Who gets to tell the world’s news?
Over the past 50 years, the global flow of news has dramatically reshaped who tells the world's stories and how they reach audiences, with the Non-Aligned Movement leading efforts to challenge Western dominance.
In the early 1980s, Daya Thussu worked at India's Press Trust of India (PTI), processing two distinct streams of international news. One came from established Western agencies like Reuters, while the other arrived through the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP), connecting newsrooms across Asia, Africa and Latin America. This dual stream represented an ambitious attempt by newly independent nations to tell their own stories without relying on Western perspectives.
Western News Cartel
By the mid-19th century, three European news agencies had emerged as dominant players: Germany's Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau, Britain's Reuters, and France's Agence Havas. In 1859, they formed agreements dividing international news markets and territories, creating what Thussu describes as "a news cartel system." Reuters, founded in 1851, became so powerful it was often referred to as "an empire within an empire" due to its close ties to British imperial infrastructure.
Non-Aligned Movement
As colonial empires unraveled, newly independent nations questioned why international news remained concentrated in Western hands. Founding leaders included Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, and Indonesia's Sukarno.
By the 1970s, NAM began taking concrete steps toward sustainable cooperation, with Sima Kokotovic noting more structured approaches at conferences in Lusaka (1970) and Algiers (1973). The movement became a platform for debating imbalances in the international system, particularly in information flows.
New Information Order
These discussions fed into the campaign for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) within UNESCO. Supporters wanted developing nations to build stronger news agencies and broadcasting infrastructure to reduce dependence on Western media. Nabil Dajani recalls the optimism surrounding these efforts, describing NWICO as "an ambitious, if idealistic, attempt to address inequalities in the global flow of information."
The Non-Aligned countries believed that the wealthy Western nations had imposed information imperialism on them, which was essentially a form of neocolonialism. Their argument was that the major international news agencies reported on developing countries only when disasters, wars, diseases and other negative events occurred.
NANAP Launch
In January 1975, NANAP was officially launched with a statement from Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike transmitted by telex across participating agencies from Yugoslavia's Tanjug news agency. Ljubica Markovic, then 24, worked closely with the designated NANAP news desk at Tanjug. This initiative represented a practical implementation of the movement's vision for more equitable information flows between developing nations.
The experiment faced challenges with cumbersome manual editing processes, but it provided valuable training for journalists like Thussu and represented a crucial step toward challenging Western media dominance. The question of who decides what the world gets to know remains pertinent today as digital platforms continue to reshape global information flows.
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