Episodes
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The goal of modern disinformation campaigns is not necessarily to turn audiences into true believers but rather to turn them into cynics, to persuade them that you can’t trust anything said by any institution, whether media or science or government.
In this world view, there is no such thing as objective truth, everyone is biased or otherwise untrustworthy, so the conclusion is that you need a strong man—a Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, say—to lead you through.
Today’s guest has an antidote to this dysfunctional belief. He’s Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of A Powerful Book called the Constitution of Knowledge.
Rauch says there is objective truth, although he’d call it objective knowledge. What matters is not the claim itself, but how the claim was vetted. Reality is a collaboration of people who may disagree on everything else but agree on the rules of evidence, on the process of argumentation, and it’s that process that eventually yields what is factual.
Do listen. The conversation is bracing and really clarifying.
Note: The conversation took place in my class on truth, disinformation and the media at the University of Chicago’s Graham School on Monday, September 9th.Website - free episode transcripts
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In Reality is taking a summer break, so this is an episode we’ve posted before, but I thought that in the middle of a US Presidential campaign, it might be a good idea to review my conversation with Glenn Kessler, editor of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column and arguably the creator of the fact checking industry.
In the Post, Glenn and his team have been holding both campaigns to account with equal intensity. Thanks to them, Post readers are now aware, for example, of Tim Walz’s exaggerations of his military record, as well as the barrage of conspiratorial falsehoods coming from the Trump campaign.
In the conversation, Glenn makes the point that fact-checks can only take us so far. You the reader have to be willing to accept facts that don’t conform to your beliefs. That last mile, if you will, of factuality, is not easy to travel. But it’s our responsibility as voters in a consequential election, and ours alone. After all, one way to make your vote count—and the only way you control entirely—is to make sure it’s based on truth.Website - free episode transcripts
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Episodes manquant?
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People have a lot of complaints about media in these polarized times. Take your pick: The mainstream press is biased, elitist, sensationalistic, hyper-partisan. If you’re on the right, you may believe that it deliberately enables falsehood.
Today’s guest is very much NOT on the right, but he agrees. Tom Johnson is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism and his book The Press and Democratic Backsliding makes the claim that media have failed democracy by losing control of the information landscape and allowing anti-democratic voices to thrive. In his view, the strength of the MAGA movement is not merely a cultural or political phenomenon. It’s a failure of journalism.
Those are fightin’ words. Tom and I talk about the role of the press in spinelessly empowering authoritarianism, about the media’s lopsided obsession with then-candidate Joe Biden’s age, its bias towards conflict and negativity, and, finally, lest you entirely despair, what to do about it all. So there’s hope.Website - free episode transcripts
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Today's guest is Andy Norman, philosophy professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of a fascinating book, Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites and the Search for a Better way to Think.
Andy argues that it’s possible to immunize the mind against harmful beliefs, just as it’s possible to immunize the body against germs. He and Eric discuss the evolutionary origins of skepticism, ideas that weaken the reasoned inquiry, how to decide whether a belief is reasonable, and applications of mental immunity in real life.
Join Eric's 'Truth, Disinformation & The 2024 Election' Class at The University of Chicago
It’s open to everyone via Zoom. It will discuss what’s going on in the coverage of the election, with a wonderful collection of guest speakers, educators, prominent political reporters and polling experts.
It will convene every Monday evening, Central US time, in the nine weeks leading up to the US election and one week afterwards. Don't miss out...
Register now: https://masterliberalarts.uchicago.edu/landing-page/noncredit/trust-and-media/Website - free episode transcripts
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Find this week's episode description below...
Join Eric's 'Truth, Disinformation & The 2024 Election' Class at The University of Chicago
It’s open to everyone via Zoom. It will discuss what’s going on in the coverage of the election, with a wonderful collection of guest speakers, educators, prominent political reporters and polling experts.
It will convene every Monday evening, Central US time, in the nine weeks leading up to the US election and one week afterwards. Don't miss out...
Register now: https://masterliberalarts.uchicago.edu/landing-page/noncredit/trust-and-media/
This week's episode
Today’s chaotic information environment is so hard to understand, so fundamentally disrupted, that many thoughtful people spend energy coming up with metaphors for it. Just to get our arms around it. It’s the familiar old gossip mill gone viral, for example. It’s traditional propaganda supercharged by social media.
Annalee Newitz, today’s guest, is an award-winning journalist and science fiction novelist who introduces an intriguing analogy in a new book, Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
What we’re seeing, Annalee says, is a kind of psychological warfare operation, using the tools of military psyops in our culture wars, as a way to undermine the institutions of liberal democracy.
Annalee and Eric discuss the history of psyops and the stories that psyops weaponizes; the difference between Russian and American psyops; why flooding the zone with misinformation is so effective; how psychological disarmament can happen, and how creative visions of the future, including those expressed through science fiction, can help inspire positive change.
