The 57th Annual General Assembly of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union, held in Georgetown, opened with a question that has followed the region's media industry for years but has never carried this much urgency. Who will control the Caribbean story in the digital age? President Irfaan Ali and CBU President Anthony Greene put the question to delegates directly, framing it as a fight that extends well beyond technology. At stake, they argued, is the region's ability to preserve its own culture and sustain an independent press against forces largely based outside the Caribbean.

Ali used his address to describe a loss of control over how regional stories are told and distributed. Caribbean broadcasters, he said, no longer compete only with each other. They now sit alongside a global field of social media influencers, international streaming platforms and foreign content creators, all vying for the same audience with far greater resources. Younger viewers in particular have shifted their attention toward this external content, drawn by platforms built and optimised well beyond the region's borders. The risk, as Ali framed it, is not simply commercial. It is the gradual erosion of a distinct Caribbean voice as local narratives are pushed aside by content produced elsewhere for other audiences.

Greene's remarks turned to the financial mechanics behind that erosion. Technological advancement counts for little, he told delegates, if newsrooms cannot sustain themselves financially. Since mid-2025, a number of media operations across the region have shut down entirely, a trend Greene described as alarming rather than incidental. Closures have cost jobs and reduced the number of independent voices able to report on Caribbean affairs from within the Caribbean. Underlying the closures is a shift in where advertising money now goes. In some regional markets, as much as a quarter of advertising revenue that would once have supported local outlets is instead flowing to multinational technology companies. Greene characterised this as a structural problem rather than a temporary downturn, one that requires new business models and closer cooperation across the media sector rather than incremental fixes.

Artificial intelligence occupied much of the assembly's attention, and delegates were careful to present it as neither wholly beneficial nor wholly dangerous. In practical terms, AI tools have already found a place in Caribbean newsrooms, handling transcription, translation and data analysis in ways that save time and expand capacity. Delegates acknowledged these gains without hesitation. But the same technology carries risks that several speakers described as severe. Deepfakes and AI-generated content have begun to circulate more widely, and unverified material spreads quickly through messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, often reaching audiences before any newsroom has had the chance to verify it. The CBU has responded with new disclosure requirements for AI-generated content submitted to its regional awards, along with a set of ethical guidelines intended to govern how member organisations adopt the technology. The measures reflect an organisation trying to treat AI as a working tool while guarding against its use as a vehicle for misinformation.

By the close of the assembly, delegates had arrived at a shared position on how the region should respond to digital manipulation. Technology has changed how news is gathered and produced, but it has not replaced the verification and critical judgement that journalists bring to their work. Several speakers returned to this point, arguing that human oversight remains the element machines cannot substitute. The consensus that emerged was that credibility, built through independent and rigorous reporting, offers the Caribbean its most reliable defence against both misinformation and the slower threat of cultural erasure. For an industry facing closures, revenue loss and a rapidly changing technological landscape, that credibility was presented as the one asset regional media can still control.

‍