Ideas - Non-Aligned News: A Journalistic Experiment to Decolonize Global News

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

In the 1970s, countries in what became known as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) embarked on an ambitious journalistic experiment to create a new kind of journalism — decolonizing the flow of information. The project came with a utopian promise, internal tensions and fierce opponents in the West. IDEAS explores its history and afterlife today in a two-part series. 

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad. In 1951, the New York Times published a story by Albion Ross, its Cairo correspondent, called The Vast and Restless Arab World. Not for centuries have the Arabic-speaking peoples, who once threatened to overwhelm the West, bulked so large in world affairs as they do today. Essentially, the New York Times story was a story on Arab nationalism, and the piece literally dehumanized Arabs everywhere. The story characterized all Arabs

essentially as mules. Clan-ish tradition and adaptation to a world of meager resources and poverty have combined to make the Arab mind a negative one. The Arab, as an American would say, balks like a mule. The New York Times piece outraged journalists and readers across the Middle East. Lebanese journalist Saeed Takhiaddin wrote, Ross does not live in the Arab world, but in a room in one of the hotels, and his studies are taken from the cocktail parties. He will help international relations if he keeps away from the Arab world. The piece wasn't unique.

There were lots of stories like this, not just about Arabs, but about other non-white groups throughout the globe in the international section of the New York Times. And arguably, there are still, unfortunately, stories like this today. Intellectuals outside the West began to critique Western news reports as another tool of imperialism. Thinkers like Edward Said, who was appalled by the New York Times coverage of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. During that war, he was actually doing jury duty. So he is closed off from the world. So the only source of information he had was whatever newspaper could be delivered to him. And he really became bothered and upset by the way in which information about that conflict

was being reported in arguably the most respected and influential newspaper in the world. He decided to do a media critique. And it's in that very text that he famously concludes, and this is a quote, if the Arab occupies space in the mind at all, it is of negative value. And it was that particular kind of media critique that played a really important part in Said's decision to write Orientalism, the book. Maurice Labelle is a historian at the University of Saskatchewan. He's the director of a research project

studying a little-known chapter in history when journalists and intellectuals outside the West tried to remake world news. I was really struck by how disturbed some of the historical actors that I had started analyzing were by the news. But also, I wanted to explore how people tried to change the news by engaging with it, all within this global phenomenon of decolonization. All within this global phenomenon of decolonization.

How much access to information did people in the South at this time have about each other and what was happening with, say, apartheid, with these different struggles? Nothing. Through our pages, they were discovering, as well as I, myself, and we that were creating this, a new world. A new world. And to build that new world, a new kind of journalism. We're calling this episode Non-Aligned News by Ideas producer Pauline Holtzworth. I wondered if we could start with a painting that I know that you like to talk about in your teaching that you return to. It's a drawing by a Uruguayan artist of the map of South America upside down.

Can you tell me about that image and what it means to you? Absolutely. I use this picture very much for many reasons. First of all, it is a very well-known Uruguayan painter, Torres Garcia, Joaquin Torres Garcia. It means for him the way to introduce the idea that we shouldn't be looking always to the north as a reference for everything, but we have to look at ourselves, our history, our culture, as our compass.

This is Beatriz Biccio, a Uruguay-born journalist who has covered the globe for decades as the co-founder of a magazine called Tercer Mundo, or Third World. She has interviewed many of the people who shaped the global South in the 20th century. Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat. Today, she's a professor of political science at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. I used to show to our students that as we live in our beautiful and challenged planet,

which is almost a ball, we shouldn't have for granted that the maps have to design the north in the upper part and we in the south in down, because there is no equivalence in our symbolic reasoning between up and down. Up, in some way, is understood as power. Who is up has power. As my experience as a journalist was always to put this South legacy and the South challenges and the South aspirations as the priority, I think symbolically to use this map is important to have a graphic way of understanding what was journalism for us. What journalism meant to Beatrice Bissio ran directly counter to how journalism operated in much of the world, where Western news agencies

