The ENDC and the Press

Differences in the reporting of international events in different countries can be an important element in international misunderstanding. This is a case study of these differences and of how they occur.

The subject is a set of meetings of the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee held in Geneva in July 1968. The first part of the study is an account of the press arrangements and of the ways in which information reached the journalists from day to day. The arrangements are found to be noticeably defective.

The second part of the study gives a detailed analysis into 84 'points' of the delegate's speeches, as reported in the verbatim record several weeks later. The prestige papers from ten countries are then examined to see which of these points they reported. Two of the conclusions are that the press coverage of the points at issue between the delegates is distinctly thin; and that papers in aligned countries give little space to the proposals made by delegates from countries in the opposite camp.