In the early 1980s, Daya Thussu, then a young subeditor at Press Trust of India (PTI) in New Delhi, found himself at the intersection of two contrasting news streams: dispatches from established Western agencies like Reuters and stories arriving via the little-known Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP). This experiment, born of the Non-Aligned Movement, sought to allow countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to exchange news directly, bypassing Western capitals. Thussu’s job was to select NANAP stories for PTI’s wires, offering him a unique window into a global media revolution that challenged the dominance of a handful of Western agencies.
Key Takeaways: NANAP was an initiative by Non-Aligned Movement countries to break free from Western news agencies’ control over international information flows. It operated from the 1970s through the 1980s, with Thussu recalling it as cumbersome but valuable training. The experiment raised an enduring question: who decides what the rest of the world gets to know?
The roots of this experiment stretch back to the 19th century, when three European agencies—Germany’s Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau, Britain’s Reuters, and France’s Agence Havas (predecessor of AFP)—formed a news cartel in 1859, dividing global markets and determining which stories circulated. Reuters, often called “an empire within an empire,” built its reach on telegraph networks and exclusive rights across the British Empire. As colonial empires crumbled in the 20th century, newly independent nations began questioning why international news remained concentrated in Western hands. The 1955 Bandung Conference and the 1961 founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade, with leaders like Tito, Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, and Sukarno, laid the political groundwork for a new information order.
Thussu, speaking from his home in London, described the NANAP process as “cumbersome” but “great hands-on training” for someone pursuing a PhD in international relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “We would check the ticker to see what the story was and where it had come from,” he recalled. “It could be from anywhere—the Philippines, Iraq, or across Africa. My job was to select stories that we would then send out to the PTI wires.” The two streams of news offered different windows on the world: one from established international agencies largely based in Western capitals, the other an attempt by countries long dependent on those agencies to tell their own stories.
Although NANAP eventually faded, its core question remains pertinent today: Who decides what the rest of the world gets to know? In an era of digital platforms, alternative media, and ongoing debates over media imperialism, the Non-Aligned experiment serves as a historical reminder of the struggle for informational sovereignty. As Thussu’s experience shows, the effort was not without challenges, but it planted seeds for later discussions on global media equity and the need for diverse voices in international reporting.
Source: www.aljazeera.com