UNESCurbs

A "new order" for news

From morning to nearly midnight, Third World delegates to the 152-nation meeting of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Belgrade vented their complaints against the Western press, demanding a "new information order" that would give them greater control over international reporting of their affairs. Last week the Third World nations used their numerical superiority in UNESCO to move that new order closer to reality.

U.S. and Western European delegates objected vehemently to the idea that UNESCO ought to establish standards for news operations. The U.S. representative, Stanford University Professor Elie Abel, told the conference that UNESCO should not become "an international nanny." Nonetheless, UNESCO Director General Amadou Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal was authorized to begin "promptly" studying "basic principles" for a new order.

Also approved were several controversial UNESCO research projects on the press, including studies into advertising and media financing, codes of press ethics and measures to "protect" journalists, a euphemism for licensing them. Those undertakings are favored by advocates of the new order but are seen by critics as threats to press freedom.

In the long and sometimes bitter negotiations in Belgrade, U.S. and European representatives successfully stood their ground on two important points. One involved funding and control of UNESCO's newly established International Program for the Development of Communication. This organization will help channel Western communications assistance (both governmental and private) in the communications field to Third World countries. In a compromise resolution on UNESCO's much debated MacBride report--a global communications study by a panel of experts under the chairmanship of former Irish Prime Minister Sean MacBride--the West also fought off Third World attempts to exploit the report's bias toward government control as a basis for restricting the international news media.

Still, not all Western delegations were happy with that compromise and the MacBride report itself had moved one British speaker to recount the story of the Anglican curate who sits down to breakfast with his bishop and finds an obviously bad egg on his plate. When the bishop offers to replace it, the curate, trying not to offend his host, protests: "Oh no, my lord. I do assure you, it is excellent in parts." The Western press may likewise find the new information order, as UNESCO seems likely to serve it up, good only in parts--and hence unpalatable as a whole.

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