Who gets to tell the world’s news?

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 today: Who decides what the rest of the world gets to know?

By the mid-19th century, three European news agencies had emerged as dominant players in the international news business: Germany's Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau, Britain's Reuters and France's Agence Havas, the predecessor of Agence France-Presse (AFP).

In 1859, the three agencies struck agreements dividing international news markets and territories between them, helping determine which stories circulated around the world and where.

“It was a news cartel system,” Thussu says.

Such was the power of these agencies that Reuters, founded in 1851 during the height of the British Empire, is often referred to in scholarly circles as “an empire within an empire”.

Through its use of telegraph networks and agreements granting it exclusive rights to collect and distribute news across much of the British Empire, Reuters built an international reach closely tied to Britain's imperial infrastructure.

But as colonial empires began to unravel in the 20th century, newly independent nations started questioning why the flow of international news remained so heavily concentrated in Western hands.

In 1955, representatives of 29 Asian and African countries gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss cooperation and a shared future beyond colonial rule. Six years later, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was formally established in Belgrade in then-Yugoslavia. It brought together countries seeking an independent path amid the Cold War rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union.

Among the leaders associated with its founding were Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Indonesia's Sukarno.

During a 20th century that saw a series of wars across the world, an end to the British Empire and the growth of US imperialism, NAM was initially a loose structure that would grow to include nations that included Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya.

By the time the OPEC oil embargo hit in the early 1970s, the growing alliance would become more structured in its approach.

Sima Kokotovic, a scholar specialising in global communication at the University of Pennsylvania, says the movement began taking more concrete steps towards a framework for sustainable cooperation among its members at its conferences in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1970 and Algiers, Algeria, in 1973.

As NAM countries pushed for greater self-reliance, they increasingly questioned the role of mass communication and “how much it was being controlled and dominated by the media companies from the West and, to a degree, the Soviets”.

For countries that had won political independence, the question was increasingly whether they could also tell their own stories, and challenge the way they were represented to the rest of the world.

The Non-Aligned Movement became the home of debates about imbalances in the international system whether economic or cultural or information.

“The Non-Aligned Movement became the home of debates about imbalances in the international system whether economic or cultural or information,” Thussu explains.

These discussions would feed into a wider campaign for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), debated within UNESCO.

Its supporters wanted developing countries to build stronger news agencies, broadcasting infrastructure and direct channels for exchanging information to reduce their dependence on Western media organisations.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from Beirut, Lebanon, Nabil Dajani, now 89, recalls the optimism surrounding those early efforts.

From 1971 to 1975, he served as a member of UNESCO’s International Panel of Experts on Communication Research and remembers feeling both energised and overwhelmed by his role on a panel that, for the first time, was addressing these issues on an international stage.

Dajani, an emeritus professor of media studies at the American University of Beirut, remembers NWICO as an ambitious, if idealistic, attempt to address inequalities in the global flow of information.

“The Non-Aligned countries believed that the wealthy Western nations had imposed information imperialism on them, which was essentially a form of neocolonialism. Their argument was that the major international news agencies reported on developing countries only when disasters, wars, diseases and other negative events occurred,” he says.

“So the underlying principle was that information is not merely a commodity but a fundamental human right.”

Today, Thussu is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. He has contributed extensively to global debates about information flows and imbalances throughout the decades that followed his time at PTI, including cowriting the 1992 book Contra Flow in Global News: International and Regional News Exchange Mechanisms.

“It wasn’t just about the flow of information one way; it was about a two-way flow with this idea about horizontal communication between nations sharing similar struggles,” he says.

“Brazilians who were reading or watching news about the Philippines, for example, were getting information mediated through London or New York and vice versa. ... This was about people knowing more than just the bad politics but about culture, individuals and day-to-day life, which were often ignored in Western media coverage.”

The debates were taking shape during a turbulent decade marked by wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, liberation struggles in Africa and military dictatorships in Latin America. By the mid-1970s, NAM countries were beginning to put their ambitions for a more equitable flow of information into practice.

In January 1975, a statement by Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike was transmitted by telex across participating news agencies from Yugoslavia’s Tanjug news agency to others across the Global South, heralding NANAP's official launch.

Ljubica Markovic was 24 years old when she started working at Tanjug, the former Yugoslav state media outlet founded by Tito in 1943, which is still in existence today. Markovic worked closely with the designated NANAP news desk during her time on the foreign desk.

