ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the process in which journalists' pack mentality turns into their narrative conventions or 'established truths' on development, and how such conventions have played a critical role in promoting geopolitical propaganda by powers such as the US and the former Soviet Union since 1945. It examines how dominant economic ideas have come to shape news discourses on development and how they have changed over the years. The chapter focuses on the transformations and continuities of the most influential journalistic narratives on development, to shed some light on why such discourses have become so embedded in dominant economic ideas and why journalists have persistently failed to challenge them over the time. Geopolitics leads the Western agenda, focusing on those views that can represent the foreign policy prerogatives of the rich donor countries. Through socialisation and other mechanisms, the underlying paradigm of this occupational ideology translates into what could be called "journalistic narrative conventions".
