Shaping the Future of Media: Dr. Sohail Discusses Truth as Infrastructure

In an age where anything can be faked, the onus of establishing the truth rests as much on a nation's digital infrastructure as on its newsrooms.

It is a conviction that our Chairperson Dr. Sohail Munir, has consistently advocated, and one he carried into the 16th National Media Workshop at the National Defence University Islamabad (NDU). He joined a respected panel on “Technology & Media: Latest Trends,” and was invited to share a perspective that institutions across the country increasingly look to.

As the Distinguished Visiting Fellow, he delivered the session's closing address, titled “Truth as Infrastructure.” He spoke about how in the digital age, society is losing its shared sense of what's real. Technology moves at the speed of invention; trust moves at the speed of institutions, and we are all living in the gap between them. As information becomes abundant and our attention spans shrink, studies have shown that falsehood travels faster and further than the truth.

His central call was for a strategic shift in how we deal with falsehood: we need to flip the effort from disproving lies to confirming the truth.

Information will be easily verifiable, and misinformation will find far less room to spread, if truth itself becomes the infrastructure through three lines of effort:

• Provenance - build the rails of trust, so authentic content can carry its own verifiable credentials from the source. Under the Digital Nation Pakistan Act 2025, the Pakistan Digital Authority is already working to lay the national rails for digital identity and trust services.
• Governance - write the rules in our own hand, requiring synthetic content to declare itself by law.
• Training the human layer - no protocol can replace a trained mind. Citizens must learn to distinguish truth from falsehood and think before they share.

None of this is the work of any single institution. If we do not want trust to depend on guesswork, we need collaborations across media, technology, and government, and we need citizens who pause before they amplify.

That is the work ahead. Building a digital infrastructure that helps align these ecosystems around trust. Dr. Sohail ended his presentation with a line worth carrying forward: truth defended is sovereignty defended. Defending the truth is how Pakistan stays in control of its own story.