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Author
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Dr Mrinal Chatterjee, Sambit Pal
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Year
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2020
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Publisher
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World Press.com
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Abstract
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The term ‘fake news’ has been overused to define news which is factually incorrect either without any ill intention or to deliberately deceive people. There could be various kinds of fake news in the media ecosystem. The scholars and media practitioners prefer to use ‘misinformation’ to denote fake news from a broader perspective. With the growth of social and digital media, the volume of misinformation has increased manifold. The fact-checking agencies, independent or attached to the mainstream publications, have been relentlessly trying to bust misinformation. However, the systematic, organized and technology-driven misinformation generators and distributors are defeating these efforts with the time, speed and bias of the news consumers. With 570 million internet users in India (FICCI 2019), mostly without a proper understanding of the new medium of text, images, video and audio mixed, the fight against misinformation is getting tougher. The wave of misinformation aided with the messages of propaganda, tilted with ideology and commercial interest, unverified assertions is confusing for the audience. Still, people are showing more faith in social media content, often generated by the users, than the mainstream media. This is an alarming situation. Hence, there is a need for digital media literacy at several levels, especially at the grassroots to combat the menace of misinformation. Digital news literacy essentially means consciously accessing, evaluating, understanding the underlying meaning of the message (Livingstone 2003) mediated through complex images, sound, words and deciphering the subtleties while consuming the digital content (Lanham 1995). This paper, through a heuristic method, tries to explore a three-pronged approach to carry out a digital news literacy campaign both among the news producer-publishers and the news consumers. This can help in forming a concrete plan of action, despite the challenges, to educate the digital, mobile-first news consumers in combating the spread of misinformation.