The Deputy PM was accompanied by Lieutenant General Nguyen Trong Nghia, Deputy Director of the General Department of Politics; Nguyen Van Tung, Vice Chief of the Government Office; and Hoang Vinh Bao, Deputy Minister of Information and Communications.

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 Deputy PM Vu Duc Dam at the working session. Photo: VNA
PAN Editor-in-Chief, Major General Pham Van Huan, briefed the Deputy PM and his entourage on PAN’s building and development history, and its major achievements over the past 67 years. Named by late President Ho Chi Minh as PAN, since its birth, the newspaper has brought into full play its good traditions and overcome difficulties and successfully fulfilled its information dissemination tasks.

Currently, the press agency has five publications, namely the People's Army Newspaper Daily; the People's Army Newspaper Weekend; Monthly Magazine: Events and Witnesses; The People's Army Newspaper Online Edition in 3 languages: Vietnamese, English, and Chinese (Lao and Khmer editions will be published in the second quarter of 2017); and the quarterly Internal Bulletin for Collaborators.

To complete this year’s tasks, PAN has tried its best to closely cover activities of the armed forces, socio-economic situation of the country, and domestic and international situations to efficiently disseminate information; continue to renovate and improve the publications in both contents and forms; focus on the implementation of the Resolution of the 12th National Party Congress; and combat wrong viewpoints of hostile forces and their “peaceful evolution” attempts.

Besides, PAN’s reporters should continuously study the Party’s guidelines, perceive the State’s policies and directives of the Ministry of National Defense to meet increasing requirements for information dissemination in the new context.

At the working session, Gen Nghia also briefed Deputy PM Vu Duc Dam on other defense and military press agencies’ and PAN’s activities. Over the past time, military press agencies in the whole army have made remarkable achievements in disseminating the Party's guidelines and State's policies and in reflecting all aspects of the army. The general proposed that the Deputy PM support PAN and other military press agencies to effectively implement the project “Modernization of military press agencies in the period of 2014-2018” initiated by the Central Military Commission and the Ministry of National Defense.

The Deputy PM praised the newspaper’s contributions to orienting the public opinion toward national events and covering exact and truthful information. He urged the press agency to promote creativity, point out difficulties and fight social vices and asked the newspaper to be more active in updating information and enhancing its dissemination work, contributing to protecting the Party, the Fatherland and combating hostile forces’ strategy of “Peaceful evolution.” “PAN should continuously improve its staffers' professional skills to improve the newspaper’s quality to increase the number of the PAN readers and to become one of the six major national multimedia agencies by 2025,” he stated.

On the occasion of the lunar New Year, Deputy PM wished all PAN’s staffers good health and success.

Translated by Hong Thanh