Who gets to tell the world’s news?

What the report says

Al Jazeera looks back at how countries in the Global South tried to reduce Western control over international news, tracing the effort to the Cold War era and the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement. The piece centers on the experience of Daya Thussu, who worked in the early 1980s at the Press Trust of India and saw both Reuters material and stories exchanged through the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, a network linking newsrooms across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The article says the effort emerged from broader political cooperation among newly independent states, including meetings in Bandung in 1955 and the formal creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961. It describes how leaders and diplomats associated with the movement began questioning why Western agencies continued to dominate the flow of global reporting even after colonial rule ended. The story also notes that scholars and participants viewed this as part of a wider push for autonomy in economics, culture and information.

Al Jazeera further places these debates within UNESCO discussions over a New World Information and Communication Order, which supporters saw as a way to strengthen developing countries’ own news agencies and communications systems. Nabil Dajani, a media scholar who took part in UNESCO work in the 1970s, is quoted saying the goal was to challenge what he and others regarded as information inequality and media dependence.

The piece matters because it links past efforts to change global news flows with current questions about who shapes international coverage. It also offers background on how news agencies, especially Reuters and other European outlets, became dominant through imperial-era networks and agreements, and why that legacy became a political issue for postcolonial states.