections. The findings reveal a sophisticated...
View ArticleWhen the Internet Is Mostly Fake
If campaign strategists see online fakery as a powerful weapon in the current realpolitik, they’re not alone; all manner of prevaricators percolate inside the internet. There are companies profiteering...
View ArticleHarm To Ongoing Matter
After years of waiting, journalists finally began digging into the redacted version of the Mueller report. On this week’s On the Media, how the special counsel’s findings confirm years of reporting...
View ArticleAre Deepfakes the Next Fake News?
In late May, a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the rounds on social media. But it wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be. The video, in which Pelosi seems to drunkenly slur her speech, had been...
View ArticleSecretary of State Mike Pompeo Verbally Attacks NPR Host Mary Louise Kelly
The Trump administration’s hostile attitude towards the news media escalated over the weekend, following an exchange in which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo verbally berated veteran NPR reporter Mary...
View ArticleA Pandemic of Lies
"After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News" studies the rise of lies in politics and their weaponization with social media. Filmmaker Andrew Rossi examines conspiracies such as Pizzagate...
View ArticleWhy Social Media Is So Captivating
Last April, states began to sporadically reopen after weeks of being shut down. South Carolina was among the first to begin the process and some others would soon follow, while some states wouldn’t...
View ArticleHow Real Journalism Gets Turned into Propaganda
Last weekend, the New York Times ran a story detailing a network of over one thousand "local news" websites with names like "North Cook News" and "DuPage Policy Journal." To the untrained eye, they...
View Article2020 Has Been A Rough Year for Press Freedom
2020 has been a grim year for global press freedom. Journalists have been routinely targeted, harassed, attacked, even killed for doing their jobs, whether they’ve been covering government abuse,...
View ArticleRemote Learning with Historian Jon Meacham
Jon Meacham, journalist, Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian, host of the new podcast "Fate of Fact" and the author of The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (Random House,...
View ArticleHistorian Jon Meacham On The GOP’s Sixty Year Path to Fantasy
Trump's GOP has demonstrated an eagerness to believe in conspiracy theories and to accept disinformation that bolsters their politics. How did it get that way?On Today's Show: Jon Meacham, journalist,...
View ArticleInside Biden's Short-Lived Disinformation Governance Board
When disinformation circulates about, say, FEMA and hurricanes, it can hurt the government’s ability to provide life-saving storm relief. Precisely why the Biden administration rolled out a potential...
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