Developing News: Global Journalism and the Coverage of 'Third World' Development

Development is a recurrent theme in the media. It is often linked to different items on the news agenda such as progress, economic growth, foreign aid and poverty, among others. However, the way in which the media covers development often tells us more about the innate biases of the news media than it does about the subjects being covered. Far from there being a homogeneous or unified view, development is represented and misrepresented in the so-called ‘Western media’ by means of different narratives. Topics such as economic growth, foreign aid, trade and industrialisation are regularly represented in the media as the causes and consequence of development and progress. This seems to be especially true about the news coverage and representation of the so-called Third World. This book explores media representations of development in the context of national economies and international markets of the so-called Third World. In so doing, it discusses different understandings of development and progress by de-constructing representations and misrepresentations in the realm of global media discourses and news media narratives. It enquires into the way journalists and news editors working in mainstream media outlets understand development and how they view it within the context of the news agendas related to the Third World. The book presents a critical assessment of the conceptualisation and operationalization of the notion of development in the newsroom from both the point of view of news production and through the analysis of the relationship between journalists and their sources when covering development issues. The book explores and discusses how development becomes newsworthy and how it is articulated in media narratives and subsequently represented. It considers how media portrayals of development subjects do or don’t reflect the consensus found in the economic and development communities. Drawing from different disciplines, this brings together recent research with a focus on media and development studies. All arguments are illustrated by discussions of specific cases from the news and grounded in theoretical work that has come out in the past few years.