 Ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome to our stakeholder session on defending truth. This is quite possibly the single most important event that is taking place during the World Economic Forum, because truth is obviously the foundation on which all of the other discussions are based. And if you look at the world that we're in at the moment, it does feel like this idea of defending truth, defending the truth, is a kind of mission impossible. Iskulus famously said that the truth is the first casualty of war. And it's not just that we have many wars going on at the moment, but Iskulus never lived through a modern election campaign. They never came across artificial intelligence. And the challenges to our information ecosystem are so fundamental that they are actually starting to affect every single aspect of our lives. And that's why many people are talking about how this new era that we're going through could, in fact, be the era of artificial truth. Over the next 45 minutes, we're going to diagnose some of the problems facing our ecosystems, looking at the challenges that consumers face in an era of misinformation, and think about how public institutions and media institutions can adapt to and affect this new reality. And we have a real all-star cast to help us make sense of these important questions. First up is Vera Yurova, who is the Vice President for Values and Transparency at the European Commission. We also have Jeanne Bourgo, who is the President and CEO of Internews. Meredith Kopit Levion is the President and CEO of The New York Times. And Emma Tucker is the Editor-in-Chief of The Wall Street Journal. Vera, can we go to you first? You're Vice President of the European Commission. You are looking at all the challenges that we're facing. If you look at the WEF's Global Risk Report for 2024, it says that disinformation is actually the top risk which people cited for the next couple of years. You're looking at both European elections taking place this year, but also increasingly finding that this whole topic of misinformation, disinformation is going right up the political agenda. Can you talk a bit about how the EU thinks about that and what kind of measures you're taking? Thank you for the question. Thank you for inviting me. Well, disinformation is a security threat. And maybe not many noticed, but it was part of the Russian military doctrine that they will start information war. And we are in it now. And disinformation is a very powerful tool. So how we think about it in the EU, we are focusing on improving of the system where the people will get the facts right. We don't speak about opinions. We are not correcting anyone's opinions or language. This is about the facts. So here comes the series of actions which we are taking at the EU level to equip the people with the facts so that they can make their autonomous choice. You set consumers. We do it for citizens. For me, this is a difference. There are five elements. First of all, we need to have strong professional media and safe place for journalists to do the job. We have Andrew Karina Galicia here, the son of the murdered journalist Daphne. Well, we adopted the laws, which I could call Daphne's laws, to protect the journalist better. We adopted the media freedom act. I can speak about it later if you want. So strong media doing the job freely and with full space. Second thing, work with the platforms. And here comes the fact checking mainly. And we have all the big tech under the commitment of the code of practice against disinformation. Again, I can say more. Third thing important, better communication from the site of politics. I remember times when the politician was caught lying, he was disqualified. Yeah, maybe we should come back to this practice. But also communication in the sense of pre-bunking. This information is not so uneasy to predict. The forcing awareness raising, lowering of the absorption capacity in the society to believe the lies. This is long-term, long-distance run, but we have to do it. Last resort, solution, law enforcement, reaction. And we see the rise of antisemitism, which is full of conspiracy theories, which have the potential to incite violence in real life. We see, again, the day with stars on the synagogues and on the buildings of Jewish people. And this is the case for police. So these five elements. Sorry I was a bit long, but this is how we have... This is a broad concept which we take in the EU. Thank you very much. No, you laid out a very full agenda. One of the topics you mentioned is politics and how that's working. Donald Trump used to love calling the New York Times the failing New York Times until at least he realised that he was maybe one of the big contributors to turning the New York Times into the enormous commercial success that it became. Meredith, can you tell us what lessons you learned, both from that period, but also how you think about the role of a global media organisation in this era of disinformation? Yeah, great, great, sort of specific and then broad question. And thanks for having me here. Let me just push on one thing you said, which is that you associated Trump with the sort of success of the Times. I would say certainly the giant political story that began in 2016 and continued has been of great interest and that made even more audience come to the New York Times and I'm sure it made even more people subscribe. But I would say for the Times and the Journal, Emma is also here and all of the major serious news organisations, we are all sort of bigger than any one story or any one topic area and we continue to have a very strong, very engaged audience and grow subscriptions long after he was President of the United States. So I'll just, I'll note that in terms, I'm actually going to