The Old Information Order - A Concept Trapped in Time
We must reaffirm our national cultural identity and eliminate the persistent consequences of the colonial era. In particular, that means the channels of information which are a legacy of the...
...There is no slightest wavering in our conviction that the orderly transition from colonial to selfgoverning status should be carried resolutely to a completion...
...Since that time, their prodigious efforts have informed the intergovernmental debate significantly...
...Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), pp...
...ILET's executive director, Juan Somavfa, was a member of the MacBride Commission...
...progressive regimes such as in Guatemala and Iran were destabilized and overthrown in the name of anti-communism...
...That month the First Conference of Heads of State or Government of Nonaligned Nations was held in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, attended by 25 member nations, together with 35 delegates of national liberation movements, parties and other movements...
...Both episodes were masterminded by the United States...
...In its own defense and as an alternative solution, the government of Fidel Castro resolved to create Togo, 1964: With UNESCO help, the government upgrades its mass media...
...And we have not given a blank check to any colonial power...
...General Assembly called for an end to the communications deficiencies in these countries and for the organization of international aid for this purpose...
...Chu En-lai y Richard Nixon," Excelsior (Mexico), July 17, 1978, p. 4 . 15...
...Secretary of State John Foster Dulles dochina...
...3 This speech followed by two months the overthrow of the nationalist government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, and preceded by seven months that of the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala...
...The liberal doctrine of information, which originally presided over the development of the mass media, was based on a rationalist view of the human being, in which each individual supposedly accepts or rejects the messages received, independently of his or her social situation...
...In his polemic, Lopez vigorously denounced the dominant role played by transnational news agencies in the global exchange of information...
...A participant in another UNESCO-sponsored investigation into the impact of this new phenomenon in 1969, a filmmaker, identified the contradiction between two essential principles: that of the sovereign right of states regarding the flow of communication across national borders, and the free flow of information...
...It was increasingly clear that the juridical norms ratified by the United Nations at the end of the 1940s were becoming distorted by their conseJulylAug1982 910 NACLA R.po.t quences...
...The Economist (London), May 1, 1948, p. 7 0 1 . 11...
...But a couple of words are in order about this question of principles: the information agencies, like dailies in general, are directed by capitalist consortiums with a monopolist character and imperialist tendencies...
...In its place was the bloodless confrontation between "two blocs," in which the information field was one of the principal battlegrounds...
...Economic efficiency translated to the expansion of transnational enterprises, replete with their technological creativity, their logical *An agreement signed in 1941 between the United States and Britain, and endorsed by 15 anti-Axis nations including the Soviet Union, committing the signatories to eight goals of the war...
...In November 1953, in a speech to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had said, "Perhaps some of you feel that your government is not pushing political liberty as strongly as it should...
...Communications as a Political Tool The political power of communications emanating from the center had long been experienced by the developing countries, if not fully understood...
...The object of hatred had been replaced almost overnight - fascism by communism - although the vilification techniques were left almost intact...
...consumption requirements and their politicalmilitary means of "defending freedom...
...In a second meeting the representatives of 14 countries of the region recommended the creation of their own news agencies...
...The conflict continued into February of 1945, the month in which the reassignment of the transnational information market took place, despite the absence of Havas, by then cooperating with the Vichy government...
...XXIX, No...
...2 The particular focus of this strong language was the mass media, the channels of information which were viewed as a legacy of colonialism and impediments to "free, direct and rapid communication among [the developing nations...
...We are not suppliers of English news...
...10 NACLA ReportJuly/Aug1982 the news agency Prensa Latina which, within a few months, had installed news bureaus in most countries of the hemisphere...
...9. United Nations, Economic and Social Council, Committee on Human Rights Documents (E/CN.4/80), p.10...
...The new Cold War ideology was merely a vehicle for doing away with the possibilities for alterations in the status quo of colonial domination and exploitation...
...Only as time passed did it become clear that this principle could not satisfy the requirements of a world in which, particularly by the 1970s, a body of nations was emerging with objectives and requirements different than, if not antagonistic to, those manifested in the Geneva discussions...
