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International conference in Chisinau: Citizens need to know their way around the “media jungle”

01 December 2015
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Dozens of teachers, academia representatives, local and international experts participated in the period of November 26-27 in an international conference where they discussed the need to educate teaching professionals in media literacy. Media experts from Germany, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, the Baltic States and Moldova shared their experience in media education and the ways to promote media culture in schools and universities.
At the inauguration of the conference, current Minister of Education Corina Fusu mentioned the importance of introducing media education into school curricula. According to the minister, to have students see the difference between manipulating news and true and objective news, we should explain to them what happens in the “media jungle.” For that very reason, Corina Fusu underlined: “before that, we need to teach teachers.”
Ambassador of Germany in Chisinau Ulrike Knotz, who was present at the event, said that without freedom of the press, there is no democracy and information that comes from different media sources is still influenced by political elements. “Readers are forced to assemble a mosaic from a multitude of sources. In this sense, information must be of good quality and always questioned, and we must learn to read between the lines,” Ulrike Knotz said.
This idea was supported by the Independent Journalism Center (IJC) director Nadine Gogu. According to her, media education is “an efficient tool for detecting propaganda and manipulation.” “We must teach people to critically analyze the information they consume,” Nadine Gogu underlined, referring also to the media literacy projects implemented by the IJC over the past years.
Several thematic workshops will take place within the conference, where teachers will learn how manipulation manifests itself in the media and how to protect from manipulation. They will also do practical tasks, playing the role of media consumers who know how to read information between the lines and to see the difference between truth and lies in the materials that appear in the media.
The event was organized by DW-Akademie (Germany) and by Ion Creanga State Pedagogical University of Chisinau. The university’s president Nicolae Chicus and the DW-Akademie representative Lydia Rehnert expressed their hope that such projects can contribute to increasing interest for media culture and education in Moldova.