\chap Book Review {\caps\rm The Geopolitics of Information} (Anthony Smith, Oxford University Press)

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B. P. Menon\par}

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The first inkling I ever had of the geopolitics of information came when I was six years old, in the \dq{first standard} at Miss B. Hartley's school in Calcutta. Our textbook for geography, a leftover from the then recently extinguished British Raj, described \dq{hill stations} as \dq{places where white people go during the hot summer months.} Miss Graham, our teacher, a leathery grey-haired white woman (whether Anglo-Indian or not was a matter of speculation), had us underline all the important definitions in the book. When she came to \dq{hill stations} she bowed to the realities of independent India and had us underline the sentence with the exception of the word \dq{white.} The underlined definition read \dq{hill stations are places where people go during the hot summer months.} I thought nothing of this definition till my mother chanced upon it while supervising my homework. I heard her snort.  She muttered something under her breath, reached for my pencil, and obliterated the entire sentence from the page. 

As far as I can see, the call for a New World Information and Communication Order, for which UNESCO is regularly criticized in the Western press, is based on sentiments similar to those of my mother---a desire on the part of the leaders of the world's poorer countries to protect their people from the subtle and not-so-subtle racial and cultural propaganda of the rich countries of Europe and North America. Most Western journalists, especially those who have taken an interest in the debate on this matter, will of course snort at my use of the word \dq{propaganda.} For them it is but \dq{free flow of information,} with good lads like themselves (and increasing numbers of lasses) doing their objective best to report the world as it is.  Attempts to discuss the imbalances in the flow of world news (with most of it going now from the rich countries to the poor), they see as a threat to the freedom of the press. And UNESCO, they think, \dq{under the influence of communists and radical Third World governments} is trying to \dq{license} journalists when it dares speak of acceptable standards. What most Western journalists fail to notice is that such reactions provide the best example there is of the overtly propagandistic role of Western mass media. The popular fears and suspicions attached to the whole matter of the Third World's desire for change in the global order of things are not accidental. They have been deliberately fostered and are the defenses of an entrenched moral and economic value system. It is not hard to see that the fears raised by Western commentators on the matter of Third World demands for change are bogeys. They result either from a gross misunderstanding of facts or, in a distressingly large number of cases, from deliberate distortions and lies. For the benefit of those inclined to dismiss this as (to use phrases I have heard in this regard) \dq{unreal,} \dq{paranoid,} or \dq{super-sensitive,} let me present here some concrete evidence, an annotated version of a \dq{news story} that appeared in The New York Times on 28 June. 

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After this story appeared on page one of \journaltitle{The New York Times}, it was picked up by the major wire services and distributed worldwide. \journaltitle{Newsweek} did a story titled "the U.N.  Buys Some Good News" (though even a cursory examination of the international supplements would have shown that nearly all the news was bad). \journaltitle{The London Times} and the \journaltitle{Guardian}, also in London, carried the Reuters version of \journaltitle{The New York Times} story without any effort to verify its accuracy. Newspapers in developing countries gave only muted attention to the story but they did seem to accept as true the allegations made.  Though the papers participating in the World Newspaper supplement project were aware of the facts and reacted with appropriate indignation, the damage to the U.N.---and to the Third World---in the eyes of world public opinion, was considerable. 

To those of my readers who are at this point shaking their heads and preparing to dismiss me as yet another communist-inspired Third World radical, let me hasten to introduce the excellent book by Anthony Smith, \booktitle{The Geopolitics of Information}. Its subtitle is \e{How Western Culture Dominates the World.} Anthony Smith is director of the British Film Institute in London, a veteran of BBC radio and television, author of several books on broadcast and print journalism. An eminently \e{Un-Third World Non-Communist} personage by any standards. 

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The book is a short one: 192 pages. But it is well researched, clearly written, and honestly argued. If you want a clear grasp of the current debate on world information this book is essential. It covers the ground from the \dq{Old International Information Order} to \dq{Cultural Dependence,} to \dq{News Imperialism} and \dq{A New International Electronic Order.} It ends with a chapter that asks the question: \dq{Double Standards of Freedom?} 

To commend the book, however, is not to agree with all its conclusions. Anthony Smith \e{sees} the Third World point of view; he does not by any means agree with or represent it. He sees, for example, as did UNESCO's MacBride Commission, that the current debate over information is not entirely centered on differences over Western traditions of a free press. As the MacBride Commission puts it, and as Smith quotes: \dq{Many people have come to realize that sovereignty, identity and independence result not only from formal political decisions but are also, and perhaps even more, contingent upon the conditions of cultural and economic life\ld\ in short, upon circumstances which affect, in an increasingly interlocking fashion, the overall development of each and every nation.} 

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Smith argues that \dq{the existing information order of the world is a product of and has itself extended the historical relationship between the \sq{active} and the \sq{passive} civilizations, the seeing and the seen, imperial and empire, exploring and explored. The prosperous nations of the North have not come to terms with the fact that they are now being obliged to be themselves \sq{observed} as the relative political status of the great power blocs is beginning to change. They are insisting upon their cultural prowess, even where their economic and political power has diminished.} But will there be a more balanced flow of news in the future? No, says Smith: \dq{There is no chance that the Third World will generate a large volume of independently sold and internationally acceptable information about itself until more developing nations establish the principle of a free press which, again, is unlikely\ld} 

This raises the question of what a free press is: free from what, or whom? In rich Western countries the answer is obvious: free from the apparatus of government. But this is possible only because the media have the support---and are in fact largely funded by---private commerical interests. In most developing countries this option does not exist, for the simple reason that the private commercial sector is either 
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* largely foreign owned, 
* rigorously controlled by the government and utterly beholden to it, or 
* non-existent.
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Also, in the post-colonial situation of many poor countries, the governments include the champions of the popular interest while businessmen---including private publishers of newspapers---have, to put it kindly, mixed loyalties. This is one reason why we find certain clown-like figures from the Third World attend- ing the parleys of Western newspaper publishers and adding their names to declarations that go against the interests of their own countries and people. 

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Even among journalists (usually people at the fine cutting edge of change), it takes time for colonial attitudes to pass. In India, for instance it took a change in generation before the perspective of the establishment press became \dq{un-colonial.} (A perfect example of the colonial mentality of the older generation of editors in India was the black-bordered full-page stories published on the death of Winston Churchill, as old and steadfast an enemy of India as there ever was.) 

The larger point which Smith makes about the importance of a free press in the Third World is, of course, a valid one.  Poor countries can for entirely understandable reasons opt for local control, but the politicians and bureaucrats in charge are then incapable of journalism. They succeed only in boring people with the official view, of creating a thriving market for rumor and distrust among their own population. And of course, they fail too in altering global news flows. But we in the Third World must ask what is the alternative. Leave ourselves open to the tender mercies of Western journalism and monopolies? No thanks. 

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