Carson Newman College New World Information and Communication Order Reflection Paper Please read the article, and write about 250-300 words reflection. The
Carson Newman College New World Information and Communication Order Reflection Paper Please read the article, and write about 250-300 words reflection. The reflection should include your own thoughts about the article and your question about article. [For Wiley-Blackwell International Companion to Media History and the Foundations of Media
Studies, edited by John Nerone]
Chapter by Kaarle Nordenstreng (abridged)
The New World Information and Communication Order: An Idea that Refuses to Die
This topic leads us to a particular chapter in media history, dealing with international politics as
much as media studies. The concept of a new world information and communication order,
known as NWICO, became a leading theme in global media policy debates from the 1970s until the
1990s covering the period from heights of decolonization to the collapse of communism. The
debates started in diplomatic forums of the developing countries, particularly the Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM)1, and extended to professional and academic circles so that in the 1980s NWICO
was part and parcel of the discourse on the medias role in society and the world at large. By the
new millennium, however, it disappeared from the agenda to be replaced by concepts such as media
globalization. In the 2010s, NWICO already belongs to the history of the field a history that keeps
re-emerging under different aegis.
NWICO is quite a hot chapter in the history of the field. It connects the media, and the study of the
media, to the geopolitical struggles between the American-led West and the Soviet-led East, on
the one hand, and the industrialized North and the developing South, on the other. NWICO
became the buzzword for media controversies in the final period of the Cold War and in the
transition to a post-Cold War world. However, NWICO did not only serve as a political context to
media and their policies at the time; it was also a catalyst for a paradigmatic shift in international
communication studies. The present author even compared NWICO and a critical variant of
communication research as two tracks of the same movement (Nordenstreng 1993).
In brief, the concept was born in an aggressive wave of decolonization spearheaded by NAM in the
first part of the 1970s; it was consolidated during an information war, with a counterattack by the
Western powers in the mid-1970s, followed by a diplomatic truce in the late 1970s; then it was
shunned by another Western corporate offensive in the 1980s. Yet its idea carried over to the new
millennium, no longer as a controversial concept but embedded in a number of key issues in global
media policy and study.
Birth in a decolonization offensive
By the early 1970s, the developing countries had accumulated a great deal of political power and
economic potential, with the support of such organizations as NAM and the Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). All this created a new relation of forces in the world arena,
already under pressure from the socialist part of the world, leading to such manifestations as the oil
crisis and the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Establishment of a New International
Economic Order (NIEO)2 all of which worked against the vested interests of the Western
countries. Another corollary to this offensive against the West was a polarization of the Arab-Israeli
conflict, reflected, not only in a war between the parties, but also in the UN resolution by which the
majority of the international community determined Zionism as a form of racism3.
In this situation, it appeared that a new chapter in world history was in the making, and it was not
by chance that the phrase new order became popular. After all, it implies a radical analysis of the
world; the concept of order points at a global structure not far from Lenin’s theory of imperialism. It
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suggested a radical program to change the world; the notion of new may well be interpreted as a
call for war against the old order. Consequently, the basic pattern was that the West was on the
defensive and the developing countries, supported by the socialist countries, were on the offensive.
Under these conditions the idea of decolonization was well established as a political program and an
intellectual concept. But before 1973, it was not applied to the sphere of information and culture.
This occurred systematically in NAM platforms during 1976: first in a symposium on information
in Tunis, then in a conference of information ministers in New Delhi, and finally in the Summit in
Colombo.
The first event to articulate media and communication in terms of an international order was the
NAM Symposium on Information in Tunis (Tunisia) in March 1976. The resolution of this
Symposium includes the following paragraph:
Since information in the world shows a disequilibrium favouring some and ignoring others,
it is the duty of the non-aligned countries and the other developing countries to change this
situation and obtain the decolonisation of information and initiate a new international order
in information. (quoted in Nordenstreng 1984a: 10)
The preceding paragraph of the resolution speaks about emancipation of the developing countries
from structures of imperialist power, which should be seen in the general context of what was
expressed already by the 4th NAM Summit in Algiers (Algeria) in 1973: the activities of
imperialism are not confined solely to the political and economic fields, but also cover the cultural
and social fields, demanding NAM to take concerted action in the field of mass communication
(ibid.: 9).
Actually such a view of placing mass communication within the structures of imperialism was
quite common at the time also among critical scholars and development activists in the USA and
Europe. Even the President of Finland a capitalist country pursuing a neutral foreign policy
between East and West used the term when drawing attention to the structural inequalities in the
media field, nationally and internationally: Just as within Finland there is a situation in the press
described as a bourgeois hegemony, on the international arena there is a state of affairs called
communication imperialism. (Kekkonen 1974: 44)4
Yet the prime mover of the NWICO concept was NAM, which followed up the Tunis Symposium
already in July 1976 when the NAM Ministerial Meeting in New Delhi (India) established Press
Agencies Pool of the Non-Aligned Countries and adopted a landmark New Delhi Declaration. It
serves as a textbook presentation of the reasoning behind NWICO:
1. The present global information flows are marked by a serious inadequacy and
imbalance. The means of communication information are concentrated in a few
countries. The great majority of countries are reduced to being passive recipients of
information which is disseminated from a few countries.
