Toward a New Information Order - The Times They Are A'Changing
Communication should promote a two-way flow of information if the world is not to be divided into producers, on the one hand, and passive consumers of information, on the other. UNESCO resolution,...
...UNESCO, according to a Washington Post editorial attack, was trying "to convert news...into a national commodity which it is any government's right to exclusively control...
...At the end of 1976, UNESCO Director General M'Bow responded, again accusing the international news agencies of highlighting negative aspects about the developing nations...
...The peoples of Europe and the United States are also prevented from knowing third world reality...
...the revision of existing multilateral accords regarding tariffs for press cables in order to facilitate the establishment of more rapid and less costly communications...
...An exception to this was Latin America, which still had not put its full weight into the Nonaligned Movement, nor gravitated together as did the other regions represented...
...8 The Fifth Meeting of Heads of State or Government of the Nonaligned Nations, held from the 16th to the 20th of August 1976, brought together the greatest number of member nations-85-in its history, with 30 more nations represented unofficially...
...The concluding part of the extensive document notes that the newly proposed economic order was becoming the object of a "twisting of facts," and had not exactly obtained enthusiastic support from the developed countries...
...In fact, the only news of Peru that occupied the pages of the newspapers was the fact that at the end of the meeting there was a coup...
...UNESCO had come a long way since the criticism in 1959 that it was a shying away from fundamental issues...
...This preoccupation resonated strongly at the summit meeting in Algeria...
...According to UNESCO, only one-fifth of the correspondents of the four major news agencies are in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East combined...
...According to U.S...
...7 Sri Lanka-Coming of Age The next summit meeting of nonaligned nations was set for August 1976, in Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo...
...from 62 nonaligned countries was held the previous month in New Delhi, India...
...Its constant growth in defiance of the visible differences which separated more than a few of its members, was an eloquent indicator of maturity, and compelling proof of the foolishness of scorning its position as a group distinct from the two great power blocs...
...TOWARD A NEW INFORMATION ORDER 1. Mervyn de Silva, "TheThird World Quarrel with the Western Press," The Sunday Observer (Sri Lanka), August 15, 1976...
...During the nine-day meeting, the debate raged not only on the assembly floor, but in corridors and cocktail gatherings where observers such as the Inter-American Press Association exercised their considerable influence...
...nature of its work or the conclusion of its discussions...
...They see their faces reflected from afar in mirrors that deform...
...The newspapers of the third world countries, obviously interested in the conference, were out of luck unless they sent their own correspondent, a very expensive proposition...
...The document also addressed the urgent need to increase agricultural and industrial production, and the need to develop appropriate technology, goals obstructed by the transnational corporations and other agents of the developed countries...
...8. Fifth Conference of Heads of State or Government of the Nonaligned Nations, Colombo, Sri Lanka, August 16-20, 1976...
...To oppose that presence opens one up to malicious and self-serving accusations from the power structure itself of opposing freedom of information...
...Rather, there is a shared interest in promoting consumerist values responsive to the transnational model...
...With over 70% of the world's population living in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, only 26% of all the world's newspapers are bought by them...
...9 The coup, although less important than what a hundred foreign ministers from around the world were saying, was the stuff that news is made of...
...If any doubts had lingered, they were erased two days after the Algeria meeting ended...
...The president of Pepsi, Donald Kendall, was also president of the Council for Latin America (now Council of the Americas), a pressure group of 200 major U.S...
...The need to bridge the communications gap between the underdeveloped and the industrialized countries was obvious...
...structural changes in the economies of the developing countries...
...Emphasis would center on problems regarding the global structures and circulation of information, diversification of international communications channels, dependency relations, lack of communications resources, cultural imperialism and the concern that rights to communication are largely in the hands of those who il*Nothing illustrates this collusion better than Chile's principal news chain, ElMercurio, whose owner was Augustin Edwards, also a vice president of Pepsi Cola...
