Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA POLICY 31
structural dependency of Third World nations on First World powers.
Drawing from dependency theory – a critical school of thought based
on the Latin American experience of underdevelopment – intellectuals
and policy-makers within the non-aligned nations challenged the assumptions
about the universality of the development paradigm and set
out to reverse the neocolonial rules governing aid and the terms of
trade. 11
International communication policy became an area of interest for
national leaders, who saw ‘decolonizing information’ and reversing ‘cultural
imperialism’ as vital to the New Economic Order, in the light of
growing US corporate domination of news and cultural flows at the expense
of mass media produced in the Third World (Nordenstreng 1984).
Throughout the 1970s, debates within UNESCO criticized the US vision
of a ‘free flow of information’ as opposed to the ‘quantitative imbalance’
in news and information flow across media, the gaping lack of
information exchange between Third World nations and the social and
cultural costs of ‘alienating cultural influences’ of commercially based
media (Gross and Costanza-Chock 2004: 24–6). The idea of a New International
Information Order (later becoming the NWICO) was laid
out in 1976 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Initially, the call for NWICO criticized
the five major news agencies that dominated international news
flows. An immediate outcome of this critique was the creation of the
News Agency Pool, which aimed to create an alternate news distribution
system within the Third World. Criticisms initially raised by radical
Latin American scholars against US commercial media imperialism were
echoed and reinterpreted by national leaders across both the North–
South as well as East–West axes of tension: ‘The East ably succeeded in
fusing its position on the possibility and thus the intervention of the state
in defense of national sovereignty with that of countries of the Third
World fighting for their cultural self-determination’ (Mattelart 2002:
181). In the end, the MacBride Commission Report, published in 1980,
after several years of heated international deliberation, raised important
questions about global information inequality, media concentration and
national cultural determination, marking a significant departure for UN-
ESCO. However, the final outcome was a source of frustration for most
of its supporters, many of whom felt that the MacBride Report presented
a contradictory and inherently impractical set of prescriptions for policy
reform. 12
The muddled prescriptions of the MacBride Report and the failures of
the NWICO debates to radically alter the course of international communication
and media policy has been rightly blamed on the overwhelming
political economic power of the US media industry to launch an