Non-Aligned News Research Partnership
Dr. Maurice Labelle, Zoe LeBlanc (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne), Heidi Tworek (UBC), Cindy Ewing (U of T), UNESCO Library and Archives, and Resonator Inc.
The Non-Aligned News Research Partnership (NANReP) examines the largest organized intervention against the racial structure of global news to date: the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP, 1974-1990s). Its international partnership spans three continents and seven countries to bring together historians, public policy analysts, digital humanists, journalists, archivists, communications scholars, and students, as well as an international organization, public institutions of higher education, and a private-sector agency.
Seeing the world through the eyes of Western news agencies troubled Third World communities and their supporters. Anti-imperial intellectuals, statesmen, and activists identified that news flows about - and in - the Third World were imbalanced, insufficient, underdeveloped, and racialized. Established in 1974 with the support of UNESCO, the Non-Aligned Movement organization, and some of their key member-states (such as India, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia), NANAP aimed to decolonize world news – a domain created by Western empires and racially-maintained by Western news agencies. Integral to NANAP’s early years was UNESCO’s 1978 declaration of a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), which called for the “decolonization of information” monopolized by the “Big Four”: Associated Press, Reuters, United Press International, and Agence France-Presse. Often ignored or forgotten since its dissolution in the mid-1990s, NANAP enabled free and open exchange between over forty national news agencies in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe.
NANReP’s goal is to analyze the formation, structure, operations, experiences, impacts, and legacies of NANAP as an international cooperative of news agencies predominantly from the Third World. In the process, NANReP seeks to shed new light on challenges surrounding systemic barriers in global news-making, the racial realities of international information networks, and anti-racist efforts to change media infrastructures in ways that amplify the voices and stories of marginalized peoples at home and abroad.
NANReP’s goal is to analyze the formation, structure, operations, experiences, impacts, and legacies of NANAP as an international cooperative of news agencies predominantly from the Third World. In the process, NANReP seeks to shed new light on challenges surrounding systemic barriers in global news-making, the racial realities of international information networks, and anti-racist efforts to change media infrastructures in ways that amplify the voices and stories of marginalized peoples at home and abroad.