The main source of information for the high school students we spoke with at the “Josip Broz Tito” gymnasium in Skopje are social media. They say they do not trust traditional and online media much, although they find it difficult to explain the reasons for that. They exchange information among themselves, mainly through Instagram and TikTok, and for current events in the city and in the country, if they are interested, they most often get information from their parents and close family members.
To better prepare young people to choose a trustworthy source of information, to know how to recognize disinformation and manipulative content, and to understand the importance of respecting the rules of responsible journalism, the Council of Media Ethics of Macedonia (CMEM) is organizing ten workshops in secondary schools and universities across the country, as part of the project “Encouraging an Ethical Approach to Reporting Among Potential Young Journalists”, supported by the European Union.
The workshops will be held in a total of six secondary schools in Skopje, Tetovo, and Shtip, as well as at the faculties of journalism, communications, or law at the universities in these cities.
Young people are often victims of disinformation and manipulative content, and not infrequently they also get involved in online discussions that result in discrimination or even hate speech. It is important for them to recognize the risks of uncritical and indiscriminate following and sharing of online content, that is, to continuously improve their media literacy, in parallel with the technological development of the media and the new risks brought by this process.
Media self-regulation is a new concept for most high school students, but after a brief introduction to the goals of this mechanism for correcting journalistic content and to the right of citizens to react if they suspect that a media outlet is spreading unethical content and violating the Code of Journalists of Macedonia, they say that “now the power is in our hands”.
The project “Encouraging an Ethical Approach to Reporting Among Potential Young Journalists” is part of the broader project activity titled “Training Academy for Journalists and Media Workers – T-AJM”, implemented by the Association of Journalists of Macedonia.