follow some of what Vera said. I would say that we are living in, you know, as dark a moment in history as I have known. I suspect many people feel that way and in that the world needs more high quality independent journalism that's willing to hold power to account and what I think we're not talking enough about is what journalism actually needs from the world and I think you're pushing on that and I'd name a handful of things. One is the opportunity for journalists to do their work in a way that is free from intimidation, harassment, legal threat and that is something that I think until recently we thought particularly in democracies was a settled matter, even something sacred and I think many of us are quite concerned about that so that's one thing. The second thing I would say is we need to help the public be more media literate as to the value and importance of independent journalism. I think people, it's very hard for many reasons to distinguish what it is and isn't and we need a public that understands the value of journalism that's from a posture of sort of searching rather than knowing and that doesn't play for a side or a team and third I think we need sustainable business models for media companies. Farrah said you need professional media organizations while those organizations have to be able to make money to put their reporters into harm's way, have the people who endeavor to keep them safe, have expert editors, have all the people who find and build audience that is really intense, expensive work requires people who can do great kind of human ingenuity and technological innovation and it costs a lot of money and we need an information ecosystem that rewards and recognizes and values that and my experience at times over the last 10 years is if we're not pushing on all of those things at the same time, you get where we are now proliferation of lots and lots of less high quality content and a real challenge to the relationship between the publisher and the reader. You called it a citizen, the end user who should be in a direct relationship for news. Great, so Emma, the meta theme for this year's Davos is the idea of building trust and that's one of the biggest challenges for media organizations in this media environment that's awash with different information from conflicting sources. How do you go about building trust? Well, I really want to echo a lot of what Meredith said that I agree with it entirely. I think there's a very specific challenge for the legacy brands like the New York Times and like the Wall Street Journal. I mean, interestingly, when there's a big news event, a big world event, people still come to the legacy brands. We still have a lot of trust, but I think you only have to go back, I think we have to maintain that trust and we have to work at maintaining it in a way that we didn't have to do not so long ago. So if you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we kind of, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers and we very much owned the facts as well. If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news and they're much more questioning about what we're saying. So it's no longer good enough for us just to say, this is what happened or this is the news. We have to explain, almost like explain our working. So readers expect to understand how we source stories. They want to know how we go about getting stories that we have to sort of lift the bonnet as it were and in a way that newspapers aren't used to doing and explain to people what we're doing. We need to be much more transparent about how we go about collecting the news in order to keep that trust because the trust is our most valuable asset and the minute we let go of that, then our business models frankly will fall apart. That also means we have to correct our mistakes. We have to be honest when we make mistakes. We have to not be afraid of that. And I think as well, we just we need to have a much more open relationship with our readers. We have to be more responsive to what they want, what they expect of us. And we have to, yeah, just keep it, have more of a dialogue. It used to be very much de eau en bas with newspapers and I think those days are over. And I think the feeling we get is that readers really enjoy that. They like it. They like us to open up and tell them what we're going on. I think the challenge for us is the people who say they trust us and want to understand why they should trust us tend to be the same people. We're preaching to the converted. The challenge is how do we reach the people out there who don't read The Wall Street Journal, who don't read The New York Times, who don't listen to the BBC or whatever. How do we persuade them of the value of trusted news? Great. So, Jean, can you talk a bit about how civil society can actually contribute to this process and how civil society can help to tackle this information? Well, I guess I want to say at the start, sort of that I am, yeah, I am civil society. We're not at the site, our name in our news. We're not a news organization, but we do support news organizations all around the world working at about 130 countries. And we work particularly in places that free and open information struggles to exist. And so sort of all of the challenges that we've been talking about up until now are amplified a thousand fold if you barely have a market economy, if you're facing conflict. And I will want to note that the elections that we're talking about are happening in 64 countries, which means many of them all over the world where they have less healthy information ecosystems. So from our perspective is what we need to do is really bolster those information ecosystems in the similar strategies that we've talked about here. We look at it sort of from