(2 of 4)
The heart of the conflict is a fundamental, perhaps irreconcilable disagreement over the role of the press. To the West, the press is the independent Fourth Estate, watchdog of the other three, and profit-making servant of an informed electorate. To the Communist world, the press is an apparatus of the state charged primarily with educating the masses about state policies. Third World leaders may prefer the Western model, but believe they need a controlled press to promote economic development, accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Observes Chicago Tribune Editor Clayton Kirkpatrick: "I hear the same complaints from the Third World as I do from Highland Park, Ill., where people think we should cover the opening of a new civic center."
The Third World's brief against the Western press contains two principal complaints:
> Western coverage of developing nations is shot through with colonial stereotypes; just as Europe's cartel once painted the U.S. as a land of scalpings, lynchings and ax murders, the Western press allegedly sees the Third World as a slough of coups, corruption and natural catastrophes.
> Western news organizations have so tight a strangle hold on international communications that the Third World simply cannot make itself heard, an imbalance that also purportedly perpetuates Western cultural domination.
Says Columbia Journalism Dean Elie Abel: "On the whole, the major media do an incredibly bad job of covering the Third World." To be sure, the West's press does devote considerably more ink and airtime to the likes of Uganda's Idi Amin than to more responsible leaders, and usually pays more attention to scandals and disasters than to complex social and economic stories. Yet those complaints can also be made about the West's coverage of its own affairs. If Western reporting about the developing world is thin, that may be because news follows the realities of world power; Washington and Moscow are more newsworthy capitals than, say, Lagos and Lima, especially to Western readers. Indeed, Third World news outlets are as parochial as their Western counterparts; a 1975 State Department study of Latin American newspapers showed that they carried little news of other developing countries.
Many Third World governments do not exactly encourage better coverage. The London-based International Press Institute, a watchdog group that monitors press freedom, reported in 1976 that 15 developing nations had expelled or refused entry to foreign correspondents in the previous year, and the rate has probably increased since then. Nigeria has booted out nearly all resident foreign journalists; the last Reuters man there was put into a dugout canoe with his wife and eight-year-old daughter and advised to start rowing toward neighboring Benin.