OREANDA-NEWS. December 11, 2009. Communication between people of the same profession, and especially among journalists – this is probably an absolutely essential feature of globalization today. This involves creative contacts as well as the exchange of experiences. I am confident that you will benefit from today's event. By the way, I actively support this very idea.

Our centuries-old traditions of shared history, economic development, common culture, close people-to-people contacts, and indeed the similarity of the problems before members of the Fourth Estate in the post-Soviet space, objectively determine your interest in joining efforts to look for effective answers to the issues journalism and the media now face. As for Russian foreign policy, developments and the state of affairs in the CIS are our absolute foreign policy priority. At the same time, relations with the non-CIS countries whose media are represented at this forum are also very important to us. After all, we have, if you will, a common “root system,” and this unique opportunity, which is available for the growth of humanitarian cooperation, of course, should be made maximum use of.

The CIS has a whole network of humanitarian entities which relate in some way or other to the media work. They include the CIS Interstate Humanitarian Cooperation Fund; and specialized industry bodies – the Council of Heads of State and Public Television and Radio Broadcasters, Council of Heads of News Agencies, and Interstate Council on Cooperation in the Periodical Press, Book Publishing, Book Distribution and Printing. These are the structures that deal with the various content and technology aspects of the issues that you care about. I think that their expertise and appropriate capabilities could be taken into account when planning the future work of the Forum, which today was convened in Moscow. I hope that this will not be a one-off event, but the beginning of a tradition.

I think that the media can and are already playing a special role in moving forward the processes our states and peoples objectively need today. This is primarily about providing objective news coverage and support for programs, projects and undertakings. If we talk about the technological side of things, progress in communication technologies objectively impedes the emergence of interfaith or ideological barriers and of any dividing lines generally – well, journalists’ honest and professional appraisal of events is also very important to us.

We at the Russian Foreign Ministry always listen to what assessments you express; it is by no means always that we agree with them, but we very often check ourselves and quite often find additional steps prompted by such indirect, circumstantial clues, if you will. Responsible journalism is in demand today as never before, not less, at least, than a responsible and intelligent policy. The language of hatred is, in principle, unacceptable for the media, which aspire to respectability, to an objective reflection of public sentiment, since a human being by nature needs peace, needs stability, tranquility and good neighborliness, the more so, I repeat, this is true for the peoples of our countries. Advancement towards the goal of unity of the modern world and the preservation of its cultural and civilizational diversity, I think, is also very clearly projected onto the space of our states. I am confident that this forum will help our work. Next year Russia will chair the CIS, so that if there are any ideas, some projects following today's forum, in the advancement of which you count on intergovernmental support, we will be ready to consider and actively cooperate with them.