Center for the literary arts in New York State
Telling the Truth 2022
5:30 p.m. Friday, October 28, 2022
Page Hall
135 Western Avenue
Downtown UAlbany Campus, Albany NY 12203
Free and open to the public
See map with parking info
We welcome the public to our 4th edition of “Telling the Truth.”
This year’s conversations will address attacks on truth, free speech, a free press, and the First Amendment, as well as propaganda, misinformation, hacks, deep fakes, conspiracy theories, and other ongoing threats to our democracy that crystallized in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Panel 1: TRUTH IN MEDIA -- 5:30 p.m.
Moderated by Paul Grondahl: the director of the New York State Writers Institute. An award-winning reporter for the Albany Times Union for more than 30 years, he is also the author of Mayor Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma.
Brian Stelter is the former chief media correspondent for CNN Worldwide and anchor of "Reliable Sources," a weekly examination of the world’s top media stories, from 2013 until earlier this year.
He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth (2020). Rachel Maddow called it, “A Rosetta Stone for stuff about this presidency that doesn’t otherwise make sense to normal humans.” His first book, Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV, inspired the Apple TV+ drama "The Morning Show." Stelter is also the executive producer of the 2020 HBO documentary "After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News."
Nandini Jammi is a leading truth-in-broadcasting activist and co-founder of of the advertising watchdog agencies Check My Ads Institute and Sleeping Giants— advertising watchdog organizations that are committed to making hate and bigotry unprofitable in American media. She has been behind some of the most high-profile social media campaigns in the U.S. since 2016, including efforts to defund far-right website Breitbart News, and movements to persuade advertisers to abandon various Fox News programs such as The O’Reilly Factor and Tucker Carlson Tonight. Business Insider named her one of 23 industry leaders “fixing” digital advertising. Sleeping Giants received the Gold Lion at the 2019 Cannes International Festival of Creativity, and the People’s Voice Award at the 2019 Webby Awards.
Panel 2: POLITICS AND DISINFORMATION -- 7 p.m.
Moderated by Rosemary Armao, a public affairs commenter on WAMC Northeast Public Radio in Albany, retired UAlbany Journalism Program Director, and an adjunct professor of journalism at Rensselaer. Armao teaches writing, reporting, investigative techniques, disinformation and the media, and ethics.
Devlin Barrett, who grew up in Troy, NY, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter who covers the FBI and Department of Justice. His new book is October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election (2020), a dark true-life thriller about the FBI’s investigation into the use of a private email server by Hillary Clinton’s staff during the 2016 election. Barrett was part of a Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for National Reporting, for coverage of Russian interference in the US election. In 2017, he was a co-finalist, together with colleagues at the Wall Street Journal, for two different Pulitzers— Feature Writing and International Reporting.
Jonathan Lemire, is the host of MSNBC’s morning news show, "Way Too Early," and the White House bureau chief of Politico. His 2022 New York Times bestseller is The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said, “A trenchant analysis… This dispatch on the state of American politics hits the bull’s-eye.”
Prior to joining Politico, Lemire served as White House reporter for The Associated Press during the Trump and Biden administrations. He also covered Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, including the candidate’s June 2015 Trump Tower campaign kickoff, and nearly 100 rallies in 2016.
The many guests featured in previous editions of “Telling the Truth” included Norman Mailer,Maureen Dowd, Tracy Kidder, and Doris Kearns Goodwin in 1991; Amy Goodman, Bob Schieffer, Carol Anderson and Floyd Abrams in 2017; and Amy Chua, George Will, John Lithgow, and Elif Shafak in our virtual COVID-year edition in 2020.
