In the Amazon, journalists are trying their hand in the classroom.
As fake news and biased coverage floods the region, independent news outlets have begun active campaigns to teach the public how to spot disinformation, think critically about news and find trustworthy sources.
Referred to as media education, the effort represents a remarkable expansion of the role of journalists. No longer are they consumed solely with reporting the news, but they are also taking an active role in building a more thoughtful, engaged public. The hands-on strategy has shown promise in restoring readership and rebuilding trust in legitimate news organizations that have long struggled to break through the onslaught of fake news on the Internet.
In the Amazon, media education initiatives have particularly sought to combat rampant environmental disinformation that has undermined Indigenous groups, environmental protection laws and legitimate environmental reporting.
“There was a problem in Manaus that was bigger than the lack of news outlets. It was the lack of media education,” said Jullie Pereira, reporter at InfoAmazonia and co-founder of Abaré, a media education organization in Manaus. “How are we going to found an outlet to publish specialized news and major investigations and major denunciations if we have a population that doesn’t even read, that has difficulty interpreting?”
Abaré, which was created in 2019, creates lesson plans for teachers, gives workshops at local schools and holds discussions about local reporting. The intention was to build “a way for us to expand journalism's ties with a wider audience, an audience that doesn't necessarily understand how journalism works,” said Gave Cabral, president of the organization.
Similar initiatives are occurring in other parts of the Amazon. Carta Amazônia, an independent news outlet based in Belém, also operates its own school, giving lectures and workshops in fact-checking and disinformation to students in Belém as well as Indigenous groups in the region.
Another independent outlet in Belém, Amazônia Vox, has already demonstrated the significant impact this kind of engagement with local communities can have for news outlets. It runs an initiative in which students from a rural high school in Pará edit its articles before they’re published, exposing the students to legitimate reporting and encouraging them to think critically about the information they consume. The project has already led to a huge spike in Amazônia Vox’s readership in the school’s municipality.
Even the Brazilian government has contributed to the media education movement in the Amazon. Last year, it announced the project MídiaCOP in partnership with France to train educators in the Amazon in media education and prepare a group of students to cover COP30 in Belém as young reporters.
The initiative is part of the Lula administration’s goal to train 300,000 teachers in media education by 2027.
Cabral said the focus of media education is not on simply telling the population which sources are trustworthy and which are not. Instead, Abaré attempts to democratize information by stimulating critical thinking about information sources and giving people tools to use their own voices to combat predominant media narratives.
This point is crucial for Patricia Blanco, one of the coordinators of EducaMídia, a Brazilian media education organization that runs programs focused on the Amazon. She said the concept of media education should be centered around social inclusion, helping all to engage critically with the society around them.
EducaMídia teaches people how news organizations work, how to find news from a variety of trustworthy sources and how to do their own fact-checking. But mostly, the focus is on “teaching how to think, teaching how to ask questions,” Blanco said.
Blanco said it’s crucial that journalists and their news outlets participate in media education initiatives, as some are doing in the Amazon. “Journalists need to engage in this moment to educate their readers about what journalism is and what it is not,” Blanco said.
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Media education, as a practice and movement, is active in the entirety of Brazil through national organizations like EducaMídia, but in the Amazon specifically, the initiatives are focused on combating one particular piece of disinformation: the notion that to develop the region economically and elevate its citizens from poverty, the forest has to be destroyed. This false idea has circulated through the region for decades promoted by mining and agribusiness corporations and the politicians they support.
Contributing to this discourse is rampant fake news, published by conservative news sites, social media influencers and politicians, that questions environmental data and science and defames Indigenous groups and other defenders of the forest. The intention is to downplay the consequences of destructive activities in the Amazon and promote the exploitation of the region’s resources as a necessity.
During the catastrophe in recent years in the Yanomami territory, for example, in which hundreds of Indigenous children died from starvation, illness and mercury poisoning as a result of the encroachment of illegal gold miners, disinformation campaigns on social media doubted the crisis and falsely linked the Yanomami to gold mining.
