HISTORICAL BACKROUND

The popular Struggle for a free flow of information and equal control of the world media known as the- new world information and communication order- (a term coined during debates over third world misrepresentation in the `international media in the 1970s and popularized by the MacBride commission) started in 1973 with the meeting of non–aligned nations in Algiers – although arguably the official date of the struggle is 1980 when the MacBride report was first published.  

Ulla Carlson (2004) gives this view of what the NWICO debate stands for

The demand for a new international information order was an outgrowth of third-world resentment of the imbalances in international news flows, as summarized in the phrase, 'one-way-flow'; the lack of respect for third-world peoples' cultural identity that such imbalances reflected, the monopoly positions of transnational communication corporations, which were perceived as a threat to the countries' national independence; and the inequitable distribution of communication resources in the world.

As at 1973, the Struggle though visible was only at a conceptualization stage, the developing countries had realized there was something like  imbalance in the flow of news between the developing world and the developed world but could not prove its existence due to lack of evidence. Soon and especially between 1976 and 1979, there was accumulation of evidence through the MacBride commission of the united nations educational scientific and cultural organization (UNESCO) which was setup to study communication problems. One very important source of evidence was the formulated 'new order' plan by Tunisia's Information minister Mustapha Masmoudi titled “mass media declaration” in 1978.

N,B,  As all this happened we must not forget that this was still during the period of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union and according to (Carlsson, 2004) “The Cold War defined the front lines in this period, but a new “front” was also emerging — that between North and South”.

 By 1980 when the MacBride report was published under the title “many voices one world”, the developed world was totally against the idea that the underdeveloped or developing world should ever want to have an equal share of the quantity and quality of news reported in the developed world or have an undistorted and fair report of events in the south. UNESCO was accused of being an enemy tote free press and to frustrate the debate, Britain and America walked out of UNESCO lead by the then president of the United States of America – Ronald Regain. Subsequently the report was scrapped out of UNESCO before the return of America and Britain in 2003 and 1996 respectively

Operational definitions

South, third world, underdeveloped countries: these words or phrases are used interchangeably in this essay to mean the countries that are adversely affected by the imbalance in the global media 

According to

West, North, developed countries: these are also used interchangeably as a cover term to refer to the technologically advanced countries that coined the phrase third world, have participated in and are still involved in the practice of misinforming the third world and its own citizens about the third world countries.