World Press Freedom Day

May 3rd is World Press Freedom Day, and every year, UNESCO organizes a conference to celebrate and honor this important global topic. Every year, the conference is in a different city around the world, and this year it was held at the United Nations in NYC. Founded in 1945, the “United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is a specialized agency of the United Nations aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture.”This year, Cartooning for Peace, partnered with UNESCO to bring cartoons from around the world to the conference, including ones from The New Yorker. You can see all the cartoons in the link. Cartooning for Peace was founded in 2005; I was one of its first members, speaking at the UN for the first time that day. Kofi Anan, then Secretary General, loved cartoons and understood their power. Today I was honored to be invited back to live-draw the proceedings. As I sat in the audience drawing the speakers, I heard a sense of urgency: free press is seriously under attack around the world. And when free press is gone, democracy is quick to follow. This is in part because of the shifting transformation of how news media is written and broadcast, we are seeing dramatic changes in how and where the world gets its news. Some of it is fact-based journalism, and some is fake. It is dire.I heard urgent cries for activism, pleas for understanding and communication. We learned that story telling is key to globally peace, it helps us understand our common humanity through our individual lives. And we heard that we must learn how to use the internet better, we must learn how to use it better than bad actors. We can harness the good that can be found in the inteconnectivity of the internet to combat nefarious forces.

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