(WAN/IFEX) – The following is a 15 February 2007 press release: New Media Increases Freedom but Holds Dangers, Conference Told Digital media offers citizens greater freedom of information, but there are dangers that the information can be easily manipulated, an international conference on the press freedom dimension of new media was told Thursday. “Citizens now […]
(WAN/IFEX) – The following is a 15 February 2007 press release:
New Media Increases Freedom but Holds Dangers, Conference Told
Digital media offers citizens greater freedom of information, but there are dangers that the information can be easily manipulated, an international conference on the press freedom dimension of new media was told Thursday.
“Citizens now have much greater control over how and when they receive information and, much more than ever before, they can react to it if they choose, they can participate and they can be active towards it,” said Timothy Balding, CEO of the World Association of Newspapers, which organised the conference in Paris with the World Press Freedom Committee and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
“On the negative side, the internet has opened up extraordinary new possibilities for the widespread, damaging and sometimes dangerous manipulation of information which is difficult if not impossible to stem,” he said. “In my view, this phenomenon will increasingly place a heavy responsibility on professional journalists to maintain high standards of fact-checking, honesty and objectivity. The very fundamentals of our societies and democracies will be lost if we are unable any longer to distinguish between true and false in terms of information.”
In recent months, there have been a number of cases that illustrate the internet’s potential to spread rumours, speculation and outright lies at the speed of light – advertising “mocudramas” that purport to be real, falsified entries on the open encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and false rumours that US presidential candidate Barack Obama had attended a radical Islamic school in his youth. Dictatorial regimes are also controlling the information their citizens receive, through “official” information and outright censorship. In this environment, trusted and credible news sources have great value.
The two-day conference, entitled, “New Media: The Press Freedom Dimension”, examines the challenges and opportunities of new media for press freedom. The programme, a list of participants and background papers can be found at http://www.wan-press.org/article12826.html
Mr Balding was joined in the opening session by Richard Winfield, Chairman of the World Press Freedom Committee, Mogens Schmidt, Director of Freedom of Expression, Democracy and Peace at UNESCO, Leslie Harris, Executive Director of the Centre for Democracy and Technology, and Guy Berger, Head of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa.
Mr Balding said that newspapers, with 1.4 billion readers world-wide, have been at the centre of the global struggle for press freedom. The internet has now joined with newspapers “on the side of pluralism and democracy.”
“The internet, without doubt in my view, has been a tremendously positive breakthrough in overcoming the monopoly of information jealously guarded by authoritarian and dictatorial regimes,” he said. “At one time, we all thought and said that the distribution of free information and opinion had become unstoppable and that revolutions would sweep the world as citizens discovered what had been hidden from them.
“Unfortunately, that turned out to be too optimistic a vision, as governments armed themselves with the surveillance and technical solutions necessary to block free information and arrest those trying to distribute it. But I like to think, I’m sure in fact, that they are fighting a losing battle; the mere fact that so many cyber-journalists are currently languishing in prison is, paradoxically perhaps, clear evidence of this.”
The full text of Mr Balding’s remarks can be found at http://www.wan-press.org/article13146.html
A full report on the conference will be available soon. To receive the report, please write to Kajsa Törnroth, Co-Director of Press Freedom Programmes at WAN, at ktornroth@wan.asso.fr
The conference is supported by the World Editors Forum and the Coordinating Committee of Press Freedom Organizations, which includes, in addition to WAN and the WPFC, the Committee to Protect Journalists; Commonwealth Press Union; Inter American Press Association; International Association of Broadcasting; International Association of the Periodical Press (FIPP); International Press Institute; North American Broadcasters Association; and the World Press Freedom Committee.
The conference was made possible by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The Paris-based WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, defends and promotes press freedom world-wide. It represents 18,000 newspapers; its membership includes 76 national newspaper associations, newspaper companies and individual newspaper executives in 102 countries, 12 news agencies and 10 regional and world-wide press groups.
