Governments and press control: Global attitudes on journalistic matters

This study, consisting of interviews with official representatives of 58 countries, was conducted from January to May, 1987 while the writer was a Senior Fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University in New York. It is an investigation of the ‘'inclination to control'’ the press by various national governments, and is related to press freedom, press ethics, professionalization of journalism, and to concerns with the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO).

The study was planned so as to get interviews from Government information/press officials (in New York City and Washington, D.C.) from six broad regions of the world—Western Europe/North America, Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia. The interviews concentrated on six main factors believed important in determining “control” in a press system: (1) in‐country licensing, (2) international licensing, (3) identification cards or accreditation, (4) university education, (5) in‐country codes of ethics, and (6) international codes of ethics.

It should be stressed that actual control of the press in the examined countries was not the focus of the study. Rather, the objective was to ascertain the tendency or inclination on the part of the government (and total system) to control the media. On the basis of the interviews, a “control inclination index”—CII—was computed for each country, reflecting attitudes toward the six factors listed in the paragraph above. CII scores of 24 would indicate the maximum inclination to control; the lower the scores, the less inclination the country has to control the press.

Results: The region of the world most inclined to control the press is the Middle East with the highest average total score of any region (21.7). The region with the second highest CII score is Latin America, with a score of 19. Eastern Europe and Africa, each with a score of 18.5, tied for the third highest spot in press control inclination. Rather surprisingly, the region with the next to lowest inclination to control was Asia (CII = 16.2). And the region least inclined to press control was Western Europe and North America (U.S./Canada), with an average CII of 12.5.

Countries of the world with the highest CII scores (24) were the German Democratic Republic, the People's Republic of China, Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, Cuba, and Peru. Countries next most inclined to control (scores of 23) were Bulgaria, Jordan, and Paraguay, followed by Ethiopia, USSR, and Lebanon (22), and Angola, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Egypt, and Panama (21). Countries getting scores of 20 were Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, Kuwait, and Bolivia.

Countries with scores under 20 in the index were Ivory Coast, Hungary, Pakistan, Argentina, Ecuador, and Guyana (19), Nigeria, Poland, Portugal, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and South Korea (18). Austria had a score of 17. With scores of 16 were Denmark, Turkey, Chile, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. The Sudan, Finland, and Spain had scores of 15. South Africa and the Philippines had 14, and New Zealand had 13.

Countries with scores of 12 and below (considered very little inclined to control the press) were the following: Norway and India (12), Sweden, Australia, and Japan (11), the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Mexico (10), Greece and Canada (9), and the United States with the lowest score (8).