The Media and the Road to Modernity | 95the newspapers to focus on events, a development that favoured a truncated
headline-like concentration on bare facts – ‘News’ instead of ‘Views’, in fact.
Finally, transmission was extremely expensive, so it had to be limited to key
data. This led the culture critic Neil Postman to the conclusion that telegraphy
accelerated the growth of irrelevant and incoherent exchanges, since it gave
precedence to acoustical, sensational and unusual information in place of con-
sidered analysis of content such as that found in books or written correspon-
dence (Postman [1985] 2005: 65–76.). Telegraphy was indeed responsible for
the fact that the popular press covered their front pages with short, uncon-
nected bulletins intended to stress the paper’s global currentness. However, the
oft-repeated assumption that the amount of foreign news increased because of
telegraphy is certainly not accurate for Central Europe, since its ratio tended
to decline in the context of nation building, press freedom and the develop-
ment of parliamentary systems (Wilke 1984: 152).
News Agencies
Telegraphy did promote the rise of globally operating news agencies. Whereas
only a few big newspapers had previously been able to afford foreign corre-
spondents, the wire services now made it possible to telegraph news from all
parts of the world into the European provinces. This in turn led to a rapid rise
in the status and consequent growth of the provincial press after the 1870s.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the British Reuters Agency, the
French Havas and the German Wolff’s Telegrafisches Bureau (WTB) devel-
oped into the world’s biggest wire services and were soon joined by the Ameri-
can Associated Press (AP). After the 1860s, Reuters in particular had offices at
its command worldwide, from Australia to Bombay to Cape Town. Examples
of how Reuters expedited news transmission even before the establishment
of the global cable network are legendary: for example in 1862 by means of
a regular courier service from Peking to Siberia so as to take advantage of the
just-completed telegraph, or even before the Atlantic cable was laid by means
of an ingenious system of ship traffic between telegraph stations that enabled
Reuters to be the first to report the assassination of Lincoln to the London
public (Read 1999: 38).
These wire service bureaus stood simultaneously for global cooperation and
the politics of national interest. Their trans-border cooperation was sealed in
1870 by secret cartel agreements between Reuters, Havas and WTB. In 1893
the Associated Press (AP), which had previously cooperated with Reuters,
joined them. In this way a small number of news agencies divided up among
themselves the job of transmitting news worldwide so as to forestall ruinous
competition. They agreed to share information, with one agency generally