Popular media is an unspoken yet ever-present element of the physics landscape and a tool we can use in our teaching.1 It is also well understood that students enter the physics classroom with a host of conceptions learned from the world at large.2,3 It stands to reason, then, to suspect that media coverage may be a major contributing factor to students’ views on physical phenomena and the nature of science4—one whose influence will only grow amid the 21st-century digital age. Yet the role of the media in shaping physics teaching and learning has remained largely unexplored in the physics education research (PER) literature so far.
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