Part 2 — Chapter IV THE ROVER NEWSBOYS ABROAD

“I want the people of every land to be as fully informed as we are, through a press of varied inclinations toward the philosophies of the day.”—Kent Cooper.

What the American press is at home—an arm of the State—it is abroad. The press, and the forces behind it, have formulated an aggressive program for pushing American commodity news into every corner of the earth. The program is put in the form of a demand for adoption of “freedom of the press as we know it” by all nations. The President, the State Department, the Congress have formally adopted the news industry’s program as a basic unit in American foreign policy.

The first major action of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights was to set up a subcommittee on the “free press,” to consider a resolution along American lines. There was strong pressure to adopt the American view in its entirety. The U.S. has also insisted that many foreign countries accept American correspondents and adopt American news concepts if they want diplomatic recognition.

Speaking for the American newspaper industry, Kent Cooper has further proposed that no country should obtain aid of any kind from the U.S. without acceptance of these views. Official backing of Cooper has gone so far that Congress even delayed a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency appropriation in an attempt to impose a “free press” condition for U.N.R.R.A. aid.

As a matter of fact, the wedding of press and State has carried the “free press” demand far beyond the limits of news policy, no matter how you define the latter. A privileged status is being demanded for the news industry, as witness Cooper’s suggestion that correspondents be given diplomatic immunity! But the matter is far from stopping there.

It is not generally known that the American news industry has now attained virtual domination of the world news market—which means every country except the Soviet Union and its immediate neighbors. The story of the battle for world opinion control will be told in later pages. Here it is enough to point out that official pressure for world news “freedom” has a double purpose. First, it is aimed to break down Soviet resistance, especially in respect to reported plans of Tass, official Soviet news agency, to serve Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary and Rumania. Second, it is designed to further expand and consolidate the powerful world position of the American news monopoly against future challenges by its now feeble rivals.

In such a program, news is a naked arm of Empire. It cannot be separated from the territorial, military-strategic, economic and political aspects of American foreign policy. The increasingly imperialistic tone of that policy, the spread-eagle drive for absolute world power, is more and more reflected in the demands of the news industry. Thus, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the banker-minded New York Times, frankly states the connection between the two. In a speech containing the crude threat of atomic bombs and the flavor of political blackmail, he declared:

I do not believe that free peoples can afford to trust dictatorships. We should not share our military secrets, or make any financial agreements, calculated to build the Soviet Union until we in this country have more knowledge of her and her ways.... I think we should put definite limits upon our cooperation ... until we have the same freedom of access to the news of Russia as they have to the news over here....

Access to the news is, therefore, my condition for full cooperation and I should hold to that position uncompromisingly. The elimination of censