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taryn515
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Posted: Dec. 04 2004,14:26 |
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Here is the continuation from the main article: “It Is Not My Job To Engage The Ignorant”
At the University of Connecticut Human Rights Conference, a panel session was held that included Ofelia Barrios who is an advocate for human rights, immigrants, women and HIV prevention, Nkosinathi Biko who is the son of Steve Biko and the chairman of the Steve Biko Foundation, and Elizabeth Blunt, an international correspondent for the BBC. Other panel members were Salim Lone, a commentator on relations between Muslims and the West, and former director of communications for the UN mission on Iraq, Paula Newberg, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution; formally special advisor to the UN and the UN Foundation, and Gregory Alonso Pirio, CEO of EC Associates, a media consulting firm based in Los Angeles and Washington DC. The panel shared their experiences with human rights and the media and warned students about the obstacles that they faced in these experiences especially when dealing with the media.
Others applauded the media for informing the world to get people involved in issues like HIV/AIDS, the apartheid movement, and other problems especially in Africa and the Middle East. The students were advised that borders exist for states, but the news and media can travel across those borders freely. They stressed that both precise and skewed news can travel across the international system because of this freedom of the media. The true theme stressed by the panelist was that we are all subscribers to the media and that we can no longer accept such bias when reporting stories. It was shown that it is the individual’s responsibility to make themselves knowledgeable; they can’t expect others to do it for them.
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