Twenty-seven-year-old Marianne Spring, who became a well-known journalist with her reporting on the way social media is used to spread false information, is now facing a nasty charge of giving wrong information herself and lying that she worked with a respected correspondent for the British BBC service. -Si" in order to try to secure a new job.

World media reported that about five years ago, Ms. Spring was trying to get a job as a freelancer in Moscow for the American news website Coda Story. An article in The New European said that when she reported to editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava of the Coda Story website in 2018 , she said she had been working alongside BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford on topics that referred to coverage of the "perception of Russia" during the 2018 FIFA World Cup .

Twenty-seven-year-old Marianne Spring, a BBC journalist who became famous for her reporting on disinformation, is now facing accusations that she lied when trying to get a job at another media service.

Her CV reportedly "boast" that in June 2018 she reported on editorial needs covering international news during the World Cup, particularly on perceptions of Russia, alongside renowned BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford. However, after checking these mentioned data by the editor of Coda Story Antelava, it was established that the BBC journalist who was looking for a job neither worked with her "famous" colleague from the BBC nor both they knew each other personally.

The case immediately resonated with the public as interesting because the world public was amazed by the fact that journalists who oppose lies and disinformation spread misinformation themselves.

Newsrooms need professional fact checkers

The problem that the region is not immune to, let alone Macedonia, was recently the focus of domestic professional media houses and associations of journalists.

It was in this context that the IMA Institute for Media and Analytics organized a panel discussion "Media freedom against political pressures and propaganda, disinformation and hate speech: How to proceed?", at which it was established, among other things, that the Macedonian media need fact checkers in the newsrooms.

According to those present at the panel discussion, it was concluded that we should focus on stronger representation of self-regulation of the media, strive to introduce media literacy from an early age among children, but also make a clear distinction in the country between professional and non-professional media.

According to the opinions expressed on this topic by the journalist Atanas Kirovski, the public will witness an even more significant development of the deep-fake in the public space, taking into account the rapid progress of artificial intelligence. According to him, it is only a matter of time when we will be faced with fake content, which we will not be able to trust our own eyes in what we see or what we hear as a edited voice and image.

"As long as the deep-fake is ascertained, you will broadcast it on the air, and with this development in the future, the question is what the media editorial offices will do, i.e. whether they will need specialized forensic teams to check whether something is a deep-fake or not." . The technological challenges for our profession will become very serious. For now, it has not come to Macedonia, but we are not isolated, in a very short time it will come to us as well", says Kirovski.

Arta Tahiri, news editor at Alsat-M television, shared the experience from the US at the debate, where every newsroom, whether large or small, has a fact-checking section. And Donald Trump could not appear in a newspaper or on television if his speech was not verified, Tahiri points out.

"Every newsroom should work in that direction," says Arta Tahiri.

 

The president of the Association of Journalists of Macedonia (ZNM), Mladen Chadikovski, is of the opinion on this topic that dealing with misinformation means giving priority to self-regulation of the media, working with children from a young age on how they should read the news and what they can expect. trust them, as well as a clear separation of professionals from non-professionals in the media space.

In a divided public, said Chadikovski, you have one truth of one structure, which consciously spreads falsehoods, and you have another structure, which tries to impose and be closer to the truth. At the same time, he reminded that untruths are spread by parliamentary speakers, they are spread by press conferences, by the political elite, regardless of whether they are from the government or the opposition.

The "fake news hunter" profession is a financial problem for media houses

The presence of so much fake news in the information space leads to the creation, in addition to the media and the state apparatus, of new jobs called "fake news hunters", who are supposed to remove information that is not true and can cause harm.

Thus, "Deutsche Welle" claims that in the future the Dutch will count the ballots manually after the elections, for fear of Russian influence. There is even speculation that Olaf Scholz is the target of attacks by European right-wing extremists through the spread of fake news. The head of "Apple" (Apple), Tim Cook, personally called on the governments of the world to start a public information campaign to fight the "evil of fake news", which, he said, means killing human minds. He said the rise in fake news was caused by "unscrupulous companies determined to attract online readers at any cost."

The fake news epidemic, he noted, is "a big problem in much of the world" and requires a functioning government and companies. Cook called for the start of the campaign and other similar campaigns that have changed attitudes about the environment to, he said, educate the public about the threat of fabricated stories online. An additional fact that represents a problem according to the writings of the worlds news agencies is the finances of the media, which cannot afford to have one journalist in the newsrooms who will deal with only one topic, that is, with demystifying the term and the phenomenon of fake news.