The Future Teachers Were Taught How to Avoid “Media Traps”

The speech of Ion Bunduchi started with the following message:”You should be more careful when consuming information, because it became merchandise”- during a new media education lesson, carried out on October 22 by the Centre for Independent Journalism at the Pedagogical University ”Ion Creanga”. ”The media does not sell air, it sells years and eyes and each of us contributes to the growth of money resulting from the advertising via the volume of information we consume. It is in the course of our nature to want to be informed, and media institutions rely on this when they prepare their materials. This is why, we, the readers have to choose and select the information they read”, Ion Bunduchi explained to the participants in the event. The interactive communication between experts and students stimulated them be completely honest. When asked what they read and how much they believed was true, the students admitted that it was not so easy to distinguish a reliable source of information from a manipulative one. The expert explained that each author emphasized some aspects and only an honest journalist would provide full information. In turn, the reader should not qualify the information as good or bad, but has to analyze it especially when he or she detects something untrue.
Ion Bunduchi thinks that the news is the most common journalistic genre that serves as a good base for manipulation. To fight against this phenomenon, the developed countries included the media education matter in education programs, so children know how to choose information sources. According to the expert, the introduction of media education in the school curricula became long time ago a need for our country. Ion Bunduchi brought many examples of ”media traps” the students should be aware of know when they listen to or watch media products like the manipulating headlines, including the use of figures, author’s opinion, news that use a single source, news that refer to a press conference and provide gross information, violation of presumption of innocence, manipulation by means of sources, when their protection is wrongly invoked etc.
At the end of the lesson, the participants summarised the information they learnt. The student Doina Onofrei said: ”I learnt that not all the information was correctly reproduced and we can be easily mislead if we do not analyse the information we read. This activity helped us to understand how can we make difference and how identify reliable sources”.

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The lessons of media education are carried out within the project “Freedom of expression and media development in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and South Caucasus", implemented by CIJ during the period May-September 2015, supported by Deutsche Welle Akademie and financed by German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development”.