Fake news has put media professionals in a new situation altogether, says APP boss

 JournalismPakistan.com |  Published: 15 May 2018

Masood Malik highlighted the challenges posed by fake news during the International Conference of News Agencies. He urged media professionals to prioritize accuracy and authenticity in their reports.

Summary

ISLAMABAD – Masood Malik, Managing Director Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) on Monday urged the media professionals, particularly those working with news agencies, to cope with the fake news phenomena without compromising on the accuracy and authenticity of the news.

Speaking at the concluding session of the two-day International Conference of News Agencies (ICNA) here, he said it was the age where citizen journalism had emerged in a big way as people now were equipped with the tools where they could contribute to the contents in the social media.

“At times they can set the trend and force the main media to respond to it in their own way. Hence the phenomena of fake news have put media professionals into altogether a new situation,” he remarked.

He said that the veteran journalists, experts in different fields of media and mass communication during the conference agreed that it was getting tough to work in the news agencies and at the same time keep up with the mind-boggling speed of social media.

The situation is not all that bad as these media professionals were of the view that the role of the news agencies could not be underestimated as whether it was the social media or online newspapers, they would all be using news agencies as their primary source of news for quite some time to come.

Given the mad race of breaking the news through ticker journalism, the journalists working in the news wires need not lose their calm and compromise on the fundamental principles of journalism that are accuracy, speed and properly sourced news stories.

“Despite some problems, we hope our objective of meeting and discussing the issues about the news agencies in particular and the journalists, in general, have been deliberated upon,” he added.

He informed the delegates that the conference provided an opportunity to show that Pakistan was a peaceful, progressive and developing country and had its share of unfortunate events that might strike any country at any time.

Later, Malik read out the recommendations that were unanimously adopted during the conference. - APP