EDITORIAL
Protect legacy media at all costs
“A politician calling for support for free media might sound like a turkey advocating for Christmas,” quipped Britain’s former foreign minister Jeremy Hunt in 2019.
He was referring to the oversight of the press on governments and holding politicians accountable for the manner in which they run their country’s affairs.
Today is World Press Freedom Day and Windhoek is the host of the global event, birthed from a Unesco seminar held in the Namibian capital in 1991.
Freedom of the press is not only a democratic principle whose existence solely hinges on how regimes run countries. One of the topics discussed on Friday at the ongoing conference was media viability.
Experts, including Reporters Without Borders - which is a leading research body for free press, admitted that journalism faces a crisis as a business model.
Yet the theme of this year’s event, ‘Information as a Public Good’, speaks to how information allows us to know not only our rights but also our responsibilities and prerogatives.
Threats to the existence of the traditional legacy media, mostly by the surge in social media platforms which seldom take responsibility of what’s published on their platforms, poses a serious danger to democracy and distorts free speech.
It is thus critical that efforts are made to save the legacy media from fading away like a spent rose. Otherwise news events will it be left to bloggers and others to ‘report’ and contextualise.
“A politician calling for support for free media might sound like a turkey advocating for Christmas,” quipped Britain’s former foreign minister Jeremy Hunt in 2019.
He was referring to the oversight of the press on governments and holding politicians accountable for the manner in which they run their country’s affairs.
Today is World Press Freedom Day and Windhoek is the host of the global event, birthed from a Unesco seminar held in the Namibian capital in 1991.
Freedom of the press is not only a democratic principle whose existence solely hinges on how regimes run countries. One of the topics discussed on Friday at the ongoing conference was media viability.
Experts, including Reporters Without Borders - which is a leading research body for free press, admitted that journalism faces a crisis as a business model.
Yet the theme of this year’s event, ‘Information as a Public Good’, speaks to how information allows us to know not only our rights but also our responsibilities and prerogatives.
Threats to the existence of the traditional legacy media, mostly by the surge in social media platforms which seldom take responsibility of what’s published on their platforms, poses a serious danger to democracy and distorts free speech.
It is thus critical that efforts are made to save the legacy media from fading away like a spent rose. Otherwise news events will it be left to bloggers and others to ‘report’ and contextualise.
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Namibian Sun
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