Can East Asia produce its own "Al-Jazeera"? Assessing the potential of Channel NewsAsia as a global media contra-flow

In the last decade, Western news organizations have been increasingly upstaged by satellite news services from the global South. New players like Al-Jazeera in Qatar and Telesur in Venezuela have emerged to challenge a monopoly long held by Western networks like CNN and BBC in the broadcasting of international news. This thesis examines the contributions of the fast-growing region of East Asia to the emergence of such media contra-flows, focusing on an increasingly prominent player, Channel NewsAsia, based in Singapore. By using Al-Jazeera as a point of reference, this thesis develops a fourfold working model of a contra-flow, against which other news organizations may be assessed. Through a content and discourse analysis that compares Channel NewsAsia’s coverage with that of BBC’s, the author discovers that the Singapore-based station is not as uniquely Asian as it purports to be, due to numerous political-economic constraints that limit its contra-flow potential.