an information integrity perspective, like how do you build that health and from a demand and supply side. And if you think about the supply side being the production of news and information that is trusted, on that side, you're sort of both trying to minimize the bad stuff and maximize the good stuff. And again, we've sort of been talking about that here already. And on the minimizing, I want to stress a couple of points of the bad is that disinformation makes money. And that's one of them, we need to follow that money. And we need to work with the, in particularly the global advertising industry that a lot of those dollars go to pretty bad content. And so you can work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists to sort of really try to focus ad dollars and challenge the global advertising industry all around the world to focus their ad dollars towards the good news and information, the good, the accurate and relevant news and information. And then on, that we've talked a little bit about the platform side, it's really complicated. I mean, the European Commission is doing amazing work in this area, but we know that it's complicated. We also know that more can be done. We know that there's not enough trust and safety people. What sorts of things do you think could be done specifically? Well, I mean, there's a lot of language in this world. And when you only cover 12 or 13 languages, you're missing the vast majority of the world. And so, I mean, getting local language expertise so that you can protect all of the world. And it's just wildly too few people sort of looking at it. I do think there's interesting interventions, civil society interventions. I mean, the Facebook oversight board is interesting and interesting conversations are happening because of it. Australia has an e-commission on e-safety. That's a brand new sort of an unusual thing in the world. So these types of things can help really sort of protect from the most egregious digital harms, but it only gets at the most egregious at that point. So lots of questions have been raised. So I'm going to sort of dip into some of them and try to talk about them. One important thing you mentioned was this idea of the business model, and you mentioned that as well. I don't know, Meredith, if you want to go into a bit more detail on that, because a few years ago that was... Yeah, can I talk about why that... I feel like we don't talk enough about why that happened. I'm going to repeat something I think I said before, which is at its best news is experienced in a committed relationship where you go to one or a handful of providers that you trust are going to have a team who are going to bring you information you can trust that is fact-based, that is worthy of your time every day. And I think over the last decade, probably a little longer, the relationship was just intermediated between the reader or the listener or the watcher and that publisher who spent all the money gathering that information and creating journalism around it. And that was not good for the consumer's understanding of what they were, I'm going to say reading, but I mean watching and listening to. For what they were reading, when much of news is experienced by the public as a bunch of atomized stories traveling around the internet sort of divorced from their context, divorced from what Emma was talking about, which are the signals to say this is news or this is an opinion, these are the other 10 stories the journal has produced around it or the Times has produced around it, that's just not good for the consumers or the reader, citizens ability to take in the whole story, that's the first thing. Second thing which you're pointing to is what tech advancement, which also gave us so much, including much more audience for our work, led to the platforms, led to the proliferation of low quality content, and you asked what can be done about that, better signals, tech providing better signals to distinguish between independent fact-based journalism and all the other stuff, quite important still plenty more work to do there. I think it's more than labeling, I mean Google actually has made real progress on this over the years, it's had a search work, how are things indexed, we're entering a next chapter of the information ecosystem, how will quality content be pointed to, how will it be acknowledged, how will it be surfaced at great scale, and then I would just say your opening question to me, we can't forget that all of this has been compounded by world leaders literally trying to sow mistrust against credible news gathering organizations, that's a big piece of this. I want to go much more deep into the politics around this, but while we're staying with this business model idea, maybe Emma, you want to comment on that, I mean you run global, the way that many of us kind of understand about the global economy and finance, et cetera, and you're also trying to operate in a much more challenging environment in terms of media organizations, business models, how do you see the challenges going forward in terms of making truth profitable? Well I think, I mean the truth of the matter is, news gathering and running a newsroom is very expensive, and I think that's something that people have come to realise that proper having people on the ground in all over the world, often in very challenging circumstances, is an expensive business. Now I suppose the question is, and the question for us was how do you make money out of news? It's very, very hard to do that. Some legacy brands have made a great fist of it by building subscription models, but in the future, I don't know, I mean it could be that the newsroom of the future is a lot smaller than the newsroom of today because AI will most definitely play a part in