96 | Mass Media and Historical Change
being responsible for a specific region. In this system Reuters (which covered
primarily the British Empire from Canada through East Africa and Asia to
Australia) and Havas (primarily South America, West Africa and the Western
Mediterranean) were clearly dominant; the German WTB tried to cover
Northern Europe and parts of Central and Eastern Europe. The agencies also
agreed on cooperation in several regions, such as the Habsburg Empire. For
the Germans even this position as junior partner brought many advantages:
they could reduce the costs of news gathering, rid themselves of competitors
because they had exclusive rights and, most importantly, protect their own
ascendancy (Basse 1991: 48f.). They also hoped for an opportunity to expand
further eastwards.
The power of the wire service agencies was rooted not only in the fact that
they had access to news from other parts of the world; they also had fairly
exclusive transmission rights. That economic interests superseded political
ones is shown by the longevity of the cartel, which continued to exist into
the 1930s. The breadth of its clientele precluded one-sided and judgemental
reporting. Even during the patriotically charged Boer War, Reuters also broad-
cast reports from the Boer perspective (Potter 2003: 44). Other agencies such
as the Russian ones had hardly any chance in the global market because they
were considered unreliable, and so WTB could function as the most import-
ant dispatcher of news from Moscow and St Petersburg (Rantanen 1990:
169–72).
Yet even in the global news agencies there were increased attempts by the
state to exercise control as a means of protecting national interests. This was
especially true of WTB. Under Bismarck in 1865 the Prussian state gained
extensive influence, and then in 1880 the German Empire used covert sub-
sidies to do the same. In return, WTB sent news articles to various govern-
ment departments before publication, pledging itself to broadcast in detail
the pronouncements of the chancellor and state secretaries. News items that
might give cause for concern were to be submitted to the Foreign Office for
an advance check (Basse 1991: 31f., 61–63; G. Stöber 2000: 58). In this way
WTB’s trans-border communication was simultaneously part and parcel of
national policy.
The rise in state influence can be documented not only in France, where
the Havas successor Agence France-Presse even today exists largely on state
commissions because the French government sits in the board of this public
organisation and is the primary client. Tendencies in this direction were also
evident in Great Britain for a long time. Hence Donald Read’s standard work
on Reuters labels the agency ‘a semi-official institution of the Empire’ during
the late nineteenth century. His pointed conclusion is that not until the Suez
Crisis of the 1950s did Reuters develop into a supra-national agency and
stop reporting news primarily from the British perspective (Read 1999: 474).