Let Eric know what you think of the episode at [email protected]Website - free episode transcripts
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Misinformation, rumor, psy-ops and propaganda--whatever you want to call the four horsemen of today’s media apocalypse—have been with us as long as the media itself. But you have to admit that the arrival of digital technology, led by social media, has given all of those forces outsized power. We still haven’t quite come to terms with how tech has shattered things like a shared reality, democracy, civil discourse.
That’s why today’s guest plays a key role in the journalism landscape. Julia Angwin majored in math at the University of Chicago before launching a remarkable career in investigative journalism. She’s a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times on topics of tech and society, a winner and two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory reporting. She’s also an entrepreneur, the founder of the Markup, an innovative data-first online newsroom and just this year, she founded Proof News, which builds on the computational techniques of the Markup to hold tech companies accountable.
Julia and Eric discuss how she uses the tools of technology to inform journalism; about why reporting is like finding mathematical proofs; how she hopes transparency at Proof will build trust in its journalism; about the role of independent creators in the news environment; and how to hold big tech accountable.Website - free episode transcripts
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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 was one of the first and maybe its most famous practitioner. He’s Glenn Kessler, better known as the creator of the Washingon Post’s Fact Checker column, and maybe even better known for his Pinocchio rating of truth or falsehood.
Glenn’s a veteran journalist who got into fact checking during what now seem the innocent 1990s. The need for his work—and for that of hundreds of fact-checking organizations that sprung up in his wake—has only become more urgent in the age of social media and AI.
Glenn and Eric discuss the nature of factuality, how he and his team choose which claims to chase down, the factuality of popular memes like Joe Biden’s supposed corruption, and the particular falsehoods most repeated by both current US Presidential candidates. The day we spoke, Glenn was investigating a video released by the Republican National Committee that had been misleadingly edited to appear to show President Joe Biden wandering away from a G-7 meeting. Glenn gave that Four Pinocchio’s...Website - free episode transcripts
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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 of facts is a fading art. Debates are hostile, ideologies harden, and we kick up a lot of dust, in which the pursuit of truth gets lost.
But there is one place where you can test your beliefs by witnessing civil discussion of the most controversial issues of our time. It’s a program on radio and podcast called Open to Debate, and today we’re pleased to introduce its CEO, Clea Conner.
Clea is a veteran of public policy programming on TV, radio and podcasting and holds more than two dozen awards for excellence in such programming. She is also a classically trained flutist.
We won’t get into that today, but we will discuss how Open to Debate chooses topics for discussion, how they keep debates respectful and on topic, the salience of facturality, what it takes to change someone’s mind—including your own--and how the rest of us can keep political disagreement around the dining room table respectful and productive.Website - free episode transcripts
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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 associate professor of political science at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California and the book is Lost in Ideology. In it, Jason explains the ideologies at large in our land as simply different answers to a common human urge to make meaning of the world. I found Jason’s explanations fascinating—and potentially a first step towards seeking the common understanding our era desperately needs.
Buy Jason's book: Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political LifeWebsite - free episode transcripts
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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 baseball team. However, for the past few years he has turned his focus to running the non-profit Project Liberty, the enormously ambitious goal of which is to rebuild the internet with a new pro-social infrastructure.
His new book, 'Our Biggest Fight', documents the dysfunctions of the current network—the spread of disinformation and polarization and the concentration of power in a few Big Tech Companies--and argues for a new blockchain based system that returns ownership of personal data to us.
Frank and Eric will discuss how the digital landscape got to this point, why it can’t be sustained, his belief that change is urgent and why he is hopeful it’s possible.
Frank's book - 'Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age' - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743398/our-biggest-fight-by-frank-h-mccourt-jr-with-michael-j-casey/Website - free episode transcripts
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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 retirement in February 2021, Martin Baron was the editor of the Washington
Post, following remarkable stints leading the Boston Globe and Miami Herald. Altogether, teams under his editorship amassed more than two dozen Pulitzer prizes, including one story at the Globe that became the subject of an Oscar-winning movie, Spotlight.
Marty and I will talk about that and other stories; we’ll focus on what it was like covering the Trump administration, what the ownership of Jeff Bezos meant to the Washington Post’s coverage, and how high-stake decisions are made in the newsroom of a national daily in this highly charged era.
The first voice you’ll hear is that of Seth Green, the Dean of the University of Chicago’s Graham School, who will offer me a chance to introduce the Alliance for Trust in Media.Website - free episode transcripts
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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 University of Michigan Law School who previously served as vice chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and co-chaired its Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee.
