In this study Dulue Mbachu examines Nigeria’s place in global news flow, using
foreign news reporting by two Lagos newspapers to illustrate the dependence
of local news media on Western news organizations for knowledge of what
happens in the rest of the world. It shows that foreign news coverage depends
largely on reporting provided by leading Western news agencies.
The study found that much of the foreign news was about the United States and leading Western European countries. Even when Nigerian newspapers covered their immediate
region of Africa and other non-Western parts of the world, the sources were often
the same leading news agencies from the West. The image of the world the
newspapers convey to their readers is essentially that created by the dominant
Western news agencies. The constructs made by these agencies are not value-
free but often correspond to their own interests, that of their countries or the
ideologies to which they subscribe in their definition of the world.
The New Gong 