The Geopolitics of lnformation: How Western Culture Dominates the World
Smith, Anthony
THE GEOPOLITICS OF INFORMATION: HOW WESTERN CULTURE DOMINATES THE WORLD Anthony Smith / Oxford University Press / $13.95 Richard E. Bissell I have seen the imperialist enemy, and it is us," the...
...Smith at least performs one service for readers: He conveys the state of mind of Third World governments, particularly as it is represented at UNESCO conferences...
...But even if the Western media were to fail to convey the truth, a "new" order would not be necessary: The marketplace will ensure that the media communicating the most truth will prevail...
...Jne doesn't have to be a friend of the NIIO to recognize that information flows affect political power...
...The recent Belgrade conference at least managed to delay consideration of the MacBride Report recommendations...
...He wants to find a meeting-ground with the NIIO, and so he accepts its premises as valid...
...Now the tiger they let out of the cage has decided to bite the media as well, and they are very unhappy...
...It show, if all that sounds like a combination of Cecil Rhodes and Buck Rogers, it just shows how fraudulent perceptions in developing countries have become...
...each developing country should have its own news service and control over the flow of information into and out of that country, and it should be the responsibility of the developed countries to provide the necessary resources and personnel...
...Smith doesn't like "old orders...
...To abandon our traditional instruments in the search for truth would be suicidal...
...The NIIO clearly knows what it is doing...
...To assure passage in 1982, delegates will spend two years mobilizing the guilt complexes of America while circus-master M'Bow provides additional funding for the NIIO...
...After the Third World experience in pushing the "New International Economic Order," the NIIO is as logical a sequel as Jaws II was to Jaws...
...the Third World will have to meet a threat posed by American construction of big computers and space stations Richard E. Bissell is managing editor o/Orbis and the author of several works on Third World politics...
...Perhaps because of the upcoming election, the American delegation for once held firm against Third World demands...
...Specifically, advocates of the NIIO have advanced the following claims: The United States, France, and Britain control the world's print media...
...Anthony Smith has a major problem with the NIIO, and he is not alone...
...In the last few years, the West has been faced with growing demands at various international meetings for a "New International Information Order' ' (hereafter cited as the NHO without well-deserved quotation marks), and with the presentation of the MacBride Report on the NIIO to the UNESCO Conference in Belgrade in October 1980, the issue has come to a head...
...with the potential to control global information in the twenty-first century...
...the people of the Third World are too dependent on the short-wave broadcasts of the BBC, Radio Moscow, and the Voice of America...
...Those arguing for the NIIO simply don't like bad news their behavior is akin to Haile Selassie's when he maintained vociferously during 1973-74 that there was no starvation in Ethiopia, or to Idi Amin's, when he fed reporters to the crocodiles for exposing his brutality...
...Amadou M'Bow, the Secretary-General of UNESCO, could not restrain his modesty in presenting the report (sufficiently contradictory internally not to be worth summarizing), and asserted that with this report UNESCO has now become "the moral conscience of the world...
...The alleged neo-imperialism of the West has been laid bare by intrepid Western media explorers in the Third World...
...Africans have good reason to listen to the BBC, and it is well understood why Soviet citizens listen to Radio Liberty and the Voice of America, or why one of the first steps taken by the Soviet Union during the Polish strikes of August 1980 was to resume the jamming of Western radio broadcasts...
...But since the solutions suggested by NIIO proponents would in effect eliminate freedom of the press, Smith subjects them to skeptical scrutiny...
...His dilemma is the same as that faced by the Ayatollah's apologists who welcomed Khomeini as a liberator only to become puzzled when he started to throw reporters in jail or expel them from the country...
...in recent decades...
...He regards the structure that provides what we understand as a free exchange of news and information as antiquated and maintains that it should be scrapped, particularly on the basis of the NIIO complaints...
...Smith has a hard time dealing with the NIIO solution, yet can offer no alternative given his acceptance of the NIIO assumptions...
...What sympathizers of the NIIO are unwilling to admit is that the dissemination of information has been far freer under the "old" order than under any other "order" known to man including the NIIO...
...The investigative tradition of the Western, particularly American, press has revelled in the "seditious activities" of various Western institutions (the CIA, ITT, et al...
...But most of all, they are confused...
...Thus, though he accepts that the West is "imperialist" in an abstract sense, he is clearsighted enough to realize that the remedies posed by the Third World will leave him marginal opportunity at best to cover his favorite Third World topics...
...THE GEOPOLITICS OF INFORMATION: HOW WESTERN CULTURE DOMINATES THE WORLD Anthony Smith / Oxford University Press / $13.95 Richard E. Bissell I have seen the imperialist enemy, and it is us," the liberal Western journalists have cried for some years not meaning to include the media in their Pogoesque indictment of the West...
...A more elegant formulation of the NIIO solution (included in the just-released MacBride Report) calls for international news agencies to "conform to national laws and development policies...
...Of course Western media embarrass developing countries, whose national media are sometimes directed to print outright lies the kinds of deceptions that could not occur in an environment where communications are seen as a competition for truth...
...and the predictable conclusion: It has become necessary to break the control of the "neocolonialist, monopolistic, and undemocratic powerful media multinationals...
...But he ignores this fundamental point: Truth is important to Third World (and Second World) citizenries if not to their governments, and it is under the present order that truth is best protected...
...At a UNESCO conference in Yaounde, Cameroon, last July, the delegates called not only for the establishment of a new pan-African news agency, but also for a "special conference about non-African radio stations whose presence in the continent embarrasses national radios...
...But the danger is that the report remains on the UNESCO agenda...
Vol. 14 • March 1981 • No. 3
