Book Review
THE GEOPOLITICS

OF INFORMATION

Anthony Smith
Oxford University Press

B. P M¢non

Echo: reansmutter-recesver stations. (Bell Labs).

President Kennedy signing legislation to establish globe-circling
system of communscation satellites (August 31, 1962). Left 1o
;‘%ht: Congressman Oren Harris (D-Ark.), Senator Warren G.
agnusan (D-Wash.), Senator Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.),
Senator Richard Russel (D-Ga.), Senator Hubert Humphrey
(D-Minn.), Joseph Beirne, President, Communication Workers of
America, Congressman William L. Springer (R-IIL), Senator John
0, Pastore (D-R.1.), unidentified, and FCC Chairman Newton
N. Minow. (Bell Labs).

12?7

PI-l:.c first inkhing Lever had ot the geopoliucs of mformaton
came when [ was six years old, in the “first standard™ at Miss
B. Hartley's school in Calcutta. OQur textbook for geography,
a lefrover from the then recently extnguished British Raj,
described “hill stations™ as “places where white people go
dunng the hot surnmer months.™ Miss Graham., our teacher, a
leathery grey-haired white woman (whether Anglo-Indian or
not was a matter of speculavion), had us underline all the
important defimuons in the book. When she came to “hill
stations” she bowed to the realities of independent India and
had us underhne the sentence with the exception of the word
“white.” The underlined definition read “hill stanons are
places where people go during the hot summer months.” |
thought nothing of this definition till my mother chanced
upon it while supervising my homework. 1 heard her snort.
She muttered something under her breath, reached for my
pencil, and obliterated the entire sentence from the page.

As far as [ can see, the call for a New World Information
and Communicauon Order, for which UNESCO is regularly
criticized in the Western press, is based on sentiments stmilar
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 martter, will of course snort at my use of the
word “propaganda.” For them it is but “free flow of informa-
tion,” with good lads like themselves {(and increasing numbers
of lasses) doing their objective best to report the world as it is.
Artempts 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, “under the influence of communists
and radical Third World governments™ is trying to “license”™
journalists when it dares speak of acceptable standards. What
most Western journalists fail to notice is thar 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 acadental. They
have been deliberately fostered and are the defenses of an
entrenched moral and economic value system. lris not hard to
see that the fears raised by Western commentators on the
martter of Third World demands for change are bogevs. They
result either from a gross misunderstanding of facts or, in 2
distressingly large number of cases, from deliberate distor-
tions and lies. For the benefit of those inclined to dismiss this
as (to use phrases I have heard in this regard) “wnreal,”
“paranoid,” or “super-sensitive,” let me present here some
concrete evidence, an annotated version of a “news story”
thar appeared in The New York Times on 28 Junc.