Alexandru Giboi, EANA Secretary General: News agencies, key role in fight against fake news

Tirana, Dec 3 /Agerpres/ - The mission of news agencies is to provide real, impartial and uncontested news. This is the best way to combat fake news, emphasized, on Monday, the Secretary General of the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA), Alexandru Giboi, during the international conference on the topic "News Agencies vs Fake News", hosted in Tirana by the Albanian Telegraphic Agency (ATA).

"News agencies have been, for almost 200 years, the main source of unbiased, objective and therefore trustworthy news, for the general mass-media. Nowadays often mistaken for online publications by the general public, news agencies are facing both challenges and opportunities when confronted to a new context marked by factors like the public's decreasing trust in media, lowering mass-media standards, more difficulty in finding dedicated journalists," said Giboi in his remarks.

Technological developments have made it easy for anyone with a smartphone to post "news" online, becoming thus a "journalist". An avalanche of information flows on our computer screens and mobile phones, making it harder and harder to discern real news from the "noise".

"News agencies rely solely on real sources. Most of the times, news agencies don't add comments to the news they public. Their business being based on selling news wires, credibility is the most important aspect of a news agency's life. Losing credibility means losing clients and partners, even more abruptly that in the case of broadcasters of publishers.Therefore, news coming from news agencies should prove to be more credible than other news. Even though a huge part of the media uses news agency wires to create their own news, the more you move further from the source of the news, the easier is to come across disinformation. (...) Fighting disinformation should have the public's best interest in mind." he added, as ATA reports.

In his turn, the director of the Cypriot news agency CNA, George Penintaex, believes that news agencies are the best place to strengthen citizens' access to reliable and verified information and prevent the spread of disinformation online, given that fake or deceiving news are broadcast everywhere in written, audiovisual or online form, and the phenomenon is spreading throughout the globe gaining ever more worrying dimensions.

'What they need to do is to be flexible to face with success needs and challenges and continues adapt themselves in the new era. At the same time, they have to find new ways of approaching the citizens directly and not only through their subscribers and clients,' concluded Penintaex.

The ATA General Director, Armela Krasniqi, believes that the phenomenon of fake news, being a global one, necessitates a global response, and that the only way in which this threat can be overcome is cooperation, given that fake news are exploited for political or economic reasons, "or even worse, just for the pleasure of undermining our societies and spreading uncertainties and fear".

She expressed her hope that "our meeting in Tirana will serve once again to strengthen the cooperation between us and hopefully, to become a springboard for a unified agenda against the spread of fake news". AGERPRES (RO - editor: Mariana Ionescu; EN - editor: Razvan-Adrian Pandea)