When in 1929, William Randolph Hearst, owner of the The New York Journal, sent a reporting team to Cuba with the mission of igniting American public opinion and creating an environment conducive to US intervention in the island that equated colonial power, the first audiovisual revolution had not yet taken place anywhere in the world. World.
In Portugal, the first wave of the audiovisual revolution, that is, the democratization of access to television, in the early 70s, occurred even before the 25th of April, reaching a population that did not have, as it still does not, the habits of reading of a bibliographic culture.
This reality potentiated, among us, the negative impact of the second great wave of audiovisual, corresponding to the emergence of the Internet.
In this context, the phenomenon of lies that try to pass for news, the so-called fake news, this pandemic that contaminates life in society, facilitates illicit practices and even criminal activities, has good ground to grow.
In this context, fighting for information that is one of the pillars of the Democratic Rule of Law is more difficult. But this is the main objective of the Portuguese Press Association (API), through the MediaVeritas Academy, with awareness-raising actions, both face-to-face and online, aimed at potentially more vulnerable audiences, from the youngest to the seniors.
The challenge is basically to make the truth tell, which implies promoting the importance of sources of trust and helping to signal situations that may indicate the presence of a lie - if it is strange, if it comes out of nowhere without being confirmed by a lie. recognized television, radio or newspaper, it is very likely to be a rumour.
And a rumor almost always gains strength among populations with insufficient initial formal schooling or hasty academic training that is limited to generating a kind of “intellectual proletariat” without the essential integral culture that would prevent all this.
As E. Lloyd Sommelad wrote in 1966, who made a career at UNESCO's department of social communication, the press, that is to say the written press, then had a very important role in developing countries – it fostered and solidified literacy and the reading habits indispensable to a bibliographic culture, without which this battle in the fight against disinformation could be lost.
Author Júlio Roldão, a journalist since 1977, was born in Porto in 1953, studied in Coimbra, where he spent, in the 70s, at the Teatro dos Estudantes and the Círculo de Artes Plásticas, having, in 1984, returned to Porto, where he lives.
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