Any newspaperman who has worked abroad, or among foreign correspondents here, knows that there is the closest connection between the work of a correspondent and the interests of the State. Walter Lippmann, in criticizing Congress for the attempted U.N.R.R.A. holdup, pointed out that virtually all of a correspondent’s news comes from officials and business men of his own country, plus some friendly foreign diplomatic sources. There is no clear line separating the correspondent from the Embassy officials of his country. There is even less sharp a distinction between the information exchanged by the correspondent with Embassy officials and the “intelligence” supplied by agents and outright spies.
The recent Pearl Harbor inquiry dented the old shallow idea of “intelligence” which centered on beautiful Mata Haris and stolen plans, though the recent Canadian spy-scare exploited this popular misconception. The United States has just created a new national intelligence agency on a more realistic basis. Gathering of every kind of public and secret information, plus the over-all evaluation of the total information, is the job of the new agency. Evaluation of information at every stage is essential. Poor evaluation led General Marshall to believe—and to tell a press conference—that the Nazis would go through the Red Army like a hot knife through butter; later that Japan was militarily a joke.
For the function of gathering information and evaluating it as it is gathered, the correspondent is ideally equipped. Since his work is conditioned to the objectives of the dominant interests in his own country, and even of his own government to varying degrees, he cannot be regarded as an innocent man from Mars, dispassionately reporting history as it unfolds. As a matter of fact, news values are determined, for the correspondent, with relation to state policy. Events are not “news” unless they have some bearing on the progress or lack of progress of specific American policies. The current American coverage of the Balkans is typical. Correspondence from that area is almost exclusively concerned with the Anglo-American effort to get “reliable” governments installed. The correspondent makes no pretense of drawing a positive picture of life in those lands.
But over and beyond what the correspondent reports, or does not report, is his value as a contact man. It is not for nothing that Sulzberger stresses complete freedom of motion and contact for the business man and correspondent alike. In the Socialist sphere, and in rival imperialist territory, the American newspaperman is part of a network of capitalist contacts within the country to which he is assigned. He is a war correspondent and intelligence agent in peacetime!
This question of contacts is as decisive for the newspaper business as it is for intelligence work. And it provides an interesting link with the secret history of the world news cartel. For just such contacts were the foundation of the global news monopoly. And the cartel was, from the start, unmistakably at the service of commercial and state interests!
News Since Feudal Days
Near the middle of the past century, governments, bankers, rich merchants, kept private couriers who travelled to all important European capitals. By carrier pigeon—and in America also by pony express—they sent specific information on prices and market conditions, plus general political information required for their long-range business planning. The couriers built up extremely valuable contacts that would have made them very valuable to newspapers. But newspapers couldn’t afford their costly services and the couriers couldn’t afford to lose their rich clients by publishing their information. Newspapers had the right to print news but no way to get it.
The telegraph broke that situation wide open. It made the relative isolation of the newspapers impossible; it spelled the doom of the private news systems.[A] It ended feudalism in the information field. But not everyone saw that immediately. Paul Julius Reuter, Prussian government courier with many business clients and topnotch European contacts, understood it at once. He determined to switch to newspapers, offering a telegraphic news service to several papers at once. Germany was no place for a progressive idea in 1851, and Britain was the nation with the most extensive world interests, so Reuter set up shop in London. His idea was a smashing success. Reuters soon was the all-powerful government-backed British Empire news monopoly.
Charles Havas, a Hungarian, established a similar monopoly for the French Empire and France’s sphere of interest, and Dr. Bernhard Wolff did as much for Germany. In the United States, Associated Press grew out of the same conditions, except that the agency, like the nation itself, was almost wholly absorbed in internal development, almost entirely disinterested in the rest of the world. Toward the close of the century, however, there were signs that the tremendous productive forces developed under American capitalism would ultimately seek an empire if not world empire. The country began to show more interest in world news. Associated Press, to improve its monopoly position and bar the possibility of successful competition at home, sought exclusive rights to a supply of world news. It made a deal with the European agencies.
That deal and the world news relationships of which it was a part, were well hidden from the world prior to World War II, but the war completed a change in the former secret relationships. Marking this change, A.P. chief Kent Cooper published the story of the news cartel in 1942. His book was called Barriers Down. Cooper published it only to mobilize support for his “crusade.”