Third World vs. Fourth Estate

In his 1942 autobiography, Barriers Down, former Associated Press Chief Kent Cooper described how a cartel of European press agencies controlled all the news that flowed into and out of the U.S. until well into the 1930s. "It told the world about the Indians on the warpath in the West, lynchings in the South and bizarre crimes in the North ... nothing creditable to America ever was sent," Cooper complained.

A similar complaint is being heard today. This time it is the developing nations of the Third World that claim to be the victims of biased and inadequate news coverage. And this time one of the accused is Cooper's own A.P., along with other Western-based news agencies that keep reporters abroad. These organizations, say Third World officials, monopolize the flow of news in much the same way that Western industrial firms dominate markets. So Third World countries are demanding U.K. endorsement of a "new world information order" to correct imbalances in the distribution of news.

This week they will try to do something drastic about it at the biennial general conference of the 146-nation United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris. Third World delegates are pushing for adoption of a draft declaration on the mass media that many Western diplomats and journalists consider a grave threat to press freedom. The document is based on a similar resolution proposed at UNESCO's 1970 meeting by the Soviets and rewritten since then to eliminate some of its more heinous features. Yet the present 1,500-word version still contains several provisions with chillingly Orwellian overtones. One would endorse government licensing of journalists. Another would compel news organizations to print official replies to stories a government deems unfair.

By far the most troubling of the declaration's eleven articles is the last: "It is the duty of states ... to ensure that the mass media coming directly under their jurisdiction act in conformity" with the declaration. To Western critics, that means nothing less than government control of the press. Warns Roger Tatarian, a longtime United Press International executive now teaching journalism at California State (Fresno): "It would in effect be putting UNESCO's badge of approval on government meddling with the news."

A number of major U.S. journalists' and publishers' associations have hotly denounced the declaration. Some have also urged that the U.S., which pays 25% of UNESCO's budget ($303 million this year), withdraw from the body if the declaration is adopted. In a letter to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, New York's Senator Daniel Moynihan last month called on the U.S. to "thunder our contempt for this contemptible document." In Paris, the 38-member U.S. delegation has been lobbying quietly to water down the declaration. But the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times last week editorialized against compromise. Demanded the Times: "What on earth have Pravda and the New York Times to bargain about in the definition of news?"

The heart of the conflict is a fundamental, perhaps irreconcilable disagreement over the role of the press. To the West, the press is the independent Fourth Estate, watchdog of the other three, and profit-making servant of an informed electorate. To the Communist world, the press is an apparatus of the state charged primarily with educating the masses about state policies. Third World leaders may prefer the Western model, but believe they need a controlled press to promote economic development, accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Observes Chicago Tribune Editor Clayton Kirkpatrick: "I hear the same complaints from the Third World as I do from Highland Park, Ill., where people think we should cover the opening of a new civic center."

The Third World's brief against the Western press contains two principal complaints:

> Western coverage of developing nations is shot through with colonial stereotypes; just as Europe's cartel once painted the U.S. as a land of scalpings, lynchings and ax murders, the Western press allegedly sees the Third World as a slough of coups, corruption and natural catastrophes.

> Western news organizations have so tight a strangle hold on international communications that the Third World simply cannot make itself heard, an imbalance that also purportedly perpetuates Western cultural domination.

Says Columbia Journalism Dean Elie Abel: "On the whole, the major media do an incredibly bad job of covering the Third World." To be sure, the West's press does devote considerably more ink and airtime to the likes of Uganda's Idi Amin than to more responsible leaders, and usually pays more attention to scandals and disasters than to complex social and economic stories. Yet those complaints can also be made about the West's coverage of its own affairs. If Western reporting about the developing world is thin, that may be because news follows the realities of world power; Washington and Moscow are more newsworthy capitals than, say, Lagos and Lima, especially to Western readers. Indeed, Third World news outlets are as parochial as their Western counterparts; a 1975 State Department study of Latin American newspapers showed that they carried little news of other developing countries.

Many Third World governments do not exactly encourage better coverage. The London-based International Press Institute, a watchdog group that monitors press freedom, reported in 1976 that 15 developing nations had expelled or refused entry to foreign correspondents in the previous year, and the rate has probably increased since then. Nigeria has booted out nearly all resident foreign journalists; the last Reuters man there was put into a dugout canoe with his wife and eight-year-old daughter and advised to start rowing toward neighboring Benin.

Perhaps the Third World's most accurate complaint is that the West dominates the world flow of communications, principally through the hegemony of the so-called Big Four (A.P., U.P.I., Reuters and Agence France Press). A study this year of 14 Asian newspapers made for the Edward R. Murrow Center at Tufts University showed the Big Four accounted for 76% of Third World news in those papers. Western dominance, however, is more a matter of economics than conscious conspiracy. International cable rates discriminate against small national news agencies and other low-volume users.

That imbalance may change. With UNESCO's blessing and the facilities of Yugoslavia's Tanjug news agency, ten nations in 1975 formed their own international news cooperative. The Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, as it is called, now has 50 member nations, and exchanges lightly edited government press releases among subscribers. Roger Tatarian has proposed a joint multinational news agency that would concentrate on national-development stories. A task force of the New York-based 20th Century Fund including Third World journalists has endorsed the idea. The World Press Freedom Committee, a group of 32 international publishers and broadcasters, has raised about half of the $1 million it plans to spend training Third World journalists and technicians. American UNESCO Delegation Chief John Reinhardt, who heads the Government's International Communications Agency, this month promised the nonaligned nations a package of U.S. technical assistance and hardware, presumably as an incentive to water down or table the UNESCO mass media declaration.

With debate on the declaration scheduled to begin this week, there seemed to be a chance that a let's-be-friends approach might prevail. The Soviets, more concerned with keeping SALT on the right track than with making trouble for Western reporters, appeared to be growing bored with the whole issue. UNESCO Director-General Amadou Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal, whose ambition is to succeed Kurt Waldheim as U.N. Secretary-General, is staking his prestige on passage of a mass media declaration, preferably by consensus. To that end, delegates from Western and nonaligned nations were caucusing last week to come up with a compromise acceptable to the U.S. Some American opponents of the declaration seem ready to go along. They note that it is not binding, and that Third World governments hardly need the permission of UNESCO to harass journalists.

Even if the measure is watered down or pigeonholed, the issue will come up again next year when a UNESCO commission of "wise men" led by former Irish Foreign Minister Sean MacBride completes an exhaustive study on the subject. In addition, the International Telecommunications Union will meet next fall to consider the first redistribution of world radio frequencies in 20 years. The frequencies are now dominated by the West and the Soviets. Third World nations are agitating for a better slice of the spectrum and for the right to block direct satellite broadcasting across national borders.

Whatever happens next in the news-flow dispute, the Third World countries have already achieved some major goals. They have made the West aware of their displeasure with slapdash coverage of their affairs. They have pried pledges of equipment and training from the West. Perhaps most important, and most disturbing, they have realized that they can, in the words of one specialist, "pull the plugs anywhere" in the international communications system.

What the West has yet to make clear to them is that press freedom need not be incompatible with national development, that government-dictated news is no more believable in the Third World than elsewhere and that any "new world information order" should be blessed with fewer government curbs on the flow of news, not more. As the 20th Century Fund's task force concluded: "The practices of a free press may be erratic, even in the West, but the aspirations of freedom should ultimately serve to unite the West and the Third World."

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