By Becca Gillis

How many times have you realized that something you were reading or watching wasn’t entirely accurate? How many times have you failed to?

“Fake news,” a once-Trumpism that has now become a more ubiquitous term, has shown no signs of disappearing since it entered the popular lexicon around the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Between debates over bias in mainstream media outlets, the prevalence of inaccurate information online, and the increasing number of bots on social media, Americans’ trust in the information they consume has waned, accelerating a downward trend that has been observed since the 1990s. A Pew Research survey from late 2016 found that one-third of Americans said they often saw false information about politics online, and twenty-three percent said they had, whether knowingly or unknowingly, shared false information online themselves.

Nearly a decade later, we’re no closer to putting a cap on the spread of fake news. While by nature difficult to measure, misinformation (inaccurate information from a mistaken source) and disinformation (inaccurate information deliberately shared with the intent to manipulate) seem increasingly unavoidable, especially on social media. Reporting in October 2025, Gallup found that twenty-eight percent of Americans express trust in mass media, down from forty percent just five years earlier, in 2020.

But who is “the media,” and what has this era of misinformation meant for them? For Commonwealth alumni/ae working in newsrooms, there’s a clear imperative to face the evolving realities of our times head-on—and to carry on delivering good journalism to a public that needs and deserves it.

The Internet: Great Democratizer or Misinformation Breeding Ground?

It’s one of the most iconic journalism scenes in fiction: Ben Bradlee leaps up from his desk, marches across the newsroom of The Washington Post, and demands of Woodward and Bernstein, “Come on, we have to nail the Twitter copy for this!” Well, not quite. But the Internet has fundamentally transformed the Fourth Estate since Bradlee’s era. In today’s predominately digital media landscape, a one- or two-sentence social media post—or a headline—might be all an audience reads of a given news story.

“We put a ton of emphasis on thinking through how to present a story in a way that’s engaging, gets people to click, and doesn’t lose crucial nuance,” says Kate Cray ’15, senior associate editor at The Atlantic. Editing and occasionally writing for the magazine’s family section, Kate works with stories that tap into the phenomena of people’s day-to-day lives, touching on parenting, education, social trends, and community issues. How to frame those stories, she explains, has become a vital part of the writing process in an ever more online world.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Center report, more than half of American adults say they at least sometimes get their news from social media, and eighty-six percent say they at least sometimes get their news on a smartphone or another digital device—compared to the seven percent who say they get news from printed newspapers or magazines. When readers encounter news online, they’re often “not seeing that full packaging,” as Kate puts it; stories are isolated rather than set within the context of surrounding stories in a physical newspaper or even a news-media homepage, and readers often quickly click away from articles, whether due to lack of time, lack of interest, or paywalls. The result: increased opportunity for misunderstanding and the subsequent spread of misinformation. “Any time you’re trying to summarize a 2,000-word story into a five-word headline, something’s going to be lost,” Kate acknowledges. “But there are a lot of conversations and a lot of care put into making sure that nothing too important is lost.… With headlines, for one story, you’ll sometimes have fifteen people brainstorming. You could probably make the case that it’s the most important text you’re coming up with.”

It’s not all bad news. Cara Bayles ’03, reporter for online legal news source Law360 and former Commonwealth teacher, has seen the benefits of digitized journalism, for reporters and readers alike. “The Internet has democratized access to publishing; Law360 wouldn’t exist without the Internet,” she says. “It’s also allowed reporters to update readers as new information becomes available—that’s something that was formerly only available to broadcasters or to newspapers with evening editions. It’s also increased public access to the government to some extent. I can listen live to Supreme Court oral arguments and watch the judiciary hearings from my living room.… All of that would have required a lot more legwork fifty years ago.” But that easy access also means mis- and disinformation can spread like wildfire in a world where everyone is connected and few are held accountable for what they share online. “I fear the proliferation of artificial intelligence will worsen the effect of this, both for bad actors and for innocent people who simply take whatever ChatGPT spews out as gospel,” Cara adds.

At Boston public radio station WBUR, News Executive Editor Dan Mauzy ’01 says journalists are more skeptical than ever about what they find online, especially when it comes to images. As major news events unfold, journalists (like all of us) are flooded with photos and videos on social media “purporting to be documentary evidence when in fact they are from entirely different locations and time periods”—and that’s if the images are even real. Methods for identifying AI-generated photos are struggling to keep up with the increasingly sophisticated technology, Dan warns, making many images found online too risky for journalists to use. “If it’s not taken by one of our journalists, we need to be 100 percent confident in the provenance of a photo or video to consider using it in our work,” he says. “For instance, the video of ICE agents arresting Rümeysa Öztürk on a Somerville [Massachusetts] street that became one of the central flash points of the Trump administration’s detention of international students. Our journalist went to the home of the resident whose security camera captured the video, interviewed them, and obtained the footage directly from them.

“The fracturing of our information systems, combined with some online communities retreating deeper into silos, and the ability of people to create false and misleading information with just a few keystrokes: that all is at least partly to blame [for misinformation],” Dan posits.

The Newsroom Where It Happens

Considering the proliferation of dubious if not outright fake “news” in today’s world, it’s no surprise that Americans’ trust in the media is abysmally low. But is it warranted? Have journalistic standards truly declined?

“No, I don’t think so,” Dan argues. “At least not broadly. Are there some journalism institutions—including major ones—that have seen a slackening of standards, or an intentional shift in standards, perhaps to curry favor with the current administration? Undoubtedly. But I think by and large the frontline reporters and editors who get into journalism do so because they want to report the truth and report it well.”