news gathering, and perhaps you'll just have much smaller newsroom with a team of editors of human oversight for what AI is generating. But I think the question of how do you fund trusted independent news is it will continue to be a headache for all of us. I don't think we may have cracked it for now with the subscription model, but that obviously is not very inclusive of subscription. We're quite expensive, I hate to say it, but we are. And that means there will be people who simply cannot afford to pay for it. Can I add a couple things to this? I want to really come in behind Emma on how expensive it is to do high quality news gathering. And by the way, just in the United States, I think like a quarter of all the newspapers have closed that has decimated local journalism and many more will still close. Many fewer working journalists. I want to suggest that what we need from here is more journalists. The world needs more understanding. It needs more people with some semblance of expertise on the ground, asking other human beings, bearing witness, trying to figure out what happened with being edited by experts, by the people who work at the Times, who work for Emma at the Journal. We need more of that. I am hopeful as you are, Emma, that there will be aspects of our business processes and companies and the way we go about some of the work that technology will help us do more efficiently. But ultimately, I want to say when I talk about a sustainable model for high quality journalism, I mean being able to keep many, many people on the front lines of important things unfolding in like every aspect of the human experience and be able to say, human to human, this is what's happening here. And I want a bigger newsroom. I bet Emma wants a bigger newsroom. And that's really what we're trying to have. Do you want to say a bit about what you think the responsibility for institutions like the European Commission is in terms of creating this sort of environment where you can have these flourishing media organisations that make money and they're able to sustain networks of journalists on the ground around the world? Well, I am European politician slash regulator. Yeah. As a person, I lived half of my life in a totalitarian regime. I know how it tastes to live in one official doctrine. So you can imagine what kind of courage it required for me to get into even the thinking of how better to regulate information space. Do you hear it, how it sounds? Dangerous. But we had to look into the reality that the European information space was already far before invasion to Russia to Ukraine. It was over flooded with this information, not only born in Kremlin, but also some other sources. And so we started with the analysis what needs to be improved or regulated. When it comes to digital space, we were mainly focusing on illegal content, which is child pornography, extremism terrorism and hate speech. It's its most violent form. These are things which are prohibited in our EU member states criminal laws. So nothing new. Here we have the Digital Services Act, which says clearly EU platforms must not be the distributors of this kind of content. For this information, which we speak about today, we had to take gloves because freedom of speech is primary principle in the EU, primary principle. So that's why when I speak about the truth, I always add evidence-based truth. So again, the facts. When we started to work on the code of contact against disinformation, we came in our analysis to what you speak about that the truth is expensive and slow. And sometimes not reaching the audience because between the bubbles in the mainstream space, there are not many people. I'm exaggerating a bit. The lie is cheap and quick. That's why in the code of practice, we have, for instance, the chapter on demonetizing. You said that disinformation makes money. We try to cut them off the money to start them out. That's why we have also advertising industry on board. And we have many, many big companies, which already said clearly we don't want to connect our brands with the systems, which spread disinformation. So this was our approach. Now we have the code under the legislation. And still we are extremely careful because the freedom of speech has to be protected. Last comment is the AI invasion into our lives and everything we do. We now keep two principles already in AI Act. Copyright has to be protected. Extremely important for the world of professional journalism. It's the first thing. And the second thing, Mr. Nobody, which is robot AI, does not have the freedom of speech. This belongs to the human beings as well as copyright. So we are very careful now in European legislation to make absolutely clear that the achievements of human beings, the rights of human beings, have to be protected now. And the AI has to take some limits. OK, so we should go a bit deeper into AI. But one of the things which came up earlier was this question about having journalists on the ground in different places. And increasingly we do seem to be living in an age of impunity where more and more journalists are being imprisoned, are being killed. The two of you are wearing, I stand with Evan, T-shirts. Emma, you've obviously been in the heart of that, having to deal with one of your employees being imprisoned in a very frightening way. Can you talk a bit about how what governments can do to actually recreate a safe space for journalism? Because that does seem to be one of the most fundamental ways of us getting news. It's such a massive issue, this, because Stalin, Russia, had journalists from the West operating not exactly entirely freely, but they were able to do their job. We now have a journalist who's entirely innocent. He was accredited by the Russian Foreign Ministry. He was doing his