ABSTRACT
The fake news panics of the past decade and the digital pivot during COVID-19 have taught essential lessons: media matter, but so does critical media literacy. Indeed, today's discourses on media reverberate with the din of protectionism: elected officials warn that fake news has usurped democracy, documentaries like Social Dilemma argue that children are being led to screen addiction by savvy engineers, schools tremble in fear that artificial intelligence like ChatGPT will disrupt education as we know it, and civil libertarians warn that we are on the precipice of a digital surveillance dystopia.
