Non-Aligned News: How journalists from the Global South fought to report their own stories
The journalistic experiment known as the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool started in the 1970s
In the 1970s, journalists and intellectuals fought to remake world news by creating an alternative media structure to tell stories for the Global South, by the Global South.
It was an ambitious experiment — even utopian.
At the heart of their movement was the idea that not all news is equal and that stories from the Global South should be told primarily by journalists from the Global South.
"Nobody understood why there was the need for a voice from the South. People said what's true in Paris is true in Timbuktu. And I say that's not true," journalist Robert Savio told IDEAS. He is the co-founder of the Inter Press Service, a global news agency based in Rome, Italy.
"In Timbuktu, the word 'family' means something different. If I say it rained for a week in Brazil, it's a natural disaster. If I say it rained a week in London, nothing happened, people go with their umbrella… we must have different voices."
Journalists, writers, and reporters from countries in the non-aligned movement couldn't circulate information and news to their own people. So, they began creating their own media outlets to assert their presence on the world stage and replace colonial narratives about their societies.
"We were always thinking that the importance of democratizing information was to have the means, the financial means, the technical means, etc., to have the opportunity to give a voice to those who wouldn't have the chance to be heard... let's say not be controlled by the state," said Uruguay-born journalist Beatriz Bissio, who has covered the globe for decades as co-founder of the magazine Tercer Mundo (Third World). She is now a professor of political science at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Bissio has interviewed many of the people who shaped the Global South in the 20th century: Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, and Yasser Arafat.
"My experience as a journalist was always to put this South legacy and the South challenges and the South aspirations as the priority. I think symbolically, to use this map is important to have a graphic way of understanding what journalism was for us."
Long-lasting challenges
The 4th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Algiers in September 1973 was a pivotal one.
The press agency of Yugoslavia, Tanjug, presented a resolution to instigate what is now known as the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool.
"The pool worked like this. Every press agency would send 1,000 words to a centre. And this centre would redistribute these 1,000 words to other agencies," said Savio.
This new kind of journalism decolonizing the flow of information wasn't without internal tensions. There were also fierce opponents in the West.
Now, 50 years later, the challenges and values that arose from the early days after the Algiers summit meetings remain in newsrooms today.
Questions that journalists and scholars wrestled with still exist. What does it mean to give voice to marginalized perspectives? Is the pursuit of objectivity a valuable goal? And does journalism have a role in the pursuit of liberation?
In our two-part series looking at the history of the Non-Aligned News Agency Pool and the future of non-Western media, IDEAS turned to journalists and scholars who continue to grapple with these questions. They also explore answers to the importance of representation, the accusation of bias, and the meaning of fairness.
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this two-part series.
*This series was produced by Pauline Holdsworth and Naheed Mustafa.
