It’s never too early to teach children how to navigate the media

This year, IMS is collaborating with DR and Danida on the Children’s Christmas Calendar, focusing on basic human rights such as freedom of expression and access to reliable information. Both are absolutely essential in healthy societies, and children should learn to navigate the flow of information from an early age. Good journalism provides a shortcut to increasing resistance to propaganda and building a basic democratic understanding.

Almost 70 percent of all young people in the world are now online. Every day, humans watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube and two billion of us are active on Facebook. For many people, these platforms are the way they access important access to news and information. But that comes with great demands: there are no filters online like we were previously accustomed to through newspapers, radio and TV. It is no coincidence that general trust in information is the lowest ever, especially for online information, but unfortunately also from both the media and governments.

This is the world that children and young people have to navigate in. In Denmark, where IMS is based, we are good at “democratic education”, and in recent years there have been initiatives in “digital education”, which includes, among other things, how to protect your own and other people’s information. But “media education” is just as important!

Media literacy is fundamentally about being able to identify media content, to discern where information comes from, about having basic knowledge of different types of information and an understanding of how journalists work. How are news stories developed and how do they differentiate from stories circulating on social media? The more informed and critically a person can relate to the information they are presented with both online and offline, the better equipped they are to resist manipulation and thus able to make informed decisions. What is true, what is false and what tries to lie in a gray area in between? You have to learn to decode that, and the earlier the better – almost half of Danish 12-year-olds use social media to read news.

Freedom of expression and access to reliable information are inalienable rights – and have become immeasurably more important in a very short time. These basic human rights are essential for democratic development, for healthy societies and for peace. This is what we at IMS are helping to focus on this year with the Children’s Christmas Calendar.

This year’s project is about establishing children’s and youth media in Tunisia, so that children and young people get their own platform, can use their freedom of expression and can help set the agenda themselves. At the same time, we’re bringing media education into the Danish schools down to the youngest classes, where students learn about true and false, how to be critical of sources and the difference between believing and knowing.

This year marks 60 years since the first edition of the Children’s Christmas Calendar was launched. In those 60 years, fantastic, positive developments have taken place all over the world areas such as child mortality, poverty alleviation, education and hunger, but we are far from the goal. In addition, global issues today have become more complex in several ways and overlap each other. This applies not least to the crisis of information, which this year’s project touches on. The public discourse in every country around the world has become a battleground where manipulation, propaganda and false information are actively circulated. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the UN went so far as to say that, in addition to the health crisis, there was also an “infodemic”, because rumours and incorrect information spread online in record time. In addition, there is severe inequality when it comes to people’s access to reliable information. Depending on your level of education, financial means and where you live, you have access to very different information. This can have major consequences for both health and democracy.

It is beyond any doubt that the current crisis of information has been made possible by the rapid technological and digital developments of recent decades. Even for adults who have a varied news diet, decoding and navigating the flow of information can sometimes be difficult. We know all about this from our work in Eastern Europe, for example, where Russian disinformation in particular is spread with immense creativity and resources behind it. In Russia, media literacy and teaching how to navigate the media would be a very short school day because independent media have been closed down there.

Some journalists may have nefarious motives behind their work, but the truth is that skilled, independent journalists perform a crucial, democratic task on behalf of the rest of us. They ensure that credible information is shared and fake news is stopped, while independent media hold those in power accountable for their actions – at least in countries where the press is free.

Supporting children and young people in Tunisia in expressing themselves journalistically through youth media therefore not only makes sense in relation to maintaining freedom of expression and the right to reliable information, it also gives Danish children a unique opportunity to learn more about an issue seen around the world. Through the Children’s Christmas Calendar teaching material, Danish school children also learn about how to work as a journalist, and the learning and understanding is thus mutual in many ways, regardless of whether you are based in North Africa or in Northern Europe.

Just as democratic development is in many ways a continuous process, so is our media literacy and understanding. The understanding of the cornerstones of democracy is a knowledge that must be built up early. When freedoms of speech and the press are included in the school syllabus, we are securing the future of democracy.