The Media and the Road to Modernity | 101thus not without significance in spite of their marginal circulation and the
prevalent illiteracy. For on the one hand each copy was often read out and
translated, and on the other, these papers sent signals to the colonial masters.
Campaigns launched by African newspapers clearly had at least partial effects;
in the 1890s, for example, they were able to slow down land appropriation.
Whether these African newspapers were instrumental in the development of
‘pan-African solidarity’ against colonial intervention is questionable. It was
more often the case that African newspapers supported military interventions
against neighbouring tribes (according to Osterhaus 1990: 280f., 477).
The role that new media like the telegraph, wire services and the popular
press played within the context of globalisation and colonialism in the years
around 1900 is best illustrated by a glance at the wars of that period. During
the Spanish–American War in Cuba (1898), the Boer War in South Africa
(1899–1902) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904/05), foreign journalists
arrived to write on-the-spot reports, take pictures for the international press
and make the first film from a war zone (Paul 2004: 76–83). An estimated
three to five hundred journalists had already come to Cuba. This enabled
much of the world to follow events with an immediacy never before possible.
Furthermore this new concentration on distant countries was a factor that
contributed to a sudden change in the global status of the warring parties.
American publishers like Pulitzer and Hearst supported the war against Spain
in Cuba, and the United States appeared as an expansive superpower after
her victory; and pictures of railroads, telegraphs and armoured battleships in
the Russo-Japanese War made Japan appear as a modern power (Gerbig-Fabel
2008).
Admittedly, the part played by early-day war correspondents and their sig-
nificance for the formation of transnational critical journalism has often been
exaggerated. The Crimean War has often been seen as its starting point, when
The Times and its war correspondent William Howard Russell, in their role
as ‘Fourth Power’, brought down the government by their critical reporting.
In actual fact this is based on a myth created by journalists themselves, as The
Times proved extremely loyal to the government (Daniel, in Daniel 2006: 62).
By the same token, photographs played hardly any public role in this war,
despite statements to the contrary in the sources. Journalists from all nations
were indeed active during the Boer War, but while critical reporting had long
been firmly entrenched in London, British journalists in South Africa hardly
ever wrote about the brutality of ‘their’ troops. The critical articles in the Man-
chester Guardian about the concentration camps in South Africa were based
on reports by the nurse Emily Hobhouse (Krebs 1999: 32–54). Nevertheless,
emotional debates about the Boer War that took place in large parts of the
world and put governments in the diplomatic hot seat were manifestations of
the media’s new global character (Geppert 2007: 125–76).