Communication Minister urges media to prevent disinformation
KATHMANDU: Minister for Communication and Information Technology Parbat Gurung -- stating that media in Nepal has been criticised for being biased, and serving political parties and leaders -- has urged journalists and media to abide by ethical standards of journalism to prevent disinformation.
Minister Gurung said so today while addressing the closing ceremony of a training webinar on Preventing Disinformation and Promoting Credible Journalism organised by Media Action Nepal.
Media Action Nepal, in a press statement, quoted Minister Gurung as saying that his ministry is ready to collaborate for activities that promote decent and credible journalism. "We plan to change media laws to make journalism decent," he said.
In the webinar, US Ambassador to Nepal Randy Berry said that the world today has a plethora of news channels which definitely help viewers to analyse and understand issues through many different angles, however, this also poses a challenge because there is a race to present exclusive contents. Putting dramatic headlines could lead to misinformation and it can also deprive people from right to information, the ambassador added. He noted that the US Embassy was proud to partner with Media Action Nepal to capacitate journalists in preventing disinformation.
Likewise, President of the Federation of Nepali Journalists (FNJ) Govinda Acharya stated that the time has come to collaborate with all stakeholders to counter disinformation so as to promote media credibility. Member of Press Council Nepal (PCN) Sangita Khadka said PCN has been orienting journalists on ethical journalism to remind the latter of their responsibility.
Highlighting that disinformation could weaken media’s role of watchdog, Chairperson of Media Action Nepal Laxman Datt Pant informed that a total of 64 working journalists have been capacitated on various dimensions of credible and ethical journalism under the initiative ‘curbing disinformation’.
As per the statement, journalists of Panchthar, Jhapa, Ilam, Chitwan, Nawalparasi and Nawalpur districts have been trained via series of training webinars including follow-up sessions on the basis of a study titled “Disinformation in Media: A Study of Newspapers and Online News Portals”.
The study carried out by Media Action Nepal presents an in-depth interpretation and analysis of disinformation published by 11 daily newspapers and 10 online news-portals of aforementioned districts.
