The air inside Notre Dame College’s auditorium in Dhaka felt charged with the restless energy of young minds, and there was an undercurrent of urgency beneath the usual carnival excitement. Students had gathered not only to celebrate their creative achievements in media and communication, but to listen thoughtfully to a message that seemed meant for their generation. State Minister for Information and Broadcasting Yasser Khan Choudhury stood before them as the chief guest at the closing ceremony of the Second National Media Carnival 2026,and his words were not the polished, distant remarks of a politician fulfilling a routine obligation. Instead, he spoke as someone who saw both the promise and the vulnerability of the digital era. His warning was stark: the spread of misinformation and disinformation through social media has emerged as an ominous sign, a shadow that looms over public discourse, democratic health, and social harmony. The minister’s language was carefully chosen, but his concern was palpable. He insisted that it is no longer enough for citizens to be passive consumers of content; it is crucial, he said, for young people in particular to play a cautious and responsible role in countering these twin evils. The carnival grounds, with their displays of student journalism, short films, photography, and discussion panels, became an unlikely but fitting backdrop for what was essentially a generational call to conscience.
The state minister’s appeal was grounded in a deep belief in the students of Bangladesh, and he reminded the audience that the student community has always been a pioneering force in nation-building. He invoked a history that still feels fresh, a history of courage and conviction. Their role in the 2024 student-people’s movement, he added, will be written in golden letters in the annals of the country’s history. By mentioning this recent chapter, he was not simply paying tribute; he was drawing a direct line between the courage students once showed for justice and the vigilance they must now adopt in the digital space. In his telling, the revolutionary energy that once moved people onto the streets must now also move them through the maze of algorithms, manipulated videos, fabricated news, and viral half-truths. The student community, he implied, has already proven it can bend the arc of history toward change; now it must prove it can protect the discursive space where truth survives. His words acknowledged a troubling paradox: the same platforms that empowered the 2024 movement, that allowed voices to be amplified and solidarity to be built, have also become terrain for deceptive campaigns that achieve what no foreign adversary could—eroding trust in institutions, stoking communal fear, and drowning out the voices that seek to inform rather than inflame.
He reminded them that distinguishing between truth and falsehood has become a major challenge in the current age of torrential information flow. The phrase alone captures a reality every student knows intimately:here lies a half-true headline that travels at lightning speed; here lies a doctored image dassumed authentic; here lies a rumor repeated so often that it begins to feel like fact. In such a world, the old literacy of reading and writing is no longer sufficient. What is required, the minister argued, is media literacy—the capacity to analyze sources, question motives, detect manipulation, and verify before sharing. Alongside media literacy, he spoke of responsible communication skills, theoughtful, ethical use of language and image that can either heal or wound a society. He addressed the students directly, not as distant authorities but as fellow inhabitants of a fragile information ecosystem. His brief remarks were an invitation to treat every share, every post, every comment as a small act of citizenship, one that requires neither a journalist’s badge nor a political office, but merely a functioning conscience.
Perhaps the most human moment of the address came not in policy but in memory. Yasser Khan Choudhury recalled his own days at Notre Dame College as a student, and his voice softened at the mention of returning to the campus. He had visited the institution earlier with friends, he said, and many memories of that time are still etched in his mind. “Coming to this campus has brought back many old memories,” he mused, bridging the distance between a man who now holds state responsibility and the teenager he once was, walking the same corridors, sitting in similar classrooms, dreaming hungrily about country’s future. That nostalgic admission mattered. It humanized a government official and signaled to students that he understood their world more intimately than they might expect. He was not an outsider arriving to deliver a sermon from above; he was one of them who had lived, learned, laughed in those very spaces. That sense of shared belonging made his subsequent message more persuasive, because it came from a place of affection rather than authority.
The official encouragement, however, was not confined to rhetoric. Yasser expressed hope that if such media carnivals are organised regularly in thefuture, students will make further progress in practising creativity, analytical skills, and responsible citizenship. He affirmed that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting is working continuously on these issues under the directives of Prime Minister Tarique Rahman. The Prime Minister, he noted, is very interested in young people, seeing them not as passive beneficiaries of policy but as co-architects of national renewal. The government’s support for such initiatives, he promised, would continue in the future. That assurance was significant, as it signaled that the state recognizes that media education cannot be confined to classrooms alone; it must extend to festivals, competitions, and workshops where young people experiment, fail, learn, and ultimately grow. The presence of senior figures at the closing ceremony reinforced the message:they were not merely decorating the event but were signaling institutional commitment. Principal of Notre Dame College Dr Father Hemanto Pius Rozario stood alongside, as did Father Anthony Gomes Rozario; Shapla Banik, Moderator of the Notre Dame Media and Communication Club; Rubayat Mannan Rafi, Chairman of ‘The Bangladesh Dialogue’very; Anisur Rahman Majumder, Vice President of NCC Bank and Head of Financial Division; Sazzad Hossain, CEO of China Education Bangladesh; and Simran Rahman from Brand and Communication Department of the University of Scholars. Their combined presence underscored that media education is not a niche concern but a shared responsibility across academic institutions, financial organizations, media bodies, and international partners.
The Second National Media Carnival, organized by the Notre Dame Media and Communication Club during October 2 and3, was more than a competition. It was, in essence, a workshop for the soul of the next generation of communicators. Students from different educational institutions across the country participated, bringing with them their cameras, notebooks, ideas, and anxieties about the future of information. They had presented their films, debated politics, interviewed guest speakers, edited newsletters, and engaged in mock press conferences, all within the safety of a campus that celebrates inquiry. The carnival was serving as a platform, the release noted, for students to develop their skills in media, communication, research,and creativity. In a country where youth constitute a large share of social media users, these skills are not optional. They are survival tools for a healthy democracy. The carnival offered students the rare opportunity to practice truth-telling in a low-stakes environment, to receive feedback, to be challenged by peers, and to leave with something more valuable than certificates: a hardened resolve to demand evidence before belief. It transformed abstract advice about misinformation into embodied learning.
As the ceremony drew to a close, the minister’s words seemed to hang in the air long after the applause faded. The challenge he placed before the students was neither small nor abstract: it was about how a generation raised on screens can resist becoming a generation asleep to manipulation. It was about remembering that in an age of deepfakes and cheap digital illusions, an ordinary skeptical mind becomes a civic weapon. The students at Notre Dame College that afternoon left with a dual identity: they were still young people with dreams, playlists, and ambitions, but they were also being asked to become guardians of truth, mediators of nuance, defenders of evidence. The minister’s call was not for heroic escapades but for the quieter, harder heroism of pausing before sharing, of checking a source, of tolerating complexity instead of craving confirmation. If these media carnivals indeed become regular fixtures, as he hoped, they will plant seeds of a generation that treats responsibility as the default setting. And if the students who marched in 2024 can channel that same indomitable spirit into.the slow, unglamorous labor of media literacy, their role in history will not end with a single movement. It will be written, as he said, in golden letters—not only for what they tore down,but for what they built up: a society where wisdom reigns over noise, where justice in information is as important as justice in politics, and where every young Bangladeshi, armed with critical thought, can look at the chaos of digital life and calmly, bravely, choose the truth.