Word: unesco
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...nation United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris. Third World delegates are pushing for adoption of a draft declaration on the mass media that many Western diplomats and journalists consider a grave threat to press freedom. The document is based on a similar resolution proposed at UNESCO's 1970 meeting by the Soviets and rewritten since then to eliminate some of its more heinous features. Yet the present 1,500-word version still contains several provisions with chillingly Orwellian overtones. One would endorse government licensing of journalists. Another would compel news organizations to print official replies to stories...
...mass media coming directly under their jurisdiction act in conformity" with the declaration. To Western critics, that means nothing less than government control of the press. Warns Roger Tatarian, a longtime United Press International executive now teaching journalism at California State (Fresno): "It would in effect be putting UNESCO's badge of approval on government meddling with the news...
...number of major U.S. journalists' and publishers' associations have hotly denounced the declaration. Some have also urged that the U.S., which pays 25% of UNESCO's budget ($303 million this year), withdraw from the body if the declaration is adopted. In a letter to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, New York's Senator Daniel Moynihan last month called on the U.S. to "thunder our contempt for this contemptible document." In Paris, the 38-member U.S. delegation has been lobbying quietly to water down the declaration. But the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times last week editorialized against compromise...
That imbalance may change. With UNESCO's blessing and the facilities of Yugoslavia's Tanjug news agency, ten nations in 1975 formed their own international news cooperative. The Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, as it is called, now has 50 member nations, and exchanges lightly edited government press releases among subscribers. Roger Tatarian has proposed a joint multinational news agency that would concentrate on national-development stories. A task force of the New York-based 20th Century Fund including Third World journalists has endorsed the idea. The World Press Freedom Committee, a group of 32 international publishers and broadcasters...
...declaration scheduled to begin this week, there seemed to be a chance that a let's-be-friends approach might prevail. The Soviets, more concerned with keeping SALT on the right track than with making trouble for Western reporters, appeared to be growing bored with the whole issue. UNESCO Director-General Amadou Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal, whose ambition is to succeed Kurt Waldheim as U.N. Secretary-General, is staking his prestige on passage of a mass media declaration, preferably by consensus. To that end, delegates from Western and nonaligned nations were caucusing last week to come up with...