Project Director: Marica Montalbano (journalist)
Information passes through paper and the web (as well as television and radio), accompanied by an indiscriminate and too often unverified flow of news.
Readers and users in general are largely unprepared to distinguish false from true news, they do not have the tools, they do not know the rules, they have not developed a critical and conscious sense that allows them to filter through words.
The damage, however, that follows from "passive" acceptance without distinction is slow, sneaky, uncontrolled. Damage that will fall on the global vision of the individual and citizen so as to compromise the construction of an autonomous and critical thinking towards society, relations, politics.
An approach falsified by false beliefs. The pure information does not direct the minds, does not flaunt certainties, does not lead to, pure information tells in the most neutral and detailed way a fact, an episode, a situation, offers the reader the opportunity to evaluate.
Analysis and comments should be left to the background articles, not to the news.
Starting from the increasing confusion in the journalistic sector, the project I present starts directly from the basics, following an interactive path in which the public (students, teachers, families) may interact with the speaker in a guided discussion.
Some topics will seem obvious (for example, who is the journalist), but in reality they constitute the basis from which to start, analyzing the common sense.
What is the task of the journalist, how he finds, checks, writes the news and deontology that guides the job. What steps to write an article, what rules to follow.
The program includes a part of explanation of the different types of article, news, editorial, custom, advertising, with particular attention to the latter, often mistaken for news in reality (and often presented with little care by the editors) only and exclusive promotional message and not of pure informative enrichment, to be welcomed and evaluated for these characteristics.
The previous steps are preparatory to make clarity, in order to then move to the real pitfalls of the web and then to the spread of fake news disguised as truth.
Once acquired the tools of knowledge it will be automatic and immediate to assess the accuracy and the authenticity of the news we are reading, distinguish it from the other only in search of a "like" in support of an advertising gain or worse with the aim of orienting our mind in this or that direction.
The meeting with schools, but also with families, will be structured in a dialogical form, with attention to the audience’s feelings, which will be the starting point of the path to follow. It’s planned the use of slides to support the explanation of technical parts.
Meetings can be structured into one or more "conversations" with students. Meetings with teachers and families are planned, depending on the needs and interests of each school.
The final intent is to intervene in a fundamental cross-section of society to which passing clarifications, explanations and useful tools to awaken an awareness understood also and above all as the construction of free and critical individuals and citizens.
