p When a Latin American opens his morning paper, eight out of ten stories he reads have nothing to do with the problems of his continent. Six out of ten reports have been supplied by AP, UPI, Reuters or Agence France-Presse. In the evening, Latin Americans watch television which presents news items in the same proportion and also from foreign sources. The situation is similar in the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa too.

p It has been estimated that today, the flow of information from developed capitalist nations to Asian, African and Latin American countries, where the majority of mankind lives, is 100 times the amount of news going in the opposite direction. Virtually the entire press, radio, television, and even the film industry of these continents are prisoners of Western propaganda and information services. The reasons are quite clear: capitalism has always used ideology and culture as a smokescreen to disguise its expansionism. The myth of the "civilizing mission" of the West was used to justify annexation of foreign territories, and oppression and plunder of colonies. One hundred years ago, on receiving a report that a territory in the heart of Africa had been safely acquired, King Leopold II of Belgium exclaimed with hypocritical fervor that 6 opening the way for civilization into the only part of the globe it had not yet penetrated, bringing light to the darkness that was reigning there was a crusade worthy of the age of progress. We all know what this crusade brought to Africa: it preserved poverty, illiteracy and economic backwardness for many decades.

p Now that the colonial system in its classic form has practically disappeared, the imperialists still use ideological weapons to secure adVantages for themselves. Holding forth on the free flow of information, the West imposes its own views on world developments, its ideals and values on the peoples of newly independent countries. The goal it pursues is clear—to slow down national liberation and create a climate favorable to bolstering its economic domination—in other words, to replace classic colonialism with the new colonialism of transnational corporations. And so the shock waves of the "information explosion" are radiating from Western propaganda centers, both private and government-owned. In a word, the mass media remain a powerful ideological tool the imperialists use to back their economic and political expansionism.

Naturally, those who have thrown off the colonial yoke and are building a new life are not happy with this state of affairs. They uphold their right to inform their people, to develop their own cultures. This struggle is gaining momentum.