site.btaUPDATED Anniversary Guests: Council for Electronic Media acting Chair Veleva, members Naplatanova, Kadrinova

"BTA is not simply an institution, BTA is an epoch," Council for Electronic Media (CEM) acting Chair Simona Veleva said here on Sunday. She attended a ceremony marking the agency's 127th birthday.

"We wish you to be a leader of the Bulgarian information society and not just a part of it," Veleva said.

She noted that the media regulator highly appreciates the professionalism and efforts that BTA staffers invest in ensuring and asserting the fair and objective coverage of current domestic and international development. "You are making impressive efforts for the exchange of news between Bulgaria and distant corners of the globe and to assert the agency's role as a news leader. Keep up the good work," the CEM acting Chair pointed out.

In her words, BTA is a "guarantee of truthfulness, of checked facts, of pluralism and diversity of everything that is happing in the capital, in all parts of the Bulgaria and everywhere where Bulgarians live. Really impressive efforts are being made to cover breaking news from all parts of the world where there are Bulgarian communities and to make them feel integrated. BTA therefore performs prominently precisely as a cultural hub. Not just a centre for sharing news but a source of news about all expatriates who live for Bulgaria and are interested in Bulgaria," Veleva added.

CEM member Gabriela Naplatanova, who also attended the ceremony, wished BTA to stay at the forefront of the modernization of journalism in Bulgaria. She wished the BTA staffers "to be, as always, exceptional professionals and irreproachable in the true, accurate, timely and comprehensive coverage of the news feed which they present to use in today's fast-developing world of technologies," she added.

In her words, "when there is a war of the narratives on certain events, it is precisely BTA that is the role model for the rest of the media to cover events and keep the public informed of all international and domestic developments."

For her part, CEM member Kadrinka Kadrinova wished BTA to remain, as always so far, a bulwark of true information about everything happening in Bulgaria. "If journalists don't check BTA, they can never be certain that something has really happened," she pointed out, adding that she herself was doing so as a practising journalist.