Another idea on it

freewilllccc

pike-winseck-condensed.doc

Home >English homework help >Article writing homework help >Another idea on it

The Politics of Global Media Reform, 1907–23

and New Delhi), Vol. 26(5): 643–675

Robert Pike

QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY, CANADA

Dwayne Winseck

CARLETON UNIVERSITY, CANADA

In contrast to much contemporary scholarship, which sees the consolidation of a global media system during the 1990s as a fundamentally new phenomenon, this article traces the rise of globalization and a global media system back to the period between the mid-19th century and the 1920s. It contributes to a growing body of research amongst communication scholars

such as Oliver Boyd-Barrett (1980) and Boyd-Barrett and Tehri Rantanen (1998), as well as in works from other disciplines (e.g. Hirst and Thompson, 1999; O’Rourke and Williamson, 2000) and broader works such as Kevin Phillips’s study of power and wealth in the US (2002).

The article makes three key points. First, globalization is not new and, furthermore, the earlier phase being considered here has been conceptualized in several different ways.

[ . . . ]

The second key point of our research is that the long period between 1850 and the late 1920s that gave rise to the global media system can be divided into two stages. The first stage occurred between approximately 1880 and 1902, and was mainly restricted to demands within the British Empire for government ownership of cables, the main result being the laying of the Pacific Cable between Canada and Australasia in 1902 (Pike and Winseck, 1999; see also Boyce, 2000). However, the analysis in this article begins a few years prior to the First World War, when the press of the British Empire were becoming strident in their demands for major

reform in cable communications, and moves through several US-inspired international conferences held in Washington between 1920 and 1923. This period represents a second phase in a long-term movement pressing for changes in how the global media system of the time was owned, regulated and used, and which had three key features: critiques of cable cartels; calls for state ownership and regulation of cables; and efforts to secure cheaper cable rates.

[ . . . ]

The third key point, related to the second, is that there was still a strong reform movement in Britain and the Dominions, held over from the earlier stage, and – as noted in the ‘utopian view’ – later extended to the US, calling for low cabling rates with the purpose of turning the cable and

telegraph into a means of mass communication. Lastly, radio became a much touted possible rival to cable, even though up until the late 1920s most analysts believed that it would develop mainly as a supplementary adjunct to cable. Hence the spate of cable-laying which followed closely upon the end of the First World War, although paradoxically the formation of the Radio Corporation of America in 1919 did have international competition with British cable interests as one of its major goals. As Lippmann remarked in Liberty and the News, all this meant that ‘the real censorship on the wires is the cost of transmission. This in itself is enough to limit any expensive competition or any significant independence’ (1995: 43). We shall return to Lippmann later in the article, but for now the key point is that it was such prescient observations that turned questions regarding the ownership and control of the cables, the costs of cabling, the adequacy of their technical facilities, their technological entrenchment, into the cornerstones of a far-reaching politics of global media.

The political economy of the cables

Cartels and monopolies

From the 1850s onwards, domestic telegraph systems had greatly extended their reach and become linked to a worldwide network of cable communications. Unlike domestic telegraphs which, with the exception of the US and Canada, were usually state owned, the cable network consisted predominantly of private companies interconnected in a complex series of monopolies and cartel arrangements; and here, British companies dominated, maintaining almost complete control over the manufacture and laying of cables and owning two-thirds of the world’s cables by 1900. Among these companies, the doyen was what Daniel Headrick (1991: 39) describes as ‘the greatest multinational company of the nineteenth century’, the Eastern and Associated Companies, presided over by John Pender and his son, John Denison Pender, which controlled some 46 percent of all cables prior to the First World War and still retained a commanding influence over government policies when amalgamated with Marconi radio interests in the late 1920s. In turn, these cable interests, both in Britain and elsewhere, supported the growth of global news agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press (AP), as well as the formation of international markets and, of course, the spread of imperialism. Some of these developments are well documented, others less so (notably Ahvenainen, 1981, 1996; Coates and Finn, 1979; Headrick, 1991; Hugill, 1999; Kennedy, 1971; Tribolet, 1929).

