9. Critically evaluate the role of the major news agencies in the production and flow of international news.
As the news media has rapidly developed into a modern, high-tech mass communication industry, it is playing an increasingly important role in different aspects: political, economy, social life, the development and peace between nations. Culture and beliefs flow across territorial boundaries, people in different countries can share ideas and information in ways both formal and informal (such as 'blogs' and the immediate use of mobile phone footage in disasters like the tsunami of 2004 or the London bombs of 2005). The growth of a globe-girdling, time-space conquering galaxy of communication is arguably of epochal importance. (Hugill, 1999) The mass media plays an important role in the process of globalisation since they are among the agents that embody the transcendence of the limitations of space that is a characteristic feature of globalisation. Communications media like the wheel and the press had distance-shrinking effects, but genuinely globalized communication only began with inventions like overland and underwater telegraphy and the early development of Reuters and other international news agencies.
Apple Sticker
Apple Sticker
Reuters Building at Times Square, New York City. A...(Keane, 2005)
The roles of these news agencies are, the distributors of news to the news companies, the bridge between nation and nation, the window of the world as news agencies set the agenda for what international stories other media choose to carry through the choice of stories they distribute to clients and the amount of visuals provided. The news agencies were among the world's first organizations to operate, not only globally, but to operate globally in the production and distribution of 'consciousness', through the commodification of news, in ways which had very significant implications for our understanding or appreciation of time and of space. News agency news is considered' wholesale' resource material, something that has...