“Disinformation about the Amazon is an industry. It has a very clear purpose, which is to take away all the strength from movements that fight for the Amazon’s cause, for environmental causes,” said Cecilia Amorim, co-founder of Carta Amazônia. “So we need to combat this.”
The fact that rampant disinformation in the Amazon has such a specific anti-environmental intention behind it means that environmentally focused information campaigns are required to combat it, media education leaders in the Amazon say.
The federal government’s MídiaCOP initiative, for example, links media education to environmental education. Mariana de Almeida Filizola, general coordinator of media education in Brazil’s Secretary of Social Communication (SECOM), said the intention of the initiative is to give Amazonian populations the tools to both communicate and evaluate information about the impacts of climate change and deforestation.
“Everyone produces and consumes information at the same time. Therefore, media education is very important so that the populations of these regions, especially when we talk about issues that directly affect their experiences in the territories, become critical agents and have their voices heard,” said Filizola.
Abaré’s media education initiatives contain a similar environmental focus. “A Abaré já participou de vários relatórios, por exemplo, analisando ataques fake news contra temas ambientais e amazônidas. A gente vai desmistificando, a gente vai checando e explicando por que esses ataques à Amazônia são mentirosos ou não.”
Sometimes this means their lessons necessarily involve discussion of politics. “We have a priority agenda that is the defense of the Amazon,” said Pereira. “We believe that it is not about one side or the other, but about the maintenance and preservation of the Amazon rainforest, which is in the country’s interest.”
But in conservative cities like Manaus where former president Jair Bolsonaro and his anti-press discourse are enormously popular, these discussions can encounter resistance. Cabral said Abaré’s most effective strategy has been fostering open discussions in workshops rather than imposing a certain discourse.
“It’s not about coming and saying, ‘Oh, you don’t believe the press, so this is what you have to do.’ But it’s possible to have this dialogue and say, ‘Why don’t you believe the press?’. And from there, you can start a dialogue and maybe it’s a job that takes a little longer, but we believe it’s more effective because we create a bond of trust first between the people and Abaré.”
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Perhaps the best case study in the potential impact of this approach to media education in the Amazon is Amazônia Vox’s project with a public school in an underserved area in rural Pará. Partnering with Marcela Castro, a teacher at the school, the news outlet has its articles read and edited by Castro’s students before they are published. The initiative, which began last year, is intended to make Amazônia Vox’s articles more accessible to a broader population as well as serve as an opportunity to teach the students about how journalism is produced.
Many of the students, Castro said, previously had never read a journalism website before and consume content almost exclusively through TikTok. But through the project, the students became far better able to tell the difference between fake news and legitimate, trustworthy reporting.
“When they come across the text… they automatically begin to understand that the work of a journalist is also slow,” said Castro. “They begin to understand that fake news is usually written with texts that are a little shorter, very eye-catching, and a text that is denser with veracity has sources that are checked with their names, surnames, data.”
But the project has also significantly benefited Amazônia Vox, making its reporting more accessible and readable and expanding its audience among the local population.
The students have made countless edits to Amazônia Vox articles that have been included in publication, suggesting synonyms for overly technical terms, adding in explanations to unclear concepts and in general, making the articles understandable to people outside of the bubble of environmental journalism.
“They suggested that some acronyms like COP, FUNAI, WHO be listed in a glossary so that riverine people from Santa Isabel, in an area where there is no internet, would not need to research if they ever had access to this text,” Castro said.
Amazônia Vox credits each of the students by name in the articles, which has been a source of immense pride for the students, the school and the broader region.
“It was incredible, because the reach of Amazônia Vox in the city where I did this work became gigantic. And the kids who had never read a news website in depth started sending news to their families and their classmates,” Castro said.
For Castro, the project has been a model for how journalism, through local engagement and education, can leave its own bubble to create a broad local audience and provide it with accurate and influential journalism.
“If journalism wants to remain relevant to the population, it will need to engage with that population. And one of the initiatives is not to take the website to schools, but perhaps to make the school be on the website,” she said. “The reverse movement creates belonging and creates audience, which is something that journalism is sorely lacking at the moment.”
Reporting the Understory