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?"