In the early 1980s, the Press Trust of India (PTI) became a testing ground for a new model of international news flow. While PTI’s newsroom in New Delhi was still busy with telex machines, a young Daya Thussu was juggling two distinct streams of stories. One came from established Western agencies such as Reuters, the other arrived through the Non‑Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP), a network that linked newsrooms across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Thussu, then in his mid‑20s, described the process as “cumbersome” – copy was edited by hand and then typed into the system – but he credited it with giving him hands‑on experience that complemented his PhD studies 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 recalls. “It could be from anywhere – the Philippines, Iraq or across Africa.”
The dual streams offered contrasting perspectives. Western agencies, largely based in capitals such as London, Paris and Washington, DC, had long dominated the global news market. In contrast, NANAP represented an effort by newly independent nations to tell their own stories without relying on the “empire within an empire” that Reuters had built through telegraph networks and exclusive agreements.
Thussu notes that this experiment was rooted in the Non‑Aligned Movement, a coalition of countries seeking independence from the Cold War superpowers. By exchanging news directly, these nations aimed to break the monopoly of Western agencies that had been in place since the mid‑19th century, when Germany’s Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau, Britain’s Reuters and France’s Agence Havas divided international news territories among themselves.
Today, the question remains: who decides what the rest of the world hears? The PTI experience of the 1980s shows that alternative networks can provide a more diverse set of narratives, challenging the long‑standing dominance of Western news agencies.
Source: Al Jazeera
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Editorial note: This is an original news report prepared from the attributed source material with AI assistance. It is not a reproduction or translation of the original article.
