ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to sketch some aspects the image of development and to identify its basis in the structure and process of the media, illustrating the case with data from Britain and Colonial Nigeria. The history of colonialism had an equal impact on the growth of the international news media. The research tradition new theorists are criticizing finds its roots in a series of assumptions about the nature of social change. Concepts like modernization, problematic in their teleology and often ethnocentric in connotation, have provoked much debate over the characteristics of 'traditional' and 'advanced' societies. Differentiation theories of social change portray modernization as the emergence of role-segmentation, institutional differentiation, and the adoption of new values appropriate to such changes. The chapter argues that the conventional definitions of news and the routines of newsgathering make the media not so much catalysts for social change, as cultural mechanisms for maintaining social order.