[ . . . ]

In short, while numerous nominally independent cable companies existed, in reality many of them were elements of one large Eastern controlled unit, with either John Pender or his son, or their close associate, the Marquis of Tweeddale, on their boards (Headrick, 1991: 36). The Eastern companies controlled not just the running of the business through TC&M, but cable construction, laying and maintenance, and constantly sought exclusive landing rights, government contracts and preferential connections with domestic telegraph companies, as they spread across the globe. Furthermore, they protected themselves by creating pooling arrangements with other cable firms, and centrally through the creation of the Globe Telegraph and Trust Company (GT&T) in 1873 [ . . . ] With Pender at the helm of the Trust and several of its ‘member companies’, and most of the world’s major cable companies ultimately collected in the same premises in London – Electra House – or along a short block of Broad Street in New York – the geography and sociology of control over the worldwide network of cables was remarkably tight-knit (Headrick, 1991: 36).2

Global cable penetration from the 1870s onwards has been fairly well documented, but needs some brief outline here, not least because of links both to news flow and later rivalries between Britain and the US. (i) From Britain, the Eastern Telegraph Company ran a cable system through to India, and beyond India, another Pender company – the Eastern Extension and Australasia Telegraph Company – linked to Singapore and Hong Kong, with an extension to Japan, and tied in Australia and New Zealand to Asia and Europe in 1876. Prodded by the threat of new government-owned cables, Eastern laid a second cable to Australia, via South Africa in 1902. (ii) By 1889, all major cables serving the east and west coast of Africa were controlled by the ‘Eastern’ group. (iii) The trans-Atlantic route from Europe was served by up to 17 cables landing either in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, the majority of them being controlled either by Western Union or, after 1883, the Commercial Cable Company, which linked to the Postal Telegraph Company in the US; the rest, by 1910, included two

German-owned cables, and, as already mentioned, two British-owned cables and the British-dominated French cable. (iv) Moving southward, the Eastern group’s cables ultimately interconnected Halifax with Bermuda and Jamaica. In South America, the Eastern-owned Western Telegraph Company was granted a 30-year monopoly for service between Europe and Brazil in 1873, and subsequently extended its lines to Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Peru. In 1892–4, Brazil extended Eastern’s monopoly for an additional 20 years on the vital route between Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, effectively shutting out US cable firms from much of the eastern coast of South America until 1919 (Denny, 1930: ch. 14). However, French and German cable companies obtained Brazilian landing rights, the German cable being part of a concerted effort by Germany to link its imperial possessions and perceived spheres of interest prior to the First World War.

[ . . . ]

Finally, on the trans-Pacific route from western North America, the stateowned imperial Pacific Cable completed the first electronic circumnavigation of the globe via Australia in 1902. However, it did not connect with Asia, and hence the main cable route to the Far East on the west–east axis continued to reside with the Eastern Extension in a complex pooling arrangement with a series of other cable companies, most notably the Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company and the Commercial Pacific Cable laid in 1902–3 from San Francisco to Hawaii, Guam and the newly acquired Philippines, and thence northwards.

The above pooling arrangement illustrated perfectly the Eastern Extension’s approach to controlling the expansion of cable networks and potential competition, all the while maintaining the illusion that the Commercial Pacific Cable was American controlled.

[ . . . ]

Cables and the press

The critique of cable cartels and of the role that high rates had in reinforcing the market power of large users also became closely tied to issues of news flow, although the matter of limited access for personal correspondence also played a part. We now review some of these issues, focusing, first, on British dominance over news; and, second, on press use of the cables and the nature of links between cable companies and news agencies.