Unlike most communist states in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia was not aligned with the Soviet Union. Its independent position during the Cold War and its leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement made it a natural champion of cooperation between countries seeking alternatives to Western and Soviet influence.

“There was a great deal of enthusiasm for international media cooperation, largely as a result of Yugoslavia’s position in the world at the time,” Markovic, today a 78-year-old grandmother living in Belgrade, tells Al Jazeera.

“With a strong media infrastructure in place, Tanjug was best placed to play a central role in NANAP. It was the backbone of this initiative, but it was neither its centre nor its arbiter. It was a large network of agencies exchanging news, and Tanjug was one of these points, probably among the most active ones,” she says.

Recalling her two decades at Tanjug, she says everyone in the editorial unit had access to the pool’s concept and the news it handled.

At Tanjug, journalists prepared domestic stories for foreign audiences, shortening and translating them before sending them through the network by telex or radio link. The work differed from the foreign desk, which selected reports arriving from other agencies and correspondents for Yugoslav audiences.

“No one questioned the value of the idea of a more equitable exchange of information and culture.”

NAM’s vision for a more equitable global information system inspired further outlets and agencies, including Third World magazine, or Terceiro Mundo, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Uruguayan-born journalist Beatriz Bissio cofounded the magazine in 1974 with a group of journalists, including her husband, the prominent exiled Brazilian journalist and politician, Neiva Moreira.

According to Bissio, Moreira was inspired to launch the magazine after attending the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Algiers the previous year.

Published in Portuguese, English and Spanish, the magazine reached a peak circulation of more than 150,000 copies in its Portuguese edition and remained active for more than three decades, Bissio says.

“Although the primary focus was on the coverage of Latin America, we always sought to offer readers information, analyses and historical perspectives on Africa and Asia as we were aware that our history and our destinies as Latin Americans were very closely related to those in these regions,” Bissio, who today works in the history department at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, tells Al Jazeera.

NANAP, she says, played an important role in bridging the information gap between Latin America and regions across the Global South.

Although Third World was not a news agency itself, it benefitted from the relationships NANAP helped foster. Bissio says the magazine built direct contacts with journalists and agencies across the Global South, particularly in countries such as Angola and Mozambique, exchanging reporting and gaining access to stories that rarely appeared in Western news coverage.

“Our challenge was to address issues such as the struggles against dictatorships and the fight for liberation in different parts of the world,” Bissio says.

“The mainstream media were not covering these issues, even stories as big as apartheid in South Africa were not known in Latin America. NANAP was really vital for us because it allowed us to have collaborators across many parts of the world.

"To have direct information through those agencies helped us diversify our coverage, and we were able to work with journalists with the same aims as us.”

The flow of information worked both ways, in particular, with the agencies in the newly independent Portuguese-speaking nations of Mozambique and Angola, which formed Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique and Agencia Angola Press (ANGOP) after their independence from Portugal in 1975.

“We met with the journalists from these agencies, formed agreements and exchanged articles. For them, covering Latin America was not easy, so they could take our coverage of Latin American countries and republish and redistribute it in their own way.”

Over a three-decade career with the magazine, Bissio interviewed key political leaders such as Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela and Hugo Chavez, travelling extensively across Asia and Africa, including Angola and Mozambique, where she reported on the final stages of the liberation struggles.

She was also in the Middle East, reporting from Beirut in 1982 during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which was aimed at driving the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) out of the country.

These experiences, she says, profoundly shaped her understanding of liberation struggles across different regions.

“Witnessing firsthand the struggle of the Angolan and Mozambican people in such adverse conditions yet driven by very strong ideals of freedom and justice was a defining experience for me. As a Latin American, I had never witnessed people taking up arms and fighting by every means they have against a colonial army.”

Despite its challenges, NANAP expanded. By 1992, researchers estimate that nearly all 108 member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement were participating in the pool, including through agencies such as Cuba's Prensa Latina and Iraq's Iraqi News Agency (INA).

The volume of news exchanged also grew from an average of 8,000 words a day in 1975 to 40,000 in 1983 and 120,000 by 1992.

Yet the disparity with established international news agencies remained enormous. In 1978, the four dominant agencies - The Associated Press, United Press International, AFP and Reuters - were reported to produce a combined 33 million words a day.

Alongside Tanjug, India, particularly under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and PTI, also played a key role both within NAM and NANAP.

