5
Free Flow Doctrine in Global Media Policy
Introduction1
If I were to be granted one point in foreign policy and no other, I would make it the free flow of information.
This statement by John Foster Dulles, one of the chief American architects of the Cold War (Schiller 1976: 30), can be read as a reminder of the fact that global media policy did not ascend to the global level for the first time at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which took place in the new millennium. Rather, global media policy was part and parcel of high politics during the Cold War.
The statement also highlights the strategic importance of the idea of freedom in global media policy. It invites us to take a critical look at how freedom has been employed as an ideological device in concepts such as “free media” and the “free marketplace of ideas.” The title of this chapter refers to the “free flow doctrine,” suggesting that we are not dealing with an objective or neutral phenomenon but instead with a construct made up of political and ideological elements derived mainly from United States (US) geopolitical interests.
In this chapter, the classics of liberal thought are first reviewed taking us back to John Milton’s Areopagitica of 1644 and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty of 1859. Neither of these texts proves to be the source of the “free flow doctrine” in which there must be a free marketplace of ideas that, itself, ensures truth will prevail. This doctrine only took shape ...
