Free Flow of Information

Toward the end of World War II (1939–45), the expression “free flow of information” and the ideas that it encapsulates began appearing in national and international documents. Briefly, the expression is meant to convey the open passage of print and electronic media across borders and among nations. Important examples include (as “free flow of ideas by word and image”) the constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 1945) and (as “freedom of opinion and expression”) the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948). The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) established the Subcommission on Freedom of Information and of the Press in the early 1950s. ECOSOC addressed the problem of a global imbalance of information structure as early as 1961, as did the United Nations General Assembly in deliberations in 1952 and again a decade later.

The intellectual currency of “free flow” has demonstrated durability and adaptability over time, appearing, for example, in the 1966 UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (as “freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media”), and in the 1972 General Conference of UNESCO's Declaration of Guiding Principles on the Use of Satellite Broadcasting for the Free Flow of Information, the Spread of Education and Greater Cultural Exchange.

Yet not long after the end of World War II it also became apparent that the principle of “free flow” of information might potentially clash with both equity among nations in their levels of technological and economic development, and with their national sovereignty. Transnational delivery of television signals by satellite, first accomplished in the early 1960s with Telstar, was predicted by some critics to pose a severe threat to national cultural sovereignty (although by the 1990s, it seemed that satellite had greater significance at local, national, and regional than at global levels). The “free flow” principle was broadened to a “free and balanced flow of information” in UNESCO's 1978 “Declaration of Fundamental Principles Concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, the Promotion of Human Rights information and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement to War.” This long-titled document called for “greater reciprocity” of information, and for a “free flow and better balanced dissemination of information”—reformulations that were reiterated in the 1980 MacBride Commission report to UNESCO. The MacBride report was the culmination of a series of debates at conferences hosted principally by UNESCO and by countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, that sought to encourage a proposed “New World Information and Communication Order” (NWICO) as a necessary sequel to an earlier New World Economic Order (NWEO). The story of the NWICO debates and their conflicting philosophical foundations has been recounted in many sources, including Mehra's 1986 book, The Free Flow of Information: A New Paradigm.

The spirit of NWICO was first reflected in global telecommunications when in 1973 the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) eliminated its colonial system of voting whereby nations voted according to the number of colonies they administered. In 1982, the ITU expanded its mandate to address particular needs of developing countries. Both the NWICO and the 1980 MacBride Commission report to UNESCO met with a sustained Western media attack, spearheaded by the [Page 641]United States (including 1982 congressional measures against UNESCO, and strong lobbying of the newspaper-backed World Press Freedom Committee) and Britain. Their reaction expressed a fear that UNESCO might endorse restrictions on “free flow” imposed by undemocratic governments. It was also argued that these might require government licensing of journalists (although UNESCO itself never supported this concept). Western negative reaction can also be seen as one reflection of an evolving postcolonial world in which the UN was no longer as compliant with Western foreign policy as it had been earlier.

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