This Tuesday begins the World Media Literacy Week urged by Unesco, and the Bofill Foundation has revealed a no less worrying figure: 74% of teachers perceive that their students are uninformed. But there is a figure that worries me even more, when the press release we received says: “The PISA report reveals an insufficient ability among teenagers to recognize the reliability of a source, although 90% of students see themselves as capable of distinguishing between information and opinion”, citing data from a study by the Ministry of Education. Note that the statement says “they see themselves as capable”, but it does not mean that they necessarily are . And it’s not the fault of the students, I hasten to say, but of a media system in which opinion and information are inextricably tangled together like a huge plate of cooked spaghetti. Reader, consider the ten most Spanish media journalists: are they known for their exclusives and the issues they raise or for the opinion easily reconciled with the argument of a party that emanates from their figures?
In Anglo-Saxon journalism, there is still a clear division between strictly informative spaces and those of opinion, with growing cracks. They are even usually two independent newsrooms, not without tension. When I was studying journalism, the faculty talked about “interpretive journalism” as a third way between information and opinion: a modern journalism that was not limited to the boring compilation of facts. The more it goes on, the more it seems to me to be a scam, because in the end it ends up being the excuse to graft subjective comments with no factual elements into pieces that should only say – and it’s no small thing – what the hell happened. If media education really took place in classrooms, fewer young people would say they know how to distinguish between facts and opinions. But more young people would know how to do it.
2023-10-21 16:51:49
#Beware #selfdeception #media #education
