World Press Freedom Day 2009: Dialogue, mutual understanding and reconciliation
The way the media influences thought and action and its capacity to foster dialogue, understanding and reconciliation will be the focus of discussions at a UNESCO conference marking World Press Freedom Day 2009, to be held in Doha (Qatar) on 2 and 3 May.
The General Secretary of SIGNIS, Alvito de Souza, will moderate a panel at the Conference on promoting inter-religious dialogue and mutual understanding.
In his message for World Press Freedom Day 2009, the Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, stressed: “We must strengthen our efforts to build a media that is critical of inherited assumptions yet tolerant of alternative perspectives; a media that brings competing narratives into a shared story of interdependence; a media that responds to diversity through dialogue.”