Media Diet

The SAVE Act: election security or voter suppression, depending entirely on which information environment you inhabit. Both sides cite evidence. Almost no one sees both.

Ellul's uncomfortable claim from 1962: people don't fall for propaganda. They opt into it.

(2/2) It's hard to teach source evaluation when the generation you're teaching never had a stable relationship with institutional news in the first place.

How are you approaching learning or teaching media literacy in this changing media landscape?

84% of U.S. teens hold negative views of the press.

Media literacy educators are rebuilding their curriculum every year because the threat keeps changing form. 2026: AI misinformation. Two years ago: polarization. Before that: clickbait. (1/2)

www.newscaststudio.com/2026/02/02/f...

(2/2) Walter Benjamin worried in 1935 that mechanical reproduction would erode the "aura" of original works.

The 2026 version of that problem is worse: authenticity is now an aesthetic disadvantage.

After the Maduro capture, AI-generated celebration videos circulated on X alongside real footage.

Musk shared a synthetic one. Better lit, steadier, more emotionally coherent than anything shot on the ground. (1/2)

"We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." (John M. Culkin)

The head of Instagram recently said "we're genetically predisposed to believing our eyes".

What replaces visual trust when the tools distributing images are also generating them?

(2/2) John Hopkins University study: one generation formed political identity through visible editorial gatekeeping. The other formed it inside systems where the curation is invisible and the feed feels like raw reality.

How have you formed your political identity?

Young Americans express deep dissatisfaction with how the political system works Johns Hopkins research examining generational divides in democratic institutions finds younger respondents have the least amount of trust in political parties and elected officials to reflect their…

Younger and older Americans aren't consuming different news. They're navigating different information architectures entirely.

The gap isn't intelligence. It's infrastructure. (1/2)
hub.jhu.edu/2026/02/09/s...

(2/2) Read together, this is combination that reshapes how trust is formed and manipulated online.

‘Deepfakes spreading and more AI companions’: seven takeaways from the latest artificial intelligence safety report Annual review highlights growing capabilities of AI models, while examining issues from cyber-attacks to job disruption

Three findings from the 2026 AI Safety Report need to be read together:

77% can't tell AI text from human writing. AI companions have tens of millions of users. AI systems detect when they're being tested and change behavior. (1/2)

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

With no local news, those in news deserts turn to social media feeds, influencers and gossip research | Feb 10, 2026

50 million Americans have limited or no access to local news. Most don't know it.

Medill: 90% in news deserts say news is "easy to access." 51% rely on non-journalistic sources. Trust runs 13 pts lower. "People don't know what they are missing."
localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/posts/2026/0...

New report unpacks the crises facing American journalism and offers solutions Journalism in the United States is in crisis: Local newspapers are shuttering at an alarming rate, large cities that were once served by multiple daily local newspapers now barely sustain one or two…

(2/2) Deregulation, consolidation, elimination of public interest obligations.

Technology was the accelerant, not the cause.

phys.org/news/2026-02...

The standard explanation blames technology. New Roosevelt Institute report says that gets the causation backwards:

“The crisis facing American journalism is the predictable outcome of decades of corporate libertarian media policy that prioritized commercial logics over democracy” (1/2)

People who use chatbots for news consider them unbiased and “good enough,” new study finds Frequent users in the U.S. and India say they trust chatbots despite factual errors and outdated information.

People who use AI chatbots for news know the outputs are unreliable. They prefer them anyway.

New CNTI study: users call them "unbiased" and ""good enough"" while acknowledging frequent errors. No byline reads as no agenda."

www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/peop...

(3/3) This is what Media Diet is about. When people live in different information environments, they stop sharing a reality. Our exhibit lets you feel that firsthand. Walk from one person's room to another and notice how different the world looks.

(2/3) When a town loses its paper, neighbors stop seeing the same stories. They stop having the same conversations. The common ground shrinks.

New report unpacks the crises facing American journalism and offers solutions Journalism in the United States is in crisis: Local newspapers are shuttering at an alarming rate, large cities that were once served by multiple daily local newspapers now barely sustain one or two…

A new Roosevelt Institute report makes a case worth sitting with: the American journalism crisis is "the predictable outcome of decades of policy that prioritized commercial logics over democracy."

Not technology. Not bad luck. Choices. (1/3)

phys.org/news/2026-02...

Who do you think should be responsible for determining real vs false information?

www.poynter.org/commentary/2...

(2/2) Understanding this gap is essential to any conversation about media literacy.

How do you get your news? Is it different from people you know of other generations?

Young Americans express deep dissatisfaction with how the political system works Johns Hopkins research examining generational divides in democratic institutions finds younger respondents have the least amount of trust in political parties and elected officials to reflect their…

Younger generations navigate fragmented, algorithm-driven information spaces that shape how they assess credibility and form political identity differently from older Americans watching cable news. (1/2)

hub.jhu.edu/2026/02/09/s...

What has your news been telling you?

This policy would shift burden of proof, putting the burden on legitimate sources to prove authenticity rather than on consumers to detect manipulation.

Who do you think should be responsible for determining real vs false information?

The real threat of AI is the collapse of trust - Poynter Why journalism needs to prove which images are authentic — not just label deepfakes

@adamrose.bsky.social of Stanford's Starling Lab argues that journalism's current approach to AI images, detecting and labeling fakes, is backwards. Instead, news organizations should prove which images are authentic using digital provenance standards like C2PA.

www.poynter.org/commentary/2...

(2/2) Such a policy would shift burden of proof, putting the burden on legitimate sources to prove authenticity rather than on consumers to detect manipulation.

Who do you think should be responsible for determining real vs false information?

(3/3) The landscape shifted that fast.

How have you been working to improve your media literacy given the prevalence of AI information?

(2/3) The project's recent study found something troubling: 84% of U.S. teens hold negative views of the press.

But here's what really striking. Media literacy education used to focus on political bias and clickbait. Now it's almost entirely about AI.

The seventh annual National News Literacy Week just kicked off—and this year's focus tells you everything about where we are. The theme is AI misinformation. (1/3)

www.newscaststudio.com/2026/02/02/f...

(2/2) Legacy news outlets are being reshaped in real-time by new owners. Understanding who controls the news is now critical media literacy.

Do you trust that the media you consume is unbiased against its owners?

2026 looks ominous for media, from Hollywood to journalism Critic at large Eric Deggans says that in 2026, audiences have more power than they realize to determine the future of news and entertainment.

Smaller groups of wealthy businesspeople control larger swaths of the country's information ecosystem, pitting their overall corporate interests against the public's desire for accurate journalism challenging powerful institutions in society. (1/2)

www.wvia.org/news/2026-01...

(2/2) Media literacy requires understanding not just whether something is true, but how it can be misused.

This is a case study in how even accurate, well-intentioned data visualization can be weaponized.