Journalism Education in Post-Truth Era: Pedagogical Approaches Based on Indian Journalism Students' Perception of Fake News

The media ecosystem of the post-truth era is shaped by several unprecedented elements--the pitfalls of the personalized/networked media, the cherry picking tendencies of news producers in an attention economy, the propagandist power-elite, and the gullible support of the semi-literate media audience. These post-truth realities also call for new approaches in journalism education to address phenomena like fake news. In this backdrop, this study examines the existing issues in Indian journalism training based on a thematic analysis of focus group discussions with graduate students of journalism at an Indian university about their perception of fake news. It recommends pedagogical approaches to focus on improving journalistic agency in students to deal with fake news situations.