Deepfakes
Since the 1920s, media has transformed right before our eyes, but the part we don’t see is the technology underneath it all.
We began with analog video. That gave way to digital, then to high-definition (HD) broadcast, then to ultra-high definition (UHD), and now to the 8K resolution many consider the pinnacle of picture quality. Each leap was driven by advances in display technology and content delivery. In the 2010s, streaming, the smartphone, and social platforms made mobile the default, disrupting broadcast and every format that came before it. And as recently as 2022, content delivery gained a new medium entirely: artificial intelligence, now a primary force shaping how content is made, how it reaches us, and what the experience feels like.
If you want to understand where media is headed in 2026, watch where the trust goes. Everything else, the budgets, the formats, the platforms, is in motion. Trust is the one asset that got harder to earn and more valuable to hold.
The picture is one of contraction. Big newsrooms kept shrinking. CNN, The Washington Post, and NBC News all cut staff, and the reporters who stayed now cover three beats where they used to cover one, leaning on AI to research and draft just to keep up. Adoption is nearly universal, north of 80% by most counts, but the people using these tools trust them the least. They’ve seen the confident hallucinations. So they hold the line on original reporting and human verification, because their name is on the byline, not the model’s.