Standardisation of News

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

Globalisation today means integration of world economies, trade and business. But this buzzword of today is as old as European colonialism. The colonial powers, by virtue of their occupation of the colonies, made them parties to all treaties, accords, rules, conventions and other arrangements they signed with other countries. When India became free, it was already party to a number of treaties and agreements Britain had signed on its behalf. Apart from this, the French left their stamp in Pondicherry and Chandranagore, the Portuguese in Goa and the British all over India. Her laws and jurisprudence, her constitution, her administrative structures all bear the stamp of globalisation. Today, globalisation is an uncontrolled process as a consequence of the marriage of satellite technology with that of the computers. Nearly three trillion dollars worth transactions take place every day on the net and elude any state oversight.

The press has not escaped the embrace of globalisation. English press in India began its career, adopting the London Times and Manchester Guardian as their models. The earlier newspapers relied on journals from Britain for their foreign news. They were all owned either by Englishmen or European missionaries. Even after Indian newspapers achieved an identity of their own, they continued to depend on and continue to depend on foreign news agencies for global news. Therefore, globalisation, whether in the area of economy or news is not a new phenomenon. News agencies like Reuters played the role of globalisers. They are the first global media organisations giving a new meaning to news as a commodity gathered and distributed for the  purposes of political communication, trade and entertainment. One aspect that missed the notice of media historians is the role played by news agencies, acting globally and as a cartel in the globalisation of ideology and markets.

Today Reuters is the richest news company quoted on the London exchange. Its news reaches 150 countries and thousands of newspapers. The New World Information and Communication Order was in fact a response to the one-sided communication globalisation taking place till the seventies. Third world countries began to challenge the maps of worldview drawn by the western news agencies. They demanded a new information order in which they would also be prominent players. The reason for this stridency is that these multinational news agencies were distributing not only news but also consciousness through news. Third world countries contended that they should be able to produce and distribute their own national image. They were not convinced of the claims to objectivity made by western news agencies which in fact enabled them to disseminate "this news" and not "that news and", project "these personalities and not "those personalities" etc.

The history of news begins with the birth of the news agency, which explains why the early news concepts then in vogue in news agencies still hold sway in all media organisations. The British Post Office may be said to be the earliest news agency because for a small fee it used to distribute to London newspapers English summaries of articles appearing in foreign newspapers in the early years of the nineteenth century. The first major news agency was Agence Havas set up in Paris in 1842 by Charles Havas. In America, newspapers came together to form a news cooperative called the Associated Press in 1848. It was more for the purposes of sharing costs of collecting news from Europe. In 1855, Bernard Wolff started an agency to distribute news to Berlin papers. Paul Julius Reuter started Reuters in London in 1858. Today's news powers are Reuters, Agence France Press and the Associated Press. At a much lower level are news agencies like the United Press International, Deutsche Presse Agenteur.

Till the break-up of the Soviet Union, Tass enjoyed the same rank as today's triumvirate. The Big 3 collect and distribute news to newspapers, broadcasters, on-line suppliers, finance and business organisations, governments, individuals and smaller national news agencies all over the world. The latest development is that two of the Big Three branched out into television news. Reuters took over Visnews and became Reuters TV. Associated Press launched APTV. Reuters has been from the beginning the leading news agency in collecting and distributing financial information. Indeed ninety per cent of its revenue today comes from distributing financial news and information. Because foreign news distribution is monopolised by these three news agencies, the number of voices heard is woefully small and the voices for most of the time sound North American or West European. They are located in the capitals of the most prosperous countries in the world as they were at the beginning. These three news agencies became the models for national news agencies in countries colonised by European powers at one time. 

Since we are consumers of the content distributed by the Big Three, it is useful to examine two aspects, which have a bearing on the news they distribute. The first is autonomy. How autonomous are these news agencies. The essence of news values in the west is freedom from government control. Because none of these agencies is owned by the state, theoretically they are autonomous. They are all owned by independent companies who are giants in the area of their activity. Reuters constitution prohibits any single group or individual from dominating its ownership. Yet a mega subscriber like Rupert Murdoch has the potential of influencing news decisions by the agency. AFP gets 40 percent of its subscriptions from the state and yet contends that it is free from state pressures despite the fact that the state nominates its representatives to its governing council. AP is a news cooperative owned by newspapers themselves.