...The attempt to respect both principles was becoming increasingly difficult within the context of reaching agreement on a coherent communications policy...
...JulylAugl1982 7NACLAReport ,m LL > 1 z Guatemala City, 1974-An invasion of consumerist values into a society where much of the population lacks adequate housing, food...
...1, 1978, p.5...
...Similar changes were reflected in the debate about communications...
...The revolutionary triumph in Cuba at the beginning of 1959 created a special case in Latin America...
...Satellites and National Sovereignty The gap between rich nations and poor was growing, in communications no less than other spheres...
...Implicitly, the agencies set themselves up as judges of reality, using criteria in fact predetermined by the political and economic interests of the transnational system and, ultimately, of the central countries of that system to which they belong...
...The first efforts in the 1940s and 50s grew out of a need to reformulate cultural concepts imposed by the two main 4July/Aug 1982 totalitarian nations of Europe -Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy...
...had 240 2-way voice channels...
...They could only expect material assistance from the central powers in exchange for this or that position, for a yes or no vote at some U.N...
...8. Ibid., p.82...
...An account of the effects that Allied propaganda produced in the insurrection movements of various nations of the Caribbean against the dictatorships in the period 1944-48, figures in William Krehm, Democracia y tiraniase el Caribe (Buenos Aires: Editorial Palestra, 1959...
...A decade earlier, while world war still raged, Kent Cooper, director of Associated Press (AP), initiated a different dispute, regarding "international press freedom" and redistribution of the news markets in the postwar period...
...A meeting of the United Nations General Assembly's 7th period of extraordinary sessions in that year conferred on ILET the mandate to implement "a research project that would cover the principal aspects of third world dependence in the field of information and communication, and, on this basis, prepare a series of concrete proposals to change the situation...
...In Latin America, on the other hand, the first regional meeting on news agencies was held in Chile in 1961, but a decade was to pass before another was held, this time in Quito...
...Supporters of a new order had by this time become conscious of the fact that postwar domination was woven into the whole structure of relations between the center and the periphery, not least in the existing information models...
...7 During the discussions, which spread into public debate, L. Barkner, professor of economics at the University of London, noted: Those who direct the three agencies in question assert that they are free of any political tendencies...
...Economic and Social Council through its Subcommittee on Press Freedom was convened in Geneva in March 1948...
...News cannot be English or North American, it is an international commodity...
...The First Steps The recognition of this need was the culmination of a process of redefining communications which had begun in the years immediately following the second world war, spurred by changing conditions in international power relations...
...For an excellent description of this period as it affected journalism, see James Aronson, The Press and the Cold War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973...
...4 It was impossible to remain neutral, at least during this first phase of the Cold War, in the battles unleashed in international forums and carried to the fields of counterespionage and information...
...What we want to hear about are the experiments carried out by the Argentinians or the Burmese in their efforts to overcome illiteracy or the dictatorial tendencies of their leaders...
...Commission for Human Rights and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) responded...
...In September 1961, the Cuban news agency had an opportunity to extend its journalistic tasks beyond the Western Hemisphere...
...John A. Willings, "Para que la comunicacidn entre culturas deje de ser una quimera," in El Correo (Paris: UNESCO), pp.15-16...
...In Africa, the delegates of 29 countries who met in 1963 recommended the creation of an African news agency...
...For a long time UNESCO suffered the effects of that division and in practice was limited to a passive role...
...More recently, the notion of the "neutrality" of information (or of "objective" reporting) has begun to be questioned through an analysis of its content...
...The eruption of the colonial countries of Asia and Africa, the constitution of the Nonaligned Movement and the creation of a news agency in the Western Hemisphere that addressed regional problems, altering the exclusionary competition of the information establishment, should not be seen as discrete phenomena, merely accidental in time...
...5 It would be another 20 years, however, before the imperatives of Lopez' vision were ratified and efforts made toward implementation...
