From Newspapers to Influencers: Who Controls Reality Now? (Ashley Rindsberg)
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2026
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Journalist and author Ashley Rindsberg returns to The Michael Shermer Show for a wide-ranging conversation about the new media world: influencers with audiences larger than cable networks, conspiracy theories built for engagement, and the collapse of trust that followed COVID, censorship, and years of institutional overreach.
Ashley Rindsberg is an investigative journalist and author focused on digital information platforms. He is the founder and editor of NPOV, which looks at how knowledge platforms like Wikipedia are used to distort information and seed damaging narratives online. He is the author of The Gray Lady Winked, an expose on The New York Times, and serves as Editor-at-Large at Pirate Wires, a leading tech, politics, and culture outlet.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Candice, I think she believes in the idea that you believe in what is useful to you. |
| 0:05.6 | Truth is not what matters, particularly on the right, which is a really strange thing to see. |
| 0:09.0 | They've embraced this kind of postmodern conception of truth, which is something that's |
| 0:13.3 | constructed by power. And I think we've all been fed this idea for so long now that truth is a construct. |
| 0:19.2 | My warning about this kind of thing, which I wrote in my book, was other people are going to notice. They're going to see that this is a construct. My warning about this kind of thing, which I wrote in my book, |
| 0:21.6 | was other people are going to notice. They're going to see that this is an effective strategy for |
| 0:26.2 | winning ideological wars, and the other side is going to do the same thing. And lo and behold, |
| 0:30.4 | they did. COVID became this turning point for people in the way that they think about information, |
| 0:34.7 | the way they sell in the media, and the backlash that we're seeing now, it's almost like the inflation that came after the stimulus, the multiple rounds of trillion dollar stimulus, where we now have huge levels of inflation. |
| 0:45.9 | We're kind of seeing the same thing in the information space where the inflation is distrust in anything, not just the media, and distrust in any kind of established fact, especially |
| 0:55.6 | having something to do with science and politics. And what we get, the inflationary effect is |
| 1:00.7 | basically conspiracy theory. |
| 1:06.4 | All right, hey, everybody. It's Michael Schumer. It's time for another episode of the Michael |
| 1:09.5 | Shermer show. My guest today, a returning champion, Ashley Rinsberg. He was here a couple of years |
| 1:14.9 | ago for his book that I'll talk about in just a moment. But he was born in South Africa, |
| 1:18.8 | immigrated to the United States as a child after earning degrees in philosophy and science and |
| 1:23.5 | technology studies at Cornell University. Rinsberg worked at the prestigious digital NGO Internet Archive, where he ran the Internet |
| 1:32.9 | Bookmobile project. |
| 1:35.1 | His work for the archive took him to Egypt, where he installed the country's first internet |
| 1:39.3 | bookmobile at the Library of Alexandria. |
| 1:42.1 | I didn't even know it still existed after they burned it down a couple thousand years ago. |
| 1:46.4 | Over the course of 13 years spent wondering Israel's unholy city, Rinsberg encountered the beggars, dreamers, artists, musicians, and Madmen, |
... |
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