News from all over the world
The announcement of a new worldwide news service on Monday set the gears of my brain turning. As I read Al-Jazeera’s report today about Bill Gates’s welcome in Vietnam, I realized that the churn in my head is about bias in the news.
The NAM News Network is
the transformation of the now-defunct NANAP or Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool. … the NNN is Malaysia’s gift to NAM but it is only workable if like-minded fellow NAM members subscribe to the continuing relevance of a revitalised NAM through increased flows of news and information.
I was ignorant of NAM until November 2005. At that time, I was in Malaysia, and the Ministers of Information of Non-Aligned Countries (NAM) held their annual conference there. NAM, I learned then, is basically all of the non-NATO countries (for comparison, see list of NATO countries).
The interesting question, I think, is why information from NNN would be trusted. The new news service is managed by Bernama, the state-controlled news service of Malaysia.
The NNN sees itself as an alternative source of information rather than being in competition with other major news services. Essentially it would serve as a conduit for NAM member countries to tell their story and use it as a yet another tool of communication for them.
Western news agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters have their own biases regarding the importance of the news of the day. Non-Western countries have legitimate complaints about priorities skewed toward the richer and more powerful nations. But is a state-controlled news outlet any kind of an answer?
I really like checking the English-language home page at Al-Jazeera. Sure, Western people complain about Al-Jazeera’s slant on the news, but I prefer to compare versions. This week, Al-Jazeera really has been covering the waterfront on events in Nepal. Nepal’s been in The New York Times and on NPR too, of course, but the coverage is never exactly the same.
Check your own biases regarding Al-Jazeera: Nepal has a smaller Muslim population (percentage) than France, and the Nepalese are not Arabs.
Technorati tags: international journalism | Al-Jazeera | online media
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