The second CPAC Hungary will take place in May, co-organized by the Center for Fundamental Rights and the American Conservative Union.Continue reading
The mainstream media in Austria and Germany are telling people to support the woke and gender ideology, and to be pro-immigration, Richard Schmitt, editor-in-chief and co-owner of the Austrian Exxpress AT, said in a panel discussion on Thursday in Budapest, on the second day of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) international conference on the state of the media market and the future of publishing.
Richard Schmitt said that today’s mainstream media in Austria and Germany treat readers as primary school children, which they do not like. And alongside gender and woke ideology, they are also telling people what to think about the coronavirus epidemic, he added. He also talked about tabloid media, of which he believes it is not a corrupter of society but a pillar of democracy, but it can be dangerous. Serious fact-checking is important in the midst of working fast, he added.
Jacek Karnowski, editor-in-chief of the Polish weekly Sieci, was also part of the same panel, and he stressed that different content is produced at different times. In Poland, the tabloid press is sometimes more serious and sometimes less so, he pointed out. He noted that
people often do not understand what is written about in the more serious newspapers.
At the same time, crime is of great interest to society: such topics are attracting more and more readers. Reacting to this, another attendee of the panel, Ralf Schuler, former chief correspondent for Bild’s parliamentary bureau in Berlin, said that the main aim of the tabloid press is to grab people’s attention, but that there are different rules in different countries on what can and cannot be published. He pointed out that
in Germany, they cannot describe the origin of the perpetrator of a crime, so the public is not fully informed.
During the MCC conference, several interesting panel discussion were held with actors of the media field, including journalists and editors. On Wednesday, a discussion panel titled New Formats: Media Revolutionaries was held, where the attendees took a look at how these new sources are shaping the media world, and how some of these have become the primary source for news consumers, even though they sometimes lack objectivity and facts.
Just like Richard Schmitt said, fact-checking is seriously needed nowadays, but as it was heard in Wednesday’s panel as well, this does not always happen. The attendees pointed out that nowadays it is getting harder to determine whether what we hear or read is actually true or a biased report. They warned that sometimes there is no relation between the fact and how it is expressed in the media, adding that there is also the problem of making up news. This means that in some cases, journalists not only report on news but make up some of it. However, this is very dangerous, and by not checking facts properly, propaganda can appear on non-objective channels, eventually leading to a situation where anyone can create news.
With more than 500 guests, 40 national and international speakers from 10 countries, 70 investigative journalists and more than 30 exclusive interviews, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium’s two-day international summit on the future of publishing was a great success. Among the conference guests was star podcaster Yair Netanyahu, son of the Israeli Prime Minister.
Featured photo via MTI/Soós Lajos