Information gap

The new information and communication technologies have conferred monopoly privileges on the industrialized countries and rendered obsolete certain cherished principles concerning national sovereignty. Information about what is available in other developing countries is scarce and difficult to find, but information about the advanced countries is available daily in newspapers and on the television.

In whatever form, the data is slanted in favour of the interests represented by the vendors, which are invariably inimical to those of the developing countries. The latter are not only becoming enmeshed in the global networks of multinational corporations, but are also being automatically forced to conform to their procedures and perceptions through the adoption of their programmes and data bases. Without the resources to compete on an equal footing, importation of hardware, software, experts and data can only result in increased dependence.

Least developed and developing countries have long depended on the developed nations' media. The BBC, Radio France, the Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherlands, Radio Moscow, and RAI, for example, have been the radio sources for information coverage on the Third World taken comprehensively, as there are of course, many highly developed national media in these countries, although limited in international scope. The neo-colonial distortion of news by these radio sources exacerbated by their official connection to their respective governments, is not much more excessive than the type of cultural propaganda, and perpetrations of misinformation by developed countries films, news agencies, publishers and periodicals.