La educación representada en los medios de comunicaciónla noticia educativa en la prensa digital

Abstract

Education represented by media: educative news in digital press María Bernal Breis In this research work, the analysis of educative news in digital press is analysed to determine the Media scheduler of the online version of the regional newspaper La Verdad. Moreover, this research work study the perception of Education that Media generate in the society, and if this vision is shared by teachers. The goals of this study were to analyse and assess the informative treatment about education news in digital press to configure a Media scheduler; and more concretely, to identify the type of news concerning the educative topic in the academic year 2013-2014, and to assess the perception of teachers in relation to the image that Media show about education. The analysis of content was performed using the News Analyser tool, which has been developed as part of this work. The tool let users to analyse and annotate news by using a set of categories identified also because of this work. A set of teachers were selected to meet and take part in a discussion group. During the meeting the results of the content analysis were shown to the selected teachers, and a set of guided questions triggers the dialogue among them, which was later analysed. The results of this study reveal that digital press analyse and show the Education from a political perspective. This perspective is the same alluded to teachers. The educative news appears in media because of the relevance given by politicians, who make these types of news daily and real. The most used journalistic genres used to write about education are purely informative such as news and the brief; this contrasts to the teachers´ desires that miss education to be approached from a mores human point, using for this purpose the interview genre. In this sense, this study points out the lack of a specialised journalist in education, who sign most news. After this study, it has been checked that most of the analysed news have been signed by a generic author, La Verdad; followed by news signed by the news agencies Europa Press and EFE. According to these results, teachers are concern about the low specialisation of journalists in the educative field, as they consider education as a secondary topic of the media priorities. As a public opinion generator and responsible of the liable of the representation of the society, the selected teacher of this discussion group express that the education is not well represented in media, because, in addition to the aspects previously mentioned, the facts published in press media show negative aspects, related with violence, bullying, bad state of facilities; and this is not the day to day reality of teachers neither in classrooms or educational centre. Concerning the analysis performed using our developed tool News Analysis, it is part of future work its extension and integration with a wider corpus of news from the national and international scope. The research performed here supports, among other implications, the necessity of bringing teachers and journalists together to allow media to be bias and as close as possible to the actual reality of the education centres when topics related to education are addressed. Moreover, it should be important to teach young people in the use of media resources and educational technologies in order to make the school more in line with the students’ reality. For all these reasons, we need teacher trained in the media literacy and digital competency.