Press: Maintaining the Vigil

News executives from 25 nations join to fight curbs on reporting

Freedom of the press is a goal enshrined in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but for the citizens of most of the U.N.'s 158 member countries that pledge can seem hollow: governments may censor publications and broadcast outlets if they do not own or operate them directly; officials sometimes imprison journalists for what they print; bureaucrats frequently have the power to decide what information the international wire services can distribute within their nations' borders. Spurred by the Soviet Union, some Third World members and executives of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization have been trying for more than a decade to achieve the next step toward a regulated press: controlling what is reported about their countries to the rest of the world.

These plans for restraining press freedom are offered in the name of "protecting" journalists and improving coverage but would include government-enforced codes of conduct for news organizations, curbs on access to news sources and the licensing of reporters. Such ideas are expected to be raised again by Soviet and many Third World delegates next month at a UNESCO conference in Paris. The Western press is fighting back: last week representatives of 60 print and broadcast organizations from 25 countries, meeting at the Alpine resort of Talloires, France, agreed to condemn all "attempts to regulate news content and formulate rules for the press."

The journalists were pursuing strategies that grew out of a similar conference at Talloires two years ago. With the help of Western governments—led by the U.S., which threatened to withdraw its 25% share of UNESCO's budget—the 1981 conferees succeeded in getting the U.N. agency to defer major antipress proposals. Diplomats predicted that the second Talloires session would reinforce the journalists' counterattack: it drew 83 participants, vs. 63 in 1981, and included news organizations from the U.S., most of Western Europe, Japan and countries as diverse as Finland, India and Peru. Said Jean Gerard, U.S. Ambassador to the agency: "This makes UNESCO a little less anxious to take a confrontational tone." Still, Gerard believes that the agency has not sufficiently recognized the value of unregulated coverage: the U.S. will propose next month that UNESCO agree that a free press stimulates economic growth and that the press is the best "watchdog" of itself.