dominated and set the terms of the conversation. So to really understand how we got to a situation that people are condemning in the 1970s, we actually have to go all the way back to the development of submarine telegraphy in the mid 19th century. My name is Heidi Tvarek. I'm a professor of international history and public policy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I'm a Canada Research Chair and I direct the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions. A key point is in 1866 when we get the first durable transatlantic submarine cable. And just as these cables are being laid swiftly around the world, a new type of company emerges, a news agency. And the idea of a news agency is you station correspondents around the world who can then send short messages by telegram back to headquarters where they can then be sent on to newspapers.

Now, there are very high fixed and sunk costs to use economist language to doing this. It's expensive to station these correspondents around the world. It's very expensive to send telegrams at this point. And so what happens is that a few agencies, news agencies emerge that are able to do this and they cooperate with each other to try to reduce costs. That kind of comes out of this moment, though, of also growing sense of needing international cooperation between these empires. Right. And so there's a sense of both competition for telegraphy, but also a sense of needing to standardize and kind of coordinate, right?

And so this is where you get the emergence of like the International Telecommunications Union and some of these other institutions that are still operating today that are essentially in charge of kind of partitioning who gets what parts of the commons, right? Because initially, this is all of ours. My name is Zoe LeBlanc. I'm currently an assistant professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. And there I work as both a historian of information and a digital humanist. So someone who's both interested in kind of how information and power have historically been constituted, but also how can we learn from the lessons of the past to build kind of more just practices today? In some ways, it's this idea of kind of connecting the world, right? And we talk about that a lot today, this idea, but it's coming from a place of very extractive, right? Very much about kind of controlling these populations. So the first

agency we get is in France called Agence Abbas. We then quite swiftly after that in the early 1850s get a British agency, Reuters, and then a German agency. And these three really cooperate with each other from the start. They're trying to divide the world between them so they have their own correspondence, but then they share that news so they can share costs. And then around the 1890s and turn of the 20th century, the American-based Associated Press joins this arrangement as well. And that's how they end up with a big fall. And this is a very formalized arrangement. There are actually cartel contracts. They get renewed in different ways. They even get renewed after World War I. So you would think this will fall apart when Germany is fighting

these other three in World War I. But actually, right after the war, this does get revived with some modifications and it lasts as a formal contract all the way into the 1930s. But even after World War II, we will see that a couple of these agencies, Reuters, the British-based agency, and the Associated Press remain incredibly globally powerful. In the wake of the Second World War, the spread of satellite technology accelerated the reach and power of Western news agencies. The gap between those who could transmit the news and those who could only receive it was getting wider. That gap became a political concern for leaders in the global South who wanted to remain non-aligned as the great superpowers carved up the world into spheres of influence. We have to remember this is the time of the Cold War

in which there is a constant ongoing ideological battle for the hearts and minds of everybody. And so who can control the news narrative and who can control what information is circulated is not only a matter of our everyday reading of news as an everyday citizen of a country but it's a policy matter and it's a key directive in how the cold war is being waged at this time my name is cindy ewing i'm a professor of history at the University of Toronto. Non-aligned states witnessed that their own journalists, their own writers, their own reporters were not able to circulate information and news to their own people in their own countries. The Global South was tired of being spoken about by people who viewed their lives as little more than pawns, chess pieces in a battle over who controlled the

future. So they began creating their own media outlets, spaces to assert their presence on the world stage, as agents of history, not subjects of empire. What we see in 1947 is a Senegalese intellectual and politician by the name of Alion Diop launches a magazine or a journal in Paris called Présence Africaine or African Presence. And the whole kind of logic behind this new medium was exactly what its title claimed, right? its title claimed, right? It was to create an African presence in kind of an information ecosystem that was inundated with anti-Black racism. Another example, of course, is in 1960, Ghana's inaugural president, Kwame Nkrumah, establishes a national news agency. And one of the main goals of the Ghana news agency was to counter the racial biases that were deeply embedded in international news services like Reuters or Associated Press.

