The text below is a slightly edited version of the author’s remarks to the M20 Media Freedom Summit held online in Delhi on September 6, 2023, by the M20 Organising Committee, which comprises 11 editors from India and a former judge of the Supreme Court.It’s a pleasure and an honour to be here with you. Thank you for this important invitation,and thank you for starting this initiative of the M20 Media Freedom Summit, I really believe it’s very important. I remember the first G20 in Pittsburgh, or first Washington and then Pittsburgh. It was a great occasion to cover as a correspondent at that time, and it’s an honour for me to be here with you. The topic which you have suggested we discuss is freedom in the media from an Italian and European perspective, and today there are three different priorities.The first one is the need to protect our copyrights. The copyright of [the media’s] intellectual property is threatened by so many different actors in the digital arena that are hijacking the contents of media in many different ways. From those that simply copy and paste the contents to make money, to those that copy and paste the contents to sustain different theses and different arguments, to those that basically have very bad intentions that have to do with threatening our common security. The more that our copyright is threatened, the more our businesses are at risk, because we as media organisations print papers, newspapers and so on. In reality, we live on the protection of our copyright. So, we have to find a way to enforce the rule of law in the digital arena to make our copyright more protected.Second point: Not only our ideas, values and hard-working news-making business, but I’d say first and mostly our way of working – the way that we look for news or that we express opinions, that is the base of journalism in the free world – is threatened by fake news in the social networks.Also read: Why M20? To Remind G20 Leaders That the World’s Problems Can’t Be Solved Without Media FreedomThis fake news might be originated by single actors or by foreign powers; both of them use the same method, that is, to take out of context one single word, one single statement, or one single concept, to spread their viruses, their messages, and their attacks. In this case, we see almost on a daily basis that you have independent media organisations and they are attacked by people that have malign intentions, they want to harm us. But they want to do it in a way that our profession will be destroyed, and will be erased. They want to transform the idea of information and communication from what it is today – what we have been known and been doing as journalism – into basically a hard ball debate that you can see or you can watch in every coffee shop. So this is the second threat, and in this case it is coming from the social networks. To imagine protection [from this] is much more complicated, but the fact that it’s difficult doesn’t preclude the need to look for a solution, and for protection.The third issue has to do with a political trend that more and more we are watching in many democratic countries – which is, whoever is holding the executive power wants to concentrate more and more power in their hands. They don’t like the balance of power. They have the express desire to change and to substitute the heritage of Montesquieu with the desire of Rousseau. And so, they would like to have the media organisations, the media world, basically not exercising the right of freedom of expression but just repeating the messages of the executive power.This is a political topic; of course, it’s much more complicated because it has to do with the need to rebalance the equilibrium among the different powers in our democratic system, and is, from a political point of view, the most urgent [question] to be faced by all of us.Maurizio Molinari is editor-in-chief at La Repubblica, Italy.
