Word: third
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Western news organizations have so tight a strangle hold on international communications that the Third World simply cannot make itself heard, an imbalance that also purportedly perpetuates Western cultural domination...
Says Columbia Journalism Dean Elie Abel: "On the whole, the major media do an incredibly bad job of covering the Third World." To be sure, the West's press does devote considerably more ink and airtime to the likes of Uganda's Idi Amin than to more responsible leaders, and usually pays more attention to scandals and disasters than to complex social and economic stories. Yet those complaints can also be made about the West's coverage of its own affairs. If Western reporting about the developing world is thin, that may be because news follows the realities of world...
...Many Third World governments do not exactly encourage better coverage. The London-based International Press Institute, a watchdog group that monitors press freedom, reported in 1976 that 15 developing nations had expelled or refused entry to foreign correspondents in the previous year, and the rate has probably increased since then. Nigeria has booted out nearly all resident foreign journalists; the last Reuters man there was put into a dugout canoe with his wife and eight-year-old daughter and advised to start rowing toward neighboring Benin...
Perhaps the Third World's most accurate complaint is that the West dominates the world flow of communications, principally through the hegemony of the so-called Big Four (A.P., U.P.I., Reuters and Agence France Press). A study this year of 14 Asian newspapers made for the Edward R. Murrow Center at Tufts University showed the Big Four accounted for 76% of Third World news in those papers. Western dominance, however, is more a matter of economics than conscious conspiracy. International cable rates discriminate against small national news agencies and other low-volume users...
...News Agencies Pool, as it is called, now has 50 member nations, and exchanges lightly edited government press releases among subscribers. Roger Tatarian has proposed a joint multinational news agency that would concentrate on national-development stories. A task force of the New York-based 20th Century Fund including Third World journalists has endorsed the idea. The World Press Freedom Committee, a group of 32 international publishers and broadcasters, has raised about half of the $1 million it plans to spend training Third World journalists and technicians. American UNESCO Delegation Chief John Reinhardt, who heads the Government's International Communications...