Nkrumah, as I understand it, in 1965 gave a speech in which he said, quote, big news agencies, papers, radio, and television reflect the bias and prejudice of their publishers and proprietors. And he describes the African journalist as a revolutionary figure, saying, quote, we are in a revolutionary period and we have a revolutionary morality in journalism as in all walks of life. Yeah, I mean, that's a great quote. And I think what it really shows is how decolonization as a phenomenon, as an experience, as a practice, came to kind of seep into media and media production. This new kind of media production was baffling, even frightening, to some in the global north who insisted there was only one reality. as some in the Global North, who insisted there was only one reality, a reality you could just as easily understand and report on from London or Paris.

Nobody understood why there was the need of a voice from the South. People said, what is true in Paris is true in Tukbuktu. And they said, it's not true. In Tubuktu, the word family means something different. If I say it rained for a week in Brazil, it's a national disaster. If I say it rained a week in London, nothing happens. People go with their umbrella. The idea of friendship is totally different, and so on.

Then we must have different voices. Roberto Savio is a journalist based in Rome. Now in his 90s, he's been fighting for decades to create a new kind of journalism. Well, I am somebody who has been all his life trying to push for a different world in which I live. Possibly better. And I started as an economist. I went to work in the prime minister's office, Aldo Moro, who was killed by the Red Brigade. Aldo Moro, who was killed by the Red Brigades. And then from there I went to create an international press agency to reduce the gap between North and South.

That press agency was called the Interpress Service. Roberto Savio co-founded IPS with Argentine journalist Pablo Piacentini. And we were the first one to introduce the concept of contextualized news. Our point was all these other agencies were fighting each other to reach one second before the other. And we said, this is not the problem. The problem is to make people understand what happens. And if I give a spot news, which is not processed in this context, people cannot understand what does it mean.

If I say, the price of tea increased in Sri Lanka, what does it mean? For instance, who collected the tea? Women. what does it mean? for instance, who collected the women how the increase of tea is affecting the women who collected the tea who is making the money of the increase so we started to make

articles which were spot news but putting the spot news in the context only 20% of the journalists will be from the north. 80% should be from the south. And journalists from Latin America should work in Latin America, from Africa and Africa, in Asia and Asia and so on. Meanwhile in Uruguay, Beatriz Biccio was getting involved in the student press, also as a way to forge a new kind of political consciousness.

also as a way to forge a new kind of political consciousness. I was a militant, very committed with the challenges of the time. As a student, I was the editor of the magazine of the students. Those who were at the university trying to accompany the politics, the national and international politics, we were two editors, really. The male editor was much more involved in politics, I used to put in his homage his family name, Ramada. Then she got the opportunity to train at a magazine run by the Frente Amplio, a left-wing political coalition in Uruguay. And I loved that. I think, well, that's what I want. So I decided just not to return to the university. The bulletin was in the hands of my colleague. And I say, bye-bye, I will be a journalist. Then the coup d'etat came and we were forced to leave. Myself, I was quite well related with this, let's say, vanguard of the students. So I think that if I stayed in Uruguay, finally, in some way, I could be perhaps one of those who for a long time have been in prison. But the real motive of this very quick need to leave was because of Neva.

Neva Marrera was the editor of the magazine. He would become Beatriz's longtime collaborator, and later her husband. As a Brazilian exile without papers, his position in Uruguay was precarious. Now the military was in power, determined to crush the left. They needed to get him out of Uruguay. For that, they needed a cover story. And there was an important story brewing.

