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Perhaps the Third World's most accurate complaint is that the West dominates the world flow of communications, principally through the hegemony of the so-called Big Four (A.P., U.P.I., Reuters and Agence France Press). A study this year of 14 Asian newspapers made for the Edward R. Murrow Center at Tufts University showed the Big Four accounted for 76% of Third World news in those papers. Western dominance, however, is more a matter of economics than conscious conspiracy. International cable rates discriminate against small national news agencies and other low-volume users.
That imbalance may change. With UNESCO's blessing and the facilities of Yugoslavia's Tanjug news agency, ten nations in 1975 formed their own international news cooperative. The Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, as it is called, now has 50 member nations, and exchanges lightly edited government press releases among subscribers. Roger Tatarian has proposed a joint multinational news agency that would concentrate on national-development stories. A task force of the New York-based 20th Century Fund including Third World journalists has endorsed the idea. The World Press Freedom Committee, a group of 32 international publishers and broadcasters, has raised about half of the $1 million it plans to spend training Third World journalists and technicians. American UNESCO Delegation Chief John Reinhardt, who heads the Government's International Communications Agency, this month promised the nonaligned nations a package of U.S. technical assistance and hardware, presumably as an incentive to water down or table the UNESCO mass media declaration.
With debate on the declaration scheduled to begin this week, there seemed to be a chance that a let's-be-friends approach might prevail. The Soviets, more concerned with keeping SALT on the right track than with making trouble for Western reporters, appeared to be growing bored with the whole issue. UNESCO Director-General Amadou Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal, whose ambition is to succeed Kurt Waldheim as U.N. Secretary-General, is staking his prestige on passage of a mass media declaration, preferably by consensus. To that end, delegates from Western and nonaligned nations were caucusing last week to come up with a compromise acceptable to the U.S. Some American opponents of the declaration seem ready to go along. They note that it is not binding, and that Third World governments hardly need the permission of UNESCO to harass journalists.
Even if the measure is watered down or pigeonholed, the issue will come up again next year when a UNESCO commission of "wise men" led by former Irish Foreign Minister Sean MacBride completes an exhaustive study on the subject. In addition, the International Telecommunications Union will meet next fall to consider the first redistribution of world radio frequencies in 20 years. The frequencies are now dominated by the West and the Soviets. Third World nations are agitating for a better slice of the spectrum and for the right to block direct satellite broadcasting across national borders.