Press: Third World vs. Fourth Estate

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Whatever happens next in the news-flow dispute, the Third World countries have already achieved some major goals. They have made the West aware of their displeasure with slapdash coverage of their affairs. They have pried pledges of equipment and training from the West. Perhaps most important, and most disturbing, they have realized that they can, in the words of one specialist, "pull the plugs anywhere" in the international communications system.

What the West has yet to make clear to them is that press freedom need not be incompatible with national development, that government-dictated news is no more believable in the Third World than elsewhere and that any "new world information order" should be blessed with fewer government curbs on the flow of news, not more. As the 20th Century Fund's task force concluded: "The practices of a free press may be erratic, even in the West, but the aspirations of freedom should ultimately serve to unite the West and the Third World."