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

Abstract

This study focuses on determinants of foreign coverage different from those entertained by debate about 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 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 since they constitute a finite basis from which editorial choices are made. It is far from clear, however, that these agencies are only sources used by third world newspapers and, more important, that way they structure is necessarily identical with that of as it is eventually published. Although 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 issues some detail. Much of criticism of present order stresses that structural dependence upon western agencies results imbalanced foreign coverage, at expense of third world. Righter (1979: 121) explains that news is ... heavily biased toward industrialized countries. Horton (1978: 49) agrees that the flow is too heavily weighted with about industrialized countries. A seasoned American journalist (Rosenblum, 1977: 619), former vice president of Associated Press (AP) and now editor of Paris-based International Herald Tribune, carries argument one step farther and concludes that in papers of most Third World countries, items are predominantly from industrialized countries.