An Indian example belie these assumptions of autonomy. During the emergency, Indira Gandhi’s government asked the country’s four leading news agencies, UNI, PTI, Hindustan Samachar and another agency to merge to form Samachar.  They resisted but soon obeyed the government directive when All India Radio threatened to withdraw subscriptions. If AP and Reuters have no government participation, it only means academically that they are free from state interference. But pressures can come also from sources other than the government. There are occasions when they are not free from their own ideological biases and leanings. Examples can be cited from the AP coverage of the Gulf war and Reuters coverage of the Falklands war.  The 'we' and 'they' syndrome was very prominent in their reporting. Also, the overwhelming demand for economic and financial information, news and data from the corporate giants obliges Reuters to project a certain worldview favoured by them. For example, a borderless world free of government control over economy.

The second factor, which has a bearing on agency news is competition. That the Big 3 dominate the news agency scene is not a certificate for competition. A competition between three is no competition because they can always operate as a cartel or carve out territories among themselves ruling out competition from the others in their territory. In fact, in the early days, the Big 3 of those days, Reuters, Havas and Wolff distributed territories among themselves. When Reuters tried to intrude into Latin America, AP persuaded the state to intervene to beat back Reuters challenge. The Big 3 supply global news to national news agencies in their territories for a fees and they in return sell national news to these three. The global news agency system is still hegemonic, only three agencies monopolising the supply of a worldview to the rest of the world. The fall of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of communism in East European countries enlarged their markets. Each of them has a regional strength -- AFP is strong in France and former French territories; AP is strong in the US and South America and countries like Korea, Philippines and Thailand and Reuters in the UK and much of continental Europe and in the Commonwealth. AFP and Reuters have a clout out of proportion to the political and economic clout of France and Britain. The Big 3 have a global presence and account for the spread of western perspectives of news and news-making.

These three have also popularised western ethnocentrism, imposing a western view on the rest of the world. For example, Meridian. It is simply an imaginary line because there is no zero point. The British made Greenwich the centre of the universe and got the rest of the world to accept it. The French did the same with the metric system. GMT implies a Eurocentric perspective. The calendar begins with the birth of Christ. The Chinese, the Buddhists, the Moslems, the Hindus and the Jews have their own calendars and new year days. Why is Sunday a holiday? Under the Nizam of Hyderabad, Friday was a holiday. It is western organisers who draw the rules of the game for beauty contests. The agencies provide circulation to the names of countries recognised by the West. India for Bharat, Ceylon for Sri Lanka, Rhodesia for Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast for Burkino Faso or Gold Coast for Ghana and so on. The original inhabitants of America are known as Red Indians because Columbus thought that America was in Asia. Did Columbus discover America? What about the Red Indians who lived there for centuries before he came? A major part of the world continues to be described by European colonial names by the agencies as if they were unproblematic or very natural.

Then there is the European obsession with complexion of people repeatedly surfacing in news agency reports. Asians are yellow, American Indians are red, people of African origin are black and Anglo-Saxons are white, though there is no person on earth who is white. A black is called a black even if his complexion is as white as that of a white. But why is this obsession with complexion as though it is the most fundamental feature of a people's cultural or biological identity? The news agencies perpetrate a white view of the world by endorsing it in their reports. The words native and immigrant, for example. The whites themselves are immigrants in the Americas and Australia. But they are never natives nor immigrants. They are either Americans or Australians. Immigrants are Asians and Latinos referred to as Hispanics, though the Brazilians are not Hispanics.  Asians and Africans continue to be called immigrants even after they have acquired citizenship of the country they have emigrated to. The whites are not natives anywhere. It is only the people of third world countries who are natives. The news agencies popularise these myths.

More significant is the vocabulary of North-South, East-West, developed, underdeveloped, free world, third world. These words are pregnant with ideological and even derogatory connotation and transfer invisible meanings to the recipient -- meanings of wealth and poverty, freedom and bondage, advancement and backwardness, democracy and dictatorship, condescension etc. Similarly, the word Eskimo means a person who eats raw meat; a tribe of American Indians is called Novajo, meaning a thief and for a long time blacks were called Niggers or Negroes. These usages have been part of the global news agencies' dictionaries.