...The interaction between a diplomacy which defended liberal principles, a business system which descended from "laissez-faire" and a modern technological potential had made possible a situation in which cultural sovereignty was being violated without a conscious response by the affected countries...
...These channels, it was argued, must be reorganized...
...This was still a somewhat ticklish argument since Reuters' managing editor had been appointed by the British government as director of propaganda during the first world war - to run concurrently with his tenure at the agency...
...Among the recommendations was the exchange of knowledge, culture and information...
...Does this have a good or bad influence on their activities...
...Gone was the hope of global solidarity proclaimed by Wendell Wilkie in a book called One World, in its time required reading for politicians and statesmen...
...A staff member of Radiodiffusion of Togo conducts man-in-the-street interviews...
...This trend would continue uninterrupted during the next 15 years until, by 1974, decolonization encompassed Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Sio Tome & Principe and Cabo Verde, all former Portuguese colonies, and Surinam (formerly Dutch Guiana), Guyana (formerly British Guiana), and the former British island colonies of Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados and Jamaica in the Western Hemisphere...
...But political stability became sanctified as defense of the established order, particularly that of the most conservative regimes in the periphery...
...A new phenomenon had burst onto the stage of war: it appeared that the best armed professional armies could be defeated by poorly fed forces lacking substantial logistic support, as long as they were inspired by the spirit and values of national liberation...
...6 In joint discussions between Cooper, Christopher Chancellor for Reuters and Hugh Baillie for UPI, Chancellor defended Reuters' moral right to the world market: "The main objective of Reuters is to maintain its independence and to supply all the world's newspapers with international coveragefree of allpreconceived ideas...
...2. Ibid...
...Information structures emerging from this conception gravitated naturally toward commercial manipulation, taken to its extreme sophistication by the advertising industry...
...Desirous of giving information to all the world's newspapers, reactionary or not, they purport to be "purely commercial enterprises," independent of parties, governments and nations...
...The radicalism of the African spokesmen brought the abscess to a head and showed up the inadmissible nature of the veto and of the dialogue between the great powers, and, above all the tiny role reserved for the third world...
...At the Asian-African conference in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955, a resolution was passed to promote cultural cooperation between the two continents, "the cradle of great religions and civilizations...
...The 1960s: Consciousness of Underdevelopment As the power balance shifted with the entry to the United Nations of new countries, it also gave rise to a new issue for that forum, that of correcting growing inequalities and progressively eliminating the existing abyss between the industrialized countries and the developing ones...
...In particular, that means the channels of information which are a legacy of the colonial past...
...The argument assumes they should have the unquestionable right and exclusive ability to choose which among the immense variety of national or international events fulfill the public's tacit right to be informed, or the world's right to access...
...General Assembly in 1960: "The representatives of the colonial countries were aggressive and violent, and carried things to extremes, but the colonial peoples did not find that they exaggerated...
...In 1962 the U.N...
...ILET, a research and publishing organization, was created in 1976, and has carried out a multifaceted program of work, including publications and seminars...
...Because this general awareness grew out of a specific political reality, it failed to recognize that the problem of information contained aspects that could not be isolated and resolved through new rules of conduct...
...Since control of mass media by the Nazis and fascists had constituted one of the first steps in their takeover of power, it was deemed necessary to re-establish and update the norms regarding freedom of expression as one of the essential human rights...
...The nations of the periphery, almost totally dependent on the machinery that fed the wire services of the industrialized nations, were victims during those years of a flood of misinformation that demanded loyalty and complicity on the one hand, and provoked repudiation and rejection on the other...
...The needs of these emerging nations were no less pressing than the original preoccupation of UNESCO, those countries whose cultural heritage had been threatened by the massive war-time destruction...
...The values and norms of the 1940s contributed to the survival of this nineteenth century ideal...
...Within this framework, some of the emerging Asian and African nations noted that all attempts to find their own solutions to their serious problems met with a conditional response...
...Department of State Bulletin, Vol...
...Nonetheless, that meeting in Geneva was one of the most important in generating a new information order required at the time by the changing postwar situation...
