Understanding The Stories That Divide Us with Harmony Labs' Brian Waniewski

In Reality

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. The cliche about disinformation is you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. What that formulation ignores though is that the facts that we regard as true, the opinions we hold as core beliefs are built on top of the stories we tell ourselves.

Stories are the way we humans make sense of the world we observe and always have been. And every group is entitled to its own stories. Actually, groups are defined by their stories. My guest today, Brian Wienyski, has made it his life's work to understand the stories we tell ourselves. He's the executive director of Harmony Labs, a nonprofit that maps how stories and media influence the ways Americans see the world, whether those stories are told on TikTok or the BBC or streaming media or movies or whatever.

In this episode, Brian and Eric talk about what his findings reveal about polarization, about how entertainment and news feed on each other and what strategies might actually help bridge divides.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm
Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com