Assessing the Role of Ethical Digital Media Literacy in the Post Covid-19 Digital Era

The digital era has brought about disruptions which have revolutionized communication. Digitization, the Internet and its inherent innovations have drastically transformed the dissemination of information making it cheaper, faster and easily accessible. However, inadequate content regulation on the Internet has birthed the practice of citizen journalism in the 21st century society, where consumers can easily create and share content online without proper verification. Such content could sometimes be misleading, a trend that has introduced the concept of “fake news” which became more prevalent during the recent Covid-19 pandemic, and has continued to pose a problem to journalism practices in the post-covid era. Using the positivist theoretical perspective, the Refracted Publics and Networked Public theories, this study adopts quantitative methods to assess the ethical digital media literacy of Nigerian consumers. The findings provide insights for improving the journalism pedagogy, whilst ensuring that the core ethical groundings of journalism are not compromised.