Critical Evaluation of Disinformation in the Media within the Formal Education System during the Coronavirus Pandemic

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, in addition to reliable and trustworthy information, plenty of disinformation about the virus, vaccination and its consequences have appeared in the media, especially on social networks. Exposure to the media during this crisis period pointed to the importance of having media competencies in order to select quality, reliable and trustworthy information. Namely, the critical evaluation of media content has become key to properly distinguishing trustworthy and reliable from untrustworthy and unreliable information. For adequate acquisition of media competencies, quality media education is important, which in Croatia, when it comes to the formal education system, is primarily conducted through Croatian language teaching, as well as also through various cross-curricular topics (Ciboci, 2018a.). Croatian language teachers and school librarians play a leading role in this process (Ciboci, 2018a.; Kanižaj and Car, 2015a.; Ciboci and Osmančević, 2015a.). In order to be able to educate the younger generations and encourage them to think critically about the media and media content, those who teach them must be media literate. The question arises as to how successful media education providers themselves are in recognizing disinformation in the media and how often, over the last year, have schools focused on these topics, since children as well as adults are exposed to plenty of disinformation about the coronavirus, which can greatly affect their attitudes and opinions on the overall pandemic. In this paper, analyzed using the survey method is to what extent school librarians recognize disinformation in the media, as well as how many activities in schools in the last year have been carried out with the aim of educating students about this important issue.