2. This situation perpetuates the colonial era of dependence and domination. It confines
judgements and decisions on what should be known, and how it should be made known,
into the hands of a few.
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3. The dissemination of information rests at present in the hands of a few agencies located
in a few developed countries, and the rest of the peoples of the world are forced to see
each other, and even themselves, through the medium of these agencies.
4. Just as political and economic dependence are legacies of the era of colonialism, so is
the case of dependence in the field of information, which in turn retards the achievement
of political and economic growth.
5. In a situation where the means of information are dominated and monopolized by a few,
freedom of information really comes to mean freedom of these few to propagate
information in the manner of their choosing and the virtual denial to the rest of the right
to inform and be informed objectively and accurately.
6. Non-Aligned countries have, in particular, been the victims of this phenomenon. Their
endeavours, individual and collective, for world peace, justice, and for the establishment
of a n equitable international economic order, have been under-played or misrepresented
by international news media. Their unity has sought to be eroded. Their efforts to
safeguard their political and economic independence and stability have been
denigrated
(quoted in Nordenstreng 1984a: 10-11).
As pointed out by the present author (Nordenstreng 1984b: 29), this declaration presents a
fundamental challenge to the traditional libertarian theory of the press in three respects. First, it
implies that laissez-faire will lead to monopolization and create neo-colonial dependence. Second, it
shows how insufficient is an abstract right to information without ensuring the material means to
put that right into practice. Third, the information in the media is given explicit content
qualifications: it should be objective and accurate.
The New Delhi Declaration was endorsed a month later by the 5th NAM Summit in Colombo (Sri
Lanka), where 87 members of the movement over half of the United Nations (UN) membership
resolved: A new international order in the fields of information and mass communications is as
vital as a new international economic order. (Nordenstreng 1984a: 11) Linking NWICO with
NIEO further galvanized the concept turning it to a highly political issue in the global arena. The
linkage also highlighted a powerful common denominator: the idea of collective self-reliance
(Pavlic and Hamelink 1985).
The political history of decolonization would not be complete without noting that the socialist bloc
of the East, although formally a separate third party of the power game, was a kind of natural ally
of NAM as they both were directed against the West and its capitalist interests in the world. This
became particularly clear in the media field, where in the early 1970s the Soviet Union had initiated
a project to establish regulatory relations between international media such as news agencies and
foreign broadcasts, on the one hand, to the principles of international law and professional ethics, on
the other. A flagship of this project was the Mass Media Declaration of UNESCO which was
drafted at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) between
1970 and 1978, with NAM and the Soviet-led East sharing the same strategic interests against the
corporate-dominated West (Nordenstreng 1984a)5.
As far as the history of ideas is concerned, a central intellectual ingredient in the raise of NWICO
was the concept of freedom how the value-loaded idea of press freedom was suddenly brought
under a critical light. Powerful input to a critical look came from Herbert Schiller’s account of the
genesis of the American free flow doctrine as an instrument of cultural domination (Schiller 1976).
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A sharp look at the same issue from the South was provided by a veteran journalist in India, D.R.
Mankekar in his books with telling titles One-Way Free Flow (1978) and Whose Freedom? Whose
Order? (1981). A Western position was articulated by a British journalist, Rosemary Righter in her
Whose News? Politics, the Press and the Third World (1978). (For and overview of the free flow
doctrine in global media policy, see Nordenstreng 2011.)6
Consolidation in an information war7
The mounting media-related activities of NAM, UN and UNESCO gave rise to an opposition in the
West, particularly among private media circles. Accordingly, the American publishers established
the World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC)8 to wage an eventually successful global struggle in
and around intergovernmental organizations to beat back authoritarian proposals for a restrictive
new world information and communication order. The WPFCs first battle against UNESCO was
waged at the Intergovernmental Conference on Communication Policies in Latin America and the
Caribbean, held in San José (Costa Rica) in 1976. Although the moment was favourable to
UNESCOs pursuit of a modestly anti-imperialist line, the WPFC succeeded in making the
concept of a national communication policy controversial, thus impairing the momentum of this
program of UNESCO.
The next battleground was UNESCOs General Conference in Nairobi in 1976, convened for the
first time in Africa. The developing countries came there with the freshly articulated NAM position,
and the socialist countries were prepared to push through the Mass Media Declaration as drafted by
an intergovernmental meeting which failed to reach a consensus and instead voted with an EastSouth majority, leaving the West in a defeated minority. The Western countries and media
proprietors were most concerned in this draft about a reference to the UN resolution equating
Zionism with racism and about an article suggesting that states are responsible for the activities in
the international sphere of all mass media under their jurisdiction (as determined by international
law).
