1st Edition
Developing News Global journalism and the coverage of "Third World" development
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The elusive, shape-shifting nature of development in the news
What is development, anyway?
The critical examination of development news
Thematic organization
Chapter 1: The "tokenization" of development in the news
Making poverty newsworthy
The focus on events and disasters
Dramatic storylines: goodies versus baddies
The "celebritisation" of poverty
The cult of economics
An exact science?
"Kicking the ladder"
Dominance of Western worldviews
Authoritative power to speak
Practical challenges in newsgathering
Any hope for change?
Chapter 2: Journalistic conventions and the geopolitics of development narratives
Geopolitics in news articulation
Pack mentality and journalistic conventions
Development news as geopolitical propaganda
From colonial rhetoric to Truman’s development categories
Cold War discourses
Concluding notes
Chapter 3: The "number game" in development news
Naïve empiricism
"Numbers rule the world"
One dollar per day to out of poverty?
The Holy Grail of GDP
Concluding notes
Chapter 4: Communicating containment and the Alliance for Progress
Ideological and practical factors
Alliance for Progress as a propagandist narrative
The "equal partnership" discourse
Mediatised development
Lessons from the Alliance
Chapter 5: News coverage of foreign aid: a case study of the Millennium Village Project in African, US and UK media
Background to the chapter: the many problems of news coverage of foreign aid
The case of the Millennium Villages Project
Background on the MVP
About this study
African Press Coverage of the villages
US/UK coverage of the MVP
Early stages: ideologies and personalities as news
Second phase: critical voices from the blogosphere
Third phase: The Idealist
Constraints on media reporting
Conclusion
Disclaimer
Chapter 6: Disempowering news: the feminization of development
The feminisation of poverty
"Empowering" women – for less gender justice?
Gendered news practices
Chapter 7: New technologies for old ideas
An ICT-driven new economy
Technology as geopolitics
Technology as colonial legitimisation
Technology without politics?
Chapter 8: Malthusianism and news framing of population growth
Shifting the blame
Legitimising racism
Malthusianism returns as the Bell Curve
Towards a better news articulation of population issues
Conclusion: Beyond the North-to-South lecture: can the news media ever get to the core of development?
Us-versus-them propaganda
What is being ‘sold’
What is being missed
Where to from here?
References
Index
Biography
Jairo Lugo-Ocando is an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. Before becoming an academic he worked as a correspondent and news editor for several media outlets in Latin America and the US.
An Nguyen an Associate Professor of Journalism in the School of Journalism, English and Communication at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom. A former Vietnamese journalist and an Australian-educated scholar, he has published widely in several areas, including digital news consumption and citizenship, public engagement with science news, and news and socio-political changes in a globalising world.
'Developing News isn’t just another study of "development" but a thorough, briskly written and radically new take on what Western media have retained from decades of change in the "Third World" and reported them to Western readers. Read this book to learn how the public’s interpretation of the global South has been shaped, mis-shaped and riddled with ideology. Then lend it to your favourite, or least-favourite, journalist. '
--Susan George, President of the Transnational Institute
‘At last, a comprehensive and historically-informed discourse on development by two scholars from the global South: Lugo-Ocando and Nguyen provide a powerful critique of development news and news about development. Highly recommended.'
- Daya Thussu, Professor of International Communication, University of Westminster, London
