World information order

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The world information order is a short name for the idea of finding international guidelines for dealing with information and mass media . The debate has preoccupied UNESCO since its inception. It came to a head in the 1970s and 1980s, when the dispute over the world information system finally led to the US temporarily leaving UNESCO.

When UNESCO was founded in 1946, the commitment to freedom of information was one of its basic principles. However, with the accession of the Soviet Union and its allies, the number of states that insisted on states' right to control the media and exercise censorship grew . Many developing countries followed a similar trend.

The core of the conflict was the strong market position of the western media. In the countries of the Eastern Bloc and the Third World , these were the primary sources of information and opinion-forming for the population, as far as they were available or receivable there. In contrast, the population showed little trust in the state-controlled media of the dictatorships in the East and South. The strong position of the media of the former colonial powers as media imperialism was condemned in particular by the regimes of the Third World . The aim of the “New World Information Order” should therefore be to push back the reporting of the western media in favor of the native ones.

In November 1978, the General Conference of UNESCO adopted by Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow , the declaration on the basic principles for the contribution of the mass media to strengthening peace and international understanding, to promote human rights, to combat racism, apartheid and incitement to war , in addition to A commitment to the free flow of information contained numerous restrictions and concessions to the countries of the East and the South. The preamble of the declaration explicitly contained the demand for a “new information and communication order”. Not only Western states interpreted this as a license to control journalists and the media.

In 1984 the USA left UNESCO, and Great Britain followed a year later. In 1989, UNESCO gave up the term “information system”. The substantive debate continued. In 1997 Great Britain rejoined UNESCO, in 2003 the USA too.

In particular, the new technical developments such as the Internet led the international community to continue discussing international rules in global communication. In 2003 and 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva and Tunis served primarily for this purpose . The term “world information system” is deliberately no longer used in this context - also due to the earlier conflicts.

literature

  • Rosemary Righter: Invented Truth: Third World Information Policy. 1981, ISBN 9783776611359

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