...The answer is obvious: "commercial" editorship cannot but impair the moral and political quality of their work...
...Rather, they grew out of similar experiences, and the understanding of those experiences would become continually more clear and shared, as would the elaboration of strategies to overcome their legacy...
...sanitation or work...
...Criteria, in short, that are hardly neutral...
...Frantz Fanon described the new tone that swamped international diplomacy in the U.N...
...In 1972 the United Nations General Assembly voted (against the vote of the United States) to institute the prin- ciple of "prior consent...
...Decolonization and the Cold War Just as UNESCO was emerging as the obligatory forum for these issues, changes began to occur which would affect its role, and in fact the nature of the debate itself...
...Since the Algeria meeting, most of the participating countries have squarely confronted the issue of recapturing the sphere of culture, information and communications, one of the most critical elements of the transformation of existing structures...
...It is these things that strengthen us, teach us and increase our efficiency ten times over...
...The Push for Third World News Agencies The outbreak of new wars of liberation became the context in which to follow decisions - or the lack of them - adopted in the information field...
...In Latin America, for example, the accumulation of value-laden messages from the United States favoring the Allies during World War II resonated long afterward...
...In December 1965, UNESCO sponsored an initial meeting to discuss the implications for the underdeveloped world of telecommunications and particularly the use of satellites for mass communications...
...Meeting of Heads of State or Government of the Nonaligned Nations, Algeria, 19731 As time passes, the conclusions reached at the fourth summit meeting of the Nonaligned Nations, held in Algeria in 1973, grow in significance as a turning point in the communications debate...
...In its preliminary report, it noted that: The right to freedom of expression also confers upon all who enjoy it the moral obligation to tell the truth without prejudice and spread knowledge without malicious intent...
...The objective was not confined to mediating any cultural currents that might flow from the socialist camp, but rather to deluging the periphery with messages aimed at inculcating the values of political stability, economic efficiency, technological creativity, the "logic" of the market, the advantages of consumerism, defense of freedom, etc...
...Theodore H. White, "Un corresponsal en pos de la historia...
...The proponents of change also focused criticism on international organizations such as the United Nations for their timidity in only proposing projects which were not oriented toward substantial transformation...
...We have not forgotten that we were the first colony to win independence...
...When Chinese Chancellor Chou En-lai extended his hand in a gesture of friendship to Dulles at the conclusion of the deliberations, according to a witness, Dulles "refused to extend his hand, humiliating him in public...
...this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers...
...XXIV, No...
...By 1960, some 15 years later, the figures had shrunk to include an area of only 13 million square kilometers and 83 million people, and UNESCO had increased from 44 to 94 mem6The news which interests the third world peoples does not include King Baudouin's marriage nor the scandals of the Italian ruling class...
...to help maintain international peace and security and to counteract the persistent spreading of false or distorted reports which provoke hatred or prejudice against states, persons or groups of different race, language, religion or philosophical conviction, confuse the peoples of the world, aggravate relations between nations or otherwise threaten and destroy the fruits of the common victorious struggle against the Nazi, Fascist and Japanese aggressions during the last world war...
...At the same time, the United Nations and the agencies which emerged from it could not escape the power struggle manifested by the socalled Cold War, at least until the correlation of internal forces became radically altered by the influx of African and Asian ex-colonies...
...News Agencies Carve Up the World In 1954, the U.N.'s Economic and Social Council analyzed a report written by Philippine delegate Salvador P. Lopez titled, "Freedom of Information, 1953...
...We appreciate ILET's graciousness and faith in allowing us to translate, condense and update Trampas into the first four articles of this NACLA Report, and recommend to all interested in this theme to read the entire book, as there was much rich material we were forced to omit...
...All temptations to bring about changes such as had occurred in China were controlled...
...The U.N...
...The revolutionary wars of the third world nations had been born...
...When it was impossible to stave off these demands entirely, minimal changes were granted, leaving the basis for traditional control intact, or allowing the introduction of neocolonial models...
...demands for independence of the Asian and African colonies were stifled...
