PRISTINA, 14.06.2021 – The Chairwoman of the Board of the Association of Journalists of Kosovo – AJK, Gentiana Begolli Pustina, last week was part of the discussion panel at the two-day conference “DISICON”, organized by the National Democratic Institute – NDI and in partnership with USAID.
The opening of the conference on Information Integrity “DISICON” was made by the Senior Resident Director for NDI in Kosovo, Ambassador Nancy Soderberg. Meanwhile, US Ambassador Phillip Kosnett and NDI President Derek Mitchell delivered introductory remarks, stressing the importance of maintaining information integrity for the proper functioning of democracy.
The second panel of this conference discussed the presence and spread of misinformation, professionalism in the media industry, legal and regulatory issues, the role of social media in spreading misinformation, and the necessary efforts to combat these phenomena.
The Chairman of the Board of AGK, Begolli Pustina emphasized that the spread of misinformation is mostly done as a result of requests from editorial policy leaders within the media or from the media owners themselves, and that exclusively for various political, economic, etc.
“What I have seen from my point of view as a journalist but also as the representative of AJK, is that during almost a year and a half that our country has been facing the pandemic, there have been a few cases where there has been ‘fake news’, even tho we are facing a pandemic with many unknowns even to the WHO itself. Meanwhile, if we talk about the month of the elections campaign, then we can see nearly hundreds of them. This proves that journalists know how to do their job, but it is actually the owners or superiors who determine the editorial policies who try to push certain agendas forward through the work of journalists. So, we are not dealing with the lack of knowledge of journalists to do their job, but we are dealing with the issue of the interests of some media owners, who try to make money through journalism “.
Participants in the two-day conference “DISICON” were ambassadors, directors of non-governmental organizations, representatives of institutions, members of civil society, journalists and media experts.
The main topic of this year in the two-day conference “DISICON”, was “The Rise of Disinformation in Digital Democracy”.