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According to Corina Fusu, ex-Chair of the Parliament Committee for the Media, the quality of journalism in Moldova these days is quite low, as the journalist community is far from united and the journalists depend heavily on their financers. In this context, information gets more and more distorted and the audience is more and more manipulated and misinformed. In the opinion of Mrs. Fusu, a solution would be to include in the school curricula a course on media education. ‘I talked to the Center for Independent Journalism about including several topics concerning media education in the civic education course at school, so that the young get the tools needed to disentangle the overflow of information… One must be equipped to identify the character of the information, to identify the source, to develop critical thinking with regard to everything he sees, hears or reads,’ said Corina Fusu during the Media Forum.
Other participants at the Forum shared the same views. ‘It is crucial to have a high school course on media as part of the civic education course, where high school students would learn to process the media materials in a critical manner,’ said Ludmila Andronic, Chair of the Press Council, commenting on the conclusions reached at the workshop on professional training of journalists in Moldova.
In her turn, Natalia Morari, a journalist and political talk show anchor, and the moderator of the workshop ‘Moldovan Media between Information and Manipulation’ proposed that the term ‘manipulation’ be included in legislation, alongside penalties for manipulation. The participants came up with a number of proposals regarding the combating of mass media propaganda and misinformation, including the proposal to set up a public online platform where anyone could run any piece of news through a filter to check its veracity.
The workshop participants also covered other media education aspects: ‘We thought it would be good to develop a series of public lectures for the students at the departments of journalism; the professional journalists would take turns lecturing at universities. Each of us might be able to reserve a couple of hours a month to provide free lectures to students,’ concluded Natalia Morari at the end of the workshop.
The Media Forum adopted a Resolution that says that the promotion of media education and the inclusion of media education in the curricula of schools and universities are needed.
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Lessons are conducted as part of the “Freedom of Speech and Media Development in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus” project implemented by the IJC with the support of Deutsche Welle Akademie and funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany.
