Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
Nobody wins the Nobel for proving the Null hypothesis (which is a shame, in its own way).
That's what is within easy reach.
I'll recommend this or that source to my elderly mom, for instance. But she struggles with the medium of PDFs and is totally beyond podcasts.
Meanwhile, MSNBC is just... right there on the TV. YouTube is consistently in the front page of a Google search. Facebook shoves headlines right into your feed full of grandkid pictures.
Complaining about media literacy is fascille when the "bad" sources are prominently on display while the "good" sources are buried in the weeds. At this point, it isn't a media problem but a technology problem.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it