(i) British dominance. American commentator Eugene Sharp (1927: 1) observed that ‘London has long been regarded as the news capital of the world due to its importance as an empire center and to its fine system of cable communications reaching out in every direction.’ Not surprisingly, the main British news agency, Reuters, was ideally situated to gather and disseminate news, its offices spreading out from Europe to India, the Far East and Australasia by the 1870s. Indeed, the extent to which Britishcontrolled news followed the cables is evidenced by the fact that the main American possession in the Far East after 1898, the Philippines, received American news via Reuters and that Reuters also had a stranglehold over

international news dissemination in China and Japan at the time (Cooper, 1942: 50; Lawrenson and Barber, 1985: 51). Furthermore, in 1869, Reuters combined with the French news agency Havas and the German news agency Wolff, to divide up global news-gathering and, in 1893, they were joined by Associated Press. As part of the deal, all AP-gathered domestic news intended for international consumption went through Reuters, and all foreign news destined for AP went through Reuters as well (Coates and Finn, 1979: 81). By 1912, however, AP began rethinking its position in the combine out of concerns about getting ‘objective’ US news into Latin America. Yet, had the news cartel been broken at that point, AP’s ambitions to deliver a news service in all of Latin America would still have been compromised by British cable dominance in the region (Lawrenson and Barber, 1985: 47). In short, whoever controlled the cables controlled the news.

[ . . . ]

(ii) Press tariffs, cable usage and press–cable linkages. Press agencies paid huge amounts to be first with the international news. During some of the factional fighting between the western US newspapers and AP in the late 1860s, when cable tolls were running at $5 a word, for example, the factions each paid cable bills of around $2000 weekly and almost bankrupted themselves (Gramling, 1940: 74–5). According to one AP historian, cable rates ‘remained the most costly convenience in newsdom’; and even after rate reductions by the 1880s, expanded news flow meant that AP’s cable tolls were rarely less than $300 a day, and frequently

$2000 (Gramling, 1940: 74, 88).

[ . . . ]

The Imperial Press Conference gave international publicity to issues of high press cable charges and the constraints they imposed on news flows, and the apparent complicity between the British government and cable companies. The conference passed a resolution in support of state-owned cables, and a Canadian delegate tabled an even broader resolution covering ‘state-owned communication across the Atlantic’, a formulation designed to bring wireless telegraphy into the m´elange of concerns being raised (Donald, 1921: ch. 17; The Times, 1909a, 1909b). The resolution was shelved, but it highlighted the fact that Marconi was offering the only alternative to cables between Canada and Britain. Even more significantly, the conference led to the creation of an Empire Press Union, which acted as an effective lobby group on press rates, and also breached the opposition of the British Foreign and Colonial Offices to any entity that formally united the press (Donald, 1921: 162). Whilst the US press does not appear to have given the conference much attention, Henniker Heaton’s criticisms of the Atlantic rates had been featured approvingly in the New York Times (NYT) as far back as 1900 and gained even more attention as time passed (see e.g. NYT, 1908a, 1908b). His proposal for a penny-a-word international rate also captured the imagination of that newspaper. As one editorial noted:

. . . to the American patrons of the cable companies, the monopolistic control of

the transatlantic lines . . . is the feature of the rate reform movement which

appeals with greatest force. . . . [I]t is a severe arraignment of the cable

companies which the leader of the rate reform movement has made. . . . [T]heir

ownership, he holds, is in the hands of combinations, and their utilization is

amongst millionaires rather than amongst the millions. (NYT, 1908b: 3)

The New York Times was even more disturbed by Henniker Heaton’s charge that the cables were being kept idle for long periods of time in order to maintain high rates, concluding with the acerbic comment that ‘So far as American cables are concerned, commerce is practically throttled’ (1909). If this doyen of the press was any indication, the US was becoming drawn into the politics of global media reform in a far more direct fashion.

[ . . . ]

The revival of proposals for a state-owned Atlantic cable faced severe opposition from the British Post Office. In a Cabinet memorandum, it argued that a state cable offering service at cost would be swamped with business; that two cables would be needed, in case one failed; and that the Post Office had a firm agreement with the Anglo-American Cable Company to give the latter all messages not marked for a particular route (NAC, 1908).14 It was further argued that backing a state cable was inappropriate at a time when wireless telegraphy was emerging as a longdistance rival (see NAC, 1910).

