Several months into President Donald Trump’s tenure, Union College Professor Robert Samet assigned students a routine book for his Media Anthropology class: War Stories, a seminal study of how American reporters misrepresented El Salvador’s civil war.

His 22 students sat in rows discussing the text. Then, a male, conservative-leaning student began to speak.

“I don’t trust the media,” Samet remembers him saying. “You’ve shown me, right here in this text, how it is that facts get manipulated. I don’t believe now what I’m seeing in the New York Times.”

Another student, a progressive, agreed.