Discussion in Baltic Assembly's culture committee to focus on media cooperation

TALLINN - In a meeting of the education, science and culture committee of the Baltic Assembly in Vilnius on Friday, MPs, government representatives and sectoral experts from the Baltic countries were about to discuss combating false information and improving media cooperation.

Urve Tiidus, the head of the Estonian delegation to the Baltic Assembly, explained that the information war waged by Russia creates a special need for residents to be able to distinguish objective information from propaganda.

"Media education is necessary, because it is easier to exploit people with poor media literacy in the information war without them realizing it," Tiidus said according to spokespeople for the Riigikogu.

"The economic situation in the media landscape is also changing. As people prefer to get information from social media, advertising money has also migrated there, and less money reaches local media outlets and professional journalists to be used for creating a high-quality information space. This is an important place for cooperation," the chair of the Estonian delegation said.

For these reasons, the Baltic Assembly is about to discuss ways for establishing a joint media literacy improvement program for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and a reliable information transmission platform that would report about what is happening in the Baltic countries in Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, as well as in English and Russian.

The meeting will also discuss the promotion of cultural cooperation between the Baltic countries and joint efforts to bring people together. Furthermore, vocational and applied education, as well as research in both the hard sciences and space, will be talked about.

The Baltic Assembly is a consultative cooperation body of the parliaments of the three Baltic states, which discusses issues of mutual interest. In 2023, the Baltic Assembly is chaired by Estonia. The motto of the Estonian presidency is to continue building up a resilient, secure, reliable and sustainable Baltic region.