News Agencies and Global Communication: Development Implications for Third World Nations

Abstract

This paper is fundamentally, an overview of western news agencies and the roles
they play in international communication. It argues that most of these roles have some consequences undesirable to the Third World Nations. Instead of facilitating the development of the poor nations of the world, the study reveals that the major news agencies by their worldwide operations are impeding the development of the under-developed counties. The study therefore, indicts the major news agencies for being a clog in the developmental wheel of Third World Nations, pointing out that they conspire with other impeding factors to render fruitless, the collective developmental efforts of most of the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. It attributes to the news agencies such global issues as: the reduction of the world to a “global village”, cultural imperialism, ethnocentrism, media imperialism, media dependency, global agenda-setting and the imbalance in world information order. It concludes on a crying call with developing nations (including Nigeria) to look inward for their re-birth, re-generation, re-discovery
and development.

LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research Vol. 5 2008: pp. 413-428