An overwhelming majority of teenagers—84% percent—have a dismal view of the news media, according to a report released Nov. 6 by the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit organization.
Teenagers’ negative take on the media could have disastrous consequences for their own well-being and the future of democracy, says the report, which is based on a survey of teens ages 13-18 conducted last spring. That’s particularly true as artificial intelligence technology makes misinformation easier to spread.
Young people’s belief that objective, fact-based news is rare or nonexistent “not only threatens the viability of the press as an important watchdog and guardian of democracy but it also leaves those teens highly vulnerable to manipulation and influence by political propagandists, trolls, conspiracy theorists and ideological extremists,” the report argues.
It also potentially diminishes “their ability to make well-informed decisions about their own lives on topics such as their health, and [makes it] harder [for them to] participate effectively in our shared civic life,” the report adds.
Many students believe journalists engage in unscrupulous practices rather than practices considered to be hallmarks of standards-based news organizations, the News Literacy Project found.
About half of teens believe that journalists “always, almost always, or often” engage in unethical behaviors such as giving advertisers special treatment, making up quotes and other details, or paying or doing favors for sources to get information. And 60 percent of teens say reporters “take photos or videos out of context.”
By contrast, less than a third—30%—of teens believe journalists “always”, “almost always” or “often” confirm facts before reporting them. About the same percentage of teens believe journalists report stories in the public interest.
Those statistics are concerning—but not particularly surprising—to Hailey Hans, 18, a senior at Weir High School in West Virginia, where she takes a journalism class and works on her school newspaper.
“If we didn’t have journalists, I feel like our nation wouldn’t be very successful,” said Hans. Hans gets most of her news on social media, but tends to rely on what she sees on accounts of local reporters or news stations. Her peers don’t always differentiate between those legitimate news sources and other content, she said. “Anyone can be a journalist on social media nowadays. That doesn’t make them a good journalist with good morals.”
Teens conflate fact-based reporting and opinion content as ‘the media’
Teenagers’ attitudes seem to mirror the public at large, the report notes. Less than a third of American adults—28%—have confidence in the media to report a story “fairly and accurately,” according to a 2025 Gallup poll cited in the report.
Part of the problem may be that teens—and the public in general—don’t really understand the difference between a standards-based news organization and an influencer or opinion writer. It doesn’t help that both types of content often come at teens, and the public in general, through social media, said Peter Adams, the News Literacy Project’s senior vice-president of research and design.
If teens think that “everything they see online about current events and social issues and politics is quote ‘news’ from quote ‘media,’ then they’re going to blame standards-based news organizations for some of the shortcomings and deceptive tactics that users online engage in, that bad actors engage in, that hyperpartisan outlets engage in,” Adams said.
Hans’s solution: “We need media literacy, and we need news in classrooms,” she said. “We need to be told how to look at a story and tell what’s biased, what’s fake.”
In fact, teens who report higher trust in news media are more likely to report having had classes with some media literacy instruction, compared to their peers who did not have any media literacy lessons, according to previous research by the News Literacy Project.
Schools can help teens make sense of what is opinion-based commentary—or straight-up propaganda—and what is accurate, objectively reported news by explaining the differences between information produced by standards-based news organizations and information from other sources, the report notes.
Schools can also teach students how journalism is supposed to operate when it is adhering to the highest standards—and how to hold media outlets accountable when they fall short. And educators can help teens move beyond the sweeping idea of “the media” by sharing specific examples of high-quality, public-service journalism produced by standards-based news organizations.
Teachers should “highlight Pulitzer Prize winning investigative series, saying, ‘Look, these reporters went and discovered that this factory was polluting this community, and exposed it. Federal regulators were failing to catch this. The press caught it and impacted real people’s lives,’” Adams said.
Another powerful way to help teens understand the news media: Have them report their own stories, using the same ethical standards as professionals, such as objectivity and fact-checking.
That can be helpful even for students who aren’t interested in becoming professional journalists, such as Greyson Scott, 16, a sophomore at Weir High School.
Greyson, who is considering a career in accounting, didn’t know much about how news gathering worked before he took a journalism class. He thought some media outlets were pushing an agenda.
“Before I started doing journalism this year, I did believe there was heavy bias” in news outlets such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, Greyson said. But now that he’s experienced a journalism class and taken a closer look at the news reporters versus the commentators on those networks, he thinks the bias among the actual news reporters is “slight,” he said.
He’s noticed reporters on all three platforms share “the same details” of a story, even if commentators may put a different political spin on it. He can see information presented on different platforms and draw his own conclusions, he said.
And Greyson said he is getting better at sussing out when information comes from an objective source, even if he stumbled on it on his TikTok feed. “I get my news from social media, but if it’s something that’s not from a trustable source, I’ll fact check it on my own.”
