racy in Iraq and elsewhere, restricting information domestically undermines the strength of U.S. policies about the importance of transparency in government. As it continues to promote free flow of information abroad, the U.S. government's half-hearted commitment to domestic dissemination of certain government-sponsored information will be increasingly scrutinized and criticized. This issue is of importance not only for the policy objectives of the U.S. government but for the continued worldwide belief in the value of access to information as the basis for rational self governance. Various scholars have examined the U.S. government's international propaganda efforts. For example, one writer chronicled the subversive radio activities of the U.S. government-primarily the Central Intelligence Agency-during World War II. 6 Another researcher documented the international implications, including Cold War-related U.S. propaganda efforts overseas, of the American civil rights movement in the mid-20th century, 7 and yet another wrote about the U.S. government's efforts to destabilize and culturally infiltrate Eastern Europe's Communist Party regimes during the early years of the Cold War. 8 Other studies have focused on the impact of wartime propaganda and other government conduct on press freedom 9 and on various aspects of twentieth century U.S. propaganda. 10 Yet the literature on international U.S. propaganda has devoted very little attention to the Smith-Mundt Act's domestic dissemination ban. The researchers who have touched on the topic have not, for the most part, examined the impact of contemporary communication technologies and their policy implications. This article examines the history and intent of the Smith-Mundt Act's prohibition of domestic dissemination of U.S. propaganda aimed at international audiences, and the subsequent creation of the U.S. Information Agency as the chief propaganda arm of govern-THE BAN ON DOMESTIC PROPAGANDA 3 6
The destruction of the Amazon rain forest is an issue defined primarily through the accounts of environmental journalists who find themselves caught between broad social and cultural forces. Environmentalism is a revolutionary paradigm which runs against traditional modernist tenets of science, but those domains are finding some areas of common ground. This project traces the significance of the tropical rain forest in terms of the social theory of Niklas Luhmann, who described ecological communication in terms of social differentiation and integration. Three separate domains of environmental discourse about the Amazon rain forest are identified in mass media: science, economics and politics. Originally, science defined the rain forest in terms of its taxonomy, then its biodiversity; in economics, the forest was understood in terms of the value of natural resources; and in the political sphere, the forest is defined variously in terms of the struggle over control of its development and/or exploitation. Labour activist Chico Mendes, who was killed in the struggle over the Brazilian forest, has been described as an eco-martyr, emphasizing his role in the struggle between opposing interests. Environmental discourse has strained to isolate causal responsibility for problems, but Luhmann reasons that cause-effect linkages are not always useful in clarifying complex issues. What emerge in the discursive traffic about the tropical rain forest are ideal conditions for the coalition and fragmentation of moral positions, and the cultivation of public anxiety, which the mass media fails to diffuse.
One of the first dialogues about international standards of communication was at an 1884 conference in Washington, DC, convened to discuss reforming time standards and designate an international meridian. The emergence of both telegraph and railroad systems had been important precursors of national time zone systems in North America and Europe, but creation of an international time system required unprecedented cooperation over divergent national interests through expanding networks of scientists. The international time system arose from the pervasive influence of the shipping industry and its innovations in science, especially astronomical innovations in reckoning longitude by chronometers. International time reform faced obstacles from competing national, economic, and cultural interests. The selection of Greenwich Observatory near London as the international meridian showed tacit acceptance among negotiators of a shift to a scientific center of global interests, in spite of resistance from France, which hoped to establish Paris as the international meridian, as well as the metric system as the basis of international exchange.Requests for reprints should be sent to
In 1987, a technical memorandum issued by the United States Office of Technol ogy Assessment predicted that the news media eventually will gain access to remote imaging technology, and certain tradeoffs will be necessary because of the possible threats to national security and foreign policy. In 1989, an officer of France's SPOT Image Corp. told a U.S. Congressional subcommittee that its satellites were well adapted for commercial news gathering, because: "SPOT can take pictures of any location in the world regardless of political or physical limitations." The first test of this claim came during the opening days of the Persian Gulf crisis in August 1990 when SPOT officers in France and the United States denied requests by the news media for satellite images of the Kuwait-Iraq region because of the volatility of the crisis. Representatives of the Western news media have argued for the unrestricted use of space for news gathering. Journalists insist that to inform the public subsumes all other concerns and if news media access to satellite images are restricted, the media will press ahead on plans for their own MediaSat. These issues will require dialogue between leaders of the news media, satellite agencies and government representatives to identify policy conflicts and workable alternatives.
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