Entitled “The Media of the Future,” the annual event is organised by Polish state news agency PAP.
This year, the main theme was disinformation and war. Special guests included the directors of some of Europe’s biggest news agencies, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.
‘News agencies must join forces’
PAP CEO Wojciech Surmacz said at the event that media organisations must work together to counteract a wave of fake news.
He told the conference: “We are capable of overcoming Russian disinformation if Western and Central European agencies join forces.”
He added that “every war starts with information warfare, which is particularly vicious during this war in Ukraine, with fake news being weaponised.”
Education is key
Justyna Orłowska, the Polish government’s commissioner for GovTech, said that education was key in making people more aware of fake news.
“Even after basic training in how to verify fake news, almost 100 percent of students develop a habit of checking information,” she said.
'Purveyors of mass disinformation'
Meanwhile, the foreign desk editor at Ukraine’s state news agency Ukrinform, Nataliia Kostina, warned that “Russia has recently tripled its spending on propaganda,” with state television providing the main outlet.
Kostina said that “the Russian public is being fed with hate towards Ukraine and the democratic countries of the West for many hours a day, every day.”
“In Russia there are no media, only purveyors of mass disinformation,” she said.
'Enormous importance of news agencies'
Clemens Pig, CEO of the Austria Press Agency APA and the president of the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA), said that the war in Ukraine showed “the enormous importance of news agencies that create and disseminate truthful and impartial news.”
The annual Media of the Future conference brings together Polish and foreign media outlets. It covers a broad range of topics, from shifts in the media market to combating disinformation and the future of the media in the face of wars and technological transformation.
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Source: IAR, PAP