[ . . . ]

Wilsonianism and international electronic communication

The background

Most of the major British and imperial cable reformers (Edward Sassoon, Heaton and Sandford Fleming) had died by 1915. By then, however, the First World War had placed the world’s communication system under immense strain. Most of the cable rate reforms were shelved for the duration. Ciphers and codes were forbidden. Government messages, and those from the troops, were sent without charge. By war’s end, the cable networks, increasingly supplemented by long-distance radio-telegraph, proved inadequate to meet government and business demands. Moreover, prior to US entry into the war in 1917, actions by the Allies had created long-term American hostility. Britain and France unilaterally cut and rerouted the German Atlantic cables, which had been administered on the US side by the Commercial Cable Company, and thereby cut off direct American contact with Germany until the early 1920s. Japan, on the Allied side, seized the German cables in the Pacific, and took control of the island of Yap, which was a vital centre for American cable communications in Asia. In addition, the position of London as the great entrepˆot for international cables gave rise to charges that British authorities were actively intercepting and censoring US diplomatic and commercial charges, not only during the war but into the early 1920s. Though Britain denied the accusations, they became another factor influencing US attacks on British cable dominance (see Britain, 1921a).

All this was occurring as President Wilson’s flirtations with progressivism began to be translated into policies designed to break up cartels, or at least to rein them in, culminating in the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 (Braeman, 1973: 6). In the same year, Postmaster General Burleson advocated nationalizing the American telegraph system and at the close of the war the federal government temporarily assumed control of the telegraph, telephone and cable systems in order, it was argued, to facilitate their efficient functioning during the communications crisis.21 Another factor was Wilson’s advocacy of a new American diplomacy ‘which placed the good of mankind above the selfish interests of the US’ (Braeman, 1973: 7) – which was translated into American proposals at the Paris Peace Conference that called for open communication and open markets as the foundation of world peace and economic stability. From this view, monopolies had to be eliminated and a concerted programme to develop cables and wireless pursued. But, as we have seen, in the world of electronic communication, most of the monopolies were British, and they controlled cable access to eastern South America – a black eye for the Munroe Doctrine – as well, de jure or de facto, the cable routes to the Far East.

British cable supremacy, and hence dominance over much of the news flow via Reuters, mediating for the British government, became important to the US as the war spawned greater demand for international news by the American public, and also when the Wilson administration became aware of just how thin had been previous American efforts to export US-sourced

news to other countries. The American news agencies prided themselves, somewhat self-righteously, on their lack of government subsidies and avoidance of propaganda.22 However, as a case in point, they had made negligible effort before the First World War to send American news to South America. Then between 1915 and 1918, United Press (UP) and AP had to rely on the Western Telegraph, a member of the Eastern group, to carry news to the region after their contracts with All-America Cables were aborted as the cable company intensified its focus on more lucrative commercial business.23 Matters turned personal, when, in China, a speech by President Wilson was apparently so badly garbled by one of the European news agencies that he concluded that firm action should finally be taken to improve news portrayals of the US both domestically and externally.

The response was the creation of the Committee of Public Information (CPI) in 1917, presided over by Walter Rogers. This committee was undoubtedly a propaganda agency, although Rogers strenuously denied it, claiming that it ‘distributed news as impartially as the AP or the UP’ (US National Archives, 1921a). Beyond heading the CPI, Rogers was a lead adviser to the Wilson government at the Paris Peace Conference and for some while thereafter. In this position, he favoured the second of two opposing policy courses on communications outlined by Wilson’s press secretary at Versailles, Ray Stannard Baker: the first being ‘a scramble by each nation for cables, telegraphic and telephonic control, and the use of those instrumentalities for purely selfish national purposes’; the other, ‘a comprehensive, cooperative scheme by which those instrumentalities of human civilization should be internationalized and used for the equal

benefit of all nations and all people’ (Baker, 1922, vol. II: 470–1). Baker favoured the ‘internationalist’ course, and stressed Rogers’ and Burleson’s role in promoting it, but complained that they were never able to overcome the position adopted by other members of the Wilson administration at the conference. This, claimed Baker, combined with Wilson’s failure to study communication issues in detail, led to existing monopoly systems being reinforced, and crippled any proposals for the international control of cables and radio (Baker, 1922, vol. II: 477). Ultimately, these issues were largely shunted from the Peace Conference to a preliminary international communication conference scheduled for Washington in 1920.

