• MBC’s Group Director Ali Jaber highlights social media power
• Youth mobilized around Gaza as Western media ‘failed’ in duty

Dalal Awienat

DUBAI: “News is a human need and not a luxury,” said MBC’s Group Director Ali Jaber in Dubai on Tuesday.

“It is a need for everyone to know what’s happening around us, a world without news is not a world that we would ever live in,” said Jaber in a session at the Arab Media Summit.

“Social media and traditional media have a complementary relationship, social media has none of the restrictions that traditional media outlets have.

“Social media platforms are not journalistic platforms but can be utilized for that purpose,” he said.

Jaber said social media has proven to influence change in the news world, and cited the crisis in Gaza as an example. Jaber said he believes global outrage from the youth was mobilized by social media.

“Social media moved generations during the Gaza crisis, especially since traditional media in the West failed. Social media filled the gap that was generated by the obvious bias in Western traditional media,” said Jaber.

“Under the motto of freedom of speech, social media is attracting a larger number of audience who are trying to find faster and shorter news to consume,” he said.

Jaber said traditional media needs to implement the quick and fast nature of social media.

“We are in a changing world, it’s naive to say traditional media will stay dominant … We have to teach newsrooms to write 360 news that can be adapted into any form including social media,” he added.

“TV benefited a lot from social media, we use social media as a means of promoting for us, we need to have a community that we can work with around the clock and that is promoted by social media,” he said.

Jaber said although he is an artificial intelligence skeptic, he believes education is key to utilizing this technology safely and to their full potential.

“AI is a real milestone and a great pillar of everything we want to do … AI will be a key part of our work in the journalism world,” he added.

“We need to educate people on how to deal with things like fake news and other problems that may arise from utilizing AI,” he said.