Media literacy is a problem not only in Slovakia, but also in Canada. Many people do not distinguish whether the source of information is trustworthy.
It is also a problem in much more important areas than sports, but we can also notice it when reporting on the popular ice hockey player Juraj Slafkovski.
Hockey30.com has been known as a non-serious site in Canada for years, yet it continues to thrive there and currently has 141,000 fans on Facebook.
We often find excerpts from it in the Slovak media, and not only in the tabloids. In many cases, these are the most read articles. The information is shocking, but often also misleading or even outright invented.
In the last few days, you could read on major Slovak websites that in Canada they say about Slafkovski that he is arrogant and that he is not doing well because his girlfriend drags him to a bar at night.
But it is not serious journalists in Canada who say this, but rather hockey30.com, where the reader should always be warned that such information should not be blindly trusted.
While the tabloid extracts information from privacy, this website also invents it.
Serious newspaper La Presse about hockey30.com did the article. He compared this and similar websites to piranhas. They make a living from the work of others, which they often do not envy, and instead of a few quotes from foreign articles, they often quote entire long passages.
La Presse illustrates the working methods of hockey30.com using the example of Slovak hockey player Filip Mešár.
Morning with the NHL is an article in which we focus on one topic from the best hockey league in the world and provide a short summary of the night’s events.
Everything about Mešár was a fabrication
You may have registered articles in the summer about Montreal not being happy with Filip Mešár and wanting to trade him to Winnipeg.
Serious journalists also provide similar information about transfer speculation, but they have it backed up by behind-the-scenes interviews with their sources from the club environment. The test of correctness is that their predictions are very often fulfilled.
But it was David Garel from hockey30.com who started the rumors about Mešár’s exchange. He didn’t have this information from any source, he made it all up, which he later admitted on the BPM Sports podcast.
“We started a rumor: why not send him to Winnipeg with a draft pick. To speculate about it. The next day it was everywhere in Slovakia. They talked about
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