The Murthy v. Missouri CaseImplications of a Decision in Murthy v. MissouriGovernment Communication with Social Media PlatformsChilling Effect on Government InterventionTrump's Allies and the War on DisinformationThe Decline in Trust in MediaThe Authoritarian PlaybookMuzzling the PressMedia Literacy and Critical ThinkingChanges in Media PracticesThe Importance of Media Literacy TrainingBringing Media Literacy Training to AdultsWhy Americans are Susceptible to DisinformationStochastic TerrorismThe Risk of AuthoritarianismThe Risks of Artificial IntelligenceAmending Section 230Demand Side Solutions: Media Literacy and Civics EducationOptimism for the Future
In her new book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, she makes it clear that then same kind of disinformation campaigns she saw originating in Russia or Iran are now homegrown. Barb and Eric talk about why Americans are particularly susceptible to disinformation; about the authoritarian playbook that leaders like Hungary’s Victor Orban or Donald Trump employ to seize power by ostensibly democratic means; about the right wing’s embrace of violent rhetoric and the dangers of stochastic terrorism; and the importance of media literacy in a chaotic information environment.
This is not perhaps the most optimistic episode to air on In Reality, but stay with us. This needs to be heard.
TopicsWebsite - free episode transcripts
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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?
Introduction and BackgroundThe Role of Information in Public HealthEncouraging Collaboration and Cross-Disciplinary WorkCommunity-Centered Approach to Addressing MisinformationThe Role of Media in Information PollutionJournalism's Responsibility and Trust DeclineMisinformation in Officialdom: Florida Surgeon GeneralUndermining of Expertise and Trust in ScienceIndividual Responsibility and Media LiteracyThe Need for Regulation and OversightThe Challenges of AI and Content ModerationThe Role of Courts in Addressing Social Media HarmsHope for Regulation and OversightThe Importance of Curating Newsfeeds and Avoiding Information Bubble
Claire Wardle has some ideas. She’s been in the fight since the beginning. In 2015, she was the founder of the pioneering research and training organization, First Draft News. She’s led teams on misinformation and verification at the BBC, Columbia Journalism School, and the UN among others. She’s now the co-founder of the Information Futures Lab at Brown University.
Claire and Eric discuss the backlash against content moderation; the perverse incentives that work against collaboration against misinformation; the role of journalists in rising mistrust of media; artificial intelligence and falsehood; and everyone’s personal responsibility for standing up for truth.
Topics
Producer: Tom PlattsWebsite - free episode transcripts
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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 audiences, who can recognize false claims before they take root. Debunking, necessary though it is, inevitably hands the initiative to manipulators and propagandists. Media literacy, on the other hand, helps news consumers debunk their own news feed. It simply scales better.
Today’s guest has spent the past decade and a half engaged in the media literacy cause. A former educator, Peter Adams is the research director of the News Literacy Project, a 15-year-old non-profit that trains middle-school and high-school teachers to impart the media literacy and critical thinking skills their students need to navigate today’s incredibly challenging information ecosystem. Peter and Eric discuss the penetration of news literacy training in school systems, how to deal with bias in news sources, the impact of collapsing media business models on the news environment, and the responsibility of news consumers to curate their own media diet.
Topics
Origin Story of the News Literacy Project
Role of the Research and Design Team
Penetration of NLP's Curriculum in School Systems
Definition of News Literacy and Its Components
Evaluation of Non-Traditional Sources of News
Understanding Bias in News Coverage
Challenges Faced by Mainstream Media
Political Bias in News Coverage
Impact of Changing Business Models on News Coverage
Addressing Partisan Bias in News Literacy Education
Responsibility of News Consumers in Curating a Healthy News Diet
Discovering News Outside of Filter Bubbles
Peter Adams' News Sources
Overview of NLP's Products and ResourcesWebsite - free episode transcripts
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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 because they find it too pugilistic, too downbeat.
Today’s guest has spent the past decade and more addressing the all too real negativity bias in the news. He’s David Bornstein, co-founder with Tina Rosenberg of the Solutions Journalism network. Solutions Journalism diverts the news media’s relentless focus on conflict and turns a clear-eyed spotlight on people attempting to solve problems.
David and Eric discuss the difference between solutions journalism and local-hero feel-good reporting; we cover the generational change drawing young journalists away from news organizations and into personal branding; our profession’s addiction to covering politics like a horse race; and the role of solutions journalism in restoring trust in professional media.
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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 in.
Talia Stroud is the director of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas. More than 10 years ago, she was one of the first to document how Americans were retreating to news that confirmed their pre-existing beliefs—now well known as the filter bubble phenomenon—and she has since gone on to bust popular myths about social media and to research practical actions that journalists can take to re-engage with audiences. Talia and I talk about recent medical misinformation emanating from, of all people, the surgeon general of Florida; about how newsrooms inadvertently feed polarization; about bringing audiences and newsrooms closer together; and why a popular silver bullet solution to algorithmic polarization won’t work.