In Algeria, the fourth summit of the non-aligned movement was about to begin. And that was for him personally and for us. It was a before and after, really. The 1973 non-aligned movement summit that took place in Algiers was a turning point in international politics. And so we might think about the 1973 summit as being a kind of high point, an apex in third worldism. that conference was by far the largest in the almost two-decade-long history of third worldism and its anti-imperialist ideology. There were about 75 nation-state members present, along with 16 liberation movements. UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim was also there. He attended as an official observer. So in total, the Non-Aligned Summit

welcomed nearly 1,400 people. And amongst those people were also journalists from all corners of the globe, journalists like Roberto Savio and Neva Morera. There were already plenty of journalists with a revolutionary morality, as Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah put it. At the Algiers conference, that idea took another step forward. The non-aligned movement formally embraced the idea that journalism was a new front in the struggle for decolonization, another battlefield where liberation could be sought and won. During the six-day meeting, members of the non-aligned movement committed to two things, a new international economic order and a new world information and communication order, and we go. And it goes to show that the notion of human flourishing at this time is evolving. It's not just about one's material well-being.

It's also one's access to information, the free flow of information. It's really a question about knowledge. through a redistribution of economic resources, are also suggesting that this is fundamentally about knowledge and ideas, and that what we need to recover and what we need to redistribute is whose ideas matter, whose knowledge matters. It becomes such an important and embattled issue that third world countries write a declaration about the right to communicate as part of their declaration of a new world information and communication order. It seems that there's a dimension here that is connected to the right to free speech, but also has a number of other layers, that it's not just about the right of an individual to speak, but the right to participate in a global conversation, access

to a global exchange of ideas and narratives. Yeah, that's exactly right. The right to participate in a global conversation, access to a global exchange of ideas and narratives. Yeah, that's exactly right. The right to communicate builds off of our time-held notion of the right to free speech and the right to expression. But it suggests that communication involves a set of social activities and practices that go beyond the act of one person's speech. It suggests that society is made up of many networks of communication, and that communication is mediated by not just persons, but by different technologies. And so what Third World Global South states are recognizing, what the non-aligned movement is emphasizing in 1973 at Algiers, is that communication is something that to this point had been hindered because of the global infrastructure of media at the time. The media ecosystem of the world had come to promote and permit only a certain set of perspectives.

At Algiers, the delegates decided that if the Western-dominated media ecosystem wouldn't permit their ideas to circulate, they would build their own. They called it the Non-Aligned News Agency's pool, NANAP. And so ultimately, NANAP would become the largest organized intervention against racism in the global media in history. racism in the global media in history. On Ideas, you're listening to a documentary called Non-Aligned News. You can hear Ideas wherever you get your podcasts, and on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear us on the CBC News app.

I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. And being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now.

In the 1970s, journalists and political leaders across the global South called for a New World Information and Communication Order. It was known, in short, as ENWICO. So ENWICO essentially contended that news kind of informed both racism and Western supremacy. And so likewise, Western supremacy and racism inform news. They wanted to create a world where Western journalists didn't dominate the global news agenda. It was an ambitious project on a collision course with powerful political forces. And it led to a dramatic showdown in the final years of the Cold War.

And so in my view, Enrico was not a race war. It was not World War III, nor was the so-called Information War, World War IV for that matter. Ideas producer Pauline Holdsworth brings us this documentary. To understand the different kinds of stories journalists in the Global South wanted to tell, the kinds of stories that were often ignored by Western news agencies, you just have to flip through the table of contents in Tercer Mundo and read some of the titles. From the Algerian revolution to insurrection in Southern Africa, miners' journalism in Bolivia, the Baghdad summit,

scope and limitations, transnational communications and national self-reliance. transnational communications, and national self-reliance. Well, we had a specific definition of what we should have at every issue. We should have at least one article on Latin America, one article on Africa, one on Asia. That's the first step. Tercer Mundo was directly inspired by the call to action issued at the 1973 Algiers Conference, where members of the non-aligned movement committed to decolonizing news. After the conference, Neva Marrera met Beatriz Biccio in Argentina, where she was living in exile. They decided to create a magazine that could tell stories of

national liberation, stories they thought weren't being covered properly in the Western press. They spent eight months in Angola and Mozambique, covering the struggle for independence. In Mozambique, they were embedded with FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Front, one of the key groups in the fight against Portuguese rule. The day of the independence of Mozambique, there was a dinner. We were special invitees of the Frelimo and particularly Samora Machel. And during the dinner, the official dinner, He said, I think that I have to introduce you to the president of the Organization of African Unity.

