Media Education Project: A necessity in the new media era
In crises and wars, mainstream media turns into a primary source of information. With the new media technology and the big transformation in the communication sector, everybody with a smartphone became a journalist, what we call “journalist citizen”. So anyone can publish news, images, videos through social media. This transformation in the nature of the news media and the way we produce news, put forward many risks, including inaccurate news and fabricated images…
This development in the media sector, both at the technical and practical level, requires to aware the public of the dangers emerged from taking every news received through social networking sites as a fact without verifying its credibility. In many cases, the inaccurate news was the fuse that sparked clashes between the Tebbene and Jabal Mohsen regions.
From here, Utopia realized the importance of media and participated in the “Media Education” project funded by the European Union and the German Foreign Ministry and implemented by the Permanent Peace Movement and Utopia organization. The goal of this project is to sensitize youth, as they are the most frequent users of social media, to the danger of relying on Facebook, WhatsApp or any other media platform as a single source of information.
Under this project, we organized a workshop targeting youth from Jabal Mohsen and Bab Tebbaneh. The training focused on how to formulate news in an objective manner and on the latest techniques used to validate the source and credibility of an image.
Additionally, a comic book was created, whose purpose is confronting extremism through media literacy. This “Comic Book”; named “Stories from al Fayhaa”; is a two-part fictional story taking place in the city of Tripoli, known locally as “al Fayhaa” city. The story portrayed the media as a ghost seeking to distort the image of the city. As a result, “Al Fayhaa” is stereotyped and depicted as a war zone that people are afraid to visit.
The story mirrored the youth’s point of view who believe that Tripoli leads the news only during the period of clashes, but all other cultural and touristic events are kept in the shadow.
Nonetheless, the events showed hidden heroes, who work constantly and succeed eventually in improving Tripoli’s image and showing it as a city of life and joy.