President of Kyodo News Satoshi Ishikawa on Friday urged the media to assume social responsibilities in face of new technologies.

"We believe the media have a social responsibility to promote world peace by sharing news and information about everyday events and by furthering mutual understanding in a way that goes beyond the limits of countries and regions," Ishikawa told the World Media Summit in Beijing.

"In this new era, the media's role and responsibility are becoming more important," he said.

Ishikawa said globalization and progress in information and communications technologies put traditional paper-based media on the defensive, while permitting Internet search businesses to prosper and enabling hand-held and mobile terminals such as smart phones to dominate the media market.

The global ongoing economic downturn seemed to have dealt a harder blow to the business of old, traditional media, he said.

He reaffirmed three principles of reliable reporting that should be established and protected by responsible journalism in the face of new media.

"First is to secure access to news sources. Second is to protect the rights of content providers or the authors. And third is to ensure that consumers of the news have access to what they want."

He stressed news media's responsibility to deliver prompt and accurate reports to people who need news and information. "I think impartial reporting produced by responsible media must be delivered quickly and assuredly to those who need it."

Ishikawa appreciated the Chinese government's moves to begin adopting a policy of openness toward foreign media organizations in the reporting of major news stories such as the Beijing Olympics and the Sichuan earthquake.

He also underscored the importance of protecting the rights of copyright holders and to defend the news value of original contents against illicit use.

As the development of communications technologies has made it easy to find interesting content online, copy it and make secondary and tertiary use of it, Ishikawa said distribution over the Internet of content copied without the copyright holders' consent must not be allowed.

Ishikawa called for both traditional media and new online media to work together in finding a global, comprehensive solution to this problem.

The two-day summit gathered heads and representatives from more than 170 newspapers and magazines, wire services, radio and television broadcasters as well as the Internet and other media from across the world.

Comments