Confronting western news hegemony: A case study of News Agency of Nigeria.

This thesis is an attempt at examining the extent to which indigenous news agencies in the third world are able to fracture the old order of information by providing alternative news. In other words, the thesis sets to examine whether indigenous third world news wholesalers could be viable alternatives to the international news wholesalers of the advanced industrialised capitalist countries as is hoped among NIIO advocates. The study focuses on the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) as a representation of such social institutions faced with the task of providing alternative window to the country's and indeed third world experience. For the purpose of providing a context for the analysis of social institutions such as the media we have drawn on primary and secondary material on the Nigerian society in which NAN operates. Similarly, primary and secondary material on NAN and other news agencies of the world have been used to assess the theoretical and empirical postulations advanced in the New International Information Order debate. In addition to foreign news content from NAN for instance, we have also excavated through the domestic news content so as to address the domestic dimension of the NIIO debate. In this regard the thesis has combined textual study with the sociological study of news production as a social process, as part of the method of analysis. The conclusions we arrived at are that far from fracturing the old order of information third world news agencies like NAN actually consolidate that old order in various ways. First, by relying on the same international news agencies for a larger part of their foreign news content, and secondly, by employing routine practices and assumptions that select certain news types, news locations, news actors and setting etc, and others, for inclusion into the news bulletin and, thirdly, by tending to focus towards more profitable services like the financial data (FD), as opposed to the non-profitable general news. These limitations more than their ownership by home governments or dearth of facilities, constrained such agencies like NAN in providing alternative news. It is for these that they disseminate a news product reflecting a skewed version of reality in so many ways that in the final count consolidate the prevailing order nationally and internationally, rather than providing a fundamental alternative.