President of Qatar University, Dr. Hassan Rashid Al Derham; Vice-President for Academic Affairs, Dr Omar Al Ansari; Professor Mariam Al Maadeed, Vice-President for Research & Graduate Studies; Professor Ibrahim Al Kaabi, Dean of the College of Arts, Scien
Doha: The 3rd International Conference on Media and Communication organised by Qatar University, represented by the College of Arts and Sciences, kicked off yesterday in cooperation with Al Jazeera Media Institute.
Researchers, academics and media professionals from Arab and foreign universities and institutes participate in the two-day conference to discuss issues related to media ethics and the challenges, especially with the development of modern means of communication and the emergence of new media.
President of Qatar University, Dr. Hassan Rashid Al Derham, Dr Omar Al Ansari, Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Qatar University, and other dignitaries were present at the conference.
Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Qatar University Dr. Ibrahim Al Kaabi said that the conference comes at a time when there is an urgent need to shed light on contemporary media practices, and the extent of its commitment to professional ethics.
He pointed out that the traditional media is suffering from the difficulty of continuity due to the vastness of digital spaces, noting that the gravity of the status quo lies in communicative globalisation, which makes false news and media practices not committed to professional ethics, spread throughout the world, and promotes the drawing of negative mental images of societies.
Dr. Al Kaabi hoped that the conference would produce a new road map for media ethics appropriate to the digital spaces, which would put an end to the chaos that threatens the traditional role of the media in spreading the truth out of its responsibility in society.
Professor Daya Thussu, Department of Journalism, School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University, delivered the keynote speech at the conference. He shed light on the trends in Internet. He said that the Internet, which was initially dominated by users from United States, will now see more users from other parts of the world, especially from Asia.
He said that the Internet has enormous information and it is getting difficult for users to ascertain the authenticity of information.
Addressing the conference, Dr. Kamal Hamidou, Head of the Department of Mass Communication, said that The importance of this conference lies in the fact that the issue of ethics in media practices goes beyond the academic dimension in its implications, because when media discourse is freed from ethical standards and controls, it may push those who place its contents to move away from accuracy, objectivity and balance as stable professional foundations in the media work, And to facilitate the hate speech in order to achieve commercial, electoral, or political goals, without calculating the consequences of this for human relations between individuals, and not for relations between peoples and countries.
The second day of the conference will see the Keynote Speech by Professor: Thomas Hanitzsch, from Department of Media and Communication, LMU Munich on Context Matters: Journalists’ Professional Ethics around the World.
