A Witness to History in the Making

World Media Association has sponsored eighteen Fact-Finding Tours from 1982 to the present. This ambitious initiative took international groups of journalists to some of the world's most strategic hot spots. Participants explored the complexities of topical issues first hand. They met and discussed with government officials, opposition leaders and media professionals.

In the 1980's at the height of the Cold War, tours went to Central America during the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua and the Communist revolution in El Salvador and Guatemala. Other tours went to southern Africa during apartheid in South Africa and civil war in Angola and Mozambique. Further tours conducted extensive travel throughout South and Northeast Asia with several visits to the People's Republic of China.

Most remarkable were the series of seven tours to the Soviet Union, beginning when the country was under Brezhnev when participants had to enter on tourist visas. In subsequent years, however, they met with Soviet media representatives from TASS, Novosti, Pravda, and Izvestia. Participants were witnesses to the birth of glasnost and perestroika and tracked the changes they wrought in Russia. Not the least of these was the growing interest of Russian journalists in the standards and practices of the Western media.

A fruit of the earlier initiatives, World Media Conference XI with 800 participants representing 100 nations, was held in Moscow in 1990, chaired by the head of the Novosti Press Agency. At the conference, participants had the opportunity to meet with then-President Gorbachev.

The Cold War dictated the agenda for most of the fact-finding tours in the eighties. During the nineties, WMA sponsored leaders from Latin American countries, particularly from the media, to visit the U.S. In 2005, two Ugandan journalists were supported by WMA to visit Washington, DC for ten days to study the operation of a free press in a free-market democracy.

Fact- Finding Tours CHRONOLOGY [Link]