Media Illiteracy at the Highest Level

The Texting Scandal That Could Change Everything

While sitting in a Safeway parking lot, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, inadvertently became a witness to a national security breach. The breach occurred when National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally added Goldberg to a Signal chat titled “Houthi PC small group.” The chat, meant exclusively for top Trump administration officials, included classified plans for bombing Houthi strongholds in Yemen. The revelation, later reported by Goldberg in a March 24 article titled, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” sent shockwaves across the political spectrum. Democrats, independents, Republicans, and MAGA supporters criticized the blunder and called for resignations. Some argued it constituted a violation of the anti-treason Espionage Act. However, beyond the political fallout, “Signalgate” exposed a much larger issue: the national security threat posed by media illiteracy.

Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in various forms. Beyond teaching people how to use digital tools, media literacy education promotes critical thinking about media. It helps individuals protect their privacy, identify false information, and ask important questions, such as: Who owns the media I consume? What messages are being conveyed? How are different identities represented? While other nations started offering media literacy to their citizens decades ago, the U.S. collectively has not, and media illiteracy is a problem negatively impacting citizens and lawmakers alike. This was made painfully clear in 2018 when a congressional hearing on social media revealed that lawmakers do not understand social media.

The lack of media literacy within the Trump administration became glaringly apparent during the Signalgate incident. Media literacy encourages individuals to weigh the trade-offs between the convenience of digital tools and the risks they pose to privacy and security. Yet, this concern seemed absent among those in the Signal chat which included Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Presumably, they used Signal to evade public records laws (which the courts are now reviewing due to Signalgate), despite regulations governing classified information handling (SCIF) and record keeping, because they thought it was a secure alternative to the government’s protocols for protecting classified information. Ironically, MAGA supporters were outraged over Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 for a similar issue. While Signal is an encrypted messaging app, it is not foolproof especially if a phone is compromised through some other means—a fact any media-literate person would understand and one that intelligence or defense officials should certainly know.

The Trump administration’s response to Goldberg’s report further underscored the need for media literacy, particularly in combating disinformation. Disinformation is often used by those in power to distract from the truth, and this case was no exception. Initially, the Trump team relied on the age-old propaganda technique of discrediting the source. Both Trump and Elon Musk publicly dismissed The Atlantic as untrustworthy. Others attempted to undermine Goldberg’s credibility directly. “Jeffrey Goldberg is well-known for his sensationalist spin,” declared Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Hegseth echoed this, referring to Goldberg as a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist,” before insisting, “Nobody was texting war plans!” A few days later, these smears collapsed when Goldberg published the actual Signal messages, proving his claims. Without media literacy, many people would have accepted the administration’s false narrative at face value.

The lies that followed the publication of the chat logs further illustrated the need for media literacy. The published messages included specific plans, locations, dates, and times, as well as sensitive information about targets and other agencies—details that many experts argue constitute classified material. In an attempt at damage control, the White House resorted to gaslighting. Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation designed to confuse the public into doubting reality. In response to public outrage over Signalgate, administration officials insisted that the leaked information was neither classified nor relevant to military strategy. For example, Hegseth posted on X: “No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information.” This deliberate misdirection—convincing people to question the clear evidence in front of them—was a textbook example of gaslighting, a tactic that media literacy education teaches people to spot. In Orwellian terms, it’s like the line in the novel 1984 that goes, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

At other times, Signalgate underscored the importance of the critical thinking component of media literacy. For instance, when Waltz was blamed for adding Goldberg to the chat, he denied knowing him during an appearance on The Ingraham Angle on Fox News Channel. “I can tell you 100 percent: I don’t know this guy… Wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, if I saw him in a police lineup,” Waltz claimed. The very next day, photographic evidence surfaced showing Waltz and Goldberg together. Moreover, the leaked chat logs confirmed that Waltz had added Goldberg to the group—meaning he had Goldberg’s phone number in his phone. However, Waltz sought to dismiss this claim by arguing that Goldberg’s phone number was somehow “sucked in” to the National Security Advisor’s phone. This blatant dishonesty was part of a broader strategy by the Trump team to deflect responsibility. The confusion caused by such lies reveals a fundamental problem: unchecked misinformation erodes trust in both the media and the government. However, applying even basic critical thinking skills makes these deceptions easy to spot. Doing something about them, however, is apparently another ongoing matter.

Goldberg’s reporting also offers media literacy lessons for journalists. In today’s hustle-driven media landscape (does anyone remember when technology was supposed to make our lives easier?), journalists face pressure to churn out content rapidly, often prioritizing quantity over quality. However, Goldberg took a different approach—he sat on the leaked messages for a few days. Media literacy teaches the importance of slowing down to analyze information carefully. By waiting, Goldberg allowed Trump’s team to entangle themselves in a web of denials and contradictions before publishing the truth. His strategy not only exposed corruption but also represented one of the first major journalistic challenges to Trump during his second term. Even by today’s digital metrics, this was a smart move, as Signalgate quickly became the most viral story of Trump’s second term thus far. The takeaway for journalists is clear: the public values investigative reporting that holds the powerful accountable, not sensationalist distractions or sycophantic news personalities groveling at Mar-a-Lago.

Signalgate underscores the urgent need for improved media literacy education. From Waltz’s blunder to the Trump administration’s falsehoods, character assassination attempts, and gaslighting, this incident underscores why media literacy is essential. If we want to protect national security and personal privacy, the U.S. must enact stronger digital privacy protections while also investing in media literacy programs that teach the public how to critically evaluate the information they consume. If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that we need more than just competent leadership—we need media-literate leadership, because national security should not depend on who gets mistakenly added to a group chat.

I sincerely appreciate Mickey Huff’s assistance in shaping this post.

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Nolan Higdon is a political analyst, author, lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Project Censored National Judge. Higdon’s areas of concentration include critical AI literacy, podcasting, digital culture, news media history & propaganda, and critical media literacy. All of Higdon’s work is available at Substack (https://nolanhigdon.substack.com/). He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (2020); Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (2022); The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022); and Surveillance Education: Navigating the conspicuous absence of privacy in schools (Routledge).