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Challenges of disinformation/ National Media Council: Self-regulation is needed

2025-05-26 15:21:00, Aktualitet CNA

The Albanian Media Council held a meeting in Shkodra on the topic of promoting ethics and self-regulation in local media and the challenge of disinformation. The meeting discussed the experiences, challenges and needs of journalists and local actors in Shkodra regarding professional ethics, self-regulation and the fight against disinformation in the media.

"The main challenge is that self-regulation of the media should become increasingly widespread. The media should understand the importance of not leaving it up to the government to regulate their expressions, but rather regulating them themselves. Of course, there are many journalists who do not respect the rules of ethics, make mistakes that can harm the reputation of the individual, and this is a very good justification for the government to intervene to limit freedom of expression, as happened with the anti-defamation package, and that was the goal. The advanced world has solved this by leaving the government out and saying that we regulate ourselves. This is one of the things that is being discussed in the negotiation process with the EU, one of the aspects of freedom of expression where the EU aims to tell the Albanian media to organize and self-regulate because this is the best form," stated Dorjan Matlija, a media expert.

The aim is for media self-regulation, apart from Tirana where it has an important focus, to expand to other large cities such as Shkodra.

"We have good efforts in Tirana, but we want to extend it to other large cities like Shkodra, Vlora or some others and we think that in this way we can expand the geography of self-regulation a little and provide what we know and what experiences we have," said Matlija.

Online media remains the biggest problem in terms of ethics and disinformation.

"Online media are a little more problematic, even for the reason that they are oriented towards making quick profits and reduce quality, making news more sensational than necessary because this is their need to gain visibility, but they are responsible not only for the content of their news but also for the comments made by different individuals, whether they are direct comments on the site or on social networks. Online media have the duty to moderate these comments, a concern that does not exist with audiovisual media", emphasized Matlija.

Following these meetings held with the media in several cities in Albania, the EU will support some of them through various projects in their further strengthening and development, with the mediation of the Albanian Media Council./ CNA