Of course, the president was Siad Barre, the president of Somalia. And he said, well, it's the first time I met Latin American journalists. Siad Barre agreed to an interview with Tercer Mundo. There was just one problem. He was leaving on a plane at 5 a.m. the next day. So he turned to Samuela Machel, who was in the side, and said, well, I can invite them to join me in my plane, and I give the interview in the plane. What do you think? The next morning, Beatrice and Neva boarded Barre's plane to interview him on his way back to Somalia, but quickly discovered they weren't going where they thought. I always want to sit by the window, and I see the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea.

And I told him, oh, I think we are not going to Somalia because in some moment we have to see the earth. And now you are tired, please. So, no, we were going to an island, which is Madagascar. And so what began as a short trip to interview the president became a whirlwind tour of newborn African nations. From Madagascar, they went to Tanzania, where they met President Julius Nayeri, a pivotal figure in the pan-African movement. And President Nyeri said, wow, the first Latin American I met. So please be my guest. I'm

building a new capital, Dodoma. Eventually, they made it to Somalia. they made it to Somalia. And Somalia recently had received an award by UNESCO because they have eradicated illiteracy in one year. They decided to close the Mogadishu University for the time it was needed, and sent all the students to record. During the day, they have to give lessons, literature, etc. By night, they inverted the rule, and they had to interview the local population, mainly the older, to register the oral history and the memoirs of the struggle against the British, against the Italian, and to rebirth, recount the history of the country by their own narrative. And that was the starting point of the new way of understanding their own history. A new way of understanding their own history in their own voices.

Beatriz Bissio went on to report extensively in the Middle East. In 1982, she traveled to Beirut, where a new phase of a brutal civil war was starting. A war that was further complicated by an Israeli invasion. She was there the day it began. The day of finally the bombing of Beirut, in the morning, I went to Sabra and Shatila and Burj al-Barakni, where three of the most important refugee camps, Palestinian refugee camps, but also Lebanese lived there, to make some cover stories.

I visited one school of children with some problems of mental illness, etc. And on returning from that visit, I heard the planes in a way that it wasn't usual because the airport of Beirut was near the place where we were, the hotel we were. But that was different. When finally I arrived to the hotel, they were, the Palestinians, neighbors, everything were in a crisis because, my God,

they are bombing us and you were not here. So the bombing started some minutes before I finally arrived. That was, of course, the first

and I hope the only time in my life to be in a city being bombed. Yeah. I asked and they allowed us to go to the top and I took pictures. I used to have this teleobjective. I took pictures of bombing, dropping from the planes.

We were pushed to the last plane that left Beirut by the Palestinians because they say to us, outside you will be more useful for us than here. We can't protect here. So please publish what you have seen and that will be the way you help us. Looking back, Beatrice says she's most proud that she and her fellow journalists revealed more of the world to their readers, both the moments of horror

and the moments that hinted another world might be possible. To show what we could show of a reality, of course, much more broad and diverse than we were able to put on the pages of the magazine, but at least to show a part of the iceberg that was under the water and waiting for someone to put the light on that. Tercer Mundo preferred to publish their own exclusive articles, but they also occasionally exchanged stories with members of the non-aligned news agency's pool, the official agency of Yugoslavia, presented the resolution asking for creating a system of information which was approved. That's Roberto Savio, co-founder of the

