Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool

The Non-Aligned Movement and News Dependence

The Cold War dominated international relations post-World War II. Both the United States and the USSR strained to expand their influence across the [Page 368]globe. Scores of new nations came into being based on former colonies. The political project of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was forged from decolonization movements and was formally constituted in the early 1960s. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the NAM crafted an anti-imperialist political platform that defined Western economic and cultural domination as mutually reinforcing. In partnership with UNESCO, NAM launched twin campaigns in which peoples of developing nations sought self-determination in a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and in a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO).

The call for NWICO emerged in part as a response to the global dominance of the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse. Despite the fact that NAM countries hastened to establish national and regional news agencies of their own, global news flows remained overwhelmingly controlled by Western firms, whose much longer histories allowed for significant infrastructure and resource advantages. Collectively, those firms largely monopolized international news flows, typically focusing on stories of concern to the West. Framing information for Western audiences within a commodity model of news production, these agencies not only negatively skewed developing world realities, but also they created international news dependency on their product. Absent the resources needed to employ foreign correspondents, domestic news agencies and media outlets in non-aligned nations often had no choice but to rely on them.

The Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool

Through a series of conferences from 1973 to 1976, NAM leaders created NANAP as a practical step toward redressing global news imbalances. In 1975, news agencies in 12 non-aligned countries officially began using the NANAP for multilateral information exchange. Yugoslavia's Tanjug was the first national news agency to coordinate the collection and redistribution of news among non-aligned countries. By 1976, Tanjug reported that NANAP had 40 participating agencies.

Despite this, NANAP's deployment and uptake among non-aligned countries was perpetually uneven. A few well-established contributors produced large percentages of the content distributed. Such disproportion reflected the postcolonial material realities of news media and communications infrastructure and professional development within non-aligned countries. Nevertheless, by 1981, NANAP had 87 participants and was transmitting 40,000 words per day in four languages, although in 1978, the Associated Press was transmitting more than a million words a day in nine languages.

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