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MEDIA: South Seeks News “For Us and By Us”

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 18 2005 (IPS) - In an interview with a U.N. correspondent many moons ago, an outspoken Asian politician was asked to name the “leading newspapers” in his country.

“We don’t have any leading newspapers,” he shot back, “because all our newspapers are misleading.”

The answer he gave was apparently prompted by the fact that virtually every newspaper in his country – and perhaps the rest of the developing world – depended heavily on Western wire services for their overseas news coverage, mostly slanted or sensational.

Ernest Corea, a former newspaperman-turned-ambassador, points out that in the run-up to the recent presidential elections in Sri Lanka, the only worldwide coverage of the polls last week was the story about a candidate promising to give every Sri Lankan household a cow – if he won.

Mercifully, the cows were spared because the candidate lost despite his bovine pledge.

Although some dismissed the story as “a lot of bull”, the wide coverage it received in the mainstream newspapers focused on the selection of news from the developing world tailored to meet the needs of a readership in the Western world.

The world’s mainstream media have long been accused of a pro-Western bias, paying little or no attention to newsworthy events in the developing world – or of focusing on political trivialities that play well before Western audiences.

Now, after a break of about 30 years, the 116-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is trying to resurrect a long-dormant proposal for the creation of a Southern news agency that will attempt to fill the current void.

As current chairman of NAM, Malaysia will be hosting a meeting of ministers of information in Kuala Lumpur next week to study the possibility of creating a NAM news organisation and to promote greater information flow among NAM countries. The ultimate goal is the creation of a New International Information and Communication Order (NIICO).

The conference of ministers of information of non-aligned countries is sixth in a series which began in Zimbabwe in 1987.

“As chair of NAM, Malaysia is very serious about establishing the proposed NAM News Network (NNN),” Ambassador Hasmy Agam of Malaysia told IPS. “We hope it will be endorsed by the Conference”.

If and when NNN is established, it is likely to be initially funded by Malaysia, with voluntary funding by other interested NAM member states.

A paper to be circulated at the upcoming Kuala Lumpur meeting says that “NAM members strongly believe that the establishment of NIICO would be an integral component to correct the current imbalanced flow of information which is a legacy of the past, and mainly serves to perpetuate the dominance of the developed nations in terms of world trade, commerce and other economic activities.”

NIICO also seeks “to remove internal and external obstacles to a free flow and wider and better balanced dissemination of information and ideas” and strengthen South-South cooperation in the exchange of news among NAM members.

Historically, the proposal to set up a news agency of the South goes back to a decision taken at a NAM summit meeting in Algeria in 1973. Subsequently, in January 1975, NAM established a “non-aligned news agency pool” under the leadership of Yugoslavia and its domestic news agency Tanjug.

The primary role of the news pool, which consisted of about 40 members at most, was to exchange news among national news agencies.

Right from the outset, the Western news media launched a campaign against it, decrying that information from NAM news agencies were under government control and that most of the agencies did not have the infrastructure for news transmission.

Corea, a former Sri Lanka ambassador to the United States and a member of his country’s delegation to the 1979 NAM summit in Havana, is supportive of the idea of a NNN. But he is hoping that it will not go the way of the now-defunct news agency pool.

“The fact that prospects for creating an ‘alternative’ news/exchange organisation are being examined in a political context, with only ministers of information involved, distorts the discussion,” Corea told IPS.

He pointed out that there will be plenty of critics who will say that the discussion is actually an attempt to breathe new life into the Non-Aligned Movement which lost much of its relevance when the cold war ended in 1979.

A NAM news pool, created many years ago, faltered and failed. That NAM news pool was meant to be part of the New International Information and Communications Order (NWICO), which was itself considered the communications arm of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), Corea added.

Since then, he said there have been far reaching changes in the world of media. “Today, domestic news distribution is dominated by local news agencies in many countries. National news agencies – whether privately owned or government-owned – now exist all over the globe,” said Corea, author of “Non-Alignment: the Dynamics of a Movement”.

India, for instance, has a particularly strong news distribution system. Almost every member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has a national news agency of its own. Similarly, information exchange through the blogosphere is flourishing, Corea said.

On the whole, however, global news coverage has greatly improved, and major news agencies as well as other media outlets write with understanding and sensitivity compared with years gone by.

“But what is still missing, however, is adequate coverage of the pluses and minuses of development, in all its aspects,” said Corea, who once chaired the Commonwealth Select Committee on the Media and Development.

Where, for instance, he asked, is coverage in the big news agencies of the “UG99”, the wheat rust that takes its name from the country and year in which it was first detected, and that could destroy some 70 percent of the world’s wheat crops?

“About the only news agency that emphasises development issues in its coverage is Inter Press Service (IPS)”, Corea said. This was, in fact, the major goal of those who were involved in its founding.

“If NAM, the 132 developing countries of the Group of 77, and others really want to fill this gap in news coverage, it could do so by persuading its domestic media institutions to support IPS, and urging its major investors to support the service financially,” he added.