...In 1960, UNESCO sponsored a meeting to develop the media in Asia and the Far East...
...AP and United Press International (UPI) were determined to wrest away some of the world markets from Reuters, the British agency which had controlled most of them together with France's Havas, the result of an agreement between Reuters, Havas and Germany's Wolff, some 50 years earlier...
...6. Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information-How Western Culture Dominates the World (Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 7 8 - 9 . 7. Ibid., p.80...
...3. United Nations, General Assembly, Official Record, First Session, December 1946, Part 2, p. 2 9 . 4. United Nations, General Assembly, Official Record, Third Session, December 1948, Part 1, pp...
...meeting, or for proclaiming support for or rejection of a certain international policy...
...Dissent was not allowed, and when the idea that "he who is not with me is against me" was imposed as a rule of Dulles' diplomacy, the obligatory nature of alignment was established...
...Frantz Fanon, 1961 ber nations...
...9 The report's emphasis was obviously motivated by the recent conflagration, which had left profound scars, especially on the lives of Europeans and Asians...
...In all, they represented 750 million people on five continents...
...4 In time, as the implications of media domination became clear, this principle would haunt efforts to change what was, in effect, a one-way flow of information and ideas...
...But suddenly, on May 7, 1954, colonial France's troops surrendered at Dien Bien Phu to forces that had confronted the most sophisticated techniques of traditional warfare with the improvisational, flexible, age-old tactics of guerrilla warfare...
...3 Exactly two years later, Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved on December 10, 1948, proclaimed that"everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression...
...1 0 This objective of consolidating and expanding their influence throughout the world became transparent through their resolute defense of the principle of "free flow of information," a value at that time not seen as objectionable in itself...
...7 4 - 5 . 5. Maarten Rooy, "Developing Media in Developing Countries, A Historical Review of Policies," Gazette (Amsterdam), Vol...
...7 7 - 8 . 16...
...Liberalism Revisited As was keenly observed by a journalist covering the Geneva meeting for the staid London Economist, "It was the impression of most delegations that the Americans wanted to secure for their news agencies that general freedom of the market for the most efficient which has been the object of all their initiatives in trade policy-that they regard freedom of information as an extension of the charter of the International Trade Organization rather than a special and important subject of its own...
...and in 1963 the Organization of Press Agencies of Asia was created...
...to facilitate the solution of the economic, social and humanitarian problems of the world through the free interchange of information bearing on such problems...
...Herbert I. Schiller, Communicacidn de masas e imperialismoyanqui (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 1976), pp.119-120...
...This propaganda had had unexpected results in some countries of the region (notably Guatemala, Costa Rica and several Caribbean colonies), whose people, stirred by the principles of the Atlantic Charter* broadly promoted by the United States, shook off the weight of longstanding oppressive dictators--who were also promoted by the United States...
...efforts in the immediate postwar period...
...He argued for the establishment of regional news agencies which, in his opinion, would be more effective in meeting the needs of the underdeveloped regions as well as more adequate channels for transmitting news from the region to the outside world...
...He Who Is Not With Me Before Dien Bien Phu, the Eisenhower Administration still preached the rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter...
...In 1961, ECOSOC passed its historic resolution calling for national development and international cooperation in the information field, in favor of the underdeveloped countries...
...With the world reduced to the size of a handkerchief, how would the weakest nations be able to defend themEarly Bird, the world's first communications satellite, launched from Cape Kennedy, April 1965...
...The widening chasm was put into perspective by Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, who reflected that, "While other countries are trying to reach the moon, we are still trying to reach our own villages...
...THE OLD INFORMATION ORDER 1. Fourth Conference of Heads of State or Government of the Nonaligned Nations, Algeria, September 5-9, 1973...
...The undeclared blockade begun in 1960 and culminating openly in 1964, limited Cuba's plan to expand the agency, and in fact caused the closure of the Latin American bureaus...
...In December 1946, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed that "freedom of information is a fundamental human right and is the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated...
