Is it really very surprising? Students are conditioned to trust the information that they are given. The teacher is always right, and the student is wrong if they disagree. Critical thinking is only correct if it agrees with the teacher's conclusions.

There is only one solution. We must destroy their faith in humanity.

A major problem might be that there's too much news in people's daily lives. Most people for most of their lives, even as kids, will use the news primarily as a source for gossip and the occasional social signalling. Good, real news is defined as something they can gossip about on social media with their friends to gain street cred or whuffie or likes or upvotes. Suddenly shocking them with some ridiculous (to them) view that news is like a revealed religious text and everyone thinks the one that politically agrees with them is the only true source and all else are false prophets that should be banned, or even worse, news is something like an English Lit class text to be deconstructed and symbolized is pretty much doomed by decades of regular life poisoning it. In practice, in daily life, news is like slightly more serious cute kitty video and you want to be the first to associate yourself with it, so you can bask in your friends glow as the cool kid who finds cool news. Certainly eliminating 99.9% of news from peoples lives would not impair their lives (other than socially, maybe, some of them) and would make it infinitely easier to teach an academic interpretation of news.

I guess in summary gossip should be about who your shared neighbor is having, or not having, sex with. Using cabinet picks and natural disasters and sports scores as a source of gossip is fun, but has a side effect of really screwing up some academic research disciplines.

This whole push behind this buzzword is an attempt at damage control for declining readership and relevance as more people get their news coverage from elsewhere.