Information Traps and Neocolonialism
Communications is not just news. It is a determining factor of all social processes and a fundamental component of the way societies are organized. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Juan Somavia,...
...cruiser "Maine" on the night of February 15, 1898, the journaljumped from average sales of 400,000 to over a million, thanks to its unconfirmed reports about the origin of the explosion, most of which were false and illintentioned...
...Whatever the interests behind these criticisms, information from third world sources is often judged this way even by the developing countries themselves...
...The history of the mass media is strewn with famous traps...
...In many ways the term is still applicable...
...It is achieved, as in the dominant countries themselves, by a saturation of the news media, films, advertising and TV and radio programming...
...Cultural penetration and control over information are in this metaphor the traps, complementary to the economic, political and even military shotgun...
...It involved the famous illustrator and engraver, Frederick Remington, and his boss, William Randolph Hearst, owner of the New York Journal...
...And Hearst was no anomaly...
...Trap," then, is not a forced metaphor...
...Information originating from those countries themselves has simply been dismissed, either because it is considered "professionally inefficient," or because it does not respond to the demands of the industrialized world's information market, or because it originates from mechanisms linked to governments considered, by definition, lacking in "credibility" and independence...
...Hearst cabled back tersely, "You just provide the drawings, I'll provide the war...
...Today's newsgathering procedures and presentation are more subtle and insidious than those of Hearst's day...
...Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Juan Somavia, 1980 Trap - a device which allows the hunter, instead of shooting directly at his prey, to exploit the animal's ignorance of the world, its good faith, so to speak...
...Necessarily, the analysis is rooted in the changing political contexts that sometimes spurred, sometimes reined in the process of defining the complexity of issues...
...Yet, as we will see, the cables attempted to project mainly negative aspects, to focus only on divergences or disunity among the participants, and to distract from primary content by transmitting marginal or simply anecdotal aspects...
...What is new is that today important sectors of the third world are no longer so naive...
...One pillar of this support is cultural penetration, aimed at obtaining internal consensus in the dependent countries with respect to neocolonial interests and ideology...
...In short, the general message of these dispatches, whether frank or subliminal, was the devaluation of this significant meeting of third world leaders...
...Ever broadening sectors of academics and journalists, and even some governments, are beginning to view the demands for the democratization of information and the construction of a new international information order as pertinent not just for the third world countries but for the universal cause of peace and better understanding among nations and peoples...
...With the advent of advanced communications technology, economic control is increasingly buttressed by the control of information...
...In the days following the mysterious explosion of the U.S...
...The third world remains caught within a transnational communications structure which has inherited the values and powers of the colonial past...
...The Cultural Trap When Latin America gained its political independence from Spain only to become economically dependent on England and later on the United States, colonialism underwent its first transformation: political subjugation was no longer needed to guarantee economic control over these nations...
...In fact, economic control was soon exercised precisely in the name of liberalism and political democracy...
...If the new information traps are less obvious (i.e., better traps), their presence and significance not only have not decreased, but, thanks to their sophistication and refinement, have become the privileged instruments of contemporary neocolonialism...
...Sri Lanka represented the largest gathering of heads of state ever held outside the United Nations, where numerous important and concrete decisions were taken...
...1 3 - 2 2 .JulviAua 1982 cated technology itself, is controlled by a handful of nations and transnational corporations...
...Remington, sent to Cuba to provide illustrations of supposed fighting, informed Hearst by cable that he had not yet carried out his mission, being unable to verify any armed conflict...
...government and the major U.S...
...The analysis presented here traces the historic unfolding of awareness which has led to the call for what is now most frequently referred to as a New World Information and Communication Order...
...Important third world agencies covered the meeting in full, but their dispatches did not penetrate the prevailing wall of interests and values...
...media since Ronald Reagan took office...
...For example, classic texts on the subject mention an episode which occurred on the eve of the war of 1898 between Spain and the United States...
...But in Sri Lanka the obstacle was not insufficient infrastructure...
...The Technology Trap The industrial world's main response to these nations' demands, apart from disdainful rhetoric, was to propose a cooperative effort to develop their communications infrastructure and the training of their professionals...
...In the developed countries themselves, it is far from a closed issue...
...The shotgun and the trap are merely two alternatives which the experienced hunter uses complementarily...
...In other words, its solution was to provide technical assistance to preserve and reinforce the existing information order...
...In more recent years, a second transformation was set in motion...
...Is it fair today, after the changes introduced in recent decades, to speak about "information traps" and to associate this image with colonial or neocolonial domination...
...Although it focuses primarily on the news aspect, many related issues are raised...
...In light of all this, we will also take a look at the response of the U.S...
...Closer to the heart of the problem, rather, is a mercantile conception of news, which only values facts when the "market" can be made interested in them and, in practice, checks efforts to provide a unique or alternative view of events and processes taking place in the third world...
...A second pillar is data collection, storage and dissemination which, like the super-sophistiTranslated and adapted fromJuan Somavfa's introduction to Gregorio Selser and Rafael Roncagliolo, Trampas de la informacidny neocolonialismo - las agencias de noticiasfrente a los pauses no alineados (Mexico: ILET, 1979), pp...
...Thus, there is another trap to be avoided: that of believing that the creation of adequate infrastructure is all that is necessary to correct the existing system...
...While Hearst didn't "make" the war entirely by himself, he did profit significantly from the sensationalist treatment he gave it...
...The use of deception as a competitive selling tool was already one of the most common journalistic practices of the period...
...To illustrate why third world nations are demanding alternative sources, we include here a content analysis of cables dispatched by the transnational wire services at a summit meeting of the Nonaligned Nations in Colombo, Sri Lanka in September 1976...
...Transnational expansion in the third world entails various types of imposition and penetration...
...This had led to strong pressures for a new international information order which could lead to a democratization of communications at national and international levels...
...For this reason, the dependent nations extended the struggle for political liberation first to economic liberation, and in more recent years to the conquest of cultural and information independence...
...While the Movement of Nonaligned Nations is playing a leading role in the struggle for freedom of information and cultural liberty, it is also being fought out in other international arenas such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which has become the global forum for the debate...
...they are aware of the traps and are looking for ways to avoid them...
...Concealed beneath an ingenious shroud of truth and trickery, the trap's outward appearances seem normal and the gullible are snared unwittingly...
Vol. 16 • July 1982 • No. 4