The whites' contempt for non-whites peeps through all reporting by western media betraying a distorted world view, which is arbitrary and prejudiced. The most striking feature about a worldview is, first, that the media claim to reproduce facts and facts only. Nobody can reproduce facts but can only narrate them. All news is an account by a person of an event he has seen himself or heard from others. No fact or event can be reproduced. This narration of an event inevitably involves selection and omission -- a process totally subjective, depending on what a reporter thinks what is important and what is not. Value judgements enter in this process. Second point about the worldview is that it is heavily mediated, meaning that we read, hear or watch an event as reported by someone who has witnessed it or heard from someone else who says he has seen it. Since we experience directly very little of the world, what we cannot experience comes to us through the media.

Thus the first worldview of the child comes from parents, then the school steps in, the university next, the workplace and so on. But from the time the child understands his or her environment he or she becomes familiar with the world through radio, TV and newspapers if he/she is literate. He or she learns a lot of history and geography at school which has influence on his/her consciousness. If many Indians believe that the Soviet Union was not a free country, it did not mean that they had visited that country and gathered first-hand impressions. Because of the monopoly of western news agencies, Indians are exposed to a negative coverage of countries with political systems different from the western ones. Same is true for our electoral decisions which are primarily based on mediated information.

This mediation leads to a selective articulation of reality. For historical reasons, we have inherited the western media model and inevitably replicate their small sins of lack of objectivity, irrelevant news values. Even our news priorities are the same as those of the Big 3. Fiji for example. It is a country where 44 per cent of the population is of Indian origin. The crisis in which a prime minister who is an ethnic Indian was ousted was reported by western news agencies in their own fashion. The focus was more on George Speight, the rebel leader, than on the Indian population whose life and properties were under attack. The Indians cannot complain if the western media were not concerned about the ethnic Indian population. India's foreign office too did not show much interest. Even less interest was shown by Indian news agencies which simply supplied to our newspapers the version that came to them from the Big 3. The Hindu reported from the periphery of the scene of action -- from Bangkok, Jakarta and Singapore. The Times of India asked a foreign media person to cover it for the paper. He did not speak to a single Indian there.

All this because Indian news media have inherited western journalistic values and practices. Take the UNI and PTI, cooperative news agencies owned by newspapers, which in turn are owned by Indian industrialists. For a population of one billion people, India has just two news agencies, which are supposed to compete with each other and ensure pluralism. The two together are as much a monopoly as the Big 3 are at the global level. Fiji, Mauritius, Seychelles, Guyana, Jamaica and Surinam where Indians constitute more than 40 per cent of these countries' populations have no correspondents from either UNI or PTI. This is in accordance with western estimates of importance of world capitals for coverage. London, which has lost political clout, continues to be important for Indian news agencies which have no correspondents and stringers in either Africa or Latin America or Australia. What is important for the Big 3 for political reasons is important for Indian agencies though there are no political reasons for such imitation.

But what should Indians do for a view of the world outside India. It is too expensive to post correspondents abroad. Indian media spend just two per cent of their revenues on news collection. They spend more on real estate and portfolio investment as revealed by the Newspaper Fact-Finding Committee. Naturally Indian news agencies rely on the Big 3. UNI has arrangements with Reuters and DPA and PTI with AP and AFP . The implication is that these two news agencies transfer to Indian readers and listeners a worldview manufactured by the western news agencies which we have seen is Eurocentric and not free from ideology. Though these arrangements with foreign news agencies are called exchanges, Indian agencies make heavy use of the material supplied by the Big 3, while there is a total blackout of UNI and PTI messages in foreign newspapers. The Big 3 have their own men in non-western countries who report half-truths mainly because they do not understand the people of these countries, their languages, their culture which in their eyes are weird. They have begun appointing Indians as their correspondents but the later do what their masters want them to do. According to a book entitled Hack, western correspondents begin to write reports about the countries they visit even before they check into their hotels. Fred Halliday says that most of the reports on Punjab (when the Khalistan movement was active) and Kashmir were written in the chanceries of UK and Pakistan in Delhi. Hack also says that cabbies are hot favourites with western correspondents as sources. It is these news agencies which have invented terms like China-watchers, Taiwan-arrivals, Kremlin experts etc. which is a frantic effort to buy credibility for their reports.

