A New Information Order or Psychological Warfare?

A book that went to press at the exact moment its subject came to a head.

Its topic is the fight over the New World Information and Communication Order - the campaign, carried by the non-aligned states and backed by the Soviet bloc, to change who owned and controlled the flow of international news. Against it stood the Western wire services, the American administration and the argument for a free flow of information. The book sets out the case for the new order: the concentration of global news distribution in a handful of agencies, the imbalance in reporting on the developing world, the UNESCO debates and the MacBride Commission that had reported in 1980.

Its date is fixed by a sentence it could not have written a month later. In the chapter on the campaign against UNESCO, American withdrawal is still a threat on a list of possible sanctions. The United States gave formal notice on 29 December 1983 and left at the end of 1984; Britain followed a year behind.

The volume names no author. Its surviving front matter gives Moscow, a translator and a designer, and nothing else - which for its purposes is the point, since it speaks in the voice of a position rather than a person.

An Andropov-era book: he is quoted as living General Secretary, and he died in February 1984.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.