DISCUSSIONS on the imbalance in the flow of news and information worldwide appear to have been obscured with the recent inroads of fake news in various news organizations and social media platforms.
Nearly 40 years ago, the debate on communication became controversial as regards the creation of a new international economic order.
The emotional rhetoric was at that time waged on a strong stage—with some academics and communication experts, including self-appointed ones, joining in the debate, nearly similar to a modified Oxford-Oregon type: with research, constructive paragraphs, questions and rebuttals.
But with fake news making a loud ripple in different broadcast, print and news agency newsrooms, the world news flow issue has become nearly, if not totally, forgotten.
What exactly was the analysis as regards the imbalance in the flow of world news?
One side—those advocating a rationalization in the perceived imbalance— was saying the volume of news from the West or the developed countries to the developing and underdeveloped nations was heavily in the former’s favor.
This means, in that view, that the volume in the flow of news from the developing and underdeveloped nations to the West was not reciprocative.
A side bar to this was that even among developing and underdeveloped nations the volume of news about themselves to the other was not as overwhelming, plus the fact that these countries would rather disseminate, pretty sadly with an obnoxious jab, what had been reported about them by the West.
There were of course several reasons for this imbalance picture.
The developed countries—like the United States, France, and Britain— had sufficient technical equipment to support their worldwide network and infrastructure.
Not to mention the other news organizations—the initially community newspapers and broadcast networks that eventually became interested in events beyond their own shorelines—that have aired their opening billboards and lead paragraphs and now compete with Reuters, Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse.
The result, in the eye range of many advocating the creation of a New International Economic Order, is that those in the Third World, including the Philippines, know more about the developed countries than they are supposed to know about events in fellow Third World nations.
In the early 80s, news executives from the Third World—like Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines, Japan, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Iran, Greece, China and the Soviet Union at that time—organized the Asia-Pacific News Agencies.
This was followed by the First Asean Editors Conference in Manila, hosted by the Philippines News Agency, which launched the Asia-Pacific News Network or ANN.
Through ANN, a new news window on Asia, where nearly half of mankind live, was opened after several years during which national news agencies in the region struggled for the establishment of a news exchange program among them.
Many, even then, were agreed that the media had a significant role to play in regional development and cooperation.
Neither could it be under-emphasized that there continued to exist the overwhelming dominance of the well-entrenched and powerful transnational news agencies which remained the major communication conduits to the Asian countries from the developed world—and vice versa—and among the Asian nations themselves.
That was the stark reality on the imbalance in the flow of news and information which confronted news executives and policy makers—that reality expected to continue and confront nations now excited by the flirty fake news.
The inequity predated and still overrides the concept of a “free and balanced flow” of information mentioned in the MacBride Commission report.
The concept slowly but steadily took flesh between the 1960s and the 1970s, by which time the imbalance in the flow of news and information between rich and poor or between industrialized and developing countries had become the subject of many international debates.
Today, virtually no one—from the academic halls to editorial newsrooms as well as coffee shops visited by newsmen—disputes the reality.
But what exactly does the imbalance look like?
The MacBride Commission report, the product of years of study of a body headed by the Irish jurist Sean MacBride, correctly stressed that the imbalance in news circulation was a complex and varied phenomenon.
The imbalance can be quantitative and qualitative and can occur at various levels and in different forms. It can as well occur between rich and poor countries, to the extent that the news or information flow is dependent on the existence of infrastructures and other transmitting facilities.
Quantitatively, the flow of news from developed to developing nations was and remains greater than the flow in the opposite direction.
The imbalance, say some experts, has been so pervasive on a global scale that sometimes it can also occur, paradoxically, between developing nations themselves, where superpowers can flex their communication muscles at the not-so-superpowers.
Add this to quickie reports by so-called visiting newsmen – or the self-declared instant experts – from magazines and other publications based abroad, on a country they have just known for a few hours or a few days, believing in the stock knowledge and observation faculty of their new-found friends whose credential as news sources is arguably questionable.
These self-proclaimed journalistic whiz kids file back home their reports with the country’s dateline, often when they are back in their own regional base elsewhere.
In many instances, these journalists have relied on unproven and apocryphal sources of information, singled out the bizarre and the sensational and then depicted them as the topical truth.
The debate continues, fake news despite.
Like other news stories, the debate will continue to be retopped—with a different slant the next time around.
(HBC, a practitioner and academic, represented the Philippines in some editorial and board meetings of the Asian News Agencies and the Organization of Asia Pacific News Agencies in Manila, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Langkawi in Malaysia, Seoul, and Beijing.)
