International communication and new media

Journalism and Mass Communication · Media and society. The idea in plain words, the rules to remember, the mistake to avoid and a worked example, written and checked by Mega Lecture.

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The idea

Most foreign news reaches newspapers and channels through news agencies, which collect news and sell it to subscribers. For a long time a few Western agencies supplied most of the world's news. In the 1970s developing countries complained that the flow of news was one-way, from North to South, and that it showed them mainly through wars and disasters.

This complaint became the demand for a New World Information and Communication Order, debated in UNESCO. UNESCO set up the MacBride Commission, which reported in 1980.

The internet has changed the picture again. Online news is instant, interactive and multimedia. Anyone with a phone can publish, which has produced citizen journalism and has also made false information easy to spread.

Rules to remember

Reuters: founded in London in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter.
AP (Associated Press): United States; began in the 1840s as a cooperative of New York newspapers.
AFP (Agence France-Presse): France; successor of the Havas agency, founded in Paris in 1835.
APP (Associated Press of Pakistan): the national news agency of Pakistan.
MacBride Report: 'Many Voices, One World' (1980); commission chaired by Seán MacBride and set up by UNESCO.
Misinformation: false information shared without intent to deceive. Disinformation: false information spread deliberately.
Online journalism: instant updates, hyperlinks, multimedia and interactivity; it weakens editors as gatekeepers. Clickbait: a misleading headline written to attract clicks.

Common mistake

NWICO is often described as a demand of the Western countries. It was the demand of developing countries; the United States and Britain opposed it as a threat to press freedom.

Worked example

A person films a street protest on a phone and posts it online before any reporter arrives. A relative forwards a wrong date for the protest, believing it to be true. Name the two concepts.

The filming is done by an ordinary member of the public, not by a trained employee of a news organisation: this is citizen journalism.
The wrong date is false, but the relative believes it and does not intend to deceive.
False information shared without intent to deceive is misinformation; with intent it would be disinformation.

Answer: Citizen journalism and misinformation.

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