Consequently, Nairobi became the scene of unprecedented diplomatic and non-governmental
lobbying. In order to understand the events at UNESCO it is important to recall that at the same
time, in 1976-77, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations prepared special reports and
organized hearings on global media policies, and these activities were no longer typical
manifestations of the counterattack waged by lobbies such as WPFC. While certainly motivated by
the same fundamental interests, they advocated a new and more flexible approach a strategy of
selective accommodation to, and active partnership with, the forces confronting the West.
Especially outspoken in this respect was the Kroloff and Cohen Report, which begins by observing:
Whether we like it or not, there will be a New World Information Order, and continues:
Worldwide the New World Information Order could be good or bad. As the situation now
stands, the United States has more to lose than any other nation as the Order becomes a
fact. It should be noted, however, that the United States need not be a loser if appropriate
actions are taken.
Indeed, the information war proceeded to a new stage, after the NAM offensive and the Western
counterattack a truce. In fact, before and during Nairobi 1976 while the Western press and
private broadcasting interests kept campaigning against UNESCO Western diplomats were busy
suggesting deals to the developing countries. The political purpose was to play down the draft Mass
Media Declaration, which by that time had become a symbol for a consideration of the principles
and contents of the mass media within an anti-Western context. By and large, the new strategy
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followed the old formula: If you cannot beat them, join them! Also, the formula of divide and rule
was employed in response to the fact that it had been precisely the united front of the developing
countries, backed by the socialist countries, which had brought about the political defeats for the
West during the first stage.
It was such a situation of conflicting political strategies that led to the compromise whereby
the Mass Media Declaration was shelved for another two years and an international
commission was established to study global problems of communication to be headed by
Sean MacBride. It was a clever tactical move by UNESCO’s then Director-General AmadouMahtar M’Bow to set up a reflexion group of wise men as a way to avoid a political crisis,
which had accumulated at UNESCO due to mounting disagreements about the Organizations
competence to determine normative standards for the media.
The conflicting strategies of Nairobi 1976 were further elaborated by the time of the next UNESCO
General Conference in Paris in 1978. An outspoken statement was given by the head of the U.S.
delegation, Ambassador John E. Reinhardt (an African-American representing Jimmy Carters
Administration), who in his address contrasted restrictive declarations against positive
cooperation and made a call for a more effective program of action, including American
assistance, both public and private, to suitably identified regional centers of professional education
and training in broadcasting and journalism in the developing world, as well as a major effort to
apply the benefits of advanced communications technology, specifically communications satellites,
to economic and social needs in the rural areas of developing nations. There was little new in this
program, but its launching at UNESCO as a kind of political demonstration gave rise to the concept
of a Marshall Plan of Telecommunications, muted by those developing world representatives who
were not quite convinced of the sincerity of U.S. intentions. In fact, this led two years later to the
establishment of the International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC).
Obviously the U.S. carrot was designed to play down even to bury the Mass Media
Declaration, as well as other political manifestations of the new order. However, the fact that the
Declaration was finally adopted, only three weeks after launching this Marshall Plan, shows that
the Western strategy did not quite succeed. It did not stop the developing countries, with the help of
socialist countries, from pushing restrictive declarations. It helped the Western side only as a
leverage in the bargaining process over the formulations of the Declaration. At this period of
accommodation, the United States did not deploy its stick for example, by threatening to
withdraw from UNESCO.
Another compromise on the same U.S.-developing countries basis was a resolution, adopted by
consensus at the 1978 General Conference, concerning the MacBride Commission. This resolution
appreciated the interim report which the Commission had prepared for the General Conference, and
invited, among other things, the members of the Commission to address themselves, in the course
of preparing their final report, to the analysis and proposal of concrete and practical measures
leading to the establishment of a more just and effective world information order. Although this
resolution did not contain explicit free flow references, it obviously met the Western interest in
alluring the developing countries to turn attention away from fundamental principles and content
considerations (such as the Draft Declaration) to practical cooperation (such as the Marshall
Plan).
Consequently, Nairobi 1976 and Paris 1978 showed that Western counteroffensive was effective by
stopping the offensive of the South and East from continuing with their automatic majority. On the
other hand, the developing countries and the socialist countries also got their part of the
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compromise. The Mass Media Declaration was finally adopted by consensus in November 1978.9
And the MacBride Commission was mandated to examine the problems of communication in
order to get towards a new more just and more efficient world information and
communication order, as the subtitle of the Commissions Report was formulated. These
were clearly compromises between the capitalist West, socialist East and the non-aligned South of
the time. There was room for compromise a truce in an information war in the late 1970s,
largely due to the East-West détente and the oil crisis, which supported those Western strategists
who preferred carrot to stick.
The UNESCO General Conference in Belgrade in 1980 was historical, not only because it formally
established the IPDC, but also because it brought together all aspects of the great debate of the
1970s, including its most controversial elements concerning the conceptual and political substance
of NWICO. This took place around a resolution on the MacBride Report. Patient and painful
negotiations between and within various geopolitical groupings led to a consensus on that
resolution, articulating the most elaborate definition of NWICO ever achieved at the UN system:
(a) this new world information and communication order could be based, among other
considerations, on:
(i) elimination of the imbalances and in…
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