Trust Me: the documentary every secondary school teacher needs to see

Your students are growing up in a world where information is everywhere – and not all of it is true. Every day, they are scrolling through feeds designed to provoke, platforms built to keep them watching, and headlines written to frighten rather than inform. The question isn’t whether they’ll encounter misinformation. It’s whether they’ll have the tools to recognise it.

That’s why media literacy is one of the most important things we can teach right now. And it’s why we’re proud to host Trust Me on ClickView — a documentary that takes this challenge seriously.

What is Trust Me?

Trust Me is a feature-length documentary produced by the Getting Better Foundation that explores how an avalanche of negative news and misinformation is shaping the way we see the world. Winner of the prestigious Walter Cronkite Excellence in Journalism Award and the UNESCO Award for Media Literacy in North America, it’s a film that has resonated with educators, senators, and students alike.

At its core, the film asks a simple but urgent question: when fear goes up, trust comes down — so what do we do about it?

“My job is to write about the one plane that takes off and blows up mid-air, and kills a hundred people,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeffrey Gettleman in the film. It’s a line that cuts to the heart of how sensational media works — and why students need to understand it.

Why this matters in your classroom

The film covers territory that will feel immediately familiar to secondary school teachers. Tech addiction and media business models. Social pressure and cyberbullying. Confirmation bias and the spread of misinformation. Foreign interference in democracy. Deepfakes. The cost of anonymous messaging.
These aren’t abstract concepts. They are the daily reality of your students’ lives.

The good news, and this is something Trust Me handles beautifully, is that media literacy is teachable. The film doesn’t just diagnose the problem. It offers solutions. It shows students that the gap between the world as it is and the world as the media portrays it can be closed, and that they have the power to close it.

“Bringing Trust Me to Australian classrooms is something I’ve been incredibly excited about, and getting to launch it in person made it all the more special. Visiting the ClickView office, meeting the team and seeing Sydney for the first time was a real highlight — it’s wonderful to see such passionate people working to get this message in front of students.”

How to use Trust Me with your class

At just over an hour, Trust Me is structured in a way that lends itself to classroom discussion. The ClickView version includes Points of Interest markers throughout the film, making it easy to pause and discuss key moments — from the mechanics of misinformation at 11:01 to solutions for media illiteracy at 1:09:42.

A Teacher Pack and Companion Educator Guide are also available to download alongside the film, supporting structured discussions and inquiry-based learning.
The film works particularly well as a discussion starter for units on:

• Digital literacy and online safety
• Critical thinking and source evaluation
• Global citizenship and current affairs
• Wellbeing and the impact of social media

A film for this moment

“We must prepare young people for living in a world of powerful images, words and sounds,” UNESCO wrote in 1982. More than four decades later, that statement has never felt more urgent.

Trust Me is a film that equips students with exactly that preparation. It is honest about the scale of the problem, grounded in research and expert testimony, and ultimately hopeful about what becomes possible when people learn to think critically about the information they consume.

It is, as Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, Executive Director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, puts it, “an incredibly important film at an incredibly important time.”

We think so too.