Idealism and reality

British imperialism provided a certain vision of world electronic communications centred around the linking of the British empire. On the other hand, Henniker Heaton’s ‘utopian vision’ was democratic and internationalist and congenial to the ‘progressivist’ views being articulated by Rogers, Burleson, Baker and some other officials at the State Department. Rogers’ profound interest in the links between cables and the distribution of information and news, in particular, connected him directly to the concerns held by Henniker Heaton. The similarities are reflected in a 1919 memo that Rogers addressed to President Wilson at Versailles which affirmed that:

. . . barriers to the flow of news from nation to nation due to lack of

communications facilities, to prohibitive charges, to preferential or discriminatory

rates, to private or national efforts to ‘guide’ the character of news,

should be removed in the general public interest. . . . Fraught with danger is a

situation in which the commerce of some nations languishes through lack of

means of communication, while the commerce of others is subventioned

through control of communication facilities. (Baker, 1922, vol. III: 429)

His solution was for each nation to nationalize its radio facilities, and then act together to develop a truly worldwide radio service with commercial press messages at ‘low, uniform rates’ (1922, vol. III: 439). He proposed also a comprehensive joint cable scheme between Britain, Japan, China and the US, and including the ex-German Yap cable, which would ‘provide ample facilities at low rates’. Ultimately, electronic communications, in his view, would need to be brought within the purview of the League of Nations.

Where Rogers joined most closely with Henniker Heaton was in his ‘large element of faith’ (i.e. the utopian view) that low radio and cable rates would improve international relations through popular education and widespread dissemination of information (US National Archives, 1921b). This idea may seem naive today, and even at the time Walter Lippmann’s view of media generated ‘pseudo-environments’ countered it. In any case, Rogers’ ‘faith’ must have been badly shaken when America failed to join the League of Nations, not to mention that the preliminary International Conference on Electrical Communications in 1920 spent most of its time wrangling over the German and Yap cables and issues of British censorship. The conference did develop a draft treaty creating a Universal Electrical Communications Union, but the plan ultimately came to nothing (Clark, 1931: 198). Yet, there was a reverse side to Rogers’ schema – namely, that since most cable monopolies were British, then these were the monopolies which needed to be attended to first. In this matter, the State Department agreed insofar as it believed that the public goal for American telecommunications overseas should be to establish independent US cable and radio systems which would receive fair and equal treatment in the market. This meant, in turn, giving support to American communications

firms, and refusing to cooperate with corporate monopolists and cartels, whether foreign or domestic (see notably Hogan, 1977: ch. 6). And here lay the rub, at least for Rogers, since many of the same companies that received US government support against the strategies of foreign governments were either monopolists or heavily entwined in cartel arrangements. And hence they were only likely to support State Department initiatives when their own commercial interests were not at risk. For Rogers and his supporters, it must have been a ‘catch 22’: indeed, Rogers’ memoranda, circa 1919–22, are full of references to American corporate opposition to

policy proposals which he supported.