This gave Thussu good insight into the day-to-day challenges NANAP faced. “The majority of pool members were not English-speaking countries, so translation was a big consideration,” he recalls.

“Plus journalism standards varied across the countries. Some of my PTI colleagues used to hate the NANAP shift because they had to deal with copy that wasn’t always of a high standard.

"Despite debates around how Western news agencies accurately represent other cultures and whether context might be missing or distorted, factually, they would always be correct. And if there was a mistake, even a tiny one, they would immediately send a rejoinder, which wasn't the case with the NANAP copy.”

Very little NANAP copy made it into Indian newspapers. “Part of the problem was that most members of NANAP represented national news agencies, which were state-controlled,  whether of right-or left-wing orientation, and their copy was, more often than not, the official propaganda of the ruling party.”

The ambition soon extended beyond newswires. In 1977, two years after NANAP’s launch, NAM nations launched a broadcasting arm, the Broadcasting Organization of Non-Aligned Countries (BONAC), which was aimed at sharing radio and television broadcasts directly with one another.

Kokotovic explains that BONAC was a more ambitious initiative because its members were interested in developing the media infrastructure needed for international collaboration.

NAM countries organised conferences, training workshops and annual television and radio festivals, bringing together media workers in cities ranging from Havana, Cuba, to New Delhi and Freetown, Sierra Leone. The aim was to develop ways for countries to cooperate in producing and sharing news and information.

Among these efforts was 20 Years of Non-Alignment, a film coproduced by Cuban, Algerian, Indian and Yugoslav television broadcasters to mark the movement's 20th anniversary in 1981. Despite these initiatives, Kokotovic says BONAC faced significant internal and external challenges from the outset.

“There were many technical and structural issues, specifically since the shapes of media infrastructures were vastly different across all the different member countries. Circulating different programmes was just technically difficult, not to mention the issue of translation. Simply put, what was at stake is how expensive this all was.”

Analysts say it was these financial imbalances that posed the biggest threats to NAM’s vision around structural change because many NAM nations were economically dependent on the same Western powers they were seeking to gain autonomy from.

Markovic recalls how this imbalance played out for journalists working at the time.

In 1984, she attended a seminar in Tunis organised by Tunisia's national news agency, TAP, which brought together journalists from about 30 nonaligned countries. Funded by the US embassy, the seminar featured American lecturers, including representatives from The Associated Press who offered training in reporting standards and impartial journalism.

The training was valuable, Markovic remembers, but she also felt the lecturers were eager to demonstrate what journalists from nonaligned countries could learn from Western media practices.

Then something unexpected happened.

“At one point, ... a critical article about Western media and cultural imperialism began circulating among the participating journalists almost clandestinely,” she says.

With NAM growing from 25 founding nations to about 90 members in 1980, working as a monolithic entity also started proving difficult, and conflicts between NAM members, such as the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, started to impact the progress of the media projects.

Thussu recalls the difficulties he faced with the war coverage: “Every day we would get a lot of copy from IRNA in Iran and Iraq’s INA because they wanted to tell their side of the story, and there would be disparities in terms of numbers of people killed or injured and discrepancies with the details of the actual attack or defence.

"In the end, we ended up using transnational agencies because we knew that at least the basic facts were clear.

"The Iran-Iraq War was a striking example of what the problem with the pool system was, but there were many other cases of conflicts too. For example, in India, you wouldn't use the Pakistan agency copy,” he says, referring to Pakistan Press International (PPI), established in 1956.

In 1980, UNESCO published Many Voices, One World, a landmark report examining inequalities in international communication.

Produced by an international commission chaired by Sean MacBride, an Irish politician, diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the report included contributions from figures such as Colombian writer and journalist Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Tunisian minister Mustafa Masmudi.

It exposed inequalities in the global flow of information, highlighting Western media dominance over Global South nations, media monopolies and commercialisation. It also called for a more just and balanced media economy.

As UNESCO’s director general, Senegalese educator Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, argues in the report’s foreword: “It is essential that all men and women, in all social and cultural environments, should be given the opportunity of joining in the process of collective thinking thus initiated. …

"With the coming of a new world communication order, each people must be able to learn from the others, while at the same time conveying to them its own understanding of its own condition and its own view of world affairs. Mankind will then have made a decisive step forward on the path to freedom, democracy and fellowship.”

