Beyond Trending: What is flow and contra-flow?
While regional and international mediations have failed to end the war in Sudan, it has also received less attention in the media. What explains this lopsided coverage of the war in the third-largest African country? The concepts of flow and contra-flow help understand it.
Since its independence in 1956, Sudan has experienced more than a dozen military coups, multiple civil wars, and the Darfur genocide (Photo: Reuters) Sudan, the third-largest African country, has been in the grip of a devastating war for nearly three years now. The war, fought between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has killed over 40,000 people, displaced more than 14 million, and pushed parts of the country into famine.
While regional and international mediations have failed to end the war, it has also received less attention in the media. Citing data provided by Chartbeat, an analytics firm, The Economist reported that in 2024, the media coverage of Sudan averaged just 600 per month, while coverage of the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine revolved around 1,00,000 stories per month.
What explains this lopsided coverage of Sudan? The concepts of flow and contra-flow will help understand it.
Post-WWII free flow of information
Following WWII, the concept of free flow of information became part of the American foreign policy goals, and was seen as rooted in the Cold War ideological confrontations between the US and the Soviet Union.
But by the 1960s and 1970s, the one-way flow of information from the Global North to the Global South was questioned. Critics underlined the ideological functions of the free flow of discourse, as it not only exported the Western way of life but also gave an “exploitative and distorted view of developing countries to the rest of the world”.
Such concern over the vertical flow of information, also seen as a new form of cultural imperialism, fuelled the debate about a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) in the 1970s. Notably, the term is traced to discussions within the Non-Aligned Movement and its demand for a more equitable New International Economic Order (NIEO).
UNESCO played a key role in furthering this debate. It set up the MacBride Commission in 1977, which made 82 recommendations for the democratisation of communication.
Rise of contra-flow
By the 1990s and 2000s, the process of development gathered pace in developing countries like India and China and paved the way for the flow of information back from the Global South to regional and global markets.
The term contra-flow was coined to “apply to this phenomenon (specifically, in relation to news agencies that gathered news from, about, or for the developing world)” by Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Daya Kishan Thussu.
Contra-flow was largely enabled by the exponential growth of the media outlets worldwide. In the context of the Global South, India’s Bollywood and Qatar’s Al Jazeera played a significant role in diversifying and broadening perspectives. A number of studies underlined Al Jazeera‘s coverage of the 2001 war in Afghanistan and the 2003 war in Iraq as markers for challenging their framing by the US.
But moving on to this era of Internet induced hyperconnectivity, where social media is said to enable grassroots contra-flow, how should one look at the lopsided coverage of Sudan?
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