[3] “Freedom of the Press – Anthony Lewis distinguishes between Britain and America,” London Review of Books, Nov. 26, 1987.

Anthony Lewis' review is full of dramatic irony such as:

Why should a self-appointed group have the power to root about in our national life, exposing what they deem ripe for exposure?

Or

We have a press that exposes real official wrongs: a press which helped to force a President from office and which has pushed candidates out of the present campaign for the White House.

unaware of the fact that those questions should be directed not at the not-so-free press but those who actually own our society. Anthony makes the case of a powerful, independent, obstinate, and cantankerous press which is a great check on power in its never-ending, unrelenting quest to get the facts.

Note 1

See Philip Lee, ed., Communication for All: New World Information and Communication Order (Orbis, 1985)

The term “New World Information and Communication Order” comes from the debates over media representation that emerged in the Third World and developing nations through UNESCO during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The main body of discussion was a report by the 1980 UNESCO International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems called Many Voices One World to

to analyze communication problems in modern societies, particularly relating to mass media and news, consider the emergence of new technologies, and to suggest a kind of communication order (the New World Information and Communication Order) to diminish these problems to further peace and human development

Note 2

William Preston, Edward S. Herman, and Herbert Schiller, Hope and Folly: the United States and UNESCO, 1945-1985 (U. of Minnesota, forthcoming).

A short blurb on the book

Created in a burst of idealism after World War II, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) existed for forty years in a state of troubled yet often successful collaboration with one of its founders and benefactors, the United States. In 1980, UNESCO adopted the report of a commission that surveyed and criticized the dominance, in world media, of the United States, Japan, and a handful of European countries. The report also provided the conceptual underpinnings for what was later called the New World Information and Communication Order, a general direction adopted by UNESCO to encourage increased Third World participation in world media. This direction – it never became an official program – ultimately led to the United States’s withdrawal from UNESCO in 1984.

Hope and Folly is an interpretive chronicle of U.S./ UNESCO relations. Although the information debated has garnered wide attention in Europe and the Third World, there is no comparable study in the English language, and none that focuses specifically on the United States and the broad historical context of the debate. In the first three parts, William Preston covers the changing U.S./ UNESCO relationship from the early cold war years through the period of anti-UNESCO backlash, as well as the politics of the withdrawal. Edward Herman’s section is an interpretive critique of American media coverage of the withdrawal, and Herbert Schiller’s is a conceptual analysis of conflicts within the United States’s information policies during its last years in UNESCO. The book’s appendices include an analysis of Ed Bradley’s notorious “60 Minutes” broadcast on UNESCO

Section Four of Chapter Two can be found here.

Section Three of Chapter Two can be found here.

Section Two of Chapter Two can be found here.

Section One of Chapter Two can be found here.

Section Six of Chapter One can be found here.

Section Five of Chapter One can be found here.

Section Four of Chapter One can be found here.