Trust In A Changing Media Landscape
The media landscape continues to change. The many ways people read, watch or listen to content important to them continue to evolve. You may see some of those changes reflected on this site as we keep up with what you, our audience, want.
We live online in what some are calling an “attention economy,” where the main goal of much online content is to keep eyeballs (or eyeballs and ears) on site, fingers scrolling or swiping, by fair means or foul.
This isn’t for our benefit, with study after study highlighting the distraction and mental health challenges amplified by social media consumption. Now, increasingly, social media is becoming less trustworthy and more congested with negative or misleading content. Artificial intelligence-generated content is adding fuel to a problem that’s existed for a long time.
A recent publication of the State University of New York at Buffalo found that 2025 was something of a breakout year for deepfakes—AI-generated videos that purport to be legitimate and can include authentic-seeming talking heads. A cybersecurity firm called DeepStrike estimates an increase from roughly 500,000 online deepfakes in 2023 to about 8 million in 2025, with annual growth nearing 900 percent.
AI and deepfakes are targeting every part of online life. They are gaining in quality, making it harder for untrained eyes to detect them. If you watch YouTube videos, you have very likely watched fake content with AI-generated “experts.” Some of these may be relatively harmless or ignorable, purporting to be celebrity news, but others may have more nefarious purposes.
Why are we mentioning this? Because there are deep-faked videos circulating on social media that purport to document drastic and unexplained losses of Mississippi River water. They come complete with fake “talking heads,” authentic-looking news chyrons and made-up “facts” that can easily be confused with legitimate content. We are preparing a feature-length story on this soon, with the participation of competent authorities.
As media consumers, it’s getting harder to separate deliberate misinformation from authentic content.
As for us, we intend to stick to our mission of creating content that is of unique importance to the inland waterways towing and barge industry and everyone who depends on it.
