Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

30 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
communications assuming a linear road to modernization and progress.
The integration of national culture often meant state censorship of minority
perspectives or the smoothing over of historically sensitive social
divisions. The diffusion of radios to farmers and expansion of satellite
television failed, of course, to take into consideration the experiences or
participation of the very people they were supposed to modernize. This
would be the basis of the critique by reformers arguing for new participatory
approaches to development communication (Melkote and Steeves
2001), often by former modernization scholars such as Everett Rogers
(1995). We are arguing that nations in the Third World in the Fordist era
were already integrated into an international system of development and
modernization defined by the West. National regulation of infrastructure
investment and expansion in the areas of telecommunications, electronics
and broadcasting followed the objectives of development, with minimum
participation from and often at the direct expense of the vast majority
of any given nation’s population. Moreover, national elites throughout
much of the Third World tightened their grip on the regulation of mass
media for the ostensible objective of national development, often with
the implicit backing of the US and other Western powers, who set aside
their commitment to ‘freedom of information’ and instead supported
authoritarian regimes faithful to a modernization agenda without social
upheaval. 10
It is in this historical context that we turn to the most significant struggle
over international communication policy in the Fordist era: the call
for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) in
UNESCO. NWICO had its roots in the non-aligned movement (NAM),
formed by a group of prominent African and Asian national leaders who
met in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, to promote an independent vision of
development outside the constraints of the bipolar framework of the Cold
War. The key players of the NAM movement like Sukarno (Indonesia),
Nehru (India), Nkrumah (Ghana), Nasser (Egypt), Nyrere (Tanzania),
Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Chou En-lai (China), outlined a philosophy of
non-interference in matters of international relations. This movement
was not promoting neutrality in international relations; rather, it laid
out an explicit critique of ‘colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism and
racism’ (Gupta 2001; 183). In 1961, a summit in Belgrade – with the
leadership of Yugoslavia’s Tito – launched the new movement against
the intervention of both Soviet aggression in the Eastern block and the
growing military involvement of the US from Cuba to Sub-Saharan Africa
to Southeast Asia. By the mid-1960s, a new group of 77 (G77) nations
within the UN emerged that by 1974 would call for a New International
Economic Order (NIEO) with the explicit objective of overturning the