Have they succeeded? Indians were told that the Soviets had brought down a Korean civilian plane but never that it strayed into sensitive Soviet territory before it was shot down and also that the Americans knew that the plane violated Soviet airspace and never alerted the Korean crew. Indians have heard about Soviet killings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia but never about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 or massacre of civilians by American soldiers in No Gun Ri in South Korea and the 1951 mayhem of 1800 political prisoners by South Korean soldiers under American command. The list can go on.  

Global news agencies have globalised news resulting in an ethnocentric consciousness. They also fashioned mechanisms which would provide a veneer of credibility and authority for their reports which in turn anesthetise audiences into a content euphoria. Originally, these were crafted to get over problems of time and economics. Since the first reports were always cabled (submarine) or sent by telephone, the longer the text, the longer was the time taken and therefore the higher were cable or telephone charges. They found that time could be saved by transmitting the most important facts first. This midwifed the birth of the inverted pyramid structure of a news story which does not narrate facts in a chronological order but in the order of their importance. This necessarily meant that somebody was taking a decision on what facts were more important than the others in a news story. The lead, as the first paragraph of a news item is called, determined the attitude of the reader to the contents. Instead of saying Seattle witnessed protests and demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation, the lead could read something like this: "Violent mobs went on a rampage damaging property and protesting the virtues of a free market." Here the villains are the victims of free market and the martyr is the free market. This anachronic structure of the news story did not change even after the communications revolution which drastically cut down both the time and expenses of transmitting reports. Structuring of news is not as innocent and objective as journalism claims it is.

It is again the agencies which invented the terms soft news and hard news. Hard news are stories which can be covered in one go like a murder, an accident, a press conference, a demonstration etc. It is easy to capture an event or happening which has a visible beginning  and end. They happen at one time and one place.  This distinction or categorisation leads to an emphasis on event reporting and also helps event management. In contrast, five million children dying of malnutrition every year is not hard news, and so not news, because all of them do not die at one place and at the same time. This is called soft news and not a priority because the events occur in undefined time and space dimensions. Development and environment stories take the back seat because Nainital (wooded holiday resort) does not  become bald in one day or the Krishna (river) does not become polluted in a week. It is this neglect of soft news which has led to alternative media aimed at motivating and empowering the common people. This soft news-hard news categorisation, a global news agency legacy, helps the journalists to conveniently evade their watchdog or surveillance function. The mainstream press has just begun taking notice of these developments under pressure from communication NGOs. Today, leading newspapers and other media have development and environment reporters.

One of the news values pioneered by news agency journalists is conflict. Peace is not news. Conflict is. One need not cover Kashmir if there is peace there. Discord and disagreement are news. Kashmir or any other troubled region swings into limelight when people are massacred. The soft news about it is rigmarole, because it skirts the juicy issue of communal discord. Today, journalists are manipulating conflict by provoking A to say something derogatory about B and inciting B to respond to it and creating a controversy where there was none earlier. Iraq was forgotten after the war. But what happened and is happening to the underclass in the country as a result of the war is not heard of much. There is a journalistic epigram which says "bad news is good news." Murder is news. Disaster is. Luckily, other facets of community life are also covered but when the Big 3 cover third world countries, the focus is always on internecine strife, coups, famines, corruption, superstition etc.

Again, people are not news. Personalities are. This explains our media's preoccupation with politicians and rabble-rousers. There is not one senior reporter in India who has not interviewed Bhindranwale father of Khalistan movement). Veerappan (an outlaw in south Indian state of Karnataka) got and gets more mileage than Medha Patkar (fighting the construction of a mega dam over the Narmada). There were books and films on Phoolan Devi (known as India's bandit queen). Such publicity generates ego problems, which hinder understanding and negotiation and encourages one-upmanship. Nearly all leading politicians have made and still make statements which are contradictory and inflammatory too, as a response directly to incitement from print journalists and attention from TV crews. Our media continue the tradition of the Big 3 which have a history of canonising despots and dictators like King Farouq, the Shah of Iran, Marcos of Philippines, Batista of Cuba etc. What is surprising is that the geographic priorities of our media are the same as those of the Big 3. Our media cover the same regions, which attract Big 3 notice.

