Page 181 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

160 Critical investigations in political economy

contestation over a new world economic order. These debates occurred in the
1970s when the so-called non-aligned states, including many newly formed nations,
could exert pressure at a moment of heightened influence. The two Cold War
superpowers, the US and the USSR, vied for their support while capitalist crises
that followed in the wake of the OPEC oil price rise in 1973 shifted the bargaining
power to resource-rich regions. The United Nations had been established as a for-
mally inclusive body with voting equality between member nations. While largely
deemed unworkable by US leaders, as the ‘executive’ powers of the Security
Council remained locked in Cold War antagonists, the UN provided a platform
and forum for debate. UNESCO began to promote the international circulation of
media, the protection of journalists, and promotion of Article 19 of the UN
Declaration of Human Rights (1948). By the 1970s the ranks of the UN had
swelled as former colonies gained independence and many were unsurprisingly vocal
in opposing Western efforts to retain or reimpose arrangements of dependency
(Schiller 1996: 99). A UNESCO meeting of experts 1969 concluded:

At the present time, communication takes place in one direction … the
image given of developing countries is often false, deformed, and what is
more serious, this image is the one presented in these countries themselves.
The participants in the Montreal meeting believe that the exchange of
information and of other cultural products, particularly in developing
countries, is in danger of modifying or displacing cultural values and of
causing problems for the mutual understanding among nations.
(cited in Mattelart 1994: 180)

Amidst broad-ranging concern about inequality in cultural flows from North to
South and from core to periphery a key target was news and news agencies.
According to Masmoudi (1979) five Western news agencies were responsible for
80 per cent of the world’s news – only a quarter of which was about developing
countries. At a UNESCO meeting in Montreal in 1976 the proposal for a New
World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) was launched by non-
aligned countries and in 1977 UNESCO established an International Commission
for the study of communications problems. The Commission, backed by some
hundred studies, papers and submissions, was presided over by Sean MacBride,
a former Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army who went on to become an
Irish Government Minister and human rights campaigner. The MacBride
Commission report (1980) produced eighty-two recommendations for action set
out under the following themes: strengthening independence and self-reliance;
social consequences and new tasks; journalistic professional integrity and standards;
democratising communication; and fostering international co-operation. It called
for guaranteed pluralism, a more just world communication order, support for
third world development, limits on the activities of transnational corporations,
measures to tackle media concentration, better conditions for journalists, and
democratisation of communications, including the abolition of censorship. It