MEDIA METAMORPHOSIS

  • by Mario Lubetkin
  • Inter Press Service

While the front pages report on the billions of dollars developed countries are pumping into their largest banks, and rising unemployment and lagging growth in the industrialised world, information on the recession in the other two thirds of the planet is scant and fragmentary, writes Mario Lubetkin, Director General of IPS news agency.

In this article, Lubetkin writes that this disparity in coverage of the North and the South is nothing new, but it has come to the fore in the financial crisis, a time when it is all the more important that the public understand the conditions in the developing countries and support an approach of international economic cooperation.

This is happening at the same time as a transformation that is hitting the daily print media especially hard and reducing the coverage of international news and global issues that "don't sell papers", like poverty, climate change, sustainable growth, human rights, democratisation, and security understood as the peaceful resolution of conflicts, disarmament, and nuclear non-proliferation.

Addressing this situation is not just a problem for media professionals but must involve civil society, academic associations that professionals should form in order to weather this period and increase their research capacity, and the communicators of the North and South, for whom there are vast possibilities for reciprocal cooperation.

(*) Mario Lubetkin is Director General of IPS news agency.

//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM//

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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