job and he's now behind bars. Now, and the really tragic thing, I think, is that this seems to be increasingly the case in more and more countries. So the idea of supporting a sort of free press is one that's definitely under threat. And the challenge for us is how do we, you know, the Wall Street Journal will never ever step away from its commitment to being on the ground, to covering the news where we can. But the safety of our journalists obviously has to come first. So we are getting very good at covering stories from outside the countries where they're happening, which is, frankly, how we have to cover Russia these days. There are other countries where we can't send our journalists. And I think that is a challenge for all of us. And, you know, because we rely on eyewitness accounts to really make sure we are getting to the truth. So it's a very grim trend. And as to how you reverse it, I don't know, because I think more regimes are cottoning onto the fact that this is something that they can do and they don't care. Can I jump on that? And it is terrible for the international news industry. It is even worse for local news industry. I mean, the war, the conflict in the Middle East is the single deadliest conflict in the history of journalism since it's been packed by the committee to protect journalists. You know, in across Latin America and Mexico specifically, the organized crime is just incredibly deadly for journalists as well, local journalists there. Hundreds of local journalists jailed every year all around the world. And so this is a... We are thrilled that it's getting so much attention. It is just everywhere. The safety issue is everywhere for journalists everywhere. And so I just want to stress that there are literally hundreds around the world. Meredith, do you want to talk a bit about AI? It's pretty difficult to walk down any corridor here without getting stuck into conversation about AI at the moment, changing everything in our lives. But this whole question of truth, I think, is one of the most fundamental challenges to truth. I'm happy to talk about it. And I want to pick up on just one wonderful thing you said. I saw you nod, Eva, which is that the truth is slow. I think the truth does. And this relates to AI. I think the truth does unfold in many cases slowly. Most big stories about very consequential things where the public really needs understanding and to know who to hold to account and for what. Take days, they take weeks, sometimes they take months. I'm guessing at the journal, I know at the times, many of the things we've done over years that have really been consequential to the world in our journalism, like, for example, the story about Harvey Weinstein by Jodie Cantor and Megan Tuhi that really played a big role in changing the world for women and unleashing the Me Too movement that took many, many, many months of work. So I just want to go back to the point that you mentioned copyrights. What all the news organizations, all the high quality journalism organizations we're talking about or doing is human led creative work that is extremely hard and complicated and requiring of experts to produce. And my comment on AI would be that I believe generative AI specifically presents the potential to reach many, many, many more people with our work to do it in more languages at greater speed and scale. And I think that is incredible. And I think that, and by the way, I could tell you across all the products at the New York Times, news journalism, games, recipes, shopping advice, sports journalism, all the different things that generative AI could do to make our business better and our business and our ability to reach people. And that has to coexist with the idea that there has to be fair value exchange for use of our content, use of our journalism in large language models, in tools, in the ecosystem. Great, thank you very much. So we've got about 15 minutes left and I'm very keen to bring in some of the members of the audience because we've got a very distinguished group of people from journalism, politics, all sorts of parts of business world. And so if people could put their hands up and I'll try and spot them as a gentleman at the back of here, if you can wait for the microphone, introduce yourself and make sure it's quite a short question so we can bring as many people in as possible. My name's Peter. Yeah, yeah, it's working. I notice it's not a public broadcaster here. So I've always thought that so I've always thought that public broadcasting, things like the BBC, is that they've got a non-commercial model and they actually do try to do a sort of a balanced view. Is that also part of the solution we're looking for? Great. Shall we take maybe a couple more questions and then come back to panel members? Who else would like to ask a question? It's a gentleman over here. AI. So my understanding is AI is just gathering all the data in history. How does AI distinguish truth from bunk, drum? OK, anyone else want to come in? It's a lady on this side. We could get a mic to her. Thank you. Another angle we haven't discussed is the youth and they consume news in a very different way than I do. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Thank you. Great, fantastic. OK, so we have three questions. Vera, do you want to go first and maybe address this question of public broadcasting? I will go quickly through all three. I will be short, I promise. On BBC, well, I am watching, of course, what's happening around BBC. UK is unfortunately not in the EU anymore. But for the EU member states, so we put into the media freedom act some rules for the public service media to get sufficient financing and transparent processes for the people to lead this. And I think that this is something which follows the desire to have the golden griles on something stable and something reliable in each member state. The second thing, how does AI distinguish the truth? I don't know. But for us, what's worrying is the deep fake, which is misleading. It might be in my legal opinion qualified as a fraud. We have, I think, to follow also this line. And the use, I would leave it for the ladies. I have just two, the first and the third one. I think public broadcasting is one of the many models that we are looking at around the world. It is difficult to set up. It's expensive for a state, and a state needs to be well run to have a good public broadcaster. But I'll say that the public broadcaster in Ukraine is doing a wonderful job covering the war. And so it is a model that's hard, but one that can sometimes be replicated. It's just pretty rare around the world that it actually works. But it is definitely in the hopper. On the third, I mean, I think that we cannot ignore the fact that Gen Z gets their news from TikTok. And it's a really intimate and different form of media. Not a news site necessarily. But I say that one of the big things that hits there is we need to recognize that all this sort of intentional disinformation just amplifies crazy as misinformation and intentionally sharing false news. And it happens a lot. But in a really intimate way. And so I don't think we know how to handle it, but we definitely have to be working in that space. Yeah, I'd love to pick up on the youth question, make a comment or two about AI. But on your point about TikTok, I think it's something like some huge percentage of young people say, I get all my news on TikTok. 51% according to the lawyers. I looked at all different numbers this week. It's a huge percentage of people. And by the way, TikTok is awesome. I have a 12-year-old. I know how awesome it is. I think that a huge part of the answer is what is it that they like there? It's the multimedia format. It's everything about what you can do on TikTok. And I suspect, Emma, you'll say something similar. I can only give you this through an anecdote. A day or two after the Hamas attack happened on October 7th, Roger Cohen, who is the Paris Bureau Chief of the New York Times and has written for us for decades and is an expert on the Middle East, lands in Tel Aviv. And the first thing, this sort of esteemed journalist who's been around forever, who's not so young himself, does when he gets there is he makes a video of himself kind of coming into Tel Aviv and saying how still it is and how different it feels from the last time he's there and the darkness of the moment and the palpable way he can feel it. So what do I mean by that? You've got the journalist putting himself at the center of a piece of our journalism, very different from what the Times and the Journal would typically do in a newspaper fashion. Sorry, Emma, to speak for you, but I'm getting certainly very different from what the Times would do. That's one, two, you've got a man who has been doing journalism forever, actually just taking a selfie video as he would do if you were making a TikTok and our team adds some multimedia to that or even he's able to. And three, he's talking to you like a human being in a conversational voice and a lot of what I think news organizations need to do. And I think, Emma, you pushed on this is to talk in more casual ways about serious things with the weight and the authority, but a voice that doesn't feel like this is some nameless institution, but these are human beings actually coming to you. So I love that anecdote. And I think it's any suggestion that young people don't care about the news, the truth is so patronized, they do. But it's our job to make sure we're giving it to them in the form that they want to consume it. So your example is great. I mean, there's this wonderful girl on TikTok. I forget her name. She's 18 years old. She's got nails this long hair out here every day or every so often she gets up and she reads our articles from the Wall Street Journal that she loves. And she actually gets the print edition. This is what's so funny. And then she sort of translates it for a TikTok audience. She's an amazing person. That's gold. I want to hire her. I think we may already have reached out. Anyway, but the point is we have to respond to them. So perhaps they want their news in a different form. They certainly want it on a different platform. Perhaps they want news that's more constructive, news that offers them solutions rather than just endless problems. And I do also think there isn't, we need to do more to educate the young about the value of trusted news. I was in Germany before I came in, I was talking to some German journalists and they were telling me there's elections in Germany to regional elections in the East, there's some general sort of concern there. They've launched an initiative called Use the News, which is I think being rolled out in schools, which is telling young people about the value of trusted, independent news. I mean, there's no reason why we shouldn't be talking about this much more often to the young people in our lives. Because as I say, they care about it, they do. I'm gonna add one beat to that, if I may, which is we have to assertively explain to people. We cannot take it as a given that people can distinguish any people, especially young people, between independent journalism that comes from a posture of searching, not knowing that can exonerate a villain or interrogate a hero. We have to teach people that that is a process. What goes into that process, and it's not an ideology, it is a process for eradicating, just like medicine is a process, for eradicating bias where you can, because the human beings doing the journalists are gonna bring some of that to the table and you