Sourcing as a tool to gain credibility and ensure objectivity and accountability is again a gift of the global news agencies. Unless the reporter was an eyewitness to the event he is reporting, his account will be challenged. If he is not an eyewitness, he has to quote some person or institution who gave him the information which forms the core of his report. Sourcing has its pitfalls like the source taking the reporter for a ride or settling scores with a rival. This, however, does not take away the merits of sourcing. It is the misuse of sourcing that is coming increasingly under scrutiny. The danger is when the reporter hides behind such nomenclature as reliable sources, informed circles, quarters close to the prime minister etc. In such cases the entire report could be the product of creative and inventive writing. Janet Cooke of Washington Post  won a Pulitzer prize in 1980 for a story on a child drug addict she wrote sitting in her study at home. The fraud was detected later. To this genre belongs a lot of war reporting claiming to report from the front. The entire Gulf war reporting was the version of the Pentagon spokesperson. It is something like showing Peter Jennings or Don Rather speaking from Red Square while in fact he was speaking from a CNN studio.

The news agencies bestowed on us sourcing devices, which obviated the need to be accountable. You get an account of what is happening in China from Hong Kong arrivals. This was the practice before Hong Kong became a part of China. Every Tom, Dick and Harry fleeing China was supposed to be a political and economic analyst. Kremlin watchers (watching from where?) tell these agencies why the Soviet Union broke up. In the early days of the collapse of the Soviet Union, a 13-year-old Indian boy came to Chennai (state of Tamil Nadu) for a vacation. Reporters of the Indian media, very much in line with the Big 3 legacy, grilled this prodigy for a deeper insight into the context of the fall of "the evil empire." Reporters accompanying a prime minister or a president on his/her overseas visit hardly can take time off from their reportorial assignment to talk to knowledgeable people about politics or economy of the country they are visiting. Yet we get to read what we read which more often than not turns out to be a briefing by the country's spokesperson.

Free Flow Debate

The result of such skewed reporting specially about third world countries led to a plea for a New World Information and Communication Order embracing free and balanced flow of information. J. Herbert Altschull, author of Agents of Power, says: "The words balance and imbalance play a decisive role in any discussion of the flow of information. A generation after the words had been introduced, no definition had yet been found that could be accepted in all parts of the world. Central to any examination of balance is the role played by news agencies which unquestionably distribute the greatest share of news about what is taking place in the advancing world. Moreover, no examination of news agencies makes sense without placing it in an economic context. Indeed, pressure for an international information order came only after the advancing nation-states had proposed a new international economic order under which there would be a major distribution of wealth."

UNESCO was the scene of many of the battles between the developed countries, insisting on a free flow of information, and the developing countries, demanding a free and balanced flow of information. In its early years, the UN, then dominated by western nations, issued a sweeping declaration asserting the right of each individual to know, to impart and to discuss. The three terms lead to wide and varying interpretations. Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights says: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." When slowly country after country shed the chains of colonialism, they too endorsed the free flow doctrine but meant something quite different from what the US and its allies had in mind. To the latter, it meant the continued domination by the west in the communication sphere and to the former it meant an epilogue to that domination.

However, the entry of newly liberated countries into the UN changed the mathematics of international organisations. Isolated in the beginning in the UN fora, the Soviet Union was able to convince the developing countries of the implications of a free flow thesis. The developing countries realised that the free flow mantra was a very clever ploy to impose cultural imperialism and win lucrative markets for US products. As Altschull says: "To the developing world, free flow meant flow in only one direction: from North to South. As a result the mighty industrialised nations were spreading 'moral and political pollution'." In short, the newly liberated countries demanded

 

	Free and balanced flow of news into and out of the third world
	More thorough, incisive and unbiased coverage of their countries on a continuing basis
	Greater emphasis on good or positive news of the third world, educational news of a progressive nature, called development news

The United States led the debate on the free flow issue in UNESCO. Social scientists in the third world realised that the real objective of the free flow doctrine was to consolidate, legitimise and expand an economic system that gave the United States a one-sided advantage, economically and politically over the newly liberated countries. The free flow concept held the centre-stage in the UN till the sixties, till the influx of the developing countries into the UN, which changed the strategic balance in the world body in favour of the new entrants who soon (1964) formed the Group of 77 aimed at reshaping the face of international trade and production. Demands to correct global imbalance both in economic power and in control over information are twins of the same parentage. News agencies in fact increased this imbalance. This development put an end to the US-authored isolation of the Soviet Union in the UN. As the struggle for a new information order shifted its scene from the non-aligned forum to UNESCO, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen told the UN agency that the laissez faire view of the world dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not only irrelevant but assisted in concealing the very presence of freedom. The heads of state of the non-aligned countries meeting in Algiers (in 1973) called upon member-states to free themselves of dependence on the western world both for manufactured goods and information.

