Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 8
Trend:
Baku has hosted a roundtable meeting on “Media coverage of criminal events: Public interests and professionalism.”
Vugar Aliyev, deputy head of the Azerbaijani Presidential Administration’s department for socio-political affairs, made speech at the meeting.
“Foundations of ensuring freedom of speech and information in Azerbaijan, creating the necessary conditions for the free activity of the media, strengthening their material and technical base, forming the media which express position of the Azerbaijani state, the public, and providing the media with full support were laid by the national leader Heydar Aliyev, they are the main directions of Azerbaijan’s media policy, which is successfully continued today by President Ilham Aliyev,” Vugar Aliyev said.
Vugar Aliyev noted that dozens of TV and radio channels, news agencies, hundreds of newspapers and magazines, online information resources operate in Azerbaijan today, a great number of journalists are freely, without any external pressure, preparing information, comments and analytics about the events taking place in the Azerbaijani society and the world, presenting it to Azerbaijani citizens.
“However, in a number of cases, given the current competition, online media forget about state and public interests, and, without considering the consequences, provide citizens with incorrect, sometimes harmful information,” he said.
“From time to time, we encounter this. In particular, the media’s too loose coverage of the events related to the ceasefire violation on the frontline between the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops in 2014 made it necessary to hold a meeting of media leaders and heads of press services of Azerbaijani state agencies, and contributed to the fact that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed the relevant act in order to better ensure information security.”
Vugar Aliyev noted that over the past two weeks, significant historical events of a global scale took place in Azerbaijan and the South Caucasus region.
“Thanks to the purposeful policy corresponding to Azerbaijan’s national interests pursued by President Ilham Aliyev, the Azerbaijani state became the central figure of the events, by having once again demonstrated its potential,” Vugar Aliyev added.
“The commissioning of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway will remain in history not only as a significant event for Azerbaijan and the countries of the region, but also a historic milestone of global, international significance,” he noted.
“The meeting of the presidents of Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia held in Tehran and the results achieved at the meeting once again showed that Azerbaijan, which is the initiator of global transnational projects and which holds a leading position in their implementation, is also a major initiator and the leading figure of bilateral and trilateral formats of cooperation in the region.”