movement for free flow of information

Movement for free flow of information
(Coordinator Comment)

So many journalism professionals have taken up the cause of the free flow of information that one can say it has become a social movement. Perhaps to some extent this is a reaction to increasing monopolization of the mass media by fewer and fewer multi-national corporations with increasingly strong links to the military-industrial complex as noted earlier. Fortunately, the Internet, community radio and small independent newspapers have grown at the same time, providing an outlet for the news that is routinely suppressed by "big media".

An especially effective organization is Reporters Without Frontiers. Their annual report, available from the website at www.rsf.org, provides a remarkable compendium of the attacks on reporters and freedom of the press and a strong defense of the freedom of information.

Whistle-blowers, those who risk their careers and even their lives to make secrets public, are an important part of the movement for a free flow of information. Among the most famous are the American Daniel Ellsberg who made public the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War and the Israeli Mordechai Vanunu who revealed secret information about Israel's nuclear weapons, for which he has spent most of his life in prison.

We may expect whistle-blowers to play an increasingly important role in the development of an alternative to state power. As we have seen, the state depends more and more for its power on the control of information. But as the amount of secrecy increases, the number of people with access to secrets, i.e. the number of potential whistle-blowers, also continues to increase. This is one of the weakest points in the culture of war.