The developing countries rightly argue that there is no such thing as free flow of information because any country which enjoys unlimited freedom to inform others irrespective of their needs limits the freedom of others. As a matter of fact, Altschull says that the press has never operated as an independent actor and that it has never been free from the direction of power, whether of governments or economic forces. It is not true to say that the developing countries are opposed to the free flow doctrine as such. What they object to is the nature and purpose of such information. The nature is determined by the objectives of the free flow doctrine identified by Economist (of London) in these words: "They (the Americans) regard freedom of information as an extension of the charter of international trade organisations." John Foster Dulles, secretary of state during the Eisenhower years, said: "If I were to be granted one point of foreign policy and no other, I would make it the free flow of information.” A US delegation sent by Dulles told the UN conference on freedom of information that it was their conviction that in the future conduct of their foreign policy the United Sates should continue to take vigorous action in the field of thought and action. On every issue of concern and interest to the US, their media including the news agencies, cooperate with the White House.

Mc Bride Commission

A major outcome of the debates in the UNESCO in the seventies was the appointment of the Sean Mc Bride Commission 1976. It submitted its report in 1980. The commission was headed by Sean Mc Bride, a former Irish foreign minister and included one of India's eminent journalists B. G. Verghese. Apart from other things, the commission's mandate included a study of the problems surrounding free and balanced flow of information and how the needs of LDCs linked with this flow.  The commission first published an interim report which is important for the controversy it generated. The interim report said "the present imbalance in communication is keenly felt and condemned by LDCs and NAM."  The report criticised neo-colonialism perpetuated on the LDCs when they imported foreign news or video programmes which upset domestic efforts at reflecting native values and culture. It attacked the TNCs in the news agency business and recommended a change in the vertical and one-way flow of information; upgrading of journalistic ethics, treatment by governments and the question of balanced reporting.

The west assailed the report for suggesting government intervention to restore balance. The west also did not agree that social change should be a  part of media agenda. The commission had before it 100 background papers, three of them by Mustafa Masmoudi (Tunisia's foreign minister at that time), Elie Abel (a member of the commission) and an anonymous person stood out from the rest. The first two papers represented two different perspectives and the anonymous paper related to imbalance and cultural penetration by TNC news agencies. According to Masmoudi, the main agents of control of information flow were the TNC news agencies who regarded information as a commodity and had no regard for the development needs of the LDCs. They imposed a world view favourable to western powers. An important suggestion he made was to create national and regional news agencies.

In a paper considered a rejoinder to Masmoudi's, Elie Abel said the imbalances were not deliberate. He also thought that information was politically highly sensitive and internationally applied standards of objectivity were not practicable. Though Abel agreed that a code of conduct was desirable, he pointed out that ethical values were different from one country to the other. The third paper took a totally neutral position. It agreed with the charges levelled against western news agencies but said that agencies had to satisfy a variety of subscribers with impartial, comprehensive and reliable coverage. The paper argued that the differences arose from conflicting perceptions of news values and content. The paper pointed out that the LDCs wanted spotlight on long-term trends, social structure and development.

The Final Report was Issued in Five Sections

	The first section laid emphasis on reducing and eliminating communication gap because communication was interwoven with every aspect of life and this goal could be achieved only as a part of clear-cut communication policies.
	The second section stressed the importance of integrating communication strategies with development plans and the need to regard communication as a prime development resource. It also pleaded for a halt to the commercialisation of communication.
	The third section showed concern for professional integrity and standards. It regarded responsibility and freedom as indivisible. It called for improved exchange and movement of news around the world.
	The fourth section is very important for its accent on democratisation of communication. Information was a human right and should reflect the pluralistic character of the national and international communities.
	The final section referred to the linkage between information disparities and economic disparities. The reduction of these disparities needed an international commitment. It also called for setting up mechanisms to ensure cooperation in the area of communication and pointed out the need for mass media to work for global peace, reduction of tensions and strengthening of international security.

Today, the process of economic globalisation has only helped the news agency giants to strengthen their reach and grip over the third world countries. Globalisation has reduced the economies of the third world countries into satellite economies and that has unfavourable consequences for the ability of national news agencies to operate on a global scale and supply to their countries  pictures of seen through their eyes.