To Örebro University

The debate concerning a new international information order has raised two important issues: the question of balance and the question of distortion. This case study of the news coverage of the Third World, mainly in Western publications, is devoted to the latter issue. The aim was to investigate empirically the validity of two partly opposing arguments in the debate: 1. That flaws in the news are due to ideological bias; this is proposed in the Third World critique. 2. That possible flaws can be explained by lack of journalistic freedom in the countries reported from; this is proposed by some Western world representatives.

The publications studies were: The Economist, L'Express, Jeune Afrique, New Statesman, New Times (Nowoje Wremja), Newsweek, The Observer, Der Spiegel, Sunday Times, Time, U.S.News & World Report, West Africa and Die Zeit. Thus the sample comprised four British, one French, two German, three American and one Soviet pubication, and two magazines specialising in Africa. In all, 659 articles were included.

Three kinds of extra media sources were consulted: 1. prior studies and explications of the traditional and colonial image of Africa in the Occident, 2. scholarly studies of the war, and 3. documents from the propaganda war.

The results are presented in two steps. Firstly, the findings in the quantitative analyses confirm both the arguments in the debate concerning a new international information order, although the first was corroborated more strongly  than the second. It was found that the ideological factor, i.e. the foreign policy in the home country, is more important for the attitudes in the articles than the question whether the sources of the news are Federal or Biafran.

Secondly, the qualitative results support the assumption that the news reports are influenced by two kinds of ideological factors: 1. the traditional colonial image of Africa, 2. the foreign policy in the home country. The image of the tribal war is thus dominant in the Western publications, and more so the more pro-Biafran the standpoint of the home country, while New Times conceptualizes the conflict in historical-materialistic terms. The possible ideological impact on the reporting in the specialist magazines was not studied, but their coverage is richer and more correct in content than the Western and Soviet publications.