Seite 1 It's time for journalists to listen Seite 2 Serving the public Seite 3 Talking with people rather than at them ZEIT ONLINE supports this year's World News Day , organized by The World News Association (WAN-IFRA), a global network of 3,000 news publishing companies. On this occasion, we have asked Rasmus Kleis Nielsen to reflect on the current threats against journalism. He is Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, a post he will leave at the month to join the University of Copenhagen as a Professor in the Department of Communications .
Read the German version of his article here . Today is World News Day, a global initiative to draw public attention to the role that journalists play in providing trustworthy news and information that serves citizens and democracy. It is a good day to underline that the biggest threats to that role are political, and that the best and last line of defence against these threats is public support for independent journalism.
Prominent politicians across the world are directly attacking inconvenient journalists with threats, lawsuits, or worse. They pressure platform companies to remove their work. They belittle and vilify individual reporters when it suits them, often singling out women and minorities.
They encourage their supporters to distrust the news, and sometimes incite them to attack journalists. While depressing, we should not be surprised that this is so. At its best, independent.