MP calls for journalists in schools to help young people spot online lies

JOURNALISTS should be brought into classrooms to help counter a global wave of disinformation, a leading MP has suggested.

The SNP’S Stewart Mcdonald believes news media professionals could help young people spot the lies and hoaxes spread online.

The MP thinks the Government should pay for journalists to go into schools – but not control what they say. He wants third-sector bodies to run the projects.

Mr Mcdonald’s proposal is one of several suggested in a new non-partisan discussion paper he published today on disinformation in Scotland and what the country can do to tackle it.

The pandemic has raised awareness of deliberately misleading information, including but not exclusively from authoritarian states trying to destabilise democracies.

Most concern has been focused on lies about vaccines and lockdowns, but Mr Mcdonald stressed social isolation was also driving people to unreliable or untrustworthy sources of news.

Mr Mcdonald’s report said: “Alongside developing a comprehensive strategy for tackling disinformation and raising media literacy, the Scottish Government could offer information literacy training as an after-school activity, taught not by teachers but by professional journalists.

“To create distance between itself and the teaching, the Scottish Government could create a Youth Information Expertise Initiative, for which the Scottish Government would provide funding and set the parameters.

“Respected non-government organisations would bid for government contracts to deliver the teaching, which would involve recruiting and vetting the journalists teaching the courses.

“Participants who successfully completed the course would be rewarded with a voucher for a subscription to a quality news publication of their choice.”

Education authorities in Scotland have already prepared material to help teachers and students navigate disinformation, a Russian word only recently gaining traction in English.

However, Mr Mcdonald’s report also highlights concerns over the disinformation and malign influence risk already in Scottish schools, thanks to a long-standing arrangement to allow the Chinese dictatorship to pay for and organise the teaching of Chinese language and culture.