Critical Thinking in a World of Fake News. Teaching the Public to Make Good Choices

Abstract

"Fake news are a big concern for media, audiences and governments. Some journalists are engaged in finding fake news and disclose them. Fake news is also a concern to the researchers and journalism professors, but they should not focus only on the way fake news work, or how to teach future journalists about them, a big challenge would be to teach the audiences, the public to make the right choices and identify fake news. Tackling this problem of the popularization of science and teaching the public should actually be one of the key-concerns of the journalism professors today in Romania. It is the purpose of this paper to propose a list of criteria to identify fake news, by using critical thinking, a list that could be easily explained to people from the public, so they can make good choices. The core notion used hereby will be quality. A large discussion on quality in journalism raised at the end of the 1990s in Western Europe, not so in Romania. Therefore, it seems more than appropriate to start it now. Keywords: fake news, media, critical thinking, education, public, criteria. "