One year on from the 2023 Media and Development Forum, what have we learned?
It was just one year ago: on 11 July 2023, 300 journalists and media activists from 45 countries gathered in Paris for a unique opportunity to exchange ideas and information: the Media and Development Forum. What did CFI learn from this ground-breaking event? (Re)discover our findings in a summary booklet available to download free of charge.
In 2019, CFI organised the first Media and Development Forum in Paris. Journalists and information activists met to discuss the various issues, share their practices and find solutions together. That was five years ago, and yet the issues addressed are exactly the same as those that trouble us today.
But five years ago, as Thierry Vallat, Chairman and CEO of CFI, recalls, "we were still a long way from the level of distrust exhibited towards journalists and the media, fuelled by a growing avalanche of fake news, hate speech and large-scale manipulation of information. We did not expect the current setbacks on the subject of women's rights. Nor did we expect to feel the tangible effects of global warming. We didn't know that new conflicts and political crises would erupt in various parts of the world, such as the many events where innocent people were killed and the myriad excuses to stifle freedom of information”.
In 2023, four years later, the second staging of the Media and Development Forum was organised by CFI to gather together nearly 300 media professionals from 45 countries ready to defend values that are increasingly under threat: truth, transparency, respect, equality, honesty and solidarity.
Together with its partners Africtivistes, Africa Check and Arab Reporters for investigative journalism (ARIJ), CFI invited its media partners from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Arab world to debate, question and compare their views on the full range of issues concerning those working in the information sector: the use of artificial intelligence, disinformation, climate change, gender inequality, media and journalists in exile, etc. Their goal: to share their practices, solutions, difficulties and innovations in the face of contemporary media issues.
Would you like to discover or rediscover the lessons learned from the round tables, conferences and workshops organised over the three days? You can download free of charge a summary of the forum in the booklet below and watch all the replays at this link: https: https://forum.cfi.fr/en/