Kate agrees, noting that the fact-checking process at The Atlantic has only grown more rigorous as misinformation soars, and she challenges her writers and herself to think twice about cultural trends and phenomena. “We have these things that sort of sound right, so we just keep on repeating them,” she explains. “But when you interrogate it a little deeper, it’s a bit more complicated.” A trend that social media would have you believe is dominating the nation, she suggests, might only be popular among wealthy East Coasters or Silicon Valley tech enthusiasts. “Is that quite disinfo? Maybe not. But it is a way that you have to be skeptical of whether what seems true to you really is, before you start presenting that to readers.”

While many institutions are tightening standards in the pursuit of high-quality journalism, the field as a whole has come under fire for failing to live up to its ideals. Issues faced by marginalized communities have historically been underreported or reported disrespectfully, Cara notes, and the media has frequently failed to take seriously political candidates who deviate from the mainstream, including figures like Donald Trump and newly elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani.

“It’s also the case that professional journalists can be careless,” Cara says. Reflecting on the 2012 Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act, she recalls how several news outlets jumped the gun and reported (incorrectly) that the individual mandate had been found unconstitutional. “I think they were basically reporting this breaking news before they’d finished reading the thing, while their fingers were still tracing the words on the page. I understand the impulse to get information out there, but sometimes, in the rush to be first, we forget our mandate to be correct.”

The field is not immune to the allures and pitfalls of generative AI, either. In May of 2025, for example, the Chicago Sun-Times suffered embarrassment as they published a summer reading list of fifteen books—only five of which were real. The paper quickly retracted the largely AI-generated article and clarified that it was purchased through an outside organization, not written by one of their staff. But how did it make it to print in the first place?

“I don’t think journalistic standards are declining across the board, but I do think there are new threats to them,” says Kate, citing AI as a looming concern. “Given how tough of an economic situation many [news] outlets are in, I think it just takes a lot of resources to properly fact check, properly edit, properly report. And I think many outlets don’t have that to the same degree anymore.”

For Dan, tackling ethical issues and offering guidance to WBUR’s reporters and editors is core to his work; in fact, he wrote the book on it (an expansive, though not exhaustive, ethical handbook for WBUR reporters). Dan sees an increase in anonymous sources as one recent ethical dilemma, as journalists weigh public trust against the need to protect sources. “It’s a constant struggle, and there are no clear right answers,” he says. In the absence of clear right answers, however, the need to continue asking the questions has never been more urgent.

A Business Model Problem

Large-scale solutions to tamp down misinformation remain elusive. Social media companies Meta and X have both moved to a “community notes” method of flagging misinformation, meaning that rather than employ third-party fact-checking agencies, the platforms rely on users to police the sites themselves by flagging posts they think are incorrect or misleading. These companies have called for prioritizing free speech and limited censorship (both politically loaded terms), and while they limit some content, misinformation remains rife. It seems unlikely, too, that the U.S. government will make any moves to combat misinformation given its purported concerns over First Amendment violations, relationships with tech CEOs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and legislative gridlock in general. And then there’s AI, which remains a legal Wild West.

So how do we become more savvy consumers and news readers—and how do journalists build trust with an audience that’s lost faith in the media? “It’s not something I’m equipped to do, to change the public’s perception on whether media is trustworthy,” Kate admits. “But what I can do is be sure to be trustworthy and really earn that label.” Dan agrees. “Newsrooms are made up of humans. They are engines fueled by the diversity of thought and experience of the journalists who work together,” he says. “The rigor of our editorial process, the independence of our journalism, and our show-our-work transparency are what I believe foster trust.”

One potential road to regrowing that trust lies close to home: local news organizations, despite their being hit hard by budget cuts and declining readership. “When you had a small-town paper, there was a greater likelihood that you might have spoken to a reporter from it, seen a reporter from it,” says Kate. “Bringing that back to whatever degree you can is going to be good for increasing trust.” As an editor for a local news organization, Dan echoes the importance of people actually seeing and interacting with reporters, noting that his newsroom frequently discusses one particular Pew Research statistic: more than seventy-five percent of Americans say they have never spoken to a journalist. Bridging that gap between reporters and the community they serve, Dan says, is key, “whether it’s through in-person community engagement to being radically transparent about how and why we do our work to even short-form vertical video where you get to see a journalist help you understand an issue in the news in a conversational, straightforward manner.” True community representation is a vital component of this, Dan adds; seeing oneself in the news can radically increase trust in its content. “We need to do a better job ensuring that the sources in our stories reflect the vibrant diversity of our region.”

Media literacy, however, is a two-way street. Consumers share the responsibility of staying alert and aware. “I think the only antidote to bad information is good information, and we all have a role to play,” says Cara. She urges readers to “check [their] news hygiene”: verify that you’re consuming work from journalists who do their due diligence, think critically about what you read or hear, and make sure to differentiate between journalism and opinion writing. Simply having an awareness of the prevalence of misinformation, Kate says, “puts you ahead of a lot of people.”

It would be an understatement to say that journalism faces a complex set of challenges in this moment. And yet, a determination to keep fighting remains. “Journalism isn’t going anywhere,” says Dan. “Our industry is resilient and innovative. What we’re facing right now is a business model problem that is frustratingly hard to solve. But as long as the news is providing value in people’s lives, journalism organizations will find a way to continue.”

Becca Gillis is the Communications Coordinator at Commonwealth. This article originally appeared in the winter 2026 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine. 

Meet More Commonwealth Alumni/ae