RevDem Podcast · Review of Democracy

Social Media, AI-Chatbots and the Death of the Evening News: How to Restore Trust in a Fragmented Media World - A Conversation with Raluca Radu

·42 min·2 clips

Raluca Radu says state actors may be “writing for AI” by scattering fragments across websites and social media.

Review of Democracy brings Raluca Radu, a professor of journalism and communication studies at the University of Bucharest, into a conversation about the role of media in an age of misinformation. The interview opens with a broad question and quickly narrows to the ways audiences now meet news through search systems and chatbots. Radu argues that the number of people treating a chatbot as their main source of information is likely to grow. She also notes that a chatbot's apparent neutrality can be misleading, because its responses depend on the code, the data set, and the intentions of the people or companies behind it. That matters because users often cannot see who is shaping the system or where the information is coming from. The conversation leaves room for the fact that a chatbot can sound balanced while still repeating bias or manipulation. Radu points to a reported example in which Grok, X's chatbot, was producing extreme-right messages before the team behind it rewrote part of the code. From there, the discussion turns toward what this means for journalism. Newsrooms cannot assume that publication alone is enough to make a story matter. They have to be present online. They also need to build a constituency of their own, in part by working with civic influencers and with other newsrooms that can help carry important reporting further. The episode treats that as a learned skill rather than a slogan. It takes years of adaptation and repeated public exposure. The conversation also returns to the audience side of the problem. Listeners need awareness skills to navigate a media environment where the same interface can present itself as efficient, neutral, and persuasive all at once. The tone stays measured throughout, with the guest given room to build causal arguments step by step. That pacing gives the show its strength, because it treats democratic communication as an institutional problem, not just a matter of individual media literacy. By the end, the episode frames trust as something journalists, platforms, and audiences all have to rebuild in different ways.

As heard by us

A clear-eyed look at how trust shifts when chatbots and newsrooms shape the path to information.

This piece treats media trust as a systems issue, tracing how information is filtered by tools, institutions, and the habits that shape credibility.

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Why you'd press play

If you want to understand why a chatbot can feel neutral and still mislead, start here.

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