Students from AESM Learned How to Filter the Information

A group of students from Academy of Economic Studies of Moldova participated in a media education lesson, carried out on October 19 by the Centre for Independent Journalism and moderated by the media expert Ion Bunduchi.
The lesson started with a question asked to students: how interested are they in news broadcast by media and how do they filter the information from numerous sources, existing on our market. The students answered that it was not so easy to identify reliable sources.
Ion Bunduchi presented a range of features of the press and the role of journalists and how the information in the news they publish daily should be presented. He explained that the journalists’ mission is to seek the truth to reproduce it and to verify all the information they access.
The media expert stated that, at the moment, the journalists are in a hurry to be the first who provide information, this is why, a lot of mistakes can be detected in the press. In this context, the students were given advice to be very careful with the materials that say how to understand a certain event, because the journalist has to trust the reader and only to reproduce the information, and the readers should take his own conclusion. ”In the public space a lot of ”informational trash” is introduced”, and the readers should have at their complete disposal ”the antidote”- to know which information they shall read and which of them to trust, because to read and to understand is a genuine art”, added Ion Bunduchi.  

Further, the students analysed some news examples, which helped them identify the requirements of a true news and learned that they should not believe in news without sources or with a single source or which use adjectives that serve for the expression of authors own opinion. At the end, the students said that the useful things they learnt within the lesson will help them in their further activity. This is what two I-st years students participants in the event told us: Maria Croitoru: ”We learnt how we could understand when a piece of news contained  lies, what news deserved to be read, when we could trust the information and when to be sceptical about it”. Veronica Titu: ”Everything I heard at this lesson was new to me”. For example I did not know how to filter the information and how to build immunity against everything I read from mass media. This lesson was very useful for me and my colleagues, because it would help us not to get manipulated by the information we read every day”.

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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”.