INDIA, THAT IS BHARAT
Alok Rai
Whose Freedom? Whose Order?—A Plea for a New International Informa¬tion Order by Third World by D R Mankekar By D.R. Mankekar, 1982, 234 pp., 55.00
Nov-Dec 1982, volume 7, No 3

The international press has not taken kindly to the debate regarding itself which has been rumbling in the genteel con¬ference rooms of UNESCO, off and on, since 1972. It was in 1972 that the General Conference of UNESCO first aired the possibility that the media of the richer nations might be a means towards ‘the domination of world public opinion or a source of moral and cultural pollution’. Harsh words—and harsher still have been said in the ten years since. However, harsh words, as the old anti-intellectual proverb has it, break no bones. And the overwhelming dominance of the western media in the process of inter¬national opinion formation has not been materially altered by the endorsement last year, after much wrangling, and with suitable diplomatic ambi¬guities, of the MacBride Com¬mission Report. Still, the intense hostility of the Wes¬tern media to the MacBride Report, their calculatedly hysterical, alarmist misrepre¬sentation of the underlying issues of the matter could not be insignificant.

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