...6 For this influential paper, "to convert all news to propaganda in the name of combating'cultural imperialism' is simply to follow the Russian example...of tailoring mass communications to the convenience of the ruling elite...
...9. Mervyn de Silva, "The Third World Quarrel...
...development of a plan for the collective use of communications satellites and a code of conduct for their use...
...In all, these participants represented two billion people, half the world's population...
...2. Fernando Reyes Matta, ed., La informacidn en elNuevo Orden Internacional (Mexico: ILET, 1977), p. 11...
...At 15 JulylAug 1982is NACLA Report that exact moment, across the continent, another important meeting was taking place - the meeting of foreign ministers of the nonaligned nations in Lima, in which representatives of 87 countries were setting the agenda for the upcoming summit meeting...
...when UNESCO modified its communications concept, changing 'free flow of information' for 'balanced flow,' and when the nonaligned countries developed a coherent offensive against cultural imperialism, the attacks turned malicious, virulent and well orchestrated...
...Similar comments came from the New York Times, Newsweek and Columbia Journalism Review, to name just a few...
...Such a fallacious concept of freedom of information, leaving absolute decisionmaking power about the information given to people in the hands of transnational news enterprises can only be termed unjust...
...At the same time that the socialist camp was demonstrating a greater propensity to approach the nonaligned position, the principal capitalist countries persisted in their disdain, in a style reminiscent of the mentality symbolized by Secretary of State Dulles...
...The participants acclaimed the constitution of the news consortium already underway, and drafted a number of important resolutions - based on the recognition of an imbalance in the flow of information - to be considered by the nonaligned leaders the following month...
...Columbia Journalism Review, March-April 1976...
...One of the most notable forms of inequality in the contemporary world," he declared, "is distorted information...
...Ingram had traveled to Georgetown, Guyana in August 1975, to attend the Conference of Finance Ministers of the Commonwealth...
...If the new term appeared merely a semantic change, it was not...
...Bitter commentaries salted the air of the UNESCO assembly...
...the creation of more egalitarian systems of international economic relations...
...Former Vietnamese diplomat, Tran Van Dinh, 1976 Home grown TV soap operas as well as U.S...
...All were elaborations of the Action Program approved in Algeria...
...4. Ibid...
...The incorporation of countries previously at the margins of the movement was further testimony to its effectiveness...
...Latin America Contributes to the Debate During a meeting of foreign ministers of the Andean Pact countries in 1972, Clodomiro Almeyda, Chile's foreign minister under Allende, had highlighted the region's information vacuum, pointing out that "the great volume of international information that circulates among our countries is processed outside our subregion...
...As finally adopted, the declaration highlighted the phenomenal increase in the balance of payments of the developing countries: from some $12 billion in 1973 to approximately $40 billion in 1975, a figure that, at that rate, could reach $112 billion by 1980...
...Even the paper itself is manufactured by a shrinking number of industrialized countries...
...It was not strange, then, that the following proposals in the Action Program for Economic Cooperation were approved unanimously in Algeria: the reorganization of communications circuits...
...4 In July 1976, 21 members of the Latin American nations, meeting in Costa Rica under UNESCO auspices, moved to debate the principle of "free flow" itself...
...the Nonaligned Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, 1976 Movement, with all its imperfections, had undeniably earned the right to exist...
...General Assembly...
...It was an audacious step since, unlike in much of Asia and Africa, the dominant power structure in Latin America is inextricably linked to the United States and, hence, to the presence of the U.S...
...The progressive military government of Velasco Alvarado was overthrown, and he was replaced by General Morales Bermudez.] About the conclusions of the ministers' meeting there was nothing...
...After this severe diagnosis, the document proposed the "use of the resources of the developing countries to promote social justice...
...Despite this, the summit meeting in Colombo would ratify the New Delhi resolutions as an "important step towards further cooperation between nonaligned countries in establishing a balanced and equitable distribution of news and information to the people of the world...