The confused record of US international communication policy in the four years following the end of the war is typified by RCA. During the war, the US Navy helped to create the most advanced radio-telegraph system in the world, and subsequently played a major role in the genesis of the Radio Corporation of America in 1919. RCA acted as an effective challenge to British hegemony in cable communications (in radio, Britain was far behind the Americans) and became a dominant force exercising de facto control of US international radio communications, not least in South America. Here, in 1921, RCA spearheaded the creation of a cartel with British, French and German radio interests to avoid ‘ruinous competition’ in the region. The consortium, with RCA at the helm, pooled patents, concessions and capital, and controlled information flows by radio to and from the region thus creating, in conjunction with US opposition to government-controlled cable and radio in the hemisphere, a basis for longterm exploitation of Latin America by foreign communication firms (Bauer, 1995: 141–50). Notwithstanding repeated indictments of RCA under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and advocacy of the ‘open communication/open markets’ policy, the US appeared to be hypocritical and engaged in what American author Ludwell Denny described as a competitive grab not just

of communications markets, but of armaments and raw materials, such as rubber and oil (Denny, 1930: passim). Rogers himself had little faith in RCA, especially after it had heaped scorn on the proposed Universal Electrical Communications Union in 1921. RCA, he claimed, sought to delay the Union until it could get a ‘world-wide monopoly’ and, he continued:

. . . certain . . . American private companies seem to be haunted by the spectre

of government ownership. . . . One of the surest ways of bringing about

government ownership will be for the American companies to go out and try

and rape the world, for reprisals will come so thick and fast that American

business will cry for relief. (US National Archives, 1921c)

Mercantilism rather than openness flowed from this convoluted state of affairs, and not only on the part of the American government but also that of the British and other governments, as well as the dominant corporate actors who sought, and largely obtained, state support for their international forays. As a case in point, the State Department focused mainly on breaking foreign, and mostly British, cartels in Central and South America, and in China. In the former region, there was a concerted US campaign to break the Eastern cartel’s Western Telegraph monopoly on the east coast of South America, notably in Brazil. In 1916, the Brazilian Supreme Court had, against British opposition, allowed an All-America Company subsidiary to have connections between Argentina and Brazil, a decision which ultimately allowed the subsidiary direct, if circuitous, communications with the US. Historian Michael Hogan notes that, in such circumstances, there was no way that Pender fils, chief director of the British Eastern interests, was going to allow a further diminution of his control of cable traffic between Europe and South America which ran via the Portuguese-owned Azores. Here he was:

. . . supported by the Foreign Office, the General Post Office, and the British

Admiralty, all of whom hoped to protect Pender’s interests and, equally

important, prevent an independent Europe–South American connection that

would make British censorship of this traffic impossible in a new war. (Hogan,

1977: 120)

Hence, a bevy of British lobbies in Portugal successfully blocked US cable companies’ attempts to get landing rights in the Azores, which would have allowed US companies roundabout connections, via European cables, with South America. Meanwhile, this complex labyrinth of power plays was typically punctuated by Western Telegraph’s use against All-America Cables of discriminatory rates on traffic between Buenos Aires and Brazil (US Library of Congress, 1920: 29) – a policy which, as mentioned, was anathema to Rogers and other internationalists.

[ . . . ]

Throughout the 1920s, despite images of Britain’s economic decline, that country remained remarkably effective at defending its political and strategic interests in the face of policy drives which the US government often defined as ‘Open Door’ and anti-imperialist but which, as suggested earlier, often looked to others like old-fashioned economic imperialism.27 So it was in China, with which the US admittedly had a strong case for improved communications but where, in a whole series of economic arenas, demands for equality of treatment by the US government were seen in London, Tokyo and Beijing as a chance to overwhelm an enfeebled

economic state by ‘the astounding American industrial machine’ (Dayer, 1981: xvii). In the case of electronic communications, the already noted domination of the British and Danish cable cartel made radio-telegraphy seem the most effective alternative for direct US communication with China. Indeed, in 1920, Owen Young of RCA suggested a Latin Americanstyle consortium among the various foreign radio concessions in China, with RCA again playing a lead role in supplying equipment and finance. However, having initially supported both RCA and the Federal Telegraph Company of California in their abortive efforts to develop radio in China, the State Department’s approval for Young’s plan came too late (see Aitken, 1985: 492). Not surprisingly, there was growing Chinese opposition to Western exploitation, and also opposition to the consortium idea, from the British, Japanese and Danish governments, especially within the context of the Washington Conference on Disarmament in 1921–2. Thus, only in 1927 was RCA able to relay radio traffic through to Hong Kong from a station in the Philippines (Aitken, 1985: 492). Quite evidently then, while Latin America had been opened up to direct electronic communications with the US, including the potential for a greater flow of press material, the US made little progress in China. As with the ‘Open Door’ Latin American cable policy, the US government proposed, and the private US corporations disposed. This was particularly so in the field of banking where J.P. Morgan & Co. thwarted a State Department plan to supplant British bankers as major financiers in many ‘underdeveloped areas’ including China. Morgan & Co., like Western Union, was on excellent terms with the British government, and much preferred to cooperate rather than compete with its foreign counterparts for established spheres of influence (Dayer, 1981: xvii).

