This paper develops and empirically assesses a comprehensive theoretical model of the dyadic flows of political information worldwide. In line with the liberal IR theory, I posit that the flows of publicly available, politically relevant information between states may be expected to reflect the patterns of their economic inter-dependence. At the same time, drawing on realist theorizing in IR and on sociology of media, I formulate alternative hypotheses that highlight the importance of the power of nations and of factors associated with the logic of media systems for the patterns of information flows globally. To evaluate the relative merit of these propositions, I present the first large scale map of the intensity of ties that connect more than 160 states in the realm of public information flows, as reflected in more than 3000 online media outlets. For each of the more than 2 000 000 articles from these outlets, forming a carefully defined sample from global media in 2018-2019, I use natural language processing tools to estimate the frequency of references to all countries in the world. Non-English articles, forming around 75% of the sample, have been automatically translated into English to allow for consistent processing and analysis. A preliminary analysis of the data partly supports all three lines of theoretical reasoning, but it lends much more value to the realist and media studies hypotheses, at the expense of the liberal interdependence hypothesis.