Time For Anadolu Agency To Shape Global News Order

By Iftikhar Gilani



When I joined Anadolu Agency exactly a year ago, the Turkish global news service was entering the 100th year of its celebrated existence.

Incidentally, the Agency's first reporter and a part of its founding team was Abdur Rehman Samdani alias Peshawari, an Indian Muslim whose ancestors belonged to my native district of Baramulla in the north of Indian-administered Kashmir.



Unwittingly, a century later, I was to follow in his footsteps on my journey from my hometown Sopore, in Baramulla district, to Ankara to work at the headquarters of Anadolu Agency -- a journey that came to fruition after I spent 27 years working for many leading national and international media organizations in India's capital New Delhi.



After an exciting and gratifying career of reporting events across the globe, working with the cardinal elements at Anadolu Agency was like touching the pinnacle of my profession.



At the same time, straight out from the hurly-burly world of journalism, it also felt like a breath of fresh air.



The newsroom of the Agency's English-language wire service is a mosaic of the global village, where people of different nationalities and faiths work together under a single roof.



Realizing the importance of the media, Turkish leaders founded Anadolu Agency on April 6, 1920.



It became only the second news agency in the world -- after the Soviet TASS agency -- that came up in a non-colonized world.

Since the inception of the wire in 1885, as many as 28 news agencies had started by 1920, but all of them were in the West or the colonies of imperial powers.



Even 135 years later, major news agencies are concentrated around the epicenter of the world's prosperous nations.



These news agencies have a status that the rest of the world has unsuspectingly seemed to follow and replicate.



According to a UNESCO study, entitled News Agencies: Their Structure and Operation, these news agencies are increasingly getting rid of journalists, focusing less on original journalism and looking to increase their amount of news content.



It is noticeable that though there are many news agencies in the world today, the news agenda is largely driven by only a few of the powerful ones -- those that had resources because they were on the winning side of the Second World War.



Global news agencies and the media have also been an integral player in shaping the conditions that made globalization possible.



In this stiff and merciless competition, where the powerful have regularly consumed the little fish, marking its 100th year of existence is no ordinary feat for Anadolu Agency.



Established just a fortnight before the opening of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, with the mission of bringing Anatolia's voice to the world, the Agency stands at a point today where more than 6,000 media outlets across the globe use its content -- be it news, pictures, videos, or infographics -- every day.



With a network covering over 100 countries, it now covers world affairs with experience and accuracy under various categories -- politics, economics, finance, energy, sports, technology, and others -- in 13 languages.



Furthermore, Anadolu Agency is the only global news agency from a Muslim country that is part of the G20 forum.



By investing more in technology, expertise, human resources, new strategies, greater operational efficiency, cohesion, and integration, the Agency has the potential to challenge existing media cartels and help shape a new world order.



Anadolu Agency has not lagged behind in speed, objectivity, and accuracy as far as news dissemination is concerned.



At a time when social media presents a challenge in terms of speed, it has become necessary for conventional media to present the facts as precisely and quickly as possible, so that public opinion the world over can be educated with adequate information to appreciate a problem and suggest solutions.



For over 150 years now, media in the West has not only been foisting its own stories but also telling our stories to the world.



The time has come for us to not just narrate our own stories, but also present its truths to the world. -