Veteran investigative journalist Cecil Rosner talks about teaching the course starting May 8th, and the importance of differentiating between what’s real and what’s fake.

Listen to the entire Global News interview

University of Manitoba extended education will be running a media literacy program that aims to help people identify fake news and evaluate the credibility of content in media using investigative journalism techniques.

The program will be instructed by Cecil Rosner, who developed the course. Rosner has over 40 years of experience as a journalist, and has worked as managing editor for CBC Manitoba and executive producer of The Fifth Estate.

“Everybody depends on media for understanding what’s going on in the world, so you have to be able to properly read the messages that come at you, whether it’s in media stories or on social media,” Rosner said.

The program will have sessions from May 8 to June 12 and will consist of a series of three courses, including “Media Literacy and Critical Thinking,” which will teach participants to assess sources, find reliable evidence and identify disinformation and bias.

“All kinds of organizations and individuals, and politicians and corporations are pushing messages at all of us, all the time, and it’s really important that we know how to properly assess those messages,” Rosner said.

One of the other two courses, titled “Understanding Public Records,” will teach participants to find their own reliable sources of information by accessing publicly available documents.

The third course, called “Advanced Investigative Journalism Techniques,” will teach citizens techniques used by journalists to locate reliable sources of information online “that go far beyond basic Google searching.” These methods include accessing information through databases, filing Access to Information requests and analyzing document metadata.

Rosner said that the contents of the program could be useful for many different types of people including students, teachers, activists and ordinary consumers. He said that methods used in investigative journalism, such as looking into the backgrounds of people and companies, are very useful in everyday life.

Read the full Manitoban article here

I’ve developed and will be teaching a new course that your readers might be interested in.

It’s designed to help people decode news media, spot disinformation, and it teaches techniques of investigative journalism so people can find information on their own.

These are some of the things I’ve been teaching to journalists, mostly inside the CBC, for the last 30 years. This is a six-week online course open to anyone. The reality is that anyone can use these techniques. They just need to know where to look and how to do it.

It’s offered by my old alma mater: University of Manitoba. Because it’s a non-credit course, anyone can take it, and the university awards a credential on completion.

The course runs May 8 – June 16.

– Cecil

A new University of Manitoba program aims to arm its students with journalistic techniques and critical-thinking skills in an effort to improve media literacy.

“In one way or another, everybody consumes media. Therefore, I think it’s important everybody understands how to read it; how they can be misled if they are not careful, how to identify misinformation and how to source information,” said Cecil Rosner, who will teach the media literacy,critical thinking and investigative journalism program.

Rosner is an investigative journalist with more than 30 years of experience, including managing CBC Manitoba’s newsroom and executive producer at The Fifth Estate

Speaking by phone Tuesday, Rosner highlighted the many benefits of media literacy.

“Journalists think about this topic all the time, but I am not sure how overtly ordinary people think about it,” Rosner said. “Some people think there’s a bit of a mystery to (journalism) and I want to dispel that myth…There are tools and techniques you need to know about but they are very teachable.”

The program is divided into three courses, which cover the tenets of journalism and critical thinking, understanding public records, and investigative journalism techniques.

Students will learn to assess the validity of news, consider cognitive biases, utilize public records and assemble background profiles on people and organizations.

Read the full Free Press story here