Some concluding thoughts, notably on radio

From their inception, Western cable interests fostered cartels and monopoly arrangements in order to avoid what they called ‘ruinous competition’. This prominent feature in the history of the global media was also crucial, with state backing, in largely negating efforts to achieve major rate reductions in Britain in 1911–12 and similarly weakened US State Department policies in the early post-First World War period. As for the ideas of the British and US ‘utopians’, the period under review did not yield a democratically oriented global communication system, and especially not one where the press and public had readily available and affordable access to information, either domestically or internationally. However, Henniker Heaton had put his faith in the future of radio as a competitor to the cable cartels and, as noted, by 1918 the Americans dominated in field of radio-telegraphy. By 1923, partly because of lower rates and partly because of congestion on the cables, RCA – though, as a monopoly, it would have been anathema to Henniker Heaton, just as it irritated Rogers – had captured 30 percent of

the Atlantic traffic and 50 percent of Pacific traffic, and was clearly a crucial counterbalance to British hegemony in cables (Headrick, 1991: 82). In such circumstances, one might assume the cable companies to be running scared of the competition, but this was hardly the case. As Eugene Sharp noted, ‘cable companies are not inclined to take the view that their business is imperiled by the advent of wireless’, and he pointed to the great sums of money being invested in new and projected cables as indicative of their confidence in cable technology (Sharp, 1927: 25).

Likewise, a cable mogul like Newcomb Carlton of Western Union was typical in his reassurance to shareholders in 1923 that radio would be an ally to cable, not a rival (Sharp, 1927: 25). Even Rogers did not believe ‘that radio development should take the line of driving out the cables or of cutthroat competition with the cable; each instrumentality should develop its own peculiar field’ (Columbia University, 1943: 24). Yet by the late 1920s short-wave (beam) radio was undercutting the cable business and causing major organizational transformations, so these comments soon seemed a bit like laughter at a funeral. However, the widespread optimism derived from the fact that, in the early post-war years, there was quite enough business to go around for both radio and cables. Besides, in fairness to Rogers, he followed up the above comments with the observation that he hoped that state-controlled radio would provide the government with an indirect, but effective, way of regulating the cable companies. Yet Rogers underestimated the efforts of the cable companies, especially the British Eastern Group, to influence the development and uses of radio. This was most evident with respect to the Eastern

Group’s claims over China. Thus in December 1921, a cyphered telegram from the Foreign Office to their delegates at the Washington conference laid out the British position on cable and radio as arrived at in negotiations with the British and Danish companies involved, including Marconi. The result was that the cable companies might surrender their claim to a veto over radio in, and to, China if their current agreements were maintained until 1930, their exclusive rights over Chinese coastal cables continued thereafter and, crucially, so long as ‘wireless service . . . obtain[ed] no preference over cables in regard to rates and other matters on internal telegraph system of China’ – i.e. that rates be kept equal (Britain, 1921b).

