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South Africa's xenophobia crisis is not simply a story about migration. It is a story about a disinformation machine tur...
16/06/2026

South Africa's xenophobia crisis is not simply a story about migration. It is a story about a disinformation machine turning economic frustration into scapegoating, ahead of elections that could make everything worse.

In this reflective and analytical piece, our Learning Experience Manager Luckson Mulako Sikananu draws on history, data, and our work on migration narratives to ask what ethical journalism owes people on the move, and what is at stake when the information ecosystem fails them. Read the article here : https://www.rnw.media/index.php/news/the-rainbow-nations-broken-promise-scapegoats-scrolling-and-the-social-media-machine-fuelling-south-africas-xenophobia/

Last Friday, our team members Fer and Surabhi facilitated an in-person workshop on Digital Storytelling & Digital Safety...
15/06/2026

Last Friday, our team members Fer and Surabhi facilitated an in-person workshop on Digital Storytelling & Digital Safety at Radboud University in Nijmegan, with 10 incredible women as part of their continuous learning program for migrant communities.

In just two hours, we talked, doodled our dreams, shared practices, and navigated what it means to be female-presenting and a migrant in the digital media space.

 

Here are some of the key insights that have stayed with them from the session:

We make sense of ourselves by talking with others. Alone, we get lost. Together, our ideas expand and reach further.

Recognise the value you already bring to your community. Unearth it. Listen to it.

You don’t need to invent yourself before becoming yourself. Just start doing. The insights, values, and people will follow.

Your professional story should be authentic, rooted in who you are. Invite others into your practice. Ask for cooperation.

A network is not a static strategy, it’s a running verb. Active, alive, carrying care, inspiration, and feedback.

Safety is a material condition that makes openness, joy, and expression possible.

Un-safety is also material: threat, oppression, surveillance. And it’s a feeling too.

The session was a safe space of mutual sharing and learning, and we all concluded the session with both inspiration and concrete action points. We look forward to cotinuing this collaboration.

As we look back at the incredible journey of Season 1 of our podcast , one major question from our live podcast recordi...
10/06/2026

As we look back at the incredible journey of Season 1 of our podcast , one major question from our live podcast recording session and season finale in Vienna still echoes: How do we rebuild public trust in the media?

The answer lies entirely in how we view the people we are creating for. As our finale guest, audience-driven media expert Khalil A. Cassimally, beautifully put it during the episode:
"We are an industry that was created to serve people and then we just forgot that. It's time to reconnect with audiences because that is the only way we're going to change."

Stay tuned about our upcoming offering (RNTC) on strengthening audience engagement.

If you haven’t listened to the finale yet, catch Khalil and Bhanupriya Rao: discussing the future of audience-driven journalism:
🎧 Spotify: https://bit.ly/3NknW2k
🎧 YouTube Music: https://bit.ly/4aBz7NY

While The Devil Wears Prada 2 brings back the iconic lines, incredible style, and nostalgic humour, it also delivers a h...
09/06/2026

While The Devil Wears Prada 2 brings back the iconic lines, incredible style, and nostalgic humour, it also delivers a heavy dose of reality. The sequel tackles the unglamorous side of modern journalism: budget cuts, layoffs, AI takeover threats, and the exhausting pressure of chasing clicks instead of stories with real gravitas. 💔📰

Check out our latest guest op-ed exploring what the film really signals about the state of media and journalism today, written by Surabhi Srivastava, Director of Media Innovation at RNW Media.

https://www.rnw.media/index.php/news/the-devil-wears-prada-2-could-not-escape-the-existential-questions-that-confront-journalism-today/

When the independent witness is removed, the story doesn't get told—and power goes unchecked.Too often, we treat press f...
04/06/2026

When the independent witness is removed, the story doesn't get told—and power goes unchecked.

Too often, we treat press freedom and media pluralism as passive "values" to be celebrated in speeches, rather than critical democratic infrastructure that requires physical, digital, and financial protection.

From the arrest of journalists in international waters on the Global Sumud Flotilla, to total digital blackouts in Iran, the methods of suppression are evolving. Alarmingly, this erosion isn't limited to authoritarian regimes; we are seeing systemic harassment and regulatory failures in the United States and the heart of Europe.

At the exact moment independent journalism is under coordinated global assault, democracies are quietly underfunding it. While European independent media face annual €7 billion decline in journalism revenues between 2019 and 2023. (source: https://bit.ly/43MN5Yq)

We have to ask: Is Europe willing to treat media viability as a strategic democratic priority, or is it a secondary value to be negotiated away when politically inconvenient?

👉 Swipe through the deck below for a strategic deep-dive into the state of global press freedom, tech platform complicity, and the urgent financial reckoning ahead.

🔗 Read the full article here, written by Hounaz Beheshti, Advocacy Manager at RNW Media: hhttps://www.rnw.media/index.php/news/silencing-of-publicinterestmedia/

European Commission
European Parliament

Tomorrow, our colleagues Surabhi and Sana will be representing RNW Media at the GDC Europe Forum 2026 in Prague!The foru...
18/05/2026

Tomorrow, our colleagues Surabhi and Sana will be representing RNW Media at the GDC Europe Forum 2026 in Prague!

The forum is organized by the European Democracy Youth Network, in collaboration with the Global Democracy Coalition, and is part of the GDC Regional Forums 2026, sponsored by the Kettering Foundation.

Surabhi will also be taking the stage as a panelist on Panel II – Campaigning in the Age of AI, exploring how disinformation and hybrid influence operations are transforming campaigns, voter behaviour, and trust in political institutions — with lessons drawn from recent and upcoming European elections.

