Media monopolies, digital democracy, cultural clashes - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 213

and inequalities: the idea that states had the right to control the flow
of information moving in and out of countries. States - of which not
all were that democratic - would have the right to decide which infor-
mation and news should reach their citizens and what information
and news from their country would be available for the outside world.
Under the banner of 'developmental journalism', governments were
given the justification to censor the flow of incoming and outgoing
information and news and to stop journalists and news agencies that
did not contribute to the state's developmental process. Although it
was aimed to limit the power of northern media conglomerates and
strengthen the media position of the South, this would, of course, seri-
ously hamper the media work of NGOs and independent journalists,
unless they would act and communicate fully in line with the official
government policy. This NWICO solution was most strongly debated
in UNESCO from 1970 onwards, culminating in the withdrawal of
the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore from UNESCO
in the mid-1980s. Although freedom of expression arguments were
one major line of criticism against these NWICO proposals, in the
United States and the United Kingdom more right-wing think-tanks
and media interests pushed the Reagan and Thatcher governments to
leave UNESCO. Although the analysis of NWICO on media monop-
olies, distortion and northern dominance today remains largely intact
and is, for instance, theoretically reflected in electronic colonialism the-
ory (McPhail, 2006 ), its drastic solution of state control on information
is no longer actively supported by many. 1
Since the 1970s, the importance of the media has not only increased
but also has become more complex, making analyses and assessments
of the role and position of the media even more pressing. The debate
on what we will call the 'old' or conventional media (television, radio,
newspapers) recently has been renewed and complicated with the emer-
gence of the 'new' media of cyberspace, weblogs, personal computers
and the Internet. Positions and arguments with respect to the old media
are not always the same and valid for the new media, as we will elab-
orate later in this chapter. But, at the same time, one can wonder how

1

There are, of course, constant attempts by various states to do so. Following
9/11, state influence on the media has been growing in the United States. See
also the example of the fifteen states that try to increase state power over the
Internet (Chapter 10 ).