The outlook is not encouraging for the media. Which is long gone, except for anything related to the incessant transformation affecting global orders and fully impacting organizations dedicated to the dissemination of quality information. The only certainty is that the reaction time to survive changes will be shorter and shorter. And it is precisely in this centrifuge of uncertainty that trust acquires a category of increasing value in the media. This is what the president of Grupo Prisa (publisher of EL PAÍS), Joseph Oughourlian, thinks: “More than half of the content on the Internet is produced by robots. In a world like this, I believe and hope that people will return to trusted media. I can no longer trust social media. I trust brands that have journalists behind them who verify the information.
The Prisa Group Chairman reflected on the challenges of the media industry in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday in a debate with former UK Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden and John Darsie, CEO of the financial technology Salt. The forum that hosts this type of meeting on the future of media and entertainment is the Bridge Summit, organized in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, where EL PAÍS went at the invitation of the organizers. Presentations on the second day of the event revolved around the viability of an increasingly fragmented media ecosystem. And the recipes from the industry experts in attendance revolve around the same idea: building trust. “I don’t see why traditional media values shouldn’t be applied to new media,” Oughourlian said. And he added: “In the case of social networks, the problem is that they treat information like any other entertainment product. But that is not the case at all. Information is something fundamental for the functioning of democracies. And lying is a problem for democracy.”
Former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Oliver Dowden, focused on the speed with which a lie can circulate across the planet today: “In front of the farms of robots installed in Asia and North Korea to boost Western democracies, governments must act. » Despite the propulsion that generative artificial intelligence offers disinformation and its derivatives in hybrid warfare between nations, Dowden argues that this technology will help – if trained to do so – to expel the lie industry from the increasingly atomized media ecosystem. “I am convinced that in a few years, artificial intelligence will be used to establish well-being situations. »
Considering the spread of lies as one of the contemporary evils of democracies, the president of Prisa added that the regulations “exist, but they have not been applied”. And he recalled that European regulations such as Digital Services Act and the European regulation on media freedom, obligatory for EU member states, “they are not reinforced by national parliaments”. Oughourlian presented his vision of the main action markets of Grupo Prisa, framed in Spain and Latin America and where “there are governments more focused on who owns the media than on what is happening in the social media ecosystem”. The president of Prisa also finds in global events like the battle brewing between Netflix and Paramount for the takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery and its various subsidiaries – which has become one of the great contemporary milestones in the American economy, politics and industry – the example that “there is still a lot of interest in traditional media”.
Andrew Sollinger, CEO of the prestigious global affairs publication, participated in another debate. Foreign policy. For Sollinger, responsible for a publication focused on analysis and long-term stories, it is essential, in increasingly turbulent times, to uphold core values such as “offering different perspectives on the same argument and letting readers judge.” And he adds: “Trust is an essential element. Some organizations have ignored this value. And it is something that must act as a driver for the credibility of newspapers, otherwise people will not know what to trust in the future.”
Almost at the end of the day, the senior vice president and editor-in-chief of the Associated Press, Julie Pace, reported from her news agency echoes of the open battle with Donald Trump for refusing to modify in his information the nomenclature imposed by the American government regarding the Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press’ decision led to its journalists being banned from appearances at the White House and it is justice that will ultimately resolve yet another conflict between journalism and power. Julie Pace reiterates: “We are a global agency and we make language decisions based on what is best for the recipients of our information. This retaliation is a violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which defends both free speech and freedom of the press.” And on why we must continue to fight for the truth in the face of everything, he concludes: “If they can take on an organization like the Associated Press, they can take on any media outlet and any citizen for the words they use.” »
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