An Analysis of News Flow From Developed and Developing Nations1

Foreign News Coverage in Two U.S. Wire Services

“…A quarter century ago, Cutlip (2) analyzed the content and flow of the AP wires, finding that only about five to ten percent of state wire copy dealt with foreign news. Two decades later, Hester (7) found that foreign datelines constituted about 20 percent of the "IB" wire. Hester also found evidence that wire news was heavily oriented to European countries and that news about developing societies tended to emphasize violence, famine, and social disintegration.…”

Cultural Factors in the Flow of International News: A Review of the Literature

“…Language is employed to evaluate how cultural affinity works in international news flow [17][18], while language is also used to assess cultural proximity in the research on international news flow [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] Cultural affinity, furthermore, is measured in terms of ethnicity [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], former colonial relationships [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19], or geographical proximity [23]. Cultural proximity is also evaluated by some concepts such as ethnicity [5,24,25,26] and geographical proximity [6]. While those usages and definitions of cultural factors vary across the studies, the cultural factors employed in the previous studies can...…”

“…The study concludes that the local gatekeepers had control in selecting some news over others on the coverage of the 1998 U.S. presidential election campaign, recognizing that cultural proximity played an important role in the way two major Greek newspapers covered the campaign. While many studies have conducted content analysis to examine cultural factors, a few studies interview journalists to see how cultural proximity influences journalists' decisions of selecting some international news over others with regard to their personal and professional backgrounds [24][25][26], for example, interviewed AP Interbureau wire editors and Wisconsin newspaper wire editors. The Interbureau editors believed their clients to be "more interested in news from foreign nations which share common cultural and ethnic backgrounds with the United States" and stated that "they would give first priority to stories from developed Anglo-Saxon nations over items from non-Anglo-Saxon developing countries if news values were held constant (p. 37).…”

Television and Newspaper Coverage of Latin American and Caribbean News: A Canadian-American Comparison

“…1 o Hal Hendrix li and Henry Raymond 12 had already presented research reinforcing this proposition, and in 1969 Albert L. Hester contributed his research on fifteen Wisconsin dailies, concluding that editors perceive a general Jack of interest in Latin American news. 13 Hester went even further. ln 1974, he directly explored the Latin American newsflow via the Associated Press, determining that not only foreign news made up 33.9% ofthe total on the AP's main trunk wire in the U .S., but also, that from that total, Latin American news made up only 9.9%.…”