...The document the participants considered for ratification put forward the cold economic facts in no uncertain terms...
...and the elaboration of a common strategy to satisfy the basic needs of the population, where 700 million people live in extreme poverty and around 500 million suffer acknowledged malnutrition...
...His ideological Manicheanism had been so intransigent that, following the Bandung forum, he declared that neutralism was merely a station en route to communism, cataloging it finally as a "myopic and immoral conception...
...These resolutions, too, particularly regarding support for national news agencies and for the news agency pool, provoked antagonistic and predictable responses from the transnational information interests...
...news agencies...
...Between 1970 and 1974, the developing countries received less than 4% of the international monetary reserves created in those years, that is, some $3.7 billion out of a world total of $102 billion, which, directed through the international monetary, system, had furthermore led to satisfying secondary needs instead of the urgent requirements of development...
...In the end, "free flow" was replaced in the UNESCO document by a new concept"balanced flow," implying support for the diffusion of information about and by the third world...
...The year following the Algeria meeting, the 18th General Conference of UNESCO resolved to treat "communication between people and the interchange of information" as one of the four great problems to be addressed during the six-year period 1977-1982...
...legitimately control economic power...
...M'Bow went on to register the observation of many that the transnational agencies systematically stressed tension or violence in the countries of the third world while ignoring events of a positive nature...
...One of the most immediate and significant consequences of these resolutions was the creation, in January 1975, of a pool of news agencies of the nonaligned nations...
...Although the majority of us-journalists, delegates and functionaries--all wanted to know what was happening in Lima," said Ingram, "we only received a few lines during the week, and in Great Britain and other areas the coverage of the conference was equally minimal...
...3 Contrary to other, more recently decolonized regions, Latin America had previously been concerned only with pragmatic questions of technology and infrastructure...
...5 Mr...
...Understanding had unfolded slowly, but once the basic components of the phenomenon of cultural imperialism were understood, the nonaligned countries set about attempting to substitute the mechanisms which were affecting their national defense...
...It postulated the elimination of "inequality and exploitation implicit in the current structures of international economic transactions," and declared that the existing economic order "no longer serves in an era in which the nations for whom it was created constitute less than half the world...
...Senate documentation, on September 15, 1970, a few days after Allende's nomination for the presidency, Kissinger, Edwards, Kendall and Attorney General John Mitchell met with President Nixon and decided to impede Allende's assumption of the presidency or, if that failed, to bring about his fall...
...There it became clear that indeed a qualitative leap was being made...
...the promotion of contacts at all levels for the interchange of ideas, experiences and technical knowledge, including the creation of regional and interregional scientific research institutes and a special chair at the United Nations for similar studies...
...For example, the countries that encompass half of the world's population only produce 7% of all industrial products...
...The reaction of the dominant news media demonstrated the extent of the threat...
...Although they make up two-thirds of the world's population, the third world countries receive scant attention from the wire services...
...And this despite the fact that one of the most important topics, as in Georgetown, was the New International Economic Order, which days earlier had been considered in New York in the 7th special session of the U.N...
...More than 20 years had passed since the pioneer meeting in Bandung...
...Musings of an English Journalist Attacks against UNESCO continued during the months following the Sri Lanka meeting...
...The agreement by the rich countries, in transferring 0.7% of their gross national product as official development assistance, had resulted in a "massive deception," in which the foreign debts of the developing countries led to a net expenditure, depriving them of any dynamism and flexibility...
...The peoples of the countries which had no part in formulating the old order have "new demands and new aspirations" and thus cannot be expected to "contemplate with indifference the tendency toward opulence of the developed countries, while injustices and their own burdens accumulate...
...Complicity, it should be noted, does not imply conspiracy...
...2 Almeyda's charge was verified four years later by a study of 14 major Latin American newspapers which showed that, of the total news transmitted by cable (i.e., most non-local news), fully 90.7% came from AP, UPI and Agence France Presse (AFP...
