The bruising 2016 presidential election and its aftermath yielded few winners in journalism. But one new voice of clarity has emerged from an unexpected quarter: 25-year-old Lauren Duca, a Brooklyn-based former lifestyle writer, has found a dedicated and expanding following at a publication better known for beauty tips and boyfriend advice: Teen Vogue.

Last week, while preparing a new message on ways to organise against Trump, Duca told the Observer her understanding of Trump’s deception and its purpose was crystal clear: to deploy strategies of alternative truth to destabilise, and attempt to intensify distrust in, the media.

“The goal is not even to convince the public of their ‘alternative facts’ so much as it to sow doubt on any account. That way, they can convince the public to throw their hands up, and say ‘well, I can’t get any of this straight’. So then there’s no accountability.”

Duca owes her growing reputation to a piece she wrote in December entitled “Donald Trump is gaslighting America”. It received widespread praise, including from veteran broadcaster Dan Rather, who described Teen Vogue as one of journalism’s “surprising new sources of serious reporting” on his Facebook page after reading Duca’s dispatch.

The term “gaslighting” takes its name from the 1944 Ingrid Bergman film Gaslight, which has gained currency as a metaphor for shifting blame for dishonest behaviour onto victims. “Suddenly, I’m beginning not to trust my memory at all,” Bergman says in the film as her husband’s deceitfulness causes her to question her sanity.

In a forceful commentary, Duca argued that Trump, through dissembling and contradictory claims, was responsible for undermining democracy. “Trump won the presidency by gaslight,” Duca wrote. “His rise to power has awakened a force of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalising deception.”

The article went viral, generating more than a million unique visitors and unseating the publication’s all-time best-performing piece, “How to apply glitter nail polish the right way”. Duca now has 166,000 followers on Twitter while Teen Vogue – a rare media success story since it began posting harder stories after a change of editorship, has seen traffic increase almost fourfold in less than a year.

Duca went on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, where she neatly eviscerated her host when he attempted to dismiss her commentaries on the grounds that it had appeared in a teen magazine. He said she should stick to writing about thigh-high boots.

“A woman can love Ariana Grande and her thigh-high boots and still discuss politics,” Duca replied, before dismissing her host: “You’re actually just being a partisan hack who’s just attacking me ad nauseam and not even allowing me to speak.”

Then, earlier this year, she tweeted that “she’d rather eat her own organs” than accept an invitation from Martin Shkreli, a doctor at the centre of a series of controversial price rises pharmaceutical price-gouging schemes, to attend Trump’s inauguration. Shkreli then posted a picture imposing himself in the place of Duca’s husband and was suspended from the service.

Duca says the Fox exchange speaks to a larger issue, one that millions of women marched last weekend to draw attention to: that young women, especially, have been denied their voice in the political dialogue.

“There’s a dismissive tone that’s especially directed to young women that’s attempting to denying them access to a political conversation based on them having non-serious interests – as if it’s not possible to have serious and non-serious interests – that was specifically designed to deny me access to the conversation..”

Duca’s popularity and the unanticipated political reach of Teen Vogue is part of the vacuum created by what is now disparaged as the mainstream media. Duca believes that too much of what is written or broadcast is created “at a pitch that only the media can hear and not reflective of an overall reality”.

Some of the hardest hit are not necessarily those of her generation, who have learned to parse alternative sources of information, but older people left bereft of information by a press, she says, that now needs to re-apply itself to basic principles of journalism.

“Alternative facts – the term coined by White House counselor Kellyanne Conway last week in her dispute over inauguration crowd size – do not have equal weight with established facts. Newsrooms need to think about they are handling the administration’s deliberate attempts to destabilize the truth because often they’re stepping on on their own toes and further eroding pubic trust.”

Chief White House adviser Steve Bannon said last week the media the administration’s “opposition party.” Meanwhile centrists and liberals are continuing to accuse the same organisations of handing over control of the news cycle, and possibly the election, to Donald Trump in a Faustian bargain for traffic and ratings.

“Based on what I see, it’s the older generation that feels frustration,” says Duca. “Donald Trump proved the old guard in the party or in the media weren’t enough to stop him. So the frustration is with the old structure, while younger people are cued-in to a range of voices and sources, primarily Twitter, and may be having an easier time of it.”

“A lot of political coverage is alienating and inaccessible, and perhaps that’s why Teen Vogue is doing exceptionally well, reaching beyond its [18-to-24 female] target audience. It’s easy to digest, welcoming and doesn’t have that exclusivity to it.”

The innovation may be twofold: Duca, whose writing appears in publications including Vice, the Nation, and the New Yorker, and who won an LA Press Club award for a Huffington Post essay entitled “The Rise of the Woman-Child”, has emerged as a rare star, while women’s publications, which typically underestimate the interests of their audience, are now capitalizing on weightier political issues and interests.

In addition to Duca’s gaslight story, Teen Vogue reports that a series on the Standing Rock pipeline protests, “Ask a Native American Girl,” generated more than 8 million views on Facebook. Last week, the site featured stories on self-care tips from the Women’s March, the lies Trump told that week, the administration’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the US, and how to treat acne scarring.

“The greatest danger is to have fact-based narratives undermined by the administration,” says Duca. “I want to be part of that bulwark because if we can’t agree on facts, then we can’t agree any solution.”