This study examined the coverage of the trilateral commission of India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA) in the national press of these three countries over a 6-year period. Even though this group has pre-dated the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) group and shares an affinity from political and economic standpoints, it has received little attention in media research. The goal of the study was to understand how news media framed the relationship among the IBSA member nations, and their individual and collective policy stances to their citizens. Each news source emphasized different areas of the cooperation; all three news sources expressed faith in IBSA to varying degrees, but also kept a close eye on the more recently formed BRICS. In sum, this study offers an exploratory view of cooperation among emerging regional economic powers located across and lobbying for the South in contemporary global spheres of influence.

Journalism and communicative democracy in general were debated intensely on a world scale a quarter of a century ago, during the debates over a New World Information and Communication Order. In this article, I demonstrate that during this period, theory and reflexive practice in journalism were envisioned through radical ideas freely deliberated in intergovernmental, professional and scholarly spaces. I analyze related themes that appeared in statements issued by Third World journalists, and in selected scholarly articles published at that time. Analysis reveals that these themes articulated an alternate, more democratic world order. I conclude by discussing the relevance and importance of these ideas and themes to the present global era.

The study assessed leaders' perceptions of adolescent alcohol use as a public health issue in 28 small communities in northern Minnesota, as part of formative evaluation for a community-based intervention to reduce adolescent alcohol access and consumption. One hundred and eighteen leaders from five key community sectors were interviewed about their perceptions of social, health and alcohol-related problems in their communities. Analyses indicated that school representatives and police chiefs perceived adolescent alcohol use and related problems to be serious; newspaper editors mentioned other social problems more often; and mayors and business representatives did not perceive adolescent alcohol problems to be as serious. In relation to efforts to affect local policy, the study suggested government and business sectors in these communities may need to be educated about the problem to build its importance on the community agenda of health issues. Thus community leaders in some sectors may comprise a key target audience for intervention.

This article traces some political and economic questions and challenges faced by colonial Britain in networking the Indian Ocean Rim (IOR) through the telegraph and wireless technologies. In the process, the article demonstrates that communication media contributed to the definition of the IOR as a geographical entity, much of which constitutes the global South today. The study concludes with a note on the legacies of media modernization inherited by these societies following independence as, ironically, an apparatus constructed to network and connect the region became fragmented as properties of postcolonial nations, used in the service of independent nation-building and national development. Now that these countries have come together in the recent Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation, implications for a networked region remain to be seen.

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