ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘flow’ has a relatively long history in international communication studies. First, there is a long tradition of comparative news flow studies which started in the 1950s (see, for example, IPI, 1953; Kayser, 1953; Schramm, 1959; Hester, 1971, 1974; Sreberny-Mohammadi et al., 1985). Second, there are studies on comparative television programme flows (see, for example, Varis, 1973; Nordenstreng and Varis, 1974; Varis, 1985) introducing the term one-way (Nordentreng and Varis, 1974) or unidirectional (Boyd-Barrett, 1977) flow. And finally, there is the concept of counter-or contra-flows (see for example, Boyd-Barrett and Thussu, 1992; Thussu, 2000:206) which challenged the position of earlier theorists who claimed that the flow was only one-way.