The backlash, however, was immediate and, as commentators have said, unsurprising.

Kokotovic explains that the report highlighted disparities in media infrastructure and the largely one-way flow of information. For the US and UK, however, its proposals were contentious. Both regarded the report as biased and argued that its approach risked imposing greater governmental control over the media.

“For their part, the Soviets were not overly pleased either.”

The United States withdrew from UNESCO at the end of 1984, followed by Britain at the end of 1985, depriving the organisation of substantial funding.

Bissio remembers the impact of these funding cuts. “The reaction of the US and of Great Britain, to put it simply, was just brutal. The funding cuts created a very serious problem for UNESCO, and it has never again tried to develop the idea of democratisation of media.”

The 1980s were a decade bookended by major events: Tito died in 1980, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Cold War was drawing to a close. Yugoslavia’s breakup followed in the early 1990s after years of mounting tensions. Amid these shifts, efforts with NWICO, NANAP and BONAC started to slowly dissolve.

The developments in Yugoslavia and changes with Tanjug, in particular, would directly impact BONAC. But as Kokotovic says, BONAC did leave a mark.

Kokotovic suggests that the international cooperation fostered through NAM's media initiatives may have helped influence how some governments later approached their own media industries.

In India, for example, the state had previously regarded the movie industry with suspicion. By the 1990s, however, it was increasingly embracing media and entertainment as industries that could boost the economy and project a positive image of the country internationally.

Kokotovic says some of the figures involved in BONAC initiatives during the 1970s and 1980s later played a role in changing perceptions of what the state's relationship with media industries could be.

The global news landscape also changed with the emergence of broadcasters based outside traditional Western media centres. Al Jazeera launched in 1996, and its English-language channel followed in 2006, reaching international audiences with reporting from the Middle East and beyond. As the network marks its 30th anniversary, the earlier debate over who gets to tell the world’s stories offers a wider historical context for that shift.

Al Jazeera has certainly made its presence felt in the global news space - and not just in the news-rich Middle East. Within the past couple of decades, it has also emerged as a credible and professional voice of the Global South.

“Al Jazeera has certainly made its presence felt in the global news space - and not just in the news-rich Middle East. Within the past couple of decades, it has also emerged as a credible and professional voice of the Global South,” Thussu says.

NANAP itself, meanwhile, had not disappeared entirely. Although its newswire operations had slowed, it was rebranded as the NAM News Network (NNN) in November 2005 and continues to operate today.

Journalists who worked during the earlier years say it was an important moment both on a personal level and for South-South transnational media cooperation.

“I had a very strong reporting experience in the Middle East when I covered the struggle of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and in Lebanon, where I covered people's struggles for justice and democracy," Bissio says.

"It wasn't the same, but there were parallels to what we as Latin Americans were dealing with under dictatorships, and these experiences helped me understand both my own and other struggles.”

She would go on to cofound the Serbian-based Beta News Agency and is today working on a book based on the testimonies of 17 journalists that documents how Tanjug was transformed during the 1990s from an internationally respected media outlet into what she says is an instrument of war propaganda.

She says that for her and some of her colleagues, the 1970s represented a time when they felt connected to the international community. “With the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia and the country’s breakup, NANAP gradually faded away. Nevertheless, it had undoubtedly helped ensure that global news coverage was not entirely one way at a time when technical means of communication were limited.

"During the pool’s expansion in the 1970s, their number was around 50. Most reports from what was then called the Third World and reports from Africa, Asia and Latin America written by Tanjug correspondents found their way into Yugoslav media. This opportunity gave Tanjug journalists a sense that they were participating in the global media scene.”

For Dajani, who witnessed the early optimism surrounding the nonaligned media movement, its ambitions remain relevant in an age when a handful of powerful technology companies increasingly shape how information is produced and consumed.

The technologies may have changed, but the underlying struggle over who controls information, whose stories are told and whose voices are heard remains unresolved.

Dajani believes revisiting that history, including its ambitions and shortcomings, could offer lessons for those seeking to build a more equitable global media landscape today.

“In today's digital age, new forms of imbalance have emerged: global monopolies in technology and media, widening digital divides and the silencing of voices from the margins. The muted fate of the new world information order reminds us that inequality in communication is not settled but an ongoing struggle.

"If this history is remembered and understood, it may yet inspire fresh initiatives, better informed and more resilient to confront the challenges of our time.”