In promoting self-regulation, especially in addressing the problem of media self-regulation in the digital world, as well as in the overall strategic strengthening of the Council, CMEM is incessantly receiving support also from the OSCE Mission in the country. At today’s conference, the Head of the OSCE Mission in the country, Nina Soumalainen, emphasized that “self-regulation is neither censorship, nor self-censorship, but regulation without sanctions and is a credible alternative to court procedures that helps to increase the ethical, trust centered, journalism. “
“We must jointly place journalism where it belongs, and that doesn’t mean production of contents, but rather a service for consistent, ethical and truthful reporting to the public”, said Marina Tuneva, the CMEM Executive Director.
According to the chairman of the Steering Committee of CMEM, Dragan Antonovski, “the priority is to take away lies and propaganda from the media, and then all other inconsistencies in the ethical behavior”.
The conference was organized with the support of the Macedonian Institute for Media, through a grant within the ReFormMedia project – Enhancing the cooperation between the civil society, institutions and citizens for implementing reforms in the media sphere, implemented by the Macedonian Institute for Media and the Peace Institute from Ljubljana, with financial support from the EU. The importance of the self-regulation and the positive effects of the existence of a self-regulatory body in the Republic of Macedonia was addressed by the Director of MIM, Biljana Petkovska.
The publication “Reporting in the public interest – protection of the ethical principles of reporting through the work of the Press Complaints Commission” was promoted at the event, whose authors were Sefer Tahiri and Mirce Adamcevski, and the editor, Snezana Trpevska. The publication offers an overview of some of the basic principles of journalism ethics and an overview of the most characteristic decisions taken by the Commission.
Also, CMEM prepared a comparative overview of the experiences and challenges in the functioning of international press councils, especially those belonging to the Alliance of Independent Press Councils of Europe, whose member is CMEM as well. The main findings of the review were presented by its author, Dejan Donev.
Mladen Chadikovski, editor-in-chief of Television 24, as well as Isuf Kadriu, the deputy editor-in-chief of Alsat-M, addressed the role of the media in the democratization of the state, the journalism today, as well as the need for professionalization of the work of the media.