> Rowlands et al. wrote about the so called “digital natives” that they lack the critical and analytical thinking skills to evaluate the information they find on the internet.

This doesn't match the cultural shift in the last 20 years. A generation of people grew up with chat rooms and immediately discovered the ability to misrepresent oneself on the internet. "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog", as they say. That whole demographic assumes that media is lying by default. Compare that to previous generations that trusted certain media institutions like cable news, newspapers, radio shows, etc. because the production value and scarcity of media instilled trust.

Trust in media institutions is at an all time low, and will likely never recover. That has to be attributed to the newer generations. They are more skeptical of propaganda than ever before. To them, the high production value media outlets are just a quaint legacy variety of content slop.