Buffalo Culture: Noted media critic addressing disinformation

By Elmer Ploetz

Steve Brill was doing media criticism almost before media criticism was a thing. Now he’s coming to Buffalo on Thursday night (Oct. 22) to speak on “The Plague of Online Disinformation: Problems & Solutions.”

The event is sponsored by Investigative Post and will start at 7 p.m. at the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

Investigative Post Executive Director Jim Heaney said he had wanted to bring Brill to Buffalo since reading Brill’s book “The Death of Truth: How Social Media And the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen And Demagogues The Weapons They Needed To Destroy Trust And Polarize The World – And What We Can Do About It.”

“I read his book, ‘The Death of Truth,’ the summer of 2025 and wanted to host an event around it. He agreed to have his team at NewsGuard participate, then decided he’d participate, as well,” Heaney said.

That was his first contact with Brill.

“I reached out to him. I had not spoken with him prior to planning the event, but have followed his work for years, Heaney said. “I’d place him in the upper tier of media critics. He knows the business.”

Indeed he does. Brill has been a serial entrepreneur for nearly 50 years, starting a series of media businesses while also writing award-winning books and articles.

He launched The American Lawyer magazine in 1979 and started Court TV (now TruTV) in 1991. His Brill’s Content magazine was a groundbreaker, launching with a story reporting that independing counsel Ken Starr was a source for much of reporters’ info on the Monica Lewinsky inquiry, which apparently violated federal law.

His previous books included “America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System” in 2015 and “Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall – and Those Fighting to Reverse It” in 2018.

In 2018, Brill co-founded Newsguard, a for-profit company that provides reliability ratings for over 7,500 U.S. websites and provides reports such as this one on 2026 elections false claims.

In an era of Artificial Intelligence, social media bots and virulant online tribalism, sorting out the truth has become more difficult than ever, with legitimate news sources seemingly outnumbered in the media landscape.

It’s a problem that Heaney hopes writers like Brill can help address.

“I expect people who attend the event will come away with a much keener sense of how the major players on the internet operate,” he said. “In a phrase, media literacy.”

Tickets are $10.

Elmer Ploetz is editor-in-chief and executive director of The Buffalo Hive.