Last week I argued that the liar’s dividend is a denominator attack, which raises the obvious question of whether the denominator can be defended at all. The country everyone names is Finland, and the story is worn smooth from handling: the Finns teach their children to spot fake news, and it works. It is a good story. It is also, in almost every particular that matters, not what Finland did.
Start with the evidence people cite, which is the ranking. The Media Literacy Index has been published by the Open Society Institute in Sofia since 2017, and Finland held first place alone for most of that run. In the 2026 edition, released in January and written by Marin Lessenski, Finland scores 71. So do Denmark, Ireland, and the Netherlands. Four countries, one number, a tie at the top.
Now read the methodology. Education is 45% of the score, taken from PISA results and enrollment data. Media freedom is 40%, taken from Reporters Without Borders and Freedom House. Interpersonal trust is 10%. E-participation is 5%. Add the first two and 85% of a country’s media literacy score is a measurement of how good its schools are and how free its press is. There is no term anywhere in the index for whether a country teaches media literacy.
That is worth sitting with. The index cited as proof that Finnish media literacy teaching works does not measure Finnish media literacy teaching. It measures the conditions that make such teaching possible. Finland ranks at the top because its schools score well and its press is free.
What Finland actually did starts with the curriculum. The National Core Curriculum issued in 2014 and in force in classrooms from 2016 introduced seven transversal competences running across all twenty core subjects. Media literacy is not one of them. The Finnish National Agency for Education says so in as many words: media literacy “is not included separately as one of the transversal competences.” It sits inside several of them, chiefly multiliteracy and ICT competence, and is therefore owed by every teacher in the building, whether the subject is mathematics or physical education.
That is a structural choice rather than a curricular one, and the difference is the whole lesson. Finland did not add a unit on disinformation to the syllabus. It made the evaluation of sources a condition of teaching anything at all, then repeated the move outside school through libraries, NGOs, and adult education. The intervention is an ambient property of the institutions a Finn passes through. A child does not sit through it once and move on.
It also does not entirely work, which the Finns say more plainly than their admirers do. Kari Kivinen, a former Helsinki headmaster who helped shape the program and is now an education outreach expert at the EU Intellectual Property Office, cited findings in June 2025 from the Finnish CRITICAL project: forty percent of Finnish twelve-year-olds cannot reliably separate commercial content from factual content, and nearly a third of upper-secondary students struggle to judge whether a text is trustworthy. That is the most celebrated version of this intervention, in a country at the top of the index, reporting its own numbers.
The numerator can be bought this afternoon. The denominator is built over decades.
The four-way tie makes the same point from the other direction. Denmark, Ireland, and the Netherlands arrived at 71 without the folklore. If three others reach the same score by other routes, the score is measuring something more general than the Finnish curriculum, which is only one expression of it.
The lesson for the rubric is narrow and inconvenient. R, the resilience term sitting in the denominator, is institutional, and institutions are slow. Volume, frequency, and emotional charge can be bought this afternoon. Coordination rents for a day laborer’s wage, as week ten showed. R cannot be purchased at any price, because it is assembled out of teacher quality, press freedom, and public trust, and none of those respond to a budget inside an election cycle. That asymmetry is the entire engine. Saturation works because the people running it operate on a timescale the defense structurally cannot match. Cleverness has little to do with it.
So the honest reading of Finland is a sobering one. A country can spend decades building institutions that are difficult to lie to, rank at the top in Europe for having done it, and still find that forty percent of its twelve-year-olds cannot tell an advertisement from a fact.
Next week: against the “just media literacy” answer, which this note has probably already made you suspicious of.
— J.W.B.
Note 15 of 24