Are You Smarter Than Your Screen?
People accept that not everything on TV and the Internet are true — but it's also their favorite trusted source.
Everyone will agree that TV and the Internet are full of misinformation… in fact, it’s where they get most of their own.
Sometimes I break my own rule and engage online with people spreading misinformation: vaccine BS, climate BS, medical BS, economic BS, demographic BS; and I often ask where they got that information. At best they will provide a link to an article that misrepresents some published study, and the link is usually from their real source: often a wellness influencer, a Washington ideologue, a whackjob represented in a clip from Joe Rogan.
They wholeheartedly believe everything they see on TV or the Internet, as long as it’s from someone they already agree with it.
And yet, if I point out that there is often misinformation on TV or the Internet, they are the first to agree!
This is the paradox that should keeps science communicators like myself up at night.
People are not, by and large, stupid. They know that media is full of misinformation. They've heard of propaganda. They understand (in the abstract) that corporations, politicians, and grifters have every incentive to manipulate what they see and read. And yet that hard-won skepticism gets neatly folded up and put in a drawer the moment their favorite podcaster leans into the microphone and says, “Here's what they don't want you to know.”
The problem doesn’t come down to media literacy, science literacy, education, or even political affiliation. It's about trust — more specifically, about who has earned it. By the time someone is deep in a misinformation ecosystem, they have usually lost faith in mainstream institutions: government, academia, mainstream media, science, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, public health authorities. And sure, sometimes that distrust has legitimate roots. Institutions have lied. Experts have been wrong — remember how doctors had to change COVID-19 strategies on the fly as we learned as we went? The problem isn't the skepticism — it's that the skepticism gets applied selectively, reserved entirely for sources they distrust, and switched completely off for sources that feel like allies.