...For the first time at that level, third world leaders articulated their shared need to develop Translated and adapted from Gregorio Selser and Rafael Roncagliolo, Trampas de la infornacidny neocolonialismo - las agencias de noticiasfrente a los paises no alineados, published by the Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales (ILET) in Mexico...
...A frank questioning of the political effects which the one-way flow of information provoked in the internal affairs of countries, violating their sovereignty, had come earlier from the Argentine government presided over by Juan Per6n (deposed in 1955), and from Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz (deposed in 1954) who denounced the U.S...
...Under the leadership of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who felt the newly independent nations should avoid overly intimate association with the power blocs, forms of contact and cooperation between the Asian and African countries began to take shape...
...He not only refused to sign the accord, thus laying one of the first stepping stones to the Vietnam War, but he expressed unstinting disdain for the Asian delegates...
...Thus the doctrine was just an extension of economic liberalism to the field of communications...
...Nonetheless this doctrine has constituted the cornerstone of the news agencies' argument justifying their determination to decide what should be considered news, without substantial national or international regulations of any kind...
...The unleashing of the Cold War undermined the spirit of universal coexistence which had guided U.N...
...The territory occupied in 1945 by the colonial powers (Belgium, Denmark, Spain, United States, France, Holland, Japan, Portugal, United Kingdom and South Africa) extended over 36 million square kilometers, encompassing a population of 663 million...
...They included noc territorial aggrandizement, free choice of government, access for all countries to trade and raw materials, economic collaboration for mutual advancement and benefit, freedom from fear and want, freedom of travel and abandonment of the use of force...
...Dulles closed the gap between his words and deeds in May 1954 in Geneva, when agreement was reached to end the colonial war in In8If I had to choose a single principle of our foreign policy and no other, I would take the free flow of information...
...The individual appears in this doctrine as a subject always inclined to select the best (i.e., to prefer good information over bad), as if there were some universal criterion of superiority...
...Prensa Latina's news was polemical, and it addressed the problematic that affected the developing world...
...wire services for news manipulations that affected his country's political situation...
...753 (November 30, 1953), p. 7 4 3 . 14...
...Soon afterward a worldwide propaganda campaign was launched to slander Cuba's image, based on information that came out of the transnational news structure...
...a more scientific analysis of cultural imperialism and a more specific strategy to resist it," recognizing that the "activities of imperialism are not confined to the political and economic spheres, but also encompass the cultural and social spheres...
...The old principles were drowned in a wave of what has been called the "ideological terrorism" of the 1950s...
...While the influence of the more developed nations remained decisive in measures taken at the UNESCO general conferences, as well as in the United Nations itself, the gradual entry of newly independent and sovereign nations began to change the picture of decisions and to alter the order of priorities...
...Although the technology by then existed to beam TV transmissions directly via satellite, without prior processing by earth stations, this principle granted the right of each country to decide which pro- grams could be transmitted in its territory...
...This historic meeting in Bandung was a prelude to the creation of the Nonaligned Movement...
...ILET, in cooperation with Inter Press Service, is currently finalizing plans to launch ALTERCOM, a service of exchanging development related material among alternative magazines and journals of Latin America...
...8 The debate with the giant news agencies assumed new forms, with an emphasis on ethical-political conceptions...
...A meeting called by the U.N...
...Invoking the so-called independence of their agencies, these merchants maintain that they are the "only free sources of objective information...
...But the presence of that alternative enterprise offered the peoples of the hemisphere for the first time a news flow that differed from the familiar...
...to help promote respect for human rights and fundamen5NACLA Report tal freedoms without any arbitrary discrimination...
...To their voices had increasingly been added others, from other continents...
...selves against satellites that circle the earth transmitting messages directly into people's homes-messages and ethics, underscored Professor Herbert Schiller in his writings on the subject, "incompatible with the projects and priorities of development"?'6 The meeting touched on the political and juridical aspects of this extraordinary technological leap and pointed to the necessity of protecting national sovereignty through some type of programming control...
Vol. 16 • July 1982 • No. 4
