Beta Agency Director at Presentation of Xinhua’s Media Report

Photo: Beta/Milos Miskov

The director of the BETA News Agency, Radomir Diklic, said at the April 30 presentation of a report by China’s Xinhua news agency on nurturing a global community of shared future, held in Belgrade, that agency journalists were the main barrier against fake news, while making sure that they do not impose their opinion, or that of one social group on the readers.

“In BETA, we adhere to an old definition of agency journalism – that news are sacred and that comments are a matter of personal choice,” Diklic said during the media, study and research seminar, which was attended by the representatives of the governments, the media and the academic communities of China and Serbia.

As one of the founders of BETA, which is marking its 30th anniversary this year, Diklic said that its creation had been precipitated by a decision of a group of journalists to defend the integrity and dignity of journalism, and that it survived to this day, in conditions of fast information flow, when even the social networks became “sources of information.”

“In that atmosphere, the role of news agencies is often disputed and minimized to the idea of them representing an obsolete form of journalism. However, integrity remains the goal. That is the hardest earned capital of a news agency – it takes years to build but it can be lost in a day. The users of BETA and Xinhua know that the news they pay for are accurate and verified,” Diklic pointed out, adding that cooperation between BETA and Xinhua began in December 2021 and that it had contributed to the average citizen of Serbia no longer experiencing China as some far away country, but as a modern and economically powerful state.