Türkiye’s global news agency, Anadolu Agency's (AA) President and CEO Serdar Karagöz on Monday lauded close and brotherly relations between Turkic countries as five of their news agencies moved to form an association to increase collaboration.
Karagöz underlined the importance of linguistic commonalities among Turkic nations during a meeting of senior officials from five countries’ news agencies, saying, “We believe in the integrative power of Turkic languages.”
Türkiye’s communications director, Fahrettin Altun, and Aksakallar Council of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) Chairperson Binali Yıldırım also attended the meeting hosted by AA, in which the Association of Turkic News Agencies (ATNA) was officially formed.
The association will also help combat misinformation, Karagöz said.
“Whenever a piece of news emerges from within the Turkic world, those five news agencies will act together to determine the reliability of it and will prevent the dissemination of a false one and manipulation efforts through this cooperation mechanism,” he said, referring to the newly formed ATNA.
“Manipulation and disinformation are two of the biggest risks in today’s world,” Karagöz said, adding that: “Fact-checking mechanisms are getting more important by the day.”
“The main purpose of news agencies is to inform the public most accurately,” he said, adding that the ATNA will focus on ways to increase the reliability of its member agencies.
Karagöz said AA is “excited to cooperate with news agencies from the Turkic world that would also bring together Turkic nations even closer owing to their common history.”
“We have to display a determined stance against international media’s biased approach,” he said, also reiterating President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s goal of “achieving a Turkic world that plays a big role in the solution to global crises.”
He asserted, “I believe that we will contribute to the president’s goal with this association.”
“Every step that we take in this platform is important so that our voice is heard and our influence grows,” he said.
“We will increase the level of cooperation between the institutions in the Turkic world and the potential of the Turkic world to adhere to a common approach,” he vowed.
“We are witnessing history being made here. The association that we are forming here will play a big role in building the joint approach, idea and excitement of the Turkic world,” Karagöz concluded.
Earlier, Karagöz and heads of agencies from Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan signed a document to form the joint media platform ATNA officially.
