Machine summary:
But even when Western professional standards of independence and ob- jectivity (which equal credibility) are met, the services inevitably reflect local priorities in reporting from abroad, particularly since the national news agency can rely, as a subscriber, on the Big Four’s broader coverage.
My own experience in the Middle East, first as a correspondent for Jeune Afrique and then as a reporter for the New York Times and later NBC News suggests that Muslim world state-controlled media will be even less tolerant and more suspicious of breaking news, or investigative journalism with a political or hard news angle that does not confirm or conform to the ruling party line when the reports in question originate from an Islamic or Third World source than from a Western source.
To offset the limits -both political and qualitative (in the professionalist sense of the word) of 3rd World pool copy and the Western or “North”bias of both "Big Four agency and syndication service copy, the Rome-- based Inter Press Service (IPS) has attempted to provide “alternative” infor- mation that treats “methodically with the Smiths problems in the South, and in the North with questions which might have an impact on developing na- ti0ns.
But whether “soft” or “hard,” from the prospective of this paper—the coverage of Islam as religion and culture and the coverage of the Muslim peoples and the societies they form--the specialized news agencies do not persent any significant departure from the secular perspective of the Big Four news agencies.