In her address to world leaders during the UN high-level debate, Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley gave a sharp diagnosis of what ails multilateralism today. The world is living through polycrises created by the challenges of climate, war, and unprecedented material inequalities, she said. Yet, international cooperation through the UN system has consistently failed to convert knowledge into action, to turn principle into practice and global capacity into solidarity.

Mottley also assessed, both explicitly and tacitly, the condition of communication rights in the world, with rich reflections on voice, representation, knowledge, and truth:

First, the global majority’s lack of voice in the Security Council.  This body “still has 15 members, five of them permanent […] Africa, with 54 States, has no permanent seat […]. Small island developing States equally confront threats that now reach squarely into the Council’s mandate and yet despite constituting a quarter of the world’s States, they have no assured representation within the Council.”* The Security Council remains a space where a few voices are amplified, as the rest are silenced.

Second, threats posed by artificial intelligence raised by various others at and beyond the General Assembly. Mottley underlined the risks of exclusion, exploitation, surveillance, the distortion of truth, reproduction of discrimination, widening surveillance, and spreading falsehoods.

Let’s unpack one, that is, surveillance. This is about the right to privacy and freedom of expression that is essential for democratic participation. Importantly, Mottley urged members not to “allow a new technological age to reproduce old hierarchies of access and power” – essentially, support for some form of AI regulation.

Third, the misrepresentation of Africa on world maps. Maps are not neutral; they are media forms that shape knowledge, identity, and power. “The mindset that established, justified, and sustained slavery is the same mindset that sustains the iniquities and inequities within the power structures of [the UN] and within the international financial architecture. It is the same mindset that caused a global map to remain grossly inaccurate on the size of Africa for centuries. As if the true size of Africa would intimidate the rest of the world into understanding its power.” This distortion undermines the right to access to accurate information, with implications on how African States and people are perceived and treated.

A common thread across the three dimensions is communicative injustice, pitting a powerful minority (of States and corporations) against the marginalized global majority. Mottley brings clarity on how the injustices are interwoven in a global order that has failed to live up to its promise. Restoring trust requires enabling communication rights for all.

*Emphasis added by Comment author.

Top image: Sculpture “The World Turned Upside Down” by Mark Wallinger outside the London School of Economics. Credit: It’s No Game on Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0

Reciting examples of Times’ coverage and the courage of its correspondents over decades, he reiterates the fundamental purpose of journalism: “Self-governance requires citizens to have access to reliable sources of information to make informed choices and know when their leaders aren’t acting in their best interests. This is why the press is the only profession explicitly protected in the [United States] Constitution. It is, as the founders believed, ‘one of the great bulwarks of liberty.’”

But the pressures today have hollowed out much of the news media industry. Sulzberger notes that the collapse of the advertising business model led to the closure of almost 3,500 newspapers in the US alone, as well as cost the majority of local journalism jobs in just two decades. In addition to the multitude of pressures from digital platforms – from demands of 24-hour news coverage to rampant misinformation and disinformation – tech companies are training artificial intelligence in part on scraping and reproducing articles and news at vast scale without permission or compensation. Add to this the direct political attacks the weakened press are now facing constantly.

The result is that there are fewer reporters, and fewer institutions “to witness events that might otherwise go unseen, to uncover abuses of power that have never been easier to obscure.”

This reflection on the current state of journalism comes when the United Nations General Assembly opens its 81st session, idealistically aiming to “revitalize global cooperation, give a critical push to the Sustainable Development Goals and drive collective action for peace, dignity and equality on a healthy planet.”

As WACC has stated repeatedly, none of the Sustainable Development Goals, nor indeed, any of the immense challenges we face today – from worsening climate change to unregulated development of artificial intelligence – can be tackled without universal rights to communication in the fullest sense – what we are now highlighting as communication justice. And a free and diverse press is an essential element of that.

As Sulzberger states, “The current period of democratic erosion around the world offers a clear warning that when a free press is undermined, other freedoms will soon fall as well. If this sounds overstated, I challenge anyone to find a country where people are free but the press isn’t.”

A free press – and the larger environment of communication justice – may not be the solution to everything needed to bring peace, dignity, and equality on a healthy planet – but it is an essential ingredient. In a world now rife with deliberate misinformation, abuse in the guise of “free speech,” together with opaque companies and politics seeking greater power and wealth without accountability, supporting public interest journalism is more important than ever.

Photo by Ana Martin on Unsplash