Interpress Service, IPS. This pool was formed like this. Every news agency would send 1,000 words to a center, and this center would redistribute these 1,000 words to all the other agencies. Imagine this web of information, kind of this map with lines connecting, you know, national capitals. And so essentially what would happen through this pool is that Baghdad would send news releases to places like Tanyug. And then Tanyug would translate them and redistribute them. You use the image of a map. And a detail that I found really fascinating and that I think becomes an important aspect of this story is that Tanyug officials in a report around this time said that their signal was of good quality worldwide, except for on the western slopes of the Andes. And this is where the Interpress service really becomes important in this story. Absolutely. So the

truth is, is Tanyug couldn't be the central frame. It didn't have the bandwidth or the capacity. So the non-aligned movement turned to IPS. And in a lot of ways, IPS and Roberto Savio kind of acted as what I would loosely call like the paper boys of the third world, right? They delivered the information. If you look at all the actors involved, we're talking here about international organizations like UNESCO and the non-aligned movement.

We're talking about nation states. We're talking about Tito's Yugoslavia, right? We're talking about Sadat's Egypt. We're talking about Fidel Castro's Cuba. And then integral to all of it is this cooperative based in Rome, cooperative of journalists, that very few people outside the domain of international news in the 1970s and since then know about. But from the beginning, there were debates over what role state governments should play in this alternative news structure. We had a difference of approach with Danube. had a difference of approach with Tanyug.

My view is that it was not important the quantity of material coming from the South, but the quality. So I said, we must put a system of journalists

all over the third world where we work together to create a professional service from the south. But TANIU had a different view because they were a governmental agency, and they decided a different system to create a pool, a pool of non-aligned press agencies. pool of unaligned press agencies. So it was a flow of official information and many press agencies were not capable of producing professional material. The same information like the Minister of Information met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. We're totally irrelevant outside your country.

I even had a conversation with a former Lebanese editor of an English language newspaper called The Daily Star. His name is Nabil Dajani. Dajani told me that he grew quickly frustrated with NANEP because, you know, he would get all this information that would come in and he'd read it. And he said 99% of the time he couldn't print any of it. It was unprintable. And he would literally just crump it up and throw it in the garbage can, which broke his heart. People involved in NANAP, like Roberto Savio, ran programs to train journalists across the global south, hoping to build up capacity. Still, the pool struggled to get enough journalistic

material. And in addition to the quantity problem, there was also a quality problem. The news releases also regularly raised professional flags because they were overly celebratory of certain regimes, especially regimes that had kind of authoritarian tendencies. It is really interesting because on one hand, we have this moment of this vision for global anti-colonial liberation. But then in most post-colonial states, what ends up coming out of that is partially formal decolonization, but also eventually very repressive information regimes, which feels very kind of counterintuitive, right? Why, if you're critiquing kind of cultural imperialism and, you know, the ways in these structures are kind of limiting your

ability to advocate, why is that going on internally? And that was know, the ways in these structures are kind of limiting your ability to advocate. Why is that going on internally? And that was one of the big critiques of Western kind of neoliberal types. But internally, it was actually much more of a debate, I think, than people realize. So there was, I think, a sense very much that there was a precarity to decolonization. That's hard to kind of see now. There was a sense that we needed to build this massive kind of information structure because it was unclear how much decolonization was going to spread. You know, especially the late 50s and early 60s, it wasn't clear that it was going to be a global movement. And in fact, even by the end

of the 60s, there were still areas of deep colonization. And so I think what that leads to is, in some ways, a kind of bracketing off of as much debate as there would have been necessarily over this question of state propaganda. But there is critiques of this. But there is critiques of this. It often comes out as this question of quality versus quantity, I think, which seems weird in terms of thinking about censorship. And to be fair, there was critiques of the amount of state censorship. But I think there was also the sense that the state had to be the place for this because how else could they kind of make liberation concrete. Those weren't the only challenges to NANAP's longevity. As the call for a new world information and communication order gained steam, so did a fierce backlash in the West, especially once UNESCO got involved. UNESCO is a really interesting arena within the United Nations system.

