History of the IPI (1980-1989)
East-West relationships dominated the discussions of the world at large and IPI was no exception.
IPI keeps tracking the changes in Eastern Europe; supporting those with positive outcome for media and protesting against negative ones.
In 1985, the IPI 34th General Assembly took place in Cairo, Egypt, the first ever held in an Arab country. Main speakers included Hosni Mubarak and Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
IPI became the first ever recipient of the newly created Turkish Press Freedom Award.
IPI continued to concentrate some of its efforts on journalist training and new technologies and its impact on newspaper publishing.
Increase of terrorism around the world sparked the controversial debate on how media should cover terrorism. British Prime Minister, Mrs. Thatcher called for the terrorist to be starved of publicity, while IPI called for impartial and accurate reporting.
Meeting in Vienna 1986, IPI members, deeply concerned about variety of threats and restrictions on media world wide, issued a set of Vienna Resolutions (on Terrorism, Chernobyl, South Africa, etc).
The GAs of this decade were held in Florence (1980), Nairobi (1981), Madrid (1982), Amsterdam (1983), Stockholm (1984), Cairo (1985),Vienna (1986), Buenos Aires/Montevideo (1987), Istanbul (1988), and Berlin (1989).
Sources: IPI Reports and IPI photo archive.
• 1950-1959 • 1960-1969 •1970-1979 •1990-1999 •2000-2009
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The Eighties – historical events:
• Ted Turner establishes CNN
• New plague identified as AIDS
• Personal Computers (PC) introduced by IBM
• Michael Jackson releases Thriller
• Hole in the ozone layer discovered
• Mikhail Gorbachev calls for Glasnost and Perestroika
• Chernobyl nuclear accident
• New York Stock Exchange suffers huge drop on "Black Monday"
• Berlin Wall falls
• Students massacred in China's Tiananmen Square
Sources: www.history1900s.about.com and Wikipedia.
