Asia-Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIDB)

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Asia-Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIDB)

9th Asia Media Summit

10.15, Tuesday 29 May 2012
Bangkok, Thailand

Session 1 – Media, Development & Conflict:
Can Media Make a Difference?

Houlin Zhao

Deputy Secretary-General,
International Telecommunication Union

Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,

·  It is a great honour for me to be with you here in Bangkok today to participate in the 9th Asia Media Summit.

·  The media landscape is being reshaped as it has never been reshaped before – with the wholesale move to mobile; increasing real-time coverage from ‘on-the-ground’ reporters who are often just passers-by; and the spectacular rise of social media and crowdsourcing.

·  ITU has of course long been concerned to ensure that the benefits of the information society are brought to all the world’s peoples, rich and poor, in developing and developed countries alike.

·  There have been quite extraordinary successes, notably in terms of mobile, with almost all the world’s population now within easy reach of a mobile phone.

·  The fact that mobile devices are now in the hands of billions of people around the world enables them to share information on every subject imaginable – from the latest football results, to searching for loved ones in the wake of a disaster, to calling corrupt governments or regimes to account.

·  Mobiles have empowered populations to agitate for political change; unite in the face of famine; find better market prices for their products; or track the movements of precious food sources, such as fish in the Indian Ocean or wild deer on the Russian steppes.

·  ITU’s membership recognizes the importance of making the most of global, shared resources, and I am pleased to note that the recent Radiocommunication Assembly, RA-12, and World Radiocommunication Conference, WRC-12, made important advances in this regard.

·  Mobile broadband requirements were addressed in some detail. The decisions of WRC-12 in this respect are a clear message to governments and industry of the importance placed by membership on the role of wireless in making broadband accessible to all.

·  With the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting now a reality across the world, WRC-12 also addressed the issue of the digital dividend, which now provides for a great deal of global harmonization of the use of the 700 MHz band for all regions by the services which most need it.

·  From an ITU perspective, a key challenge is to make spectrum allocations globally available, and the decision of WRC-12 to include a specific agenda item for WRC-15 on this matter addresses this issue.

Distinguished guests,

·  ICTs are helping us to observe – and report on – the state of the planet, not just in terms of climate change, but in terms of humanity’s impact on our environment.

·  A good example is the midwayjourney[1] project, for example, where media and nature photographers are using social networks such as Flickr and Facebook to report the ecological disaster happening at Midway Atoll, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On this remote island, albatrosses are dying in their thousands from ingesting plastic debris from the gyre of marine litter known as the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’[2]

·  The rise of social networks also continues to transform traditional point-to-multipoint broadcasting (such as TV and radio) into many-to-many reporting and broadcasting.

·  This gives people – and especially tech-savvy young people, digital natives – tremendous opportunities to speak out and make a difference.

·  To take just one example, look at one twelve-year old Bangladeshi child’s recent campaign against child marriage in Bangladesh – which started on-the-ground, but was then picked up and reported widely by the BBC[3].

·  These are inspirational stories, but from a media perspective there are disadvantages to a hyper-connected world, too.

·  One of the biggest disadvantages is that in a world of e-media and m-media, there is vastly more ‘noise’ online than there ever was from traditional media – and it is increasingly difficult to sift out the meaningful signal or content from the clutter.

·  How can users be sure that what they access via e-media and m-media is real, and valid – as opposed to misleading, misguided, ignorant or false?

·  This is why the world still very much needs you, trained media professionals: to help evaluate, sift and report on the growing mass of content and news.

·  Some might argue that traditional media will become less relevant in a world where traditional channels and printed newspapers have to compete, and any observer can now report events and news as they unfold.

·  But I would argue that the opposite is true.

·  In the dense online forest of social media, e-media and m-media competing for our attention, we need more, and better-trained professional reporters and journalists than ever before, to guide us through the woods – assessing content, authenticating sources, and promoting the most important stories.

·  This means that there will always be a crucial role for traditional media.

·  This is true both in helping to evaluate and authenticate information, and in broadcasting that information to a widespread audience through media such as radio and TV. We should not forget that radio and TV are still, today, massively more pervasive than the Internet – indeed, while radio and TV are almost ubiquitous, the Internet still only reaches one third of the global population.

·  I am very pleased to see that traditional media sources are rapidly adapting to take advantage of new channels to help report on the key issues of our time – and let me encourage you all to do so.

Ladies and gentlemen,

·  At ITU, we firmly believe in the right to communicate, and it is our mission to bring the full benefits of ICTs to all the world’s people, wherever they live, and whatever their circumstances.

·  One of the key activities we undertake, at the request of membership, is to hold global conferences covering specific areas of work, and at the end of this year we will be having three in succession, hosted in Dubai – and I encourage you to attend where possible.

·  The first of the three is ITU Telecom World 2012, which is being held from 14 to 18 October. The event will bring together top-level representatives from government and industry to debate and discuss the shape of the future world of ICTs.

·  We will then be holding the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA) and the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) back-to-back in November / December. We are very much looking forward to participation from across the Asia-Pacific region, and from AMS in particular, at these very important events.

·  WCIT-12 is all about keeping the Internet open for business, in order to sustain growth in the massively inter-dependent global digital economy.

·  It is also about keeping the Internet open for people – in order to continue leveraging the social and economic benefits of access to knowledge and information; access to one another; and access to applications and services delivered over the Internet, including e-health, e-education, and e-government.

·  WCIT-12 is clearly going to be a tremendously important conference, not just for ITU, but for the global ICT sector – and we are looking forward to the debates there. These are debates which will shape the next 20 years of the most exciting business in the world – the business of ICTs.

Thank you.

[1] See: http://www.midwayjourney.com/

[2] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

[3] See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/17876357