page five er from Costa Rica, an NBC reporter in trouble with management and essentially banished, and a United Press International stringe1 from Columbia who wanted to go home after receiving death threats. It was not as if the revolution had failed to heat up. More that 12,000 people had assasinated or murdered by the time he arrived. . ‘Face it, the North Amer- ican and European press does just a completely lousy job of covering the third world. Until the next crisis, El] Salvador will sink back into the oblivion’ that the mass media thinks it des- erves.”’ .McCullum said his visit to Zimbabwe aftwr the election of Robert Mugabe revealed “‘some of the most exciting stories I’ve run into -for some time.’’ Yet the West— ern media ignores the attempts at restoring a war corn nation after ‘‘painting Mugabe as a baby-eating savage who would turn the country into a bloodbath.’’ .‘“We don’t cover the third world unless there is a crisis a ‘sexy’ story. It has to be something to titillate, to ‘confuse the readers back home. Information has be- come an economic com- modity viewed in a profit- able fashion. Packaged like soap, sold like a car, the amount of information you see depends on how your ratings are doing or what your sales are.”’ MENTAL REVOLUTION .For Antoine Char, the only ‘solution to the imbalance of the flow of information from the industrialized world to the third world is a ‘‘revo- lution in mentality.’’ Only recently have the large news agencies become interested in third world demands, he says. The next step is to decolonize media influ. ences. .Char is Montreal staffer for Inter Press Service, an alt- ernative news agency with 200 correspondents in the chird world. Char says that a new information order must develop with third world demands for a new economic order. .‘‘The present information order must be destroyed. But how when so few con- trol that order? This im- posed information order is held in so few hands. Seven- ty per cent of the people consume 12 per cent of the world’s newspapers, 10 per cent of the radios, and only 5 percent of the televisions. There must be a significant change in content. There must be an attempt to understand why there is a > volcano in Latin America instead of reporting that another 40 civilians have been shot in El Sal aor ; "Western a ee crust third world wire ser— vices, Char says, charging them with bias and prop- aganda while ignoring that “each service is dedicated to a different image of the world. ‘‘Sure, some (third world reporting) is prop- aganda, but at least you can compare the news and come to some decision yourself.’’ CORPORATE APOLOGIST Hume, the- 38-year-old wunderkind of the Edmon- ton Journal whose rise to the editorship was officially announced during the con- ference, was perhaps the only person of the 150 at the conference who strongly de- fended the commercial media’s coverage of the urd world. He supported « Journal’s coverage by ‘nung to the number of ré services to which it _oseribed, only to be em- .rassed later when he imnitted his paper had de- The Other Press XISTENT LINES ned to take Inter Press vice, ata relatively inex- usive $175 per month, Called a ‘‘corporate apol- .st’ by one delegate,