To Fact-Check or Not: The Importance of Media and Information Literacy | Ekene Odigwe | TEDxAsata
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpboRMKIVWA Video ID: MpboRMKIVWA ============================================================ [Music] so i grew up in a home where we watch a lot of movies we're encouraged to read books we're encouraged to see movies but not listening to the radio so radio is very foreign to me you get to hear a whole lot of things i have no idea how the damn thing works and my grandmother would always say it is a small box where you have people inside and they never stopped talking and that's how we described it later all of that changed in my secondary school days when i went to namda sequestering school la bagana you see my french teacher mrs bibian anichi wanted to give us an experience of something we would always bank on something to get us more interested in the course and something to make every other person take the class so she started a radio program with and amber broadcasting service and she would always drive us to the place the very first time i was on air he was quite excited you know there's a small party just turning turn and then you're talking to the world and everyone is listening at you but then i in that all excitement there's something missing i just cannot but feel a bit of emptiness in 20 by the age of 14 i wrote a letter to delta broadcasting service asking them if it is possible they could call on me and train me possibly tell me the course i could take on in the university because i wanted to be on air fast forward to 2011 i landed my first official radio job with radio nigeria it was exciting and apart from the fact that there's no button in the studio you could just turn them and you're talking to the world the idea that your study with responsibility of shaping narrative became crystal clear and then again it dawned on me there's a difference between media and information literacy and as what we know it so media is a platform anyone can access it when you have the right school when you have right access when we talk about information literacy why does it matter why do we have to know see our brain is hardwired in a way that it can recognize patterns and narratives especially from the things around us and these patterns or stories help us become clearer especially if they confirm that which we hold dear to our hearts in talking about being a media literate person first thing comes to mind you have to have the ability to identify when new information is needed if you can identify that then what type of information is required from you are we talking about eyewitness accounts or we are talking about empirical research from a study you've done or something else or you need to be able to know when to source for information across from anywhere in the world and in sourcing for information checking for the credibility and reliability of the sources of your information and finally as a media literate person you need to be able to synchronize all of this information and be able to solve a problem or answer a question so when you're media literate people expect you to be able to access information when you are information literate people expect you to access information and know when it's true or when it's forced we're living in a digital age where information come online and we are always online at the speed it's going no one has the time to sit back and think about is this message true who is it coming from so for you to be able to do that three things comes to mind first of all who is the author if you can identify the author then you can also look at what is the purpose of this message then thirdly think about what has been taken out of this message how was this message constructed so because you're telling me a narrative you take away every other narrative that does not sync with what you're telling you want us to believe in your argument so you take away every other thing that does not align with your thoughts when we talk about media literacy now we're talking about your ability to be to access all of these information take them all in and be able to reproduce them so in a conventional way being literate is about ready to write okay you can understand reading you can write when you're media literate you should be able to access all the messages understand them and write them that's what makes you i have seen how messages could get disrupted marginalized or anything and just to a channel and get into something in 2015 the nimble headers for mass clash happened i was in soccer then first hand i saw how many down messages can be purported weaponized or even used to destroy anything because they understand that then political class and reporters understand that fact so all they needed to do was couch the message in a way that we want to use it to gain what you want to gain so i started what i call the situation report on radio nigerian soccer which was my station at the moment at that time the idea was simple tell us your story we call it switching reports people calling any time of the day to report what they see what they hear how they hear it then we the media will go to verify what that is and then send that report we've had to the authorities so we'll build this network where see something say something we do something then the authority gets to action and that saved a city that was on the brink of destruction started by false news started by fake news and a whole lot of propaganda within the media circle in 2019 last year i had the opportunity of training journalists in five states and in six cities in nigeria on fact-checking and telling impactful stories at the end of that training for two months one thing was clear we cannot win the war against news manipulation news falsification classification of data and manipulation if the journalists generally say everyone is not aware of how to use digital media tools to tell a story or even how to check a story the videos the stories the link and read beyond them live in an age where everyone has a cell phone so we take pictures we post online we tell our stories via the cell phone and that makes all of us sensing journalists so if we can begin to access these information or even take a moment to pause and say is it right am i doing it the right way then we are falling back into that same circle where we only know tom deport on and we're speaking to the world we are not listening to the part that says is about shaping the narrative now fast forward to that how do you as an individual or how do everyone key into that we need to be able to start looking out for if your story is right then you need to be able to check them how do you check we've talked about checking the author but then beyond that we need to be able to teach our children to know we need to be able to take this to the grassroots imagine if the people of nimbo understand our media literate information literate and they understand how the media works what happened nimble headers clash wouldn't have happened imagine if the world everyone at the little grassroot at every corner of the world understand how to fact-check every story imagine if all of us in this room can check a single picture know when it first came online and who posted it and not be able to post it because it does not align with the story that is um they want us to tell that way everyone gets to be very conscious of what we say how we say it and the people we say it too because every story will tell is about creating a new world and making the world go bad and that's why the idea of using the library make our children understand the library works let them go to library information when they know it they understand it they can access it effectively use of information is all they need for them to be information literate for media literacy they need to be able to couch the messages perfectly to tell the story they want to tell otherwise we'll end up from where we began thank you