‘The MacBride Movement’ was the culmination of the campaign by the Non- aligned Movement to secure a better share of the global communications flows, while improving coverage by the dominant Western news media of Third World information and political objectives. The Soviet bloc, for its own Cold War objectives, joined the Nonaligned's bid for some ‘new world information and communication order’.

With the MacBride Commission's report in 1980, following the relatively moderate Mass Communication Declaration at Unesco in 1978, the Nonaligned Movement's drive for NWICO reached its peak. This was the result, I maintain, mainly of 1) the changed global geopolitics, demonstrated spectacularly in 1989–91, and 2) the opportunities for diversity of information flows provided by the new communications technologies. They had already demonstrated they could generate and sustain political revolutions in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The paper traces the ‘Hegelian dialectic’ of events preceding and during the rise of the MacBride Movement: the ‘old order’ (Thesis, or Western dominance) from 1946 to 1976, the old ‘new order’ (Antithesis, or Nonaligned-Soviet challenge) from 1976 to 1989, and the new ‘New Order’ (Synthesis, or coming age of ISDN) from 1989.

ISDN, integrated systems of digital networks – the networking of networks, worldwide – provides 'small’ communications capabilities (telephone, fax, copier, computer, radio particularly FM) tied to the long-distance lines (satellites, fiber optics, computer links). The cost of linkage will drop dramatically as each new facility is mass-distributed, and as competition – especially system competing against system – reduces the cost to the citizen.

There are, indeed, dangers in mass linkage. The Orwell warning is appropriate. But this paper argues that competition and government regulation (replacing censorship in many places) will prevent the monopolization by commercial interests, as diverse communication machines in the hands of citizens will prevent government monopolies.

As a consequence, there were mainly winners in the decade-long debates in Unesco over NWICO. The developing countries are beginning to receive aid in building communication infrastructures, Western coverage of their news is improving, and developing-world citizens will increasingly have access to the domestic as well as international information flows. The West, meanwhile, has ended the bitter debates over NWICO, and the perceived threat of new forms of media censorship from governments or intergovernmental organizations.