have to explain to people how that happens again and again. And honestly, the public deserves to know that. They deserve to, you said this, Emma, they deserve to understand, how did this journalism come to be? Who wrote it? Why should I believe them? What expertise do they bring to it? And another quick solution along those lines, against misinformation is the use of humor and satire. It works beautifully in this country. Yes, and games, and games. All of these things work beautifully and can get audiences where they live. OK, so next year we should have a game instead of a discussion. We still got time for one or two more questions if people want to ask. There's a gentleman over here, and yeah, just there with this. Hello, my name is Marcus Price. I'm working with ARD, German TV. So I'm working for a public broadcaster. I appreciate your statement, Vera Jurova. But how will the Commission navigate in the future if we see revenues and profits shrinking for the private companies and having strong public broadcasters who are a competitor in any case? So will you value this in the future? And the other question goes to Emma and Meredith concerning the fight against misinformation. If you have a lot of misinformation, do you see a fatigue to write about it? Because doing that, you also spread them again. So will you print all the news that's fit to print? Or will you write about all the news that were not fit to print before? Thanks. OK, time for one more question. Lady at the back. Great, thank you. Well, wonderful panel. My name is Dr. Rupa Dot. I lead the fastest growing women's movement in health called Women in Global Health. And it's wonderful to see this almost all women panel. And while we are really excited for this discussion as a practitioner myself and leading this global movement, we know misinformation is really affecting the health sector. It's breaking down the trust between providers and their patients and communities. And we are all hoping to move past the pandemic, but it still is a pandemic. What lessons have all of you learned that can be passed on to the wider society that's trying to really make sure facts get in front of people so that they can make the best health decisions? Thank you. Great. So we've got time, I think, for each of you to try and answer those questions as best you can. I can give a really short answer to that, which is you need. And I think it may get at your question. The only answer, in my opinion, is strong independent news gathering organizations that can reach many, many people with their work. That is the only answer. And on your question about AI, the information ecosystem will only be as good as the inputs. And in news, those inputs must begin with human news gathering, as Emma described. OK, Jean, do you want to go next? Just on the health information piece, the misinformation that was polluting that space is similar to that polluting the climate and environmental space. I just want to make a note for all the women in here that, in fact, gendered misinformation and disinformation is particularly undermining when it comes to expertise and a particular danger that news organizations need to think about all over the world. Any public-facing women are particularly vulnerable if they're scientists, if they're news organizations. So they're all sort of blended together. And that doesn't answer your question, but it does. You did highlight a really important issue. Great, thanks. Yeah, may I? COVID, we took very clear lessons from that. Because when we were in COVID, we wanted the platforms to offer privileged space for the health authorities to inform the people, to use the authority and to take care of the truth, which was known at that moment. You remember how hot it was. And I have to say, not all the health authorities were ready to do that. So the lesson is, each sector should take care of its evidence-based truth. Nobody else will do it. And it is mainly about the public authorities. Financing of the public service media, well, we put into the law that the public service media should have sufficient financing and predictable financing. So we were not precise. We didn't put three years ahead or something like that. Neither fees nor the direct public budget. We had to be more general. But now it's set in European stone that the public service media have to have the money. For the private media, my god, the situation is much more difficult because of the advertising money goes to the big tech space. So but you didn't ask about that. I don't want to steal time. OK, Emma. I would simply say that on misinformation, there's no silver bullet. But as we enter the next phase of disruption, we're going into it with our eyes open. It's not like the last phase of disruption where no one could have foreseen what social media was going to do to the public discourse. I really hope we have our eyes open. We know what the challenges are. I'm not entirely clear what the solution is. But at least we know that it's something we've got to confront. Great. Thank you very much. We're almost out of time. I should have introduced myself at the beginning. I'm the token man on the panel. I'm the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. It's been an absolutely fascinating discussion. As I said at the beginning, this idea of defending truth does feel a bit like Mission Impossible. It's like Sisyphus trying to push a stone up, a rock up the hill. But I think the important thing about this discussion is that a lot of people want to keep trying. And as Albert Camus famously wrote in his essay on the myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus was smiling. So I think that's a hopeful note to end on. But thank you very much. Maybe you can join me in thanking our brilliant... Thank you.