New World Information and Communication Order

Summary

The controversy around a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) is a key episode in the emergence of global communications governance. Beginning in the 1960s, US efforts to maintain the “free flow of information” as a core principle in international communications were met with criticism from the Soviet Union and its allies as well as the Non‐Alignment Movement (NAM) of independent states. International arguments within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the main forum of NWICO‐related debates between 1972 and 1985, led to the creation of a commission mandated to investigate imbalances in global information flows. Documenting the dominance of commercial and military communications infrastructures by industrialized nations, the commission proposed a stronger international regulation of the media system, based on alternative development paradigms that stressed cultural identity, independence, and self‐reliance. Actively promoted by UNESCO until 1983, NWICO contributed to the departure of two of its key members, the United States (1984) and the UK (1985).