[ . . . ]

Walter Lippmann received early mention in this article, and so let us end with him. Like Rogers, Lippmann was present at the Versailles Conference but, unlike Rogers, he was disillusioned by the deliberate manufacture of opinion both for export and home consumption. And unlike Rogers, he had no belief that news spread through the press could lead to international

understanding, but rather thought it would lead to the furthering of stereotypes and prejudices. Lippmann’s proposed response to this state of affairs was to generate expert knowledge, bureaus of research and social science research to ‘countervail the corrosive impact of self-interested parties on society’ (Blum, 1984: 80, 83). Although Lippmann was more inclined towards technocracy than democracy, his views still placed him far closer than Rogers to the reality that corporate power, in league with the state, had made a mockery of prospects for a democratic global media system. Unchastened, today’s exponents attach similar notions to the

Internet and other ‘new media’, while attacks on media convergence and of media control by mega-corporations have taken the place of Henniker Heaton’s and Rogers’ critiques of monopolies and cartels. Thus, while Lippmann might still be right in his cynical views, the spirit of positive change rests with those who dream dreams – and certainly it is to such people that we doff our proverbial hats.

References

Ahvenainen, J. (1981) The Far Eastern Telegraphs. Helsinki: Suoumalainen

Tiedeakatemia.

Ahvenainen, J. (1996) The History of the Caribbean Telegraphs before the First

World War. Helsinki: Suoumalainen Tiedeakatemia.

Aitken, H. (1985) The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio

1900–1932. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Australia (1909) Press Cable Service Committee Report in Journals of the Senate,

vol. 1, 20 May–8 Dec. Canberra: Australian Govt. Printer.

Baker, R. (1922) Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, (3 vols). New York:

Doubleday, Page and Co.

Bauer, C. (1995) ‘Incommunicado: The Arrested Development of Telecommunications

Systems in Latin America’, Doctoral dissertation, San Diego: University of

California.

Blum, D. (1984) Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitanism in the Century of Total War.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Boyce, R. (2000) ‘Imperial Dreams and National Realities’, English Historical

Review 115: 460.

Boyd-Barrett, O. (1980) International News Agencies. London: Constable.

Boyd-Barrett, O. and T. Rantanen (eds) (1998) The Globalization of News. London:

Sage.

Braeman, J. (ed.) (1973) Great Lives Observed: Wilson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice Hall.

Britain (1902) Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Cable Communications,

1901–2, also known as the Balfour Committee Report. London: HMSO.

Britain (1914) Pacific Cable Act 1901, Account 1913–14. London: HMSO.

Britain (1921a) Correspondence Respecting Alleged Delay by British Authorities of

Telegrams to and from the United States, Cmnd 1230. London: HMSO.

Britain (1921b) Cypher Telegram to Mr Balfour, Washington Delegation, 22 Dec. In

Public Record Office, Foreign Office 228/3416, Dossier 1120 (April 1921 to July

1922).

Cable and Wireless Archives (1899) ‘The Cable System Monopoly’ (handwritten

proceedings, uncatalogued).

Cable and Wireless Archives (1905a) ‘Pacific Agreements, etc.’ (book of compiled

agreements), 25 Sept.

Cable and Wireless Archives (1905b) ‘Memorandum Respecting American Pacific

Combination’, Doc: CW/7/1, 11 July, in ‘Records Relating to the Pacific Cable

Company’, Box 1.

Clark, K. (1931) International Communications. New York: Columbia University

Press.

Coates, V. and B. Finn (1979) A Retrospective Technology Assessment, Submarine

Telegraphy: The Transatlantic Cable of 1868. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco

Press.

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1943) ‘Report re Rogers’

Papers, Walter Rogers’ Memorandum to President Wilson, Feb. 12, 1919’

(photocopies of material supplied by Institute of Current World Affairs).

Cookson, G. (1999) ‘“Ruinous Competition”: The French Atlantic Cable of 1869’,

Enterprises et Histoire 23: 93–107.

Cooper, K. (1942) Barriers Down: The Story of the News Agency Epoch. New

York: Farrar and Rinehart.

Dayer, R. (1981) Bankers and Diplomats in China, 1917–1925. Bournemouth:

Frank Cass.

Denny, L. (1930) America Conquers Britain. New York: Alfred Knopf.

Dominions Royal Commission (DRC) (1912) Royal Commission on the Natural