Today – Monday, May 3, 2021 – is World Press Freedom Day, and to commemorate it, The New York Times has posted this story, which links to us at South King Media:
According to the United Nations:
“In 1993, the UN General Assembly proclaimed 3 May as World Press Freedom Day following a recommendation adopted at the twenty-sixth session of UNESCO’s General Conference in 1991. It serves as an occasion to inform citizens of the violations of press freedom. It is a reminder that publications and social media are censored, fined, suspended, while journalists, editors and publishers are harassed, attacked and even killed worldwide.”
Here’s a statement by Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day 2021:
“The theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day, ‘Information as a Public Good,’ underlines the indisputable importance of verified and reliable information. It calls attention to the essential role of free and professional journalists in producing and disseminating this information, by tackling misinformation and other harmful content.”
South King Media is an active member of both the Society of Professional Journalists as well as LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers. which is “committed to strong local independent journalism, whether in small towns or big cities, creating stories that serve their residents and build a sense of place, and shining an informative light that allows citizens to make wise decisions.”
I strongly feel that while elected representatives have failed us, so have too much of the mainstream news-media.
Like so many other people, I have grown weary of Facebook specifically and much of general social media. The physical (and often identity) disconnect, through which the ugliest of comments can be and often are made without consequence for the aggressor, is largely at the heart of the matter. What I find indispensable about social media in general, however, is that it has enabled far greater information freedom (for example, on corporate environmental degradation and destruction) than that allowed by what had been a rigidly gatekept news and information virtual monopoly held by the pre-2000 electronic and print mainstream news-media. If not for the widely accessible Facebook, I seriously doubt that Greta Thunberg’s pre-pandemic formidable climate change movement, for example, would’ve been able to regularly form on such a congruently colossal scale.
While I don’t know his opinion of social media, in an interview with the online National Observer (posted Feb.12, 2019) Noam Chomsky noted that while there are stories published about man-made global warming, “It’s as if … there’s a kind of a tunnel vision — the science reporters are occasionally saying ‘look, this is a catastrophe,’ but then the regular [non-environmental pro-fossil fuel] coverage simply disregards it.”