What are the aims and objectives of the McBride Commission of the UNESCO? What is India's position on these?

Why UNESCO created the Commission

• In the 1970s, four or five Western news agencies and a handful of satellite and advertising systems dominated what the world read about the South.
• Developing countries argued that this was cultural dependence after political independence: coups, famines and 'instability' were the only stories, while their development efforts were invisible.
• UNESCO, under a majority of developing members, asked a commission of journalists, scholars and public figures to study the imbalance and to recommend a more just and efficient world information order.

Aims and objectives (Many Voices, One World)

• To study the totality of communication problems in the modern world — news, broadcasting, satellites, transborder data, and the right to communicate — not only press freedom as defined in one capital.
• To reduce the imbalance in the flow of news between North and South, and among regions, so that developing countries are sources of news, not only objects of news.
• To strengthen national communication systems: news agencies, broadcasting, telecommunication, and training of journalists in the South, including through public investment where the market would not build them.
• To defend cultural identity and plurality against homogenising commercial content, while still honouring the free flow of ideas.
• To treat communication as a human right: access, participation, and a two-way flow, including the rural poor and women, not only urban elites.
• To promote a New World Information and Communication Order as a counterpart to the New International Economic Order: less monopoly, more diversity of sources, and fairer use of the electromagnetic spectrum and satellite slots.
• To improve professional ethics, limit concentration of media ownership, and caution against reducing all information to a commodity.
• To ask UNESCO and states to help with technology transfer, reduced tariffs on communication equipment, and protection of journalists — without making the journalist a state clerk.

India's position

• India supported NWICO and the McBride diagnosis in NAM and UNESCO forums. It knew the cost of a one-way Reuters–AFP–AP picture of the subcontinent.
• India backed public-service broadcasting (All India Radio, later Doordarshan) and a national news agency tradition (PTI, UNI) as tools of development communication, which fitted McBride's call to build Southern capacity.
• India did not read McBride as a licence for prior censorship or for a single government newspaper. The Indian Constitution's Article 19(1)(a), with reasonable restrictions, and a combative private press, set a red line: equity of flow is not the same as state monopoly of truth.
• India stayed in UNESCO when the United States (1984) and the United Kingdom (1985) left, accusing UNESCO of politicising the press and of NWICO. New Delhi treated that walk-out as a defence of old monopolies, not as a defence of liberty alone.
• At the same time, Indian editors and the Supreme Court's later expansion of press and speech rights kept India from the extreme of some one-party states that used NWICO language to muzzle dissent.
• Practical Indian line: more voices from the South, South–South news exchange, development-oriented communication, community radio and later digital access — and a free press that can criticise the Indian State itself.
• After the Cold War, UNESCO's emphasis shifted toward press freedom days and safety of journalists. India can still use McBride's unfulfilled bits: plurality of ownership, linguistic diversity, and cheap access for the poor, now in a digital platform market that repeats some of the old one-way power.

A tight join

• McBride's aim was many voices, not one official voice. India's position is to agree with the many-voices aim and to refuse the one-official-voice distortion.