A New Look at Foreign News Coverage: External Dependence or National Interests?

Extract

This study focuses on determinants of foreign news coverage different from those entertained by the debate about the New International Information Order (NIIO): national interests and media traditions. It is common knowledge that newspapers devote little space to foreign news; we know even less about what that small space contains. The NIIO discussions suggest that third world newspapers, dependent mostly upon western wire services, have little choice but to print what they get. A newspaper like the New York Times, by contrast, relies on its own foreign correspondents and much less on wire service copy; hence it can choose what it prints. Wire services do help determine published news since they constitute a finite basis from which editorial choices are made. It is far from clear, however, that these agencies are the only sources used by third world newspapers and, more important, that the way they structure the news is necessarily identical with that of the news as it is eventually published.

Although the NIIO debate has been going on for years, it is now reaching western audiences. Horton (1978), Rubin (1977), Sussman (1977), Rosenblum (1977, 1979), and Righter (1978, 1979), among others, have recently described the issues in some detail. Much of the criticism of the present “order” stresses that structural dependence upon western agencies results in imbalanced foreign coverage, at the expense of the third world. Righter (1979: 121) explains that “news is … heavily biased toward the industrialized countries.” Horton (1978: 49) agrees that “the news flow is too heavily weighted widi news about the industrialized countries.”