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Now, Jourgensen is taking his lesson on the road: He’ll use dihydrogen monoxide at the 2026 National News Literacy Conference, taking place Oct. 8 to 10 in Salt Lake City.
Read on to learn more about how Jourgensen teaches high school students the importance of verifying information in the age of mass misinformation.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
You’re teaching students how to identify what information deserves their trust. Where do you see the widest gaps in media literacy?
Jourgensen: It’s becoming more and more difficult for them to instantaneously discern what is true and what’s not. I think one of the biggest problems we have is that we’ve made the question binary — true or false — and it’s not that anymore. The second problem that we’ve created is: Who made this? Where did it come from? Can any of it really be trusted?
But what I’m really working with the students on is that I don’t want them to become cynical because that’s the worst thing that can happen. I want them to become optimistic about the truth that they do see — but become more informed and proactive in going out and finding out that information for themselves.
It would be easy at the end of the [water] lesson for me to turn around and be like, “Ta-da, it’s water! You fell for it.” It’s not about embarrassing them. It’s asking them why it worked and that every claim can be technically true, but deception comes from the selection, the framing, the omission, the language. All of that surrounds them, not only in news but in everyday life. Pure accuracy shouldn’t be the goal. That’s the baseline.
What can you share about how this particular exercise helps students?
Jourgensen: I remember doing this lesson when I was in school. When you find out it’s water, it flips your brain because everything that was said was true. So that really got me doing that lesson with my students and seeing their reaction and some of the commentary that they had, especially after the proliferation of social media.
[After the lesson] they are able to take a step back and go, ‘Oh wait, this might change how everything is because everything in here is true.’ The absence of information is just as important as the information that’s there.
For folks who won’t be able to attend, what’s the biggest takeaway that you want to share with your audience in Salt Lake City?
Jourgensen: The main crux of what I’m trying to get across is that telling everybody to trust journalism isn’t enough anymore. There’s a problem even defining for [students] what journalism is or where they get their news. TikTok is not a news source. News agencies put news on TikTok, but TikTok is not a source in and of itself. So even just in the framing and verbiage, just getting the students to really think before they post.
Social media is not going anywhere, but if we can apply friction to the speed at which information, or more importantly misinformation, spreads by just getting people to pause and wait five or 10 seconds before they share and actually think about it — that can make a world of difference. You’re not going to undo it, but if you slow it down, that’s going to stop the spread.
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