Inter Press Service - IPS's Role in The Mediascape

IPS's Role in The Mediascape

The actual role of IPS in the international mediascape is only marginal (cf. Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 1998: 175). This is due to a number of problems, such as:

• IPS's limited financial resources;
• its inability to cover all countries with an appropriate number of correspondents (in many countries, IPS only employs stringers);
• because of the two aforementioned limitations, IPS can only provide a scattered coverage about regions and issues, and is often unable to produce timely news and follow-ups;
• IPS's focus on background news "is not particularly attractive to market-driven commercial media" (Giffard, 1998: 200).

However, it seems that IPS has played a significant part in shaping the modern media and their news. Some of its structural innovations have been adopted by other international media organizations, most notably regarding the employment of local journalists for the coverage of developing countries. Furthermore, IPS claims to have led the way to a particular style of news (by demonstrating that in-depth analysis is as much part of the news as immediate coverage of the "facts") and to raising awareness about less "newsworthy" topics, such as poverty or the environment.

Even if IPS's direct outreach is rather limited, it plays an important role in providing background news to journalists, decision makers from governments and UN institutions, and civil society organizations.

In recent cases, IPS exercised direct influence on the mainstream media agenda:

• Following the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, the U.S. media blamed Arab terrorists. IPS was the first news outlet to maintain that white U.S. Americans from the ultraright had in fact committed the bombings. The assertion was finally confirmed and accepted by the mainstream media.
• IPS was the first to announce that the existence of asbestos worsened the contamination related to the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center in New York and the clearance works of Ground Zero. It led the way in consistently informing about the resulting health risks as well as the fact that most clearance workers were undocumented immigrants, who were not entitled to health compensation and got paid inadequately.
• Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy: the international mainstream news picked up the controversy surrounding the publication of these cartoons in a Danish newspaper in February 2006, while IPS had already reported on Islamic organizations' protests against them in November 2005.