Oloruntola Sunday

Unending Imbalance in Global News Flow Direction and Intensity: Comparing Global Media Coverage of the 2008 USA and Ghana Presidential Elections Oloruntola Sunday

Concerns, that the pattern of global news flow is inherently lopsided, has occupied the realm of discourse for decades now. Developing nations had in the 60s cried out against the imbalance in the volume, intensity and direction of flow of news, observing that more attention was given to developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere and little to developing nations of the South, as important events were ignored and reality distorted. This controversy climaxed in the 1970s, culminating in the stillbirth of the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). While some scholars have posited that the evolution of the new ICTs for global news distribution have produced drastic changes in the character of global news flow, others insist that the new technologies have only increased the quantity and quality of information flows, but have not yet threatened the basic hierarchical structure of those flows . To establish the current structure of global news flow, this study examined the coverage of the 2008 USA and Ghana Presidential elections by three Nigerian national daily newspapers- The Punch, the Guardian and the Nation, the Daily Telegraph of London and Taiwan's China Post.