Media are a kind of item that can occasionally be hacked from portals. Media items can contain text, images, sound clips or videos.
They will often contain videos recently released on the official Ingress YouTube channel, some of them unlisted. Other times, they will contain other materials relevant to current events in the Ingress story line. Media will sometimes contain passcodes, but apart from that, their only practical in-game purpose is to be recycled for 20 XM. Media are always level 1 items, although in the past higher-level media has been seen.
An archive of all released media is maintained by Operation Essex.