By Melanie Petrucci, Senior Community Reporter
Northborough – Catherine Griffin, a business teacher at Algonquin Regional High School (ARHS), welcomed a group of international journalists from Europe and Asia Nov. 1. This was the third group within the past year to visit the school.
The journalists were selected to participate in the Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists – “Promoting Discerning Consumers of Media” – sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program.
“Their objectives while here in the U.S. are to examine the efforts of federal, state and local levels to counter dissemination of disinformation, introduce and provide broad exposure to the seriousness of the current threat posed by disinformation and deceptive news and explore ways to verify reliable sources of information,” Griffin said.
The journalists spent an hour and a half engaging with students in a question and answer format in the school library. The focus of the session was media responsibility in the age of disinformation.
“What I didn’t expect to see was the level of grassroots activities that take place all over the U.S.,” said Ondrej Podstupka, managing editor of Petit Press in Slovakia. “It is not common for in my country to see so many engaged people in civic life. So that was very surprising to me.”
Topics of discussion between the students and journalists included fact-checking, dealing with dishonest politicians, U.S. relations with Turkey, fake U.S. news and gun control.
The primary topic, however, was about social media and how the students obtain their news. Most said through social media but, surprisingly, there were some who said that they read newspapers and watch news on television.
“What struck me most is that there is a lot of struggle happening in this society that we don’t see much of outside but I saw lots of people struggling to make America a better society,” said Anna Pambukhchyan from the Union of Informed Citizens in Armenia. “These are very nice people and what I will take home is this feeling of a culture which is promoting some kind of social responsibility.”
Added Podstupka: “You have smart kids here. U.S. schools’ reputation in Europe is you have very engaged students.”