Fake News and Indian Journalism Education

What is it about?

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 powerelite, 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.

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Why is it important?

The present scholarly attention on fake news is heavily western centric with limited comparative perspectives. Many of these academic narratives are primarily focused on finding technological solutions to the issue by making the networks and the algorithms more responsible. However, just addressing the technological aspect may not be a viable, long-term solution to fake news, especially in media markets like India. With several instances of Indian mainstream journalists mistaking fake news for real, it can be seen that the issue is not just proliferation, but also how it is perceived by its audience, including journalists. In this backdrop, the present study looks at Indian journalism education and tries to suggest pedagogic approaches to address fake news issue. Instead of making it a descriptive account about “doing” journalism education (Deuze, 2006), it examines the issues of existing pedagogical approaches in light of Indian journalism students’ perception about fake news.

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