Thank you for the floor. My name is Anna Oosterlinck, and I represent the Global Forum for Media Development, a network supporting over 200 media organisations worldwide.
Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen.
The million-dollar question today is: Who controls our reality?
In our everyday personal and work life, do we choose to make decisions based on fabricated or synthetic content, boosting profits and serving the political interests of a handful of mighty corporations based in a few countries? Or do we seek out independent reporting and evidence from public-interest journalism?
I have been engaging with the GD since it was a mere idea on paper. I have heard much talk about information integrity and saving our democracies. Journalism, the institution designed to hold power to account with facts, seems to be largely missing in this dialogue. As my colleague Courtney Radsch from the Center for Media and Digital Governance at Open Markets has said, in an information ecosystem, journalism is a keystone species. It stabilises trust, anchors verification, structures accountability, and enables other institutions to function. Remove it, and the information ecosystem doesn’t adapt — it collapses.
This is about the concentration of power that has allowed Big Tech to lay claim to all of humanity’s information and creativity, what we often call “content”: AI systems are trained on journalistic content from around the world, which is scraped without consent, compensation, or credit. This is about AI infrastructure, which is increasingly concentrated with a few hyperscalers and digital platforms, reinforcing existing inequalities and undermining journalism’s business models and public trust.
The solution? Journalism IS critical infrastructure, this is not just about “reading the Sunday paper”. Every democracy, every market, every security architecture relies on trustworthy information.
This requires a multi-layered governance approach – we need:
- Public digital infrastructure, including cloud services, that are accessible, affordable, non-discriminatory and human rights compliant by design, driven by communities, including media, in the public interest. GFMD is providing space for the development of the journalistic stack.
- Industrial policies that ensure public-interest AI – not just for developers, but most importantly for those using AI in the public interest, including media.
- Finally, AI governance must require that all human rights are embedded across the full lifecycle of all AI technologies, including media freedom and freedom of expression. AI governance must also support the economic sustainability of independent journalism, including fair compensation mechanisms.
Responsible, secure, accountable, transparent, and human rights-based AI by design is our collective priority.
Thank you.