Media, academe, government and civil society organizations are set to convene next week for the coming celebration of Global Media and Information Literacy Week.
This will be held from October 24 to 31.
The event was initiated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2011 to help raise awareness of the need to help people become more informed and literate as consumers and creators.
This year, Global MIL Week aims to focus on restoring the public’s trust in democratic institutions and traditional sources of information, including journalists.
This goal was developed after a recent Pulse Asia survey that showed that 40% of Filipinos see journalists as purveyors of fake news about the government and politics.
This number closely follows social media influencers, bloggers and vloggers at 58%.
Similarly, most people have also read or seen fake news on the following platforms:
- Internet or social media – 68%
- Television – 67%
- Radio – 32%
- Friends/acquaintances – 28%
- Family/relatives – 21%
Overall, most Filipinos, or 86% of the participants believed that fake news is a problem in the Philippines.
Pulse Asia’s nationwide survey on fake news is conducted from Sept. 17 to 21, 2022.
Response to these findings
With these findings, media literacy advocates hope to teach the public how to discern which sources to trust.
Among the activities slated are the following:
- A nationwide MIL contest for media-savvy high school and college students
They are invited to create 90-second videos that will answer questions related to trust and disinformation. Winners can receive up to P8,000 in cash. The deadline for this contest is on October 26.
You can read the mechanics here Nationwide MIL Contest – Out of The Box – Out of The Box (ootbmedialiteracy.org).
- A raffle draw promo for teachers and librarians of media and information literacy for the School Year 2022-2023
All participants have to do is share their MIL activities and strategies with the organizers, use the #GlobalMILWeekPH frame on their Facebook profiles, and register their entries to the raffle draw.
Ten lucky winners can get a gift package that contains different #GlobalMILWeekPH gift items and many more prizes.
The raffle draw will be held on October 28.
You can view all the activities and the mechanics for the contests here #GlobalMILWeekPH – Out of The Box – Out of The Box (ootbmedialiteracy.org).
Marlon Nombrado, the co-founder of OOTB which clinched first prize in UNESCO’s 2021 Global Media and Information Literacy Awards, said that earning the trust of people is the most difficult in teaching media literacy.
“Besides being an issue of truth and knowledge, disinformation is a trust issue. Media literacy educators must be more conscious of the factors at play why some people find it hard to trust the media now,” Nombrado said.
Global MIL Week will open with a stakeholder’s forum on October 24 at the Far Eastern University in Manila.
Three hundred media professionals, educators and students will join the half-day forum that will highlight media literacy as a human right and global ideal.
Forum organizers are led by the educational nonprofit org Out of the Box Media Literacy Initiative (OOTB) and the FEU Department of Communication.
Other MIL stakeholders include VERA Files, Break the Fake Movement, and the National Council for Children’s Television (NCCT), an attached agency of the Department of Education focused on promoting child-friendly media.