Free Flow Doctrine

The free flow doctrine is associated with 1940s U.S. polices of international communication as promoted by William Benton, Assistant Secretary of State from 1945 to 1947. Benton was responsible for U.S. policy in the creation of United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and was on the Executive Board later. He lauded UNESCO's promotion of the free flow of information across national boundaries that, he claimed, would improve the plight of poorer countries. At the heart of the controversy about the free flow doctrine is the question, whose freedom to do what? Benton's proponents hailed free flow as a repudiation of the system of state-regulated media that they associated with the Soviet Union, then the world's second major superpower and Cold War nemesis of the United States. In contrast, critics called it a doctrine, a disparaging suggestion that for U.S. policy makers, it was an unquestioned article of faith that masked self-interest.

Kaarle Nordenstreng, a prominent critic, acknowledges that UNESCO's constitution does indeed promote the free flow of ideas by word and image, but that it does so in the service of mutual knowledge and understanding of peoples for the overriding purpose of contributing to peace and security. Within this framework, therefore, free flow is not an absolute good whose integrity requires that it be protected from all regulation. Nor is it merely a negative freedom, as in freedom from censorship. There are times when the conditions that underlie the possibility of expression must be regulated—in an act of positive freedom—to ensure that individuals may hold and express opinions and to receive those of others, without discrimination.

The notion of free flow resonated, for many, with purported traditions of free speech and free press in Western democracies that distinguished these from fascist and communist regimes. It extended the metaphor of flow beyond circulation of ideas within nations to traffic between nations. The idea of free expression was originally established in argument against prior state censorship, but took little account of the political economy of mass communication. The notion of a free press, for example, refers specifically to the editorial rights of newspapers and broadcast organizations. Mostly profit-driven corporations, their freedoms of expression fall far short of fulfilling Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression and that this right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

The presumption that news media shoulder this broader responsibility to the rights of everyone to freedom of expression would seem naïve in the light of sociological studies of the selectivity of media content and practices such as the framing of stories to highlight certain angles and obscure others. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky identified a propaganda model in which mainstream [Page 413]press coverage is governed by (a) the power relations between media owners and the interests of political, business, and military elites; (b) the strategic orientation of media content to the goal of maximizing advertising revenue; (c) journalistic privileging of authoritative or official sources; (d) journalists' fear of retribution from powerful news sources; and (e) ideological convergence between media owners, practitioners, and powerful news sources.

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