Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
Chapter 2: What is the importance of media literacy in today's world?
Media literacy is an essential skill of our time. With each technological leap, we've had to work double time to keep up, says journalist and comedian Dave Jorgensen. In his talk, he explains why media literacy, which he defines as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in various forms, is a crucial skill in an age of proliferating misinformation.
But it doesn't mean you can't have a bit of fun doing it.
Chapter 3: How can humor be an effective tool against misinformation?
With his absurdist sketches that he makes to explain the news, he shows us how humor can cut through fear, spark curiosity, and cool down hot takes in order to explore more nuanced truths. And since this talk is quite visual, I'll jump in throughout to describe a few of the videos and images that Dave shares during his talk. I'd also recommend going to watch the video on TED.com.
I'm Dave.
Chapter 4: What historical examples illustrate the fear of new media?
I've spent pretty much my entire adult life working in video journalism and media. But what is media, and what forms does it take? Let me show you an example. This is Kipu.
Hey, y'all. Elise here. So Dave is sharing an image of this Kipu, in English often spelled Q-U-I-P-U, which, as he said, was a record keeping device. It looks almost like a half circle with long rays of string of different lengths coming down or a large necklace. The string is colorful, different earthy oranges, blues and yellows.
It was used by the Incas in South America. It's a system of knots and strings, and every knot, the shapes, the colors, dimensions, numbers, all of it works together to tell a story. While you and I may not understand khipu or how it works, this is a form of media. And let me give you another example of media from across the pond in around 370 BC.
At this point, Dave shows us a photo of a piece of papyrus scroll with tiny ancient Greek writing on it. It's hard to read and clearly very old.
Chapter 5: How did misinformation impact society during the War of the Worlds broadcast?
Imagine an ancient manuscript you might see behind glass at a museum.
So Plato wrote this story where he was imagining a conversation with his real-life teacher, Socrates, and a student, Phaedrus. Eventually, the conversation veers into a debate about speech-giving and whether or not you should do it, kind of like 10 moderators deciding whether or not I should be at this event. Spoiler alert, I'm here. So I think I'm supposed to be.
Anyway, the conversation eventually veers into another part where Plato, as Socrates, says that the written word is actually bad, that it could be misinterpreted and taken out of context. So in other words, people have always been afraid of media and how it could be manipulated. So hundreds of years later, one of the first films to ever come out, black and white. It's a train platform.
This is a French film, so these are all French people on a French train, I presume.
This film that Dave is playing is an iconic 1896 French short silent documentary film, and I mean really short, about 50 seconds long, directed and produced by Auguste and Louis Lumiere. The audience sees the train hurtling towards the camera.
That train is coming really fast.
Duck! Duck!
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Chapter 6: What role does TikTok play in spreading misinformation?
To prove his point, Dave starts to react the way that early observers of the film did. He freaks out and ducks, literally throwing his body on the floor of the stage, only to realize that the train remained in the fully 2D space of the film. And he was safe the whole time. Oh, okay.
It was coming right at us. Anyway, rumor has it that's how people reacted to it when they first saw it in theaters. They jumped out of the way. Um... Very scary. We just weren't ready for that type of media yet. Decades later, in 1938, there was a radio broadcast that scared a lot of Americans. Here's a snippet of it.
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. A special bulletin? At 20 minutes before 8 central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas... Explosions?
Chapter 7: How can we differentiate between real and AI-generated content?
...occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. Mars? The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving toward the Earth with enormous velocity.
Did you guys hear that's coming towards Earth? So we all know that that didn't really happen, but people listening thought it did. And it was an Orson Welles broadcast. People heard this broadcast and were literally in the streets forming mobs. There was police officers outside the CBS studios in New York, and the NECU executives were trying to shut the broadcast down. It was a widespread issue.
The CBS affiliate in Cleveland, where the host was the Future Tonight Show host, Jack Parr, he was there trying to convince listeners that it was a fictional story, but they didn't believe him. People were calling in and saying, no, this is an adaptation of War of the Worlds. It's fictional. It's not real. And so every time there's a new form of media, we have to adapt.
You guys remember email chains?
Chapter 8: What are some recent examples of misinformation in media?
I've dug this one up the other day. Don't delete this. Scared the crap out of me. This is starting to sound familiar. Once there was a man giving 10x, suddenly it all went to chaos. Forward this email. Everyone forward it. Get out your phones. So obviously, we figured out eventually that these emails were scams, and so were the Nigerian princes that shared them.
Though my Nigerian prince was real. Basically, I spent a lot of my job as a journalist trying to explain to people what they're getting wrong online versus actually talking about breaking news, because all of this is so complicated. And there's a word for that in understanding media.
It's called media literacy, which is best defined as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in various forms. So I kind of soft-launched my career into media literacy with this viral Pez video. I don't know if anyone saw this, this was back in 2021. It was someone showing you a Pez dispenser and that you can actually load it by putting the candy in through the bottom.
That is patently false. I was very angry to see this video going viral and all the comments saying, wow, I didn't know that. Well, you didn't know it because it wasn't true. And as someone who's made 5,000 journalism TikToks, I was like, I'm getting to the bottom of this. Here's the video.
You may have seen a TikTok recently in which someone takes a fully wrapped stack of Pez candy and puts it in the bottom of a Pez dispenser and then it comes out fully unwrapped. It's fake. There's a plastic bottom here that the candy would not be able to get around. I instantly knew this because I was a super cool and totally normal kid that collected 400 pest dispensers.
But what about the other people that were also totally normal and cool kids that didn't see the obvious cut in that TikTok? Video in particular can be a very powerful vehicle for misinformation. And when it's something much more important than a pest dispenser, it can be really dangerous too. Here's some false claims that were made on the internet just last week.
This video ends with scrolling text of a number of claims that have been made on the internet that are not true. For example, that COVID-19 isn't real or that Dave was really cool in high school. He ended with that one.
My editor suggested the last one. Who knows if that's true? Anyway, so, you know, unless you were a Pez head like me, that story wasn't probably that important to you. But it was a nice way into talking about media literacy, especially on TikTok, where people were taking what they saw at face value and not really challenging it.
And sometimes what happens is that everything you see online, people think is true. So ... One example of that, more recently, up to date in 2025, is this video from Will Smith's social media team. He was on a tour. Some of you, I heard some grumbles. Get ready for your minds to be blown.
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