Vsevolod Pulya
Russia Today
Hello, dear friends, dear colleagues. It's a pleasure and honor to be here in Shanghai. Even though I'm just filling in for my colleague Dimitrionkov who unfortunately wasn't able to make it here on time. Well sorry for Dimitri for missing on magnificent Shanghai and meeting this great and beautiful, company of international journalists at the conference.
But anyway the topic of our panel today is “The Case for Media Sovereignty.” And I have to say that media sovereignty is actually a great thing when applied properly, because media sovereignty is an ability of a nation or a community to control and regulates so on media landscape. It's a good thing because it helps to reflect unique culture, unique values of the respective country. It helps to preserve cultural diversity of the set country to promote national values and to ensure unbiased information dissemination.
One of the compelling aspects of media sovereignty is the ability to promote and stress local stories and local narratives, and make sure that these stories are represented and celebrated. And it makes sense, because we are all most care about what happens in our backyard. But as the world grows more complex, the stories that happened in thousands of miles away from our backyards are having direct impacts on our life. And sometimes we don’t have enough expertise to report on them. And we have to embrace foreign media with respective expertise to report on these stories.
So every country needs it, and I believe that foreign media has potential to represent and transmit cultural values and traditions of respective countries. Some call it soft power. I wouldn't call it soft power because power means that you are enforcing something. I would call it bringing more context to the table, to make our dialogue more fruitful and to foster public discourse, and make the local audiences more knowledgeable on the subject that they don't know about.
I mean in our previous panel there were already some stereotypes mentioned about people like having stereotypes about Africa in Russia, in China, in Africa. And it happens all the time. I know what I'm talking about, because in addition to being a manager of RT China, I'm also editor-in-chief of the publication called Russia Beyond. This is also a project by RT, and it tells the world about Russian culture, history, travel opportunities, no politics whatsoever.
I want to comment on sanctions and bans of various RT operations in Europe and the US. But sometimes these regulations they come to a point of ridiculousness, when our channels our Facebook groups, our Facebook pages, YouTube channels of Russia Beyond that doesn't have any political agenda whatsoever across being banned.
And I'll just tell you a few anecdotes, like once we were labeled by Facebook our page called Russia Beyond. It was labeled by Facebook as China state-controlled media. That label stay there for like a week or so. Fortunately it was changed after a while. Then a page that was called “Russian Kitchen” telling the recipes of Russian dishes, pastries and porridge of course. It was just deleted by Facebook and I understand that media sovereignty is a great thing but I'm not sure that US is so, you know, trying to protect the audience from the rest of your Russian porridge. Anyway, that page was deleted. It was restored after a while in 2019, but we are still facing sort of shadow bans, restrictions and everything. We can't tell the world about Russian country in full capacity.
And that makes me think that in addition to imposing media sovereignty regulations by the states, the platforms are also imposing their own media sovereignty policies. And they are not transparent at all. They are not being monitored. They are not being checked by 3rd parties. It is a complete black box and we don't be known nothing about it, and that's a bad thing.
So allowing for a media to operate in the country has its pros and accounts obviously. I would say that the pros have an alternative points of view for richer and more informed public discourse to push local media to improve to remain competitive because foreign media are bringing new technologies, new practices to the markets. And it fosters competition. But there are also cons of course. It may lead the presence of foreign media on the local market, may lead to erosion of local culture and values, because more and more globalized content is being consumed. It can lead to struggle to compete with well-funded foreign media from local companies who might be under-funded. And of course, it may disseminate biased information by foreign-funded media.
So regulation is needed. Media sovereignty is needed. But it should be balanced, it should be sprayed forward, it should be transparent. The rules should be applicable to all of the media operating in a certain country. That's not something that RT faced in Europe and the US, where a lot of efforts were made to just overcome the artificial obstacles that were built for the telecompany operations in these countries rather than tell stories.
We want to tell stories, we want to bring more context to the table, but apparently it's not something that our former partners wanted. So we need for balanced regulation and oversight, and I'm very happy that we have a Chinese language broadcasting service here in China. And the rules are very straightforward, very transparent. We are happy to follow these rules and breathe more context to the table to boost conversation and understanding of each other between China and Russia. It's something that my colleagues do all over the world, be it RT Africa or RT Arabic, RT Spanish, and RT International. So my hope is that media sovereignty should be applied in a proper way and we all have a more informed and more fruitful dialogue altogether. Thank you very much.