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Experts call for cultivating Russia-Africa media ties without mediators

TASS Director General Sergei Mikhailov said that agency plans to actively develop cooperation with its colleagues in Africa and give the continent’s citizens a chance to familiarize themselves with a stance on events in the world

SOCHI, October 24. /TASS/. Russia and Africa need to boost their relations in the sphere of information exchange and mass media, but no mediators should be involved in this process, participants of the news agencies forum at the Russia-Africa summit in Sochi said.

"Today we started with an interesting plenary session - a speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who exactly described the relations between Russia and Africa," TASS First Deputy Director General Mikhail Gusman said, opening a panel session of the forum, "Russian-African Relations: The Role of Media."

"Here at the summit many leaders of African states are present as well as foreign ministers, representatives of business communities and our session naturally fits this general context. As media representatives, our professional duty is to provide information in detail and unbiasedly about the processes, which are underway on the African continent, between Russia and Africa," Gusman said.

Director General of the Maghreb Arab Press news agency Khalil Hachimi Idrissi noted that the African continent often becomes an issue for discussion in the media, but usually this information is negative. "We often get wrong evaluation by other mass media outlets. Information may be subject to marginalization and the focuses are out of equilibrium," he noted. "Our goal now is to seek to counter this misbalance and create a new model for cooperation with Russia, which will become an example of unity. We should stop looking at the events by other people’s eyes." He also explained that information about Russia in Africa is often provided only through Western and US mass media, and thus a prism is created and the image of Russia is distorted.

TASS Director General Sergei Mikhailov noted that without African states it’s impossible to cultivate international economic ties, stable development of international ties, and to build a stable and cohesive system of international security. Cooperation between media outlets has been one of the most active areas of developing ties with Africa, he said.

"Today TASS plans to actively develop cooperation with its colleagues in Africa and give the continent’s citizens a chance to familiarize themselves with a stance on events in the world and on the African continent, which is different from that of most Western mass media. TASS plans to significantly increase the number of its news bureaus in Sub-Saharan Africa," Mikhailov said. "We hope this will contribute to improving mutual understanding between Russian and African peoples. We want the events in Africa and vital issues of its development to again become top news."

The Russian Foreign Ministry supports a plan by the TASS news agency to open new offices across Africa in 2020 and urges the agency to go ahead with widening its African correspondent network, said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, who is also the Russian presidential envoy for the Middle East and Africa. He mentioned Angola, Guinea, Tanzania and Madagascar among the potential host countries for future TASS offices.

Honorary President of the Africa Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Editor-in-Chief of the Asia and Africa Today magazine Alexei Vasilyev has stressed that Russia and Africa don’t know much about each other. "Measures are needed to enable us to better understand each other. Africa is different. As journalists, we have to report not only diseases, demonstrations and murders, but also about real achievements and successes [of the African continent]," he said.

Russian Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media Alexei Volin emphasized that information cooperation was developing not the way it should be. The ministry has put forward proposals on expanding cooperation with Africa, including exchanging information with Russia’s state mass media, training courses for African journalists and trips of Russian specialists to Africa for training personnel.

Some 300 news bureaus from 60 countries are operating in Russia, including 800 correspondents and 400 technical personnel, while Africa was represented by just three missions of Egypt and one Moroccan bureau, Deputy Director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Information and Press Department Artem Kozhin said. According to him, this modest representation of African media hardly meets the level of dynamically developing relations. "We invite all interested parties to open news bureaus and expand media cooperation with Russia," he said.