Free Flow of Information

Abstract

The free flow of information has been a key policy as well as a political aspect in the US government's approach to → international communication since World War II. There has often been a conflation of the term between a principle of democratic governance found in many national constitutions and United Nations agencies' charters (→ UNESCO), and the political principle of promoting free trade status to the export of news and entertainment content across national boundaries (→ Cultural Products as Tradable Services). The historical review of the term “free flow of information” made by Schiller (1981) showed that the US Associated Press (AP) news agency had for decades before World War II argued against the European cartel of British, French, and German → news agencies that controlled the dissemination of international → news. At the end of World War II, the US emerged as the dominant economic and military power and began to promote the free flow policy as a universal principle of democracy for other nations. The US was among those nations that proposed and approved the inclusion of rights to free speech and information flow in the United Nations charter. As the Cold War got started in the late 1940s, the issue of free flow took on a whole new character, making it into an enduring political factor that included both the issue of government control of information and the export of news and entertainment to other countries.