The control of the media environment and the use of the media are a story that belongs to the past and young people can now turn to social media, stated the president of the well-known British news agency Press Association, Clive Marshall at the Global Media Forum, which is taking place in Shusha, the cultural capital of Azerbaijan.

“This is why I think that countries like Albania, Bulgaria and Romania are giving excellent examples in this direction”, Marshall declared .

“And to think about their history. The environment for the media is very open and they have achieved very good results even in international evaluations”, he emphasized.

“I think that we should aspire to all these developing countries, while the media works and grows under the influence of social media, so that we really have enough trust and journalists do their work independently and professionally”, Marshall  added in the panel on “Investment and Consumer Trends in Media”.

“If you’re teaching, your students are dealing with people who challenge everything, and over time they’ll begin to understand whether what they’re reading from a certain source holds up or not. We have to go back to the basics of good journalism and good journalists check their stuff”, he added, speaking about the checking of facts in the media or as it is known “fact checking”.

“They check the news from two or three sources, before there is a technology that can help them understand whether the picture of that video was taken in that particular part of the world or in another part of it,” Marshall said .

“We must be very careful how we will protect those facts through their control”, he added.
“So I think that with the public media in particular, given the funding that often comes from governments, there should be a separation from the goals of the governments and the way of separation of how the public media behaves. Because I think that young people are smart and understand the propaganda”, Marshall emphasized.

“So I think that as countries develop and grow, they need to trust their public media to allow them to do their job, being impartial, intelligent and objective,” Press Association CEO Clive Marshall was quoted as saying.

/k.s/