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Asian media urged to cooperate

BOAO (CHINA): Asian media vowed on Sunday to challenge their Western rivals which dominate the world media market.

``The world is not flat actually,'' Liu Jiang, deputy editor-in-chief of Xinhua News Agency, said at the annual conference of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA), which was held over the weekend in the south China town of Boao.

``The world is in reality a slop on which information flows downward from developed countries to developing countries and regions,'' Mr. Liu said.

``The World Is Flat'' by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been frequently quoted to prove an alleged ``magic power'' of globalisation by Bill Gates and other speakers at the conference.

The book figures out 10 driving forces to grind the world flat, in each of which the media play an important role. ``Developed contrives, which have one-seventh of the world population, have dominated two thirds of the total information flow,'' Mr. Liu said. ``However, globalisation does not balance a horizontal world when it is grinding the world.''

Western domination

``Why do Asian media always yield to Western culture?'' Felix Soh, deputy editor-in-chief of The Straits Times headquartered in Singapore, questioned in his speech at the sub-forum discussing globalisation and the media.

News agencies in Asia have been struggling to challenge Western rivals in reporting regional events with objective, fair and comprehensive coverage.

``Asian media, especially those in developing countries, should seek active participation in world events and cooperate more on the coverage of regional news,'' Mr. Liu said. By exchanging news, joining hands in editing and sharing beats of report, Asian media have broken the monopoly in reporting prominent regional events.

Mr. Liu particularly called for more joint research on technologies to improve news outlets on the Internet and via mobile phones.

Developing countries including those in Asia have called for establishing a new order of spreading information since the 1960s when they were fighting against an unfair information control by the Western countries.

The imbalance and differences of information flow between the developing and developed areas have not been narrowed by disputes for decades and most of the criticism against Western media were focused on bias and misinterpretation on developing countries, according to scholars. ``The image of Asia depends on how the world media describe it in a globalised era,'' said Li Xiguang, a scholar on communications of Tsinghua University. — Xinhua

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