Cooperation Is Vital As No Newsroom Can Fight Fake News Alone - Bernama Editor-in-chief  

From Salawaty Supardi

MOSCOW, Sept 22 (Bernama) -- No single newsroom can monitor the entire information environment alone, making cooperation among news agencies essential in the fight against fake news, said Malaysian National News Agency (Bernama) Editor-in-Chief Arul Rajoo Durar Raj.

He said the growing influence of bloggers, influencers and citizen journalists had created a far bigger challenge than the traditional competition among established news organisations, as they often published unverified material on their own platforms.

"Before this, we usually compete among ourselves, among other news agencies, with other newspapers. But now, a bigger problem is influencers, and also what we call citizen journalism," he said during the panel session at the Organisation of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA)’s International Forum "Dialogue about Fakes 4.0”, here, on Tuesday.

The session titled "GFCN and OANA: Adopting Joint Approaches to Countering Disinformation” was moderated by Global Fact-Checking Network (GFCN) Vice President Daniil Bisslinger.

Other panelists were OANA Secretary-General and Russia News Agency TASS Deputy Director-General Marat Abulkhatin, and IRNA Director of International Relations Zaman Rezakhani.

Bernama Chief Executive Officer Datin Paduka Nur-ul Afida Kamaludin also attended the forum, which was organised by Russian News Agency TASS in conjunction with OANA's three-day 65th anniversary celebrations, as well as the 58th OANA executive board meeting (EBM) and technical committee meeting which began on Sunday.

Elaborating, Arul Rajoo said news agencies had established processes for producing news that emphasised the need to verify and check information.

"But these online reporters, what they do is they just get probably hearsay, or somebody says something, and they already put it in the news using their own platform, whether it is social media, Facebook, TikTok and others," he said.

"So our problem now is actually competing with them, competing to deliver content and news which we verify, but the other side, they are not verifying it," he said, adding that a similar problem was now occurring in almost every country.

On the way forward, Arul Rajoo stressed that platforms such as the forum were essential and welcomed OANA's collaboration with the GFCN as timely.

He said news agencies should also share content, noting that each country had its own material that could benefit others.

"We have all the tools, we have the technology, and most importantly, as OANA members, we have the trust to ensure we remain credible," he said.

-- BERNAMA