We will be unable to stop the flow of fake news or propaganda if the citizens themselves will not be able to make a difference between a fake news item and a real news item, Ion Bunduchi, executive director of the Association of Electronic Press APEL, said in IPN’s public debate “About old and new faults of electoral process 2020 inveigled by the press and old and new faults of the press, unveiled by electoral process”.
Ion Bunduchi noted that in the Republic of Moldova there are many media outlets that do not share the journalistic values and do not really have economic motivation to obey a deontological code.
According to the expert, in the current elections only a part of the media outlets fulfilled their duties to inform about all the elements of an electoral process so that the citizen could vote in an informed and conscious way. Another part of the media outlets are resonance boxes for particular electoral competitors. “Regrettably, they did the job of the competitors and continue to do this, not their job,” stated Ion Bunduchi.
He also said that journalism is an open profession and the journalists are different from other content creators because they check the information before publishing it, except for the journalists who aim to intentionally misinform. He made reference to the Scandinavian countries, saying the bloggers in the election campaigns there became more correct in informing the public and the tendency to recognize the bloggers as a part of the media came from there. However the people’s attitude to these is different.
“How many journalists who publish without checking the authenticity of the information do we have? That’s why I think we should be more categorical in terms of activity of bloggers compared with institutionalized journalism,” concluded Ion Bunduchi.
The debate “About old and new faults of electoral process 2020 inveigled by the press and old and new faults of the press, unveiled by electoral process” was the sixth installment of the electoral series “We and the President: who elects who, who represents who” that is supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
