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THE HISTORY OF GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA POLICY 45
impart information through any media regardless of frontiers.’ See:
http://www.un.org.overview.rights.html
4. Mattelart writes: ‘It was in 1949 that the notion of “development”
appeared in the language of international relations, designating by its
antonym “underdevelopment” the state of the part of the planet that
did not yet have access to the benefits of progress ...The expression
was born in the White House and passed into history via the 1949
State of the Union speech given by President Truman, in a section
entitled “Point Four”. This program aimed to mobilize energies and
public opinion to combat the great social disequilibria that threatened
to open the door to world communism. The ideology of progress
metamorphosed into the ideology of development.’ (Mattelart 2002:
148).
5. The gendered construction of mass consumption was a necessarily
complex process that involved evoking desire, comfort and convenience
as well as negotiation on the part of female consumers as
discussed by Spigel (1992) and others (Meehan and Riordan 2001).
Although beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the gendered
dimensions of Fordist public policy in greater depth, it is important
to point out that the paternalistic and patriarchal images of ‘housewives’
as grateful consumers also reinforced gendered ‘distinctions
between the (female) domestic private space and (male) public space’
as a broader objective of public policy (Graham and Marvin 2001: 70).
6. Following in the tradition of dependency theorists in communications
and other fields, Mattelart provides much-needed geopolitical
context for the timing of the interest in communication for development.
For instance, Lerner’s research was based on a study of
six Middle Eastern countries in the 1950s, after the US became
concerned about democratically elected political leaders such as
Iran’s Mossadegh, who nationalized the oil industry in 1951, which
was reversed thanks to the CIA-backed coup d’état in Iran in 1953.
For more see: Mattelart 2002: 148–50.
7. UNESCO was associated with development communication as early
as 1948. However, it began focusing on helping ‘develop media of
information in underdeveloped countries’ in 1958, with a series of
‘expert meetings’ in the early 1960s. The organization prepared a
report that it presented to the General Assembly in 1961, entitled
Mass Media in Developing Countries, where it was estimated that
70 per cent of the world population lacked the ‘minimum levels of
communication capacity’. This marked the beginning of indexing
communication needs as a development problem to be solved through
aid and First World Assistance. For more on the institutional history