Cultural dependency has become a serious international issue over the past two decades, especially as it relates to the news media. If charges that the Latin American media are subservient to foreign interests have any truth, then the content of their media should closely resemble that of the foreign wires to which they subscribe. The news can be separated into two components: the topics that represent the objective facts of the stories, and the themes that represent subjective overtones or labels closer to opinion than fact. Given this distinction, one could expect an independent newspaper with access to divergent sources to reject themes in wire copy more often than a dependent newspaper. From neither dependent nor independent newspapers could one expect a rejection of wire topics, which are, after all, the substance of the news. A large-scale content analysis of the news wires and foreign news in seven Latin American newspapers, sampled papers from April through June, 1979, to determine whether cultural dependency may be indirectly measured by comparing topical and thematic agendas between the wires and the newspapers. Though all the sampled papers showed topical dependence, the two Mexican papers were thematically independent, the two Brazilian papers thematically dependent, and the three Argentine papers a combination of the two stances. The findings suggest that the more news sources a newspaper attributes, the more thematically independent its foreign news will be. (Author/HOD)