Imnasenla
In this Digital Age, we are flooded with all kinds of information and it becomes difficult to distinguish between fake and real news. For the consumers it’s difficult to discern between news and propaganda, news and advertisement, news and paid-news. Information in the media has grown exponentially overall the past years and we believe everything we see and read. Today people spend most of the time on social media and though it has increased reading on screen, reading printed materials, including newspapers and magazines have decreased. There has been a major and critical change in terms of uses and consumption of media, which can be explained by the decline of traditional media as it is witnessed by circulation figures around the world.
Richard Hornik, Director of Overseas Partnerships at the Centre for News Literacy believes that the latest communications revolution has transformed society anew by making it possible for everyone with access to a computer or a smart-phone to publish information. He however opines that these challenges have created the demand for a new kind of literacy.News Literacy can become a valuable tool for consumers, if they understand the contemporary media in terms of their reliability, objectivity, balanced and unbiased reporting.
News literacy is a process of describing, interpreting and evaluating news. It has been characterized as one that introduces new associations or attributes a new meaning to original communicative act.
Professor Janet Wasko, President of International Association for Media and Communication Research is of the view that news aggregators, bloggers, pundits, provocateurs, commentators and “citizen journalists” are competing with traditional journalists for public attention. She further asserts that uninformed opinion masquerades as news and lines are blurring between legitimate journalism and the propaganda, entertainment, self promotion and unmediated information on the internet.
Taking an instance on Health Communication, it has become an important part of media intervention, as demand for health related issues in media have grown exponentially. An important health issue of our time is HIV & AIDS and there are several challenges for the media to create balanced information. The increased coverage of HIV & AIDS related information in media, especially the newspapers has led to various challenges as many media practitioners do not have the adequate skills to write and report on the issue. There are limited HIV & AIDS resource centres, which makes it difficult for journalist to get up to date information. Hence, there is a need for providing factual information which is reliable, balanced and is attributed to credible sources. People want objectivity, reliability, balanced and unbiased information on HIV & AIDS, political news or any other kind of news from credible sources. However, with the increased flow of HIV related information and any kind of information in the media, the certainty of the source and authenticity of the information becomes questionable. With so many sources to choose from, the responsibility of the media is to monitor and pick the right news information from reliable sources; providing the facts and putting them in perspective. Failing which, the media has often come under the scanner for being insensitive towards HIV & AIDS reporting and creating confusion among the consumers.
Very often journalists publish news reports on “Miracle Cure” for HIV & AIDS without verifying the facts and sources. This creates confusion and gives a sense of false hope to the People Living with HIV & AIDS. Pollard R and Walters E ( 2006) in a media guide advises journalist not to believe everything the government or the drug companies or the community group says, but rather dispel myths on HIV & AIDS by practicing good journalism and see first-hand what it means to live with HIV & AIDS by seeking out information and interviewing those affected.
Not only in the case of HIV & AIDS, there are numerous health related information in the media, where the consumer has to discern in getting the right information and not believe everything they read. Likewise, all the breaking news in the media cannot all be true. Sometimes, different news information in the media especially the social media can be deceiving and confusing.
In the light of this, it becomes vital that every consumer is News literate. Though News Literacy is still at its infancy in India, the new movement first started it root at the Centre for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, New York US in 2006. During the past 10 years, the need for news literacy has only grown. Where the movement once worried about blogs, left-right bias and how to decode the front page of a newspaper, it now confronts a booming content-marketing business that is cranking out native advertising, all manner of “sponsored content”, and glossy magazines and slick docu-ads produced by corporations that look and sound a lot like journalism.
An association known as the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) helps newspapers, parents and teachers work together to engage the young to create a literate, civic-minded new generation of readers all over the world. It is important that consumers are well informed with reliable sources and objective reporting for a healthy society or the consequences of rumors and gossip in the media can be quite dangerous for the society.
