Moscow (ANTARA) – Indonesia’s ANTARA News Agency strengthened cooperation with three major Russian media organizations—RT, Sputnik and TASS—during its president-director’s visit to Moscow on Tuesday.
ANTARA President Director Benny Siga Butarbutar met executives from the three organizations on the sidelines of the annual Organization of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA) meeting.
At RT, Butarbutar met Director General Vera Kharina to discuss potential audiovisual cooperation and participated in a television interview on OANA and the future of media.
He discussed the spread of disinformation and fake news in Asia-Pacific and the need for stronger media cooperation and fact-checking to address the problem.
Butarbutar also stressed that excessive information dominance by any single region could undermine news balance and called for greater diversity in regional sources.
He later visited Sputnik’s headquarters, where he signed a news-exchange cooperation agreement with Sergey Kochetkov, first deputy editor-in-chief of Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency.
The signing was witnessed by Hartyo Harkomoyo, deputy chief of mission at the Indonesian Embassy in Moscow, and Alla Chernysheva, Sputnik’s deputy director for foreign-language news production.
Butarbutar also accepted an invitation to participate in an English-language dialogue hosted by Sputnik.
During a meeting with TASS officials, Butarbutar discussed expanding cooperation beyond news exchanges, with an emphasis on strengthening the professional capacity of news agency journalists.
The three Russian media organizations will follow up on the agreements and discussions at the technical level through their representatives in Jakarta.
The meetings took place during OANA’s annual gathering, which brought together 41 news agencies from 35 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Besides its Russian partners, ANTARA held discussions with Kyodo, Xinhua, Yonhap, Nepal News Agency RSS, Mongolia’s Montsame and Afghanistan’s Bakhtar News Agency.
Butarbutar also discussed potential cooperation with Saudi Press Agency, Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) and Turkiye’s Anadolu Agency.
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Translator: Andika Wahyu W, Nabil Ihsan
Editor: Rahmad Nasution
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