It is a microcosm of international politics that affects questions of education, culture, scientific progress, and research. And therefore, it covers aspects of life that may go beyond headline news, hard policy questions. And yet it has implications for how we think about war and peace. It has implications for how we think about future generations and how we educate children. And it has implications for our pursuit of knowledge and scientific discovery. early in the development of this concept. In UN fashion, an international commission is struck, and there's an international commission created to study the problems of mass communication. How has it affected the lives of hundreds of millions of people on the planet? The new director general at UNESCO, Amadou Mahdare Mbou from Senegal, got Sean McBride, who's the Irish co-founder of Amnesty International and a recipient

of both the Nobel and Lennon Peace Prizes, to chair this commission. And this commission produces a report in 1981 which agrees wholeheartedly representing UNESCO's point of view that there is an inequality in international news and journalism and in the distribution of information technology. And they make a number of recommendations that involve things including the type of loans that the IMF and the World Bank make to developing countries to try to promote and assist their development of information technology, but also the cultivation of different educational standards to be able to and assist their development of information technology, but also the cultivation of different educational standards to be able to develop their own systems of broadcast news.

This earns UNESCO a lot of condemnation. Western adversaries accuse UNESCO of being this kind of international big brother. They accused it of launching a global First Amendment war. NUICO, they felt, attacked the free press. And NGOs, not just governments, but NGOs like the World Press Freedom Committee and Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders, incorrectly, and I would argue racially, depicted NWICO as being the opposite of freedom. They argued that Enrico, racially speaking, represented slavery, that Enrico sought to enslave the West and take away its freedoms.

In my view, Enrico was not a race war. It was not World War III, nor was the so-called information war, World War IV for that matter. Decolonization called for the opposite of supremacy and hierarchy. And it called for the opposite of domination, which was not counter-domination. It was non-domination. But the idea of a new world information and communication order became so controversial that in 1984, the U.S. withdrew from UNESCO in protest. The U.K. threatened to do the same. And the reason I find that so interesting is for a bigger reason, which is that sometimes the United

Nations says, well, you know, no country has ever left the U.N. And that's true that no one has left the U.N. General Assembly. But if we look at other agencies, UNESCO is such an important example of how countries sometimes do withdraw funding and to try and see why they do and how they try to use that funding to leverage power. The US is the most obvious example of that, having done that now several times with UNESCO, most recently over the question of the membership of Palestine. But the first time this happens is over these questions around media imperialism. And it seems like organizations like UNESCO become an arena where countries like the US and UK can maybe flex or wield political power within the larger UN system without going so far as withdrawing from the General Assembly.

without going so far as withdrawing from the General Assembly. Yeah, and it just, it gives us, I think, a different perspective on the kinds of levers of power that get used by governments like the US and the UK. So we know, of course, in the Security Council that the US or Russia, etc., can use the veto. And that's often seen as one of the potential dysfunctions of the UN is that veto power. There's lots of power politics going on in other international organizations. And this is a really good example of that. It's not just about media. It's actually about these bigger political dynamics. When UNESCO officially abandons Enrico as one of its official programs in 1989, descendants Enrico as one of its official programs in 1989, Enrico becomes taboo. But I think it's a,

it would be a huge disservice to call Enrico dead or to say that it doesn't exist. Nanup and Enrico both were massive undertakings. Were they unrealistic? Probably. But I think what's important to not lose sight of is to come back to people. And so even though after UNESCO officially abandons its official Inuco aid program in 1989, you know, journalists and other people didn't stop trying to decolonize information. They just had to try and do it in different ways. I mean, a really popular example, of course, is the creation of Al Jazeera. trying to decolonize information. They just had to try and do it in different ways. I mean, a really popular example, of course, is the creation of Al Jazeera. Do you see a direct line between the creation of Al Jazeera and the ideas in this movement? I absolutely do, because essentially Al Jazeera, one of its core founding principles, was this desire to essentially globalize let's say a so-called arab perspective right of everything and anything and that wanting to empower the flow of arab

