Contextualizing Fake News in Post-truth Era: Journalism Education in India

Abstract

The current debate on fake-news is heavily focused on American and British post-truth politics and the tactical use of ‘alternative facts’. However, the concerns about the impact of fake news on journalism are not restricted to European and American contexts only. This commentary attempts to examine journalism practice and training in India in the post-truth era. Unlike the issues projected in the American debate on the need to reengage and empathize with the non-elite audience and the rise of a fact-checking culture, the apprehensions appear to be slightly different in other countries. In India, tackling the post-truth era challenges is also about addressing obstructive institutional forces like inactive regulatory bodies and out-dated curricula in University-based journalism programmes. The commentary argues that Indian journalism educators should focus on formulating a dynamic curriculum framework that integrates collaborative verification practices with an emphasis on reengaging with the audience to address the enigmatic post-truth politics in the country.

Fake news as a two-dimensional phenomenon: a framework and research agenda

“…However, as a recent poll shows, exposure to fake news stories is likely prevalent in Eastern European countries such as Hungary and Turkey (Newman et al, 2018). Furthermore, fake news is widely discussed in many other parts of the world, such as South Africa (Wasserman, 2017) and India (Bhaskaran, Mishra, & Nair, 2017). Importantly, Wasserman (2017, p. 3) argues, 'Newswhether "fake" or "real"should not be understood outside of its particular contexts of production and consumption'.…”

“…Similarly, fake news might constitute different problems within different country contexts as well. For instance, in India, a larger problem than citizens falling for fake news articles online is that journalists increasingly cover the false information propagated by political actors (Bhaskaran et al, 2017). These examples quite simply point to the need to investigate the fake news genre both in specific country case studies and in a cross-national comparative manner outside of the Western contexts, in general, and the U.S. context, specifically.…”

Journalism Education in Post-Truth Era: Pedagogical Approaches Based on Indian Journalism Students’ Perception of Fake News

“…This rural audience is not the only audience of fake news ecosystem in India. It is a complex network of urban elite, politicians, mainstream media, the state ministries, and state departments (Bhaskaran, Mishra, & Nair, 2017). These nodes overtly and covertly facilitate the distribution of fake news through a network of websites, Facebook pages, WhatsApp groups, and paid trolls for political and monetary gains.…”

Teaching Data Journalism: Insights for Indian Journalism Education

“…Indian journalism academicians rarely take stakeholders into confidence to develop a roadmap for academia. Some recent studies tried developing approaches based on India-specific contexts (Bhaskaran et al, 2017; Bockino, 2017) and by considering stakeholders other than just academicians (Bhaskaran et al, 2019). The present study also attempts to take a similar approach by triangulating insights from the global experience of teaching data journalism with country-specific insights generated by closely examining data journalism practices in India.…”