News From Nowhere: Sources of International News in the Pacific Islands.

A study was undertaken to examine the sources of international news in the Pacific Island press in the light of J. Galtung's structural theory of imperialism and to explore the relationship between the remoteness and isolation of the Pacific press and its sources of news. The Galtungian concepts of center-periphery and dominance-dependency were related to sources and conditions of remoteness. A content analysis of 32 newspapers was conducted--20 from the Pacific Islands and 12 from the Pacific Rim countries of North America and Asia. Eleven coding categories were used and the space of each item was measured, a headline/summary was recorded, and advertising and "newshole" were measured. In all, 4,710 international news items were coded from 162 issues of the newspapers. The resulting data were consistent with the Galtungian construct that the flow of news will be from the center to the periphery and that the center countries, particularly those with historical colonial ties, will predominate as sources in the periphery press. An additional finding was the general lack of "cross bloc" use of sources--the "British/Australian Pacific" used British sources, the "American Pacific" used United States sources, and the French areas depended on French sources. (FL)