UALA LUMPUR — The 114-member Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) launched on Tuesday, June 27, a news service to counter ill-founded and misleading Western media reports.
"Unless we do this, we shall continue to bemoan the fact that the so-called international media have not and will never give the fair coverage that is due to us," Malaysian Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin said launching the NAM News Network (NNN), reported the official Bernama news agency.
The nascent service, the transformation of the now-defunct NAM News Agencies Pool (NANAP), will be run by Bernama with contributions from 35 news organizations in NAM countries.
Its website carries an average of 60 news items plus pictures.
The new service was endorsed during the 6th conference of NAM information ministers in Malaysia last November.
Malaysia is current chair of NAM, a grouping of mainly developing nations formed during the Cold War as an alternative to the Western and Eastern power blocs.
Balanced
NNN is seen as an alternative balanced source of information, said the Malaysian official.
"Before, people had a strong confidence, (they) wholeheartedly believed in BBC, believed in CNN, but now the situation has changed," he added.
"We are giving the news fairly, we are not using the deceiving approach, just like the Western media are doing," Zainuddin maintained.
"If you want to know about what is press freedom, write about the coverage of the Iraq war by CNN, by the BBC," he said.
"We don't want to practice that, we are trying to project ourselves as free, independent news."
An independent review ordered by the BBC has recently concluded that its coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is "inconsistent, incomplete and misleading", failing to adequately report the hardships of Palestinians living under occupation.
"Feet to the Fire, the Media after 9/11," a book by award winning journalist Kristina Borjesson, has raised questions over whether the US media was duped by the White House, was negligent or complicit in the rush to war, and whether senior reporters were too close to government sources.
US academic Stephen Schwartz had criticized the western media for failing to meet the challenge of reporting on Islam after the 9/11 attacks.
Malaysia has recently proposed setting up an international Islamic journalism center to counter mounting Islamophobia and coach non-Muslim journalists about Islam and Muslims.
Window
The Malaysian minister called on NAM countries to support the nascent news service to become a window of NAM to the world.
"Admittedly, it already has its fair share of detractors but we must not be discouraged.
"With commitment and determination, we can make NNN a successful news organization of the South and prove the doomsayers wrong."
Zainuddin also urged NAM news organizations to raise their standards to match international agencies.
He said NAM news organizations were better positioned to report on breaking news in their respective countries.
The minister said Malaysia would seek solutions to the lack of resources and capacity of the NAM media to become the first to come out with newsbreaks on tragedies happening in their backyard.
He said NNN was "another landmark event in our continuing revitalization of NAM."
http://islamonline.net/English/News/2006-06/27/05.shtml