Media monopolies, digital democracy, cultural clashes - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 212

9 Media monopolies, digital
democracy, cultural clashes
1. A New World Information and Communication Order?
In the 1960s and 1970s, following the decolonisation and debates on
how the structure of world capitalism affected the international order,
the notion of a New International Economic Order was launched,
as a critique against the distortions and inequalities of the existing
international economic order. Following similar lines of analysis, the
distortions of and inequalities in the world's international news and
information structure were criticised in the 1970s, especially for the
concentration of media power within a few mighty news agencies. This
resulted in a call for a New World Information and Communication
Order (NWICO; cf. Gaber and Willson, 2005 ; McPhail, 2006 : 241-
66). According to the NWICO proponents, (i) the conventional, exist-
ing information order had (and still has) a highly unjust and inequitable
balance in the flow and content of information between OECD coun-
tries (and the major nonstate actors related to them) and the South;
(ii) there should be a right for countries to self-determination and
sovereignty of domestic communication and information (in- and out-)
flows and policies; and (iii) internationally, a two-way information flow
should more accurately reflect the aspiration, activities and interests of
developing countries, rather than that dominant northern media con-
glomerates create, reproduce and transmit stories on the South only
as they relate to famines, wars and disasters. The aim of NWICO
was to restructure the system of media, information and telecommu-
nication, so that developing countries gained larger influence and self-
determination not only over their media and information flows, but
also over their economic, cultural and political systems. This analysis
fit well within more general ideas that circulated in the Information
Society debate of the 1970s (see Chapter 2 ). But diverging from the
Information Society scholars was one of the solutions proposed by the
NWICO analysts to deal with the media and information distortions
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