...Newsweek, September 6, 1976, pp.69-70...
...The Yugoslavian agency, Tanjug, was put in charge of its creation, linking together initially national agencies with the goal of decolonizing news...
...2 (Fall/Winter 1981/2...
...More than three-fourths of the world's population, the majority of whom live in third world countries, are still below minimum standards set by UNESCO...
...The intensity was so unusual in international conclaves that UNESCO Director General Amadou Mahtar M'Bow was moved to observe that no UNESCO conference had hitherto been "contested by particular groups even before public opinion could become acquainted with the 13 JulvlAua 1982Attacks by the principal western media have often been tinged with a racist attitude, contemptuous of the Movement as a simple 'tool of communism...
...The third world was moving from the merely rhetorical to concrete, practical proposals, which would in turn prove very difficult to attain...
...New International Economic Order The solicitation of a new international economic order, proclaimed in the 1973 Algerian meeting and adopted as basic policy by the United Nations in 1974, became the most important issue at the Sri Lanka meeting...
...imports distort reality and aspirations of many Latin American women...
...This meeting put the issue of content and informational dependency on the continent's diplomatic agenda for the first time...
...The international press only collects information that undermines the image of our people...ignoring our struggles, our efforts and just claims for a system of international justice...
...Derek Ingram, ex-sub director of London's Daily Mail, brought the argument home in a presentation to the Royal Society of London...
...As a result, he said, "the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean region do not really know each other...
...The scant news they receive about one another comes from other sources...
...For every 100 people, the organization says there should be ten newspaper copies, five radios, two televisions and two movie seats...
...it was about violence and the usurpation of power...
...Roughly 90% of the world news disseminated by the press, radio and TV in these three continents (except for Japan and China) emanates from centers in Paris, London or New York.' More important, pioneer studies were making increasingly clear the complicity between the economic interests of the highly industrialized nations and their instruments of pressure and cultural penetration, particularly mass communication...
...As a result of greater elaboration at the next general conference, in 1976, UNESCO established the Commission for the Study of Communications Problems, under the presidency of Irish journalist and lawyer, Sean MacBride...
...This was the essence of "Track Two...
...35, No...
...In summary, their representatives reiterated the same well-known arguments about ideological or political censorship, the risk of putting news instrumentation in the hands of governments, and the limitations and restrictions to informational "free flow...
...5. UNESCO, Final Report, Intergovernmental Conference on Communications Policies in Latin America andthe Caribbean, San Jos6, Costa Rica, July 12-21, 1976...
...From the level of consciousness they had reached, it was not a great leap to recognizing actual collusion among the same forces to carry out acts of political destabilization against democratically elected governments...
...3. Eleazer Diaz Rangel, Pueblos subinformados (Caracas, Venezuela: Monte Avila, 1976), quoted inJournal of InternationalAffairs, Vol...
...UNESCO resolution, 18th General Conference Conclusions reached in Algeria in September 1973, and adoption of the term "cultural imperialism" referred to at the outset, become more intelligible when one appreciates the long and painful struggle to arrive at these understandings and reach consensus about how to articulate them...
...corporations operating on the continent...
...6. Washington Post, July 30, 1976...
...On September 11, Chilean President Salvador Allende 12JuIvIAua 1982 13 was overthrown and assassinated, thus fulfilling the objectives of the "Track Two Operation" enunciated three years earlier by Nixon's National Security Council chief, Henry Kissinger...
...A meeting of Ministers of Information and Directors of News Agencies NACLA Report 14Our people live submitted to an uncontrolled invasion of news which inculcates distant values that threaten our national identity...
...7. New York Times, July 19 and 22, and August 20, 1976...
...It had already undergone three years of incessant struggle in international forums and bilateral and multilateral meetings...
Vol. 16 • July 1982 • No. 4
