The News flow Controversy: evaluation of news imbalance and distortions

The News flow Controversy: Evaluation of Imbalances, Inadequacies, distortions in International news flow and how it affects African development and democracy.

Information is power and the most critically sought commodity in today’s world. Those that control the information are usually seemed to be the most powerful in our contemporary society. Therefore, for the past thirty years, there has been a controversy resulting from accusations and counter-accusation of the imbalanced flow of information from the west to the south. The purported victims which are the developing nations have been raging bitterly over the news coverage of events in their continent and have denounced western newspapers, journals, and television outlets for their alleged sensationalism and anti-development bias (Legum & Cornwell, 1978). Due to this controversy, on several accounts, developing nations have attempted to engage the western nations through different channels to address the issue of global information inequality. One that may readily come to mind is the UNESCO meetings in 1969 (Sean , Elie, Sergei , & Somavia, 1980), 1974 (Mowlana, 1985), 1976 (Bandopadhyay, 2006) and 1980 (Tokunbo, 2000) consecutively, where the UNESCO group of experts on mass communication and society noted in its disturbing but revealing report that: What has come to be known as the free flow of information at the present time is often, in fact, a one way rather than a true exchange of information.

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