Media Literacy Challenge #10: "Fact-checking the mailman"

The Nomadic Blog

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Media Literacy Challenge #10: “Fact-checking the mailman”

Nate Noorlander
June 19, 2026

This post is part of The Nomadic Professor’s 2026 Media Literacy Challenge: Read Smarter Online! Twice a month throughout 2026, America’s 250th anniversary year, we’re sharing one small skill to help you read better online—social media, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, forums, magazines, journals, newspapers, and everything between. Follow along or join and enter the drawing to win free courses or Amazon gift cards—including a grand prize of lifetime access to all Nomadic Professor courses, or a $500 Amazon gift card. Learn more here.

What’s wrong with this scenario?

Your mailman delivers junk mail to your home—misleading ads, bad science, dubious politics—and you find his home address, push the junk mail into his face, and ask him to “prove it.” He can’t prove any of it, and you celebrate your sophisticated information literacy.

If your only move after hearing a claim is to look into the source of that claim, you might be guilty of a version of this absurd scenario: you’re fact-checking the mailman, not the person making the claims the mailman is merely delivering. You’re fact-checking the information distributor, not the information manufacturer.

Tracing claims back to their original source instead of the anonymous mouthpiece that shared them with us is not new—even if we don’t do it ourselves, if asked we’d all agree that it’s an obvious best-practice in 2026.

But it’s not what’s happening. Research suggests young adults get and believe a lot of new information from information middlemen on social media, and they take in this new information passively, without putting up any kind of active filter for what’s true, what’s false, and what’s fluff. They’re primed in a thousand ways to believe what they’re exposed to, rather than what’s been verified.

Setting aside the pitfalls of passive information consumption for now, how do we efficiently verify the claims we hear in an age where a lot of those claims seem totally anonymous?

My suggestion: put the claim into AI, then push the AI with follow-up questions about evidence and context. Utilize the best sources that come from that conversation.

Go ahead and run a test: Is it easier to look into who I am and what my sources are in order to judge the credibility of what I’m saying, or to plug my claims into an AI chatbot, get a quick sense of the broader context of my claims, and derive a handful of reliable sources from that conversation?

For the purposes of this exercise, I purposely cited no one in the body of my post. You can look further into my sources here and here.

Media Literacy Challenge 2026 – Skill #10: “Fact-checking the mailman”

Definition

fact-checking the mailman:

verifying a claim by merely looking into the person who delivered it to you, even if they’re only a third-party delivery person, rather than the original source

Downloadables:

Starter kit

8 Responses

Hyrum Petersen says:

June 19, 2026 at 11:31 am

Getting sources from AI would prbably be faster, but you would have more risk of error, as well as you probably wouldn’t have as good of an understanding as if you looked it up manually and extensively.

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Emily D. says:

June 19, 2026 at 10:22 pm

I gave it a go. Actually I have used AI to get a broader view of an issue before. I like it because it helps me see multiple sides of the story, it doesn’t care what my political position is, and I can see where it is pulling its information. The headlines I pulled made for interesting chats and included AI backtracking when I pushed for sources saying that part of the conversation was an “interpretation of the reported incidents”. Which I do not call good or bad, but important to recognize. Also important to remember is AI can only search what is online. It’s not somehow pulling truth out of a blackhole. So I think AI is an excellent shortcut to seeing multiple sources and seeing where information is coming from quickly. Or it could just be moving the mailman.

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1. Vanessa says:
  
  June 21, 2026 at 7:33 pm
  
  My husband works in digital marketing. And from his experience, the blogs he wrote for a very niche company actually trained AI on that specific area. My husband did go to university but he didn’t get a degree related to that niche.
  
  Knowing this, AI is not even my go-to for exploring and fact-checking a claim. Shoot, even Google searches have become unreliable for personal research. So, I use alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo or Ecosia. And they are okay, but Wikipedia is still reliable at the moment, and I do explore the articles’ references. Books written before AI and not published by a small, independent company are probably the best sources if possible.
  
  Reply
Wanda W says:

June 21, 2026 at 1:48 pm

I have avoided AI. I refused to use it or look at any results, even though AI results are the top result returned. I was uncomfortable with a computer forming an opinion or suggestion instead of just providing facts. I was shocked when this article advocated using AI.

In the past I have asked people where they got their information for their opinion from. Often, they were unable to tell me.

Since reading this blog post I have tried asking AI as suggested. I still have mixed feelings about using AI at all. Since it appears it is here to stay, I have decided I should use it some more to have a fully developed opinion on the good or bad of AI.

Reply
Nate Noorlander says:

June 22, 2026 at 6:29 am

Hi everyone! Thank you for your comments so far. Wanted to offer another take on tracing claims back to their original source. The same media literacy expert I cited in my AI chatbot suggestion above, has a previous training on tracing claims back to their original source here (pre-AI chatbots):

https://youtu.be/tRZ-N3OvvUs?si=FUOdAvOytZMaTzTf.

It’s worth a watch.

In any case, AI chatbots are throwing interesting wrinkles into what it means to be literate online. We’ll keep experimenting!

Reply
Nate Noorlander says:

June 22, 2026 at 6:35 am

Another quick note: Eli Pariser coined the term “filter bubble.” Here’s his current take on how chatbots are going to upend our media diets in the coming years, as algorithms and social media feeds did in the past; worth a scroll:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1z5KiIEeQetnF7kJBYihCYoSWr3S0Mj1qK3LVuifIsqU/edit?slide=id.g3dc298b8d13_0_547#slide=id.g3dc298b8d13_0_547

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Brenna says:

June 26, 2026 at 11:26 pm

Interesting idea to use AI for fact checking. I think it can be a great place to start and get ideas, although I think it can be easy to start to rely solely on what it says. Using it as a spring board for ideas of other sources can be very helpful.

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Kelly Hutton says:

June 29, 2026 at 2:41 pm

I think asking AI and then getting clarification would be much easier, but it never occurred to me to do so until you mentioned it. I’m not sure if it would be more accurate initially, but it would definitely be broader. Whenever I get info from AI, I always feel like I need to verify what it’s giving me – so double the work maybe, for me. Worth looking into, though. Great concept regarding fact checking the messenger instead of the originator. Yet another question we have to ask ourselves when verifying information.

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