Who gets to tell the world’s news?

ملخص مفصل

A look back at the Global South's early efforts to challenge Western dominance of international news.

Daya Thussu was still a student when he landed a subediting desk job at the Press Trust of India (PTI), then India’s largest news agency.

It was the early 1980s, and the newsroom in New Delhi was alive with the clatter of telex machines delivering dispatches from across the world.

At his desk, Thussu, then in his mid-20s, worked through two very different streams of international news. One came from established Western agencies, including Reuters. The other arrived through a little-known network connecting newsrooms across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

“We would check the ticker to see what the story was and where it had come from,” Thussu says of his work with the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP). “It could be from anywhere - the Philippines, Iraq or across Africa. My job was to select stories that we would then send out to the PTI wires.”

The two streams of news offered different windows on the world. One came from established international agencies, largely based in Western capitals. The other represented an attempt by countries long dependent on those agencies to tell their own stories.

Describing it as a cumbersome process in which copy was edited by hand and then given to a typist to put into the system, Thussu nevertheless remembers it as valuable training. “It was great hands-on training for someone like me who was very interested in international news and was pursuing a PhD in international relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University,” he says from his home in London.

For decades, a handful of Western news agencies had dominated the flow of international reporting. Now, countries that had fought for political independence were trying something else: exchanging news directly with one another without relying on London, Paris or Washington, DC, to tell their stories.

It was an experiment born of the Non-Aligned Movement, a coalition of countries seeking a path independent of the rival superpowers of the Cold War.

And it raised a question that remains pertinent…

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