Sharing the stage with her are:
🔹 Aleksandar Mijailović (European Democracy Youth Network Serbia, Lawyer & Civic Activist)
🔹 Dr. Anthony DeMattee, Ph.D. (Data Scientist, The Carter Center Democracy Program)
🔹 Rasto Kuzel (Head of MEMO 98, media & elections expert)

These are conversations that sit at the heart of our work at RNW Media — We look forward to some insightful conversations and to sharing our learnings from the forum with you later this week. Stay tuned!

What does it mean when the conferences we hold to defend our rights become targets of the very forces we gather to resis...
15/05/2026

What does it mean when the conferences we hold to defend our rights become targets of the very forces we gather to resist? That's the question at the heart of a sharp new op-ed on RNW Media by Luckson Mulako Sikananu & Giovana Fleck — published the same day Zambia's Parliament passed the Public Gatherings Bill 2026.

💬 "The cancellation of the 2026 edition of RightsCon did not occur in isolation. It is one incident in a long and well-documented pattern of governments around the world effectively narrowing the conditions under which civil society can operate, and doing so with language carefully designed to appear reasonable."

The piece ends with a challenge the movement cannot ignore: there is no safe geography. Only the difficult work of building enough insulation — political, legal, diplomatic — to make these spaces harder to erase.

🔗 Read the full op-ed: https://ow.ly/mCaZ50YYQGE

We signed. And here's why it matters. RNW Media is proud to stand with hundreds of civil society, media and cultural org...
13/05/2026

We signed. And here's why it matters.

RNW Media is proud to stand with hundreds of civil society, media and cultural organisations across Europe — and beyond — in calling on EU institutions to strengthen the financial backbone of in the next Multiannual Financial Framework 2028-2034.

The numbers tell a stark story:
📉 €7 billion decline in journalism revenues across Europe between 2019 and 2023
📰 Two-thirds of Europeans pay nothing for news — while newsroom jobs keep shrinking
🚨 85% of civil society organisations working on fundamental rights fear funding shortages threaten their very existence
✅ Only 7% of Creative Europe Culture proposals were funded in the last call

Meanwhile, authoritarian actors are not standing still. Russia alone allocated the equivalent of €1.4 billion to state media in 2021 — with further increases since. The information space is a battlefield, and independent media is on the frontline.

AgoraEU is not a cultural nice-to-have. It is democratic infrastructure.

As an organisation working at the intersection of media freedom, information integrity and democratic resilience — including in some of the world's most repressive media environments — RNW Media knows firsthand what happens when independent voices go dark. We cannot let that happen in Europe or anywhere else in the world.

We call on and to ensure the final AgoraEU envelope matches the scale of the challenge. We also urge the Council to direct decommitted funds from the Rule of Law Conditionality Mechanism back into programmes that defend the values they were withheld to protect.

To our Dutch colleagues in the European Parliament — including and — your voice in these negotiations matters. We stand ready to engage.

And to and the Commission team driving Tech Sovereignty and Democracy: AgoraEU is where those commitments meet reality. Let's fund it accordingly.

Disinformation doesn't stop at borders. Electoral interference doesn't respect national jurisdictions. And yet — our res...
12/05/2026

Disinformation doesn't stop at borders. Electoral interference doesn't respect national jurisdictions. And yet — our responses to these threats remain fragmented, nationally anchored, and often one step behind. This is the central tension that the Global Democracy Coalition's Europe Pre-Forum Webinar will tackle head-on tomorrow, and RNW Media is proud to have Giovana Fleck, our Media Innovation Manager for Information Integrity, joining the conversation.

Giovana works at the intersection of technology and human rights — researching digital policy, narrative manipulation, and disinformation, and building healthier information ecosystems across the regions where RNW Media works. She leads our information integrity portfolio and brings a sharp, practice-grounded perspective to questions that are too often left in the realm of theory.

Alongside an exceptional group of experts — including voices from International IDEA, Democracy Reporting International, and the International Anti-Corruption Academy — Giovana will explore:
🔹 Why cross-border democratic threats continue to outpace coordinated responses
🔹 Where structural barriers to collaboration exist across governments, civil society, and the private sector
🔹 What meaningful democratic resilience looks like when disinformation and digital manipulation operate without boundaries

📅 Wednesday, May 13, 2026 | 3:00 PM CET / 9:00 AM ET💻 Online via Zoom — livestreamed on the GDC YouTube channel 🔗 Register via https://ow.ly/JJgQ50YXWLH

If you care about the future of democracy in Europe — and the global infrastructure needed to protect it — this is a conversation worth showing up for.

Luckson Mulako Sikananu now lives in Amsterdam, but his mind keeps going home — to Lusaka, Zambia. Zambia goes to the po...
07/05/2026

Luckson Mulako Sikananu now lives in Amsterdam, but his mind keeps going home — to Lusaka, Zambia. Zambia goes to the polls this year. And like so many countries in the Global South, the biggest threats to democratic participation won't make the headline — they'll show up in the everyday. In this powerful op-ed he challenges one of journalism's quiet failures: treating elections as though they are democracy itself.

💬 "Democracy is not a moment, it is a set of conditions, institutions, and norms that determine whether those in power are held accountable, whether citizens can participate freely and meaningfully, and whether the outcomes of elections translate into governance that reflects public interest and serves people."

Real democratic reporting asks harder questions. It traces the line from a conflict in the Gulf to a price hike in Lusaka. It interrogates political slogans instead of amplifying them. It refuses to let the ballot be the beginning and the end of the story.
Because democracy is not won or lost on election day alone. It is built — or eroded — in the conditions that surround it.

📖 Read the full essay https://ow.ly/Vqk650YVXXU

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