Please reach out to let Eric know your thoughts on the episode at [email protected]
Topics
02:00
The Impact of Media on Democracy
03:11
The Challenge of Media Polarization
05:30
The Influence of Social Media Algorithms
08:28
Research Collaboration with Meta
11:29
The Effectiveness of Algorithm Changes
15:16
Promoting Civil Conversations on Social Media
19:16
The Role of Professional Journalism
24:41
The Business Model of News Organizations
29:55
Rebuilding Trust in Journalism
34:36
Understanding Election Misinformation
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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 Murray, the CEO of Fortune media, was a long-time Washington columnist for the Wall Street Journal before becoming editor and eventually CEO of Fortune, one of the most storied brands in business journalism. But Fortune, too, has had its share of disruption. Its former corporate owner, Time Inc., once one of the world’s richest media companies, collapsed under the weight of digital competition; Fortune is now owned by a foreign billionaire, and its success in recent years has hinged on multiple lines of business, like events, not on old-fashioned reporting and writing.
Alan and Eric discuss the economic changes that bedevil the news industry and what they mean to society; we talk about media bias and the myth of the mainstream media; the critical need for news literacy; and democracy’s enduring reliance on quality journalism.
Topics
00:00
Introduction and Background
01:06
Early Start in Journalism
02:25
Challenges in the Media Industry
08:29
Changes in Media Consumption
11:53
Impact of Media on Society
15:40
The Myth of Mainstream Media
17:15
Media Bias and Business Reporting
20:37
The Role of Media Literacy
25:43
Regulation and Media Responsibility
27:09
Social Media and Journalistic Standards
31:41
Future Plans and the Need for Quality Journalism
44:38
The Importance of Business Reporting
57:12
Stepping Down as CEO and Future Endeavors
58:00
Building Trust and Rapport
Conclusion
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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 credible run.
Gordon Crovitz is the co-founder, with Steven Brill, of NewsGuard - a five-year-old for-profit enterprise that rates news sites for editorial integrity helping news consumers and advertisers avoid sites that spread toxic disinformation. Crovitz comes to NewsGuard after a distinguished career as a journalist and media entrepreneur. He was publisher of the Wall Street Journal, as well as an award-winning columnist for that paper.
Before NewsGuard, he founded or cofounded Factiva and Online Journalism—so he’s no stranger to media startups. Gordon and Eric discuss NewsGuard’s business model, his decision to take up the cause of countering disinformation, the role of advertising in funding lies and the explosion of artificial intelligence in the information ecosystem and what seekers of truth can do about it.
Topics
00:00
Introduction and Background
00:23
The Need for Trustworthy Journalism
01:12
The Problem of Identifying News Sources
02:10
The Role of Advertising in Misinformation
03:40
NewsGuard as a For-Profit Model
04:39
NewsGuard's Data and Reports
06:34
Ads Supporting Misinformation on Social Media
08:23
News Reliability Ratings and Misinformation Fingerprints
09:33
Examples of News Ratings
12:15
The Importance of Misinformation Fingerprints
16:55
Trust in Media and Political Bias
20:29
Challenges in Steering Ads to Reliable Sources
24:57
The State of Professional Journalism
29:56
Losing the Battle Against Misinformation
31:39
The Need for Regulation and Disclosure
35:50
Approaching Social Media Regulation
38:59
Gordon Crovitz's News Consumption Habits
44:24
Conclusion
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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 most conservatives; it is also the only one whose leaders admitted, under oath, that the newsroom deliberately promoted a theory they knew to be false, namely that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.
Brian Stelter has chronicled Fox News and its impact on political discourse for years. A media reporter for the New York Times and then CNN, his unrelenting criticism of the network on his own program, Reliable Sources, may have cost him his role at CNN, but it has not shut him up. In his latest book about Fox, Network of Lies, he goes deep into the revelations about Fox that showed up in the Dominion Voting Systems libel suit and in Congress’s January 6th Committee hearings. Brian and I talk about journalists’ role in today’s polarized politics; about Fox’s promotion of election lies; about Tucker Carlson’s ouster; and about the challenge we all face in finding trustworthy news in a world of disinformation.
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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 tackle the problem from both sides of the ledger. She’s a long-time journalist and founder of the Trust Project, an organization that evaluates newsrooms along eight standards of integrity, called trust indicators. Newsrooms that measure up display a “Trust Mark” on their sites to help distinguish them from less deserving sites, and audiences, including social media platforms, can thus make an informed judgment about that site’s trustworthiness.
Sally and I talk about what the trust indicators are and how they work and how everyday news consumers can use them. We’ll also get into more philosophical questions: to what extent newsrooms are responsible for the distrust audiences feel; about audience’s reactions to coverage of the war in Gaza; and whether media literacy training really works.
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