How Journalists Can Protect Truth in the Synthetic Media Era

Synthetic media is reshaping trust, accelerating disinformation, and attacking the one thing that defines every newsroom: credibility. The challenge is no longer catching false news after it spreads; it's ensuring that synthetic content never becomes news in the first place.

In this piece, we examine the implications of deepfakes for journalism today, the limitations of existing workflows, and how media organizations can incorporate real-time verification into their reporting to prevent the next synthetic story from spreading faster than the truth. 

The Growing Challenge for Newsrooms

Synthetic audio, video, and images are spreading through newsfeeds, social platforms, and private channels. Their realism allows them to slip past manual verification, making human review insufficient on its own.

Audiences are struggling too. Adobe’s Future of Trust study found that 70–76% of consumers across the US, UK, France, and Germany struggle to verify whether online content is real. For media organizations, this is not just a technology challenge; it’s an erosion of trust, the core of the newsroom’s product.

Synthetic Content Is Already Disrupting Reporting

As verification windows shrink and synthetic media becomes frictionless to produce, disinformation is spreading faster than facts. The impact is already clear:

• Political distortion: In the United Kingdom, MP George Freeman reported a deepfake video falsely claiming he had defected to Reform UK, warning it “has the potential to seriously distort, disrupt, and corrupt our democracy.”
• Misleading crisis imagery: In early 2025, AI-generated images of planes landing at a burning airport spread online with false claims of airstrikes in Beirut. Even after the creator clarified they were produced in Midjourney, the misleading versions continued circulating widely.
• Weaponized campaign messaging: An altered John Lewis advertisement circulated as a Harris–Walz campaign video, featuring an AI-generated voice clone of Kamala Harris. Reality Defender assessed the audio as having only a 1% likelihood of being authentic.

Why Deepfake Verification Can’t Wait

Traditional journalistic safeguards — source confirmation, editorial layers, and specialist fact-checking desks — were built for a world where deception required time, resources, and skill. Now, anyone can generate convincing synthetic audio, imagery, or video in minutes, compressing the verification window to near zero.

This shift doesn’t replace editorial judgment; it overwhelms the processes surrounding it. Newsrooms can no longer rely on manual review alone when manipulated media spreads faster than teams can respond. Verification must reside within the systems and workflows where editorial decisions are made, at the pace the modern news cycle demands. Deepfake journalism demands new editorial workflows, as our article on Safeguarding Media Integrity outlines. 

Real-Time Deepfake Checks in the Newsroom

Picture a breaking-news moment. A video surfaces of a political figure making inflammatory remarks. The visuals hold up. The voice sounds authentic. Social platforms are already circulating it, reactions are forming in real time, and the newsroom is under pressure to move.

Historically, editors faced a binary choice: wait and risk being late, or publish and risk amplifying something false. In the era of synthetic media, that trade-off is untenable. Newsrooms need the ability to verify when a decision is made quickly.

Real-time deepfake verification makes this possible. It gives journalists, editors, standards teams, and audience-trust units a way to assess questionable media before it shapes public opinion. It acts as an embedded layer of editorial integrity, just like plagiarism checks or security protocols. Reality Defender provides the verification layer that supports these efforts.

For daily newsroom workflows, RealScan provides fast, direct verification.

Verification teams can run checks immediately without engineering support. The process is simple:

• Upload video, audio, or images
• Receive results showing clear manipulation-likelihood scores seconds
• See visual indicators for potential tampering

For larger organisations, API access extends this capability at scale.

RealAPI integrates into CMS pipelines, social ingestion tools, and internal editorial systems, bringing automated verification directly into newsroom workflows without slowing them down.

Deepfake detection at the point of publication protects both audiences and journalists — stopping harm before it spreads.

Ready to Build a Trusted Newsroom and Test Your Content?

Automated verification will soon be to newsrooms what encryption is to communications: non-negotiable infrastructure. Broadcasters are setting authentication standards, and newsrooms are forming AI-threat working groups as trust and safety leaders build cross-functional response plans.

Journalism has always relied on human judgment, ethical reporting, and editorial discipline. Those principles do not change. What changes is the tools supporting them.

If your newsroom is rethinking its verification systems, Reality Defender’s RealScan platform can help ensure every video and image your organisation publishes is real, verified, and worthy of your audience’s confidence.