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

Abstract

The media ecosystem of the post-truth era is shaped by several unprecedented elements—the pitfalls of the personalized/networked media, the cherry picking tendencies of news producers in an attention economy, the propagandist power-elite, and the gullible support of the semi-literate media audience. These post-truth realities also call for new approaches in journalism education to address phenomena like fake news. In this backdrop, this study examines the existing issues in Indian journalism training based on a thematic analysis of focus group discussions with graduate students of journalism at an Indian university about their perception of fake news. It recommends pedagogical approaches to focus on improving journalistic agency in students to deal with fake news situations.

Journalism Students and Information Consumption in the Era of Fake News

“…Our results also align with the findings on other studies in other contexts (Bhaskaran et al, 2019). To confirm this assumption, more meticulous comparative research is needed, not to overstate what could be context-specific and to allow some extent of generalization.…”

“…Despite the interest that this subgroup of young people should arise, very few studies (Bhaskaran, Mishra, & Nair, 2019) have focused on journalism students' understanding and perception of 'fake news. ' Herrero-Diz, Conde-Jiménez, Tapia-Frade, and Varona-Aramburu (2019), analyzing students of Communication from the Spanish region of Andalusia, conclude that university students have difficulty differentiating the veracity of the sources.…”

Teaching Data Journalism: Insights for Indian Journalism Education

“…This, to an extent, restricts the findings of the study. Certain suggestions may get temporally irrelevant in the near future due to its focus on specific tools and technology (Bhaskaran et al, 2019, p. 165). Due to these limitations, the insights shared by this study shall not be considered normative but iterative, and shall be improved by future studies.…”

“…Indian journalism education, on the one hand, is struggling to provide quality education to develop critical and analytical thinking in students and to meet industry needs (Tere, 2012), and on the other, it is crippled by its industry disconnect and Western influence. The challenges put forward by disruptive changes in journalism as a profession are the latest entrant to this mix (Bhaskaran et al, 2019).…”

“…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.…”