ABSTRACT
Much of international communication research seems to have implicitly heeded the McLuhanite assertion that the "medium is the message." Economic and organizational studies of different media systems, power connections between the media and political centers, the role of the media in development, as well as "gate-keeping" or the selection process in international news flow, are the primary areas which have received attention from investigators. Much less is known about the five major news agencies which produce international news, or about the content of the media in non-western societies.1 Questions whether one country's information is more biased than another's, why bias occurs, and how it can be detected and measured are left largely unanswered for want of an adequate comparative methodology. We know little about the social role of mass communicators in different cultures2 and even less about their ethical or ideological preconceptions.
