Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media by Diana Lemberg (review)

Diana Lemberg examines how journalists, media producers, academics, and policymakers set out to define a uniquely American approach to global press and speech freedoms that shaped U.S. foreign policy post–World War II. The United States cultivated trade and diplomatic policies designed to reduce cross-border restrictions on information exchange and increase the flow of American media overseas. While Americans initially defended “freedom of information” as a weapon to combat fascism and communism, “free flow” policies became central to U.S. efforts to contest European media protectionism and to spread American influence in newly independent countries during decolonization. Weaving together intellectual and diplomatic history, Barriers Down argues that commitments to the free flow of information became distinctive leitmotifs of American internationalism. Historians of technology will find this book useful in evaluating international political disagreements over the appropriate uses of radio, television, satellite, and digital communications technologies.

World War II transformed U.S. political debates about press freedoms, Lemberg argues, as rights language became critical to the struggle against fascism, with Nazi media censorship and propaganda serving as a convenient foil for American civil liberties protections. Intellectuals reworked classic liberal notions of press freedoms by arguing for a greater government role in shaping free media, both at home and abroad. Although industry elites had long worried about government intervention in the private sector, executives from RCA, the Associated Press, and the Motion Picture Association of America embraced “free flow” arguments to contest tariffs and cartels that had locked news agencies and films out of European markets. By 1945, American academics and businessmen agreed that the “global dissemination of American media,” whether in news, film, or broadcasting, “would serve as both instance and agent of worldwide press freedoms” (p. 39). This conviction undergirded U.S. efforts to include an expansive definition of speech and press freedoms in the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Yet when American policymakers began exploiting international organizations to promote their vision of “freedom of information,” they often faced pushback. At UNESCO, an incubator for a host of new media research and professional associations, European journalists and academics contested U.S. domination of the global newsprint supply by proposing an international redistribution system. They also challenged American social scientists’ efforts to make English the global lingua franca, as well as their predilection for behaviorist methods of media analysis. French experts, in particular, found Americans oblivious to the political economy of mass media. Yet despite pushback from French and British authorities seeking to retain cultural and linguistic influence over their former empires, the U.S.-based Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, working alongside USAID, introduced radio and television-based English literacy programs in Latin America and Southeast Asia. For UNESCO-based American communications scholar William Schramm, media capacity became a tool for measuring “developing” nations’ economic and political growth. Building television infrastructure proved to be expensive, and as newly independent countries like Algeria and Congo began nationalizing studios built by their former colonial rulers, American officials shifted their attention to satellite technology, an opportunity to dominate a truly global network of high-speed communication. In the 1970s, smaller countries turned to the United Nations to regulate satellite communications they believed would threaten their national sovereignty and cultures.

Lemberg’s book highlights policies that incorporated multiple media, but her broad sweep occasionally lacks important points of historical nuance. The battles over satellite communication, for example, closely resemble mid-1930s debates about the disruptive power of cross-border radio broadcasting. Surprisingly, Lemberg rarely discusses radio, the media with perhaps the largest global impact in the post-World War II decades, even though American international broadcasting did not always follow the trends Lemberg describes. U.S. broadcasts across the Iron Curtain relied heavily on other European languages rather than English for their cultural legitimacy. While Lemberg focuses on American relationships with Western Europe and the “developing” world, this broader context is important for evaluating...