opinions and arab crafted news, Arab crafted truth, that has NWICO all over it. We might say that the NWICO movement lives with us even if we don't know much about it. And failed solidarity movements are often like that, where they still reach into the way that we talk about an idea. like that, where they still reach into the way that we talk about an idea. They still reach into the kinds of questions we ask, even if we may not realize that they're tied to that history. As information technology has exploded and continued to evolve, that we still struggle over those. And we still recognize that there are serious inequalities in how people access information, media, and news. And so this search for a right to communicate is very much still ongoing. And I think that a lot of the

struggles that we see today are actually about those same questions from the 1970s about whose communication, whose ideas, and whose knowledge really matters. Over half of the world's adults are voting in elections in 2024. But when we think about which elections are getting the most coverage, it's certainly not the election in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim democracy. And so we still see this kind of imbalance in terms of which elections will get coverage, where journalists assume a

real base level of knowledge, and then finally, in where platforms actually invest. So if we're thinking about where, for example, Meta is investing its money, we see from a report by civil society organization Global Witness, that even within Europe, where there is regulation, even there, most of the content moderation by far is focused on English language. And yet, of course, there are 27 member states of the EU, only one of which, Ireland, has English as its official language. We see that a language like Bulgarian or Croatian doesn't get a huge amount of attention. So you take those kinds of problems and you multiply it out by a thousand, a million when you start talking about languages like Amharic, for example. Can I ask you finally as one last question, how do you see your role in this world?

My role is a very simple role. We go in a world which is going in the opposite direction of the one I hoped we would go. We go in a world not of peace, but of war. We go in a world not of peace, but of war. We go in a world not of development, but of greed. We go in a world of confrontation, not of dialogue. We go in a world where international relations are not based on international law, but on geopolitics and strength and force and guns.

We have lost dialogue. We have lost tolerance. We lost respect. And we have lost the ability to think in common, common goods. Now the water, which is a classical common good, is. Now the water with a classical common good is quoted at the Stock Exchange of Chicago. I wonder when air

will become also a good. So we go in a direction which is opposite to what I want, what I think, what I am, and what I thought all my life. What I think I can do is simply to give a witness, continue to speak of the values of peace,

of cooperation, of social justice, of the tolerance, of fraternity, of equality, of freedom, the values in which I believe. Roberto Savio is still deeply engaged with the future of news and information. The week we spoke, he had just returned from giving a lecture on AI. You buy six eggs. You buy, take one, two, three, four, five. At five, artificial intelligence says to you, you are done with eggs, buy eggs.

You become an indispensable tool in life. This system is like a cage with flexible side. You can enter inside, but it will be very difficult to get out. And he's founded an independent media outlet called The Other News, which covers stories about human rights, multilateralism, and civil society. It's funded entirely by its readers and members. So if somebody wants to buy other news, cannot buy other news because what does he buy? There is no capital. If somebody wants to make influence in other news,

how does he? There's no capital. I think we are so close to having the same kind of debate now that many people did in the 1970s when they recognized that the information they were being given wasn't their own. Unfortunately, things like the rise of fake news and disinformation really show that media continues to be this embattled space. It's not just a way that we talk to one another. It's also a way that we talk about what matters and we try to figure out truth. And so an Enrico movement for the 21st century, for the 22nd century,

I think would continue to be a global and cosmopolitan movement. It would be a bottom-up movement that would be made of people who both believed in the news, something that I think we're seeing as just fading away, believe in the news and then feel vested in making news. And that both means becoming a historical actor, but also writing history. On Ideas, you've been listening to Non-Aligned News. This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth. It's the first of a two-part series about what a new world information and communication order for the 21st century might look like. Special thanks to Mo Labelle and Cindy Ewing. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

The technical producer for Ideas is Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed.