On 20 March, The Henry Jackson Society (HJS) was proud to host the UK launch of WAM (Emirates News Agency) and their new White Paper on the future of the media industry at 1 Great George Street, Westminster.
The morning’s panel, which featured the Director-General of WAM, His Excellency Mohammed Jalal Al Rayssi, was watched by an array of senior media figures, policymakers, and leading academics. Also on the panel were former UK Government Minister, Lord Bethell, former BBC journalist and now Senior Business Editor, Chiyo Robertson, and HJS’s own Director of Research, Marc Sidwell.
Lord Bethell drew on his experience as a Minister at the Department for Health and Social Care during the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlighted the importance of trust in media institutions in responding to public health emergencies, commending the findings of the White Paper. Lord Bethell and Robertson also recognised that while AI can play a role in enhancing our media eco-system, it can also be exploited by bad actors to influence opinion and spread disinformation.
The paper seeks to address this disinformation trend and presents eight different perspectives on news organisations’ resilience in the age of disinformation, based on feedback from last year’s Global Media Congress. The Global Media Congress was made up of discussions from close to 14,000 thousand media professionals and 193 media brands. The paper also aims to provide insight into the sustainability of media organisations, faced with a rapidly changing industry landscape in terms of both production and consumption. The paper included some key statistics which demonstrate these challenges; notably, that ‘Gen Z typically have an attention span of just 8 seconds (Forbes, 2017) and 80% of them receive their news primarily via social media (AP-NORC, 2022)’.
His Excellency, Jalal Al Rayssi, expressed his hope that the paper would serve as a ‘reference point’ for sustainable, world-wide media reform.
The role and place of the media in society have never been so crucial to all aspects of our lives, especially public health and national security. HJS welcomed the invitation to collaborate with WAM and help launch their White Paper, which provides an opportunity for the media industry to come together, address these challenges and build resilient media organisations that can thrive and redress the balance in the age of disinformation.
