Forum in Cuba Debates on Journalism's Impact in New Technologies

The impact of the new information and communication technologies stands out on Tuesday in Havana among the issues being debated during the second and last day of an international forum on journalism sponsored by Prensa Latina News Agency.

The panel dedicated to access these technologies takes place at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, with papers addressing their role in social cohesion and the search for alliances to face right-wing media campaigns and the information monopoly imposed from the centers of power, particularly the United States.

Papers by Argentine journalist Alberto Rabilotta, Colombian Jorge Enrique Botero and Cuban Rosa Miriam Elizalde stand out among the participants of the event started on Monday on occasion of the 60th anniversary of Operation Truth and the foundation of Prensa Latina.

The closing ceremony of the forum that brings together more than 30 experts from Latin America and other parts of the world also includes a panel on the dangers of journalism in the region, with speeches -according to the program- by Argentine journalist and writer Stella Calloni and Brazilian Paulo Cannabrava.

Monday's forum was the scene of complaints about media manipulation and the proliferation of fake news to attack left-wing processes and progressive leaders.

French-Spanish intellectual Ignacio Ramonet called on journalists to stick to the facts before a world of information that he described as a crisis of credibility.

The lie always existed in media, but now it is something more serious, it seems a great intoxication, he stressed.

Calloni told Prensa Latina that it is urgent to articulate responses to break the media monopoly imposed by the information machines of the centers of power, a battle in which he insisted on the importance of the protagonism of young people.

Other participants talked about the validity of the scenario that led Fidel Castro six decades ago to convene 400 journalists from different parts of the world to Havana to learn first-hand details of the trials against those responsible for crimes during the defeated Fulgencio Batista dictatorship, in Operation Truth.