It was very interesting and a great opportunity to meet and discuss yesterday with the Vicepresident of Bulgaria, Ms Илияна Йотова – Iliana Iotova.

I took the opportunity to suggest increases of wages for the journalists working for public media like БТА / Bulgarian News Agency and also discussed disinformation and the need for building media literacy as a basis for insuring the future viability of the media and of our democratic societies. In short, I said that, although it’s great to do it and it definitely should be continued and expanded in the future, fact-checking is only a response to disinformation campaigns, therefore we need our societies to be better educated in the future so that disinformation campaigns can target less and less people that don’t know how to discern truth from fiction.

I has happy to be in #Sofia alongside my colleagues Clive Marshall, the president of the News Agencies World Council and CEO of PA Media, Peter Kropsch, CEO of Deutsche Presse-Agentur and leader of the European Newsroom (enr), Aimilios Perdikaris, CEO of Athens News Agency – Macedonian Press Agency and President of ABNA-SE and Skender Krasniqi, owner of KosovaPress and member of the Board of ABNA-SE. Also very nice to meet Ivaylo P. Petrov from MINDS International.

Many thanks to Kiril Valchev, the director general of BTA, for the kind invitation and best wishes to BTA and its journalist on the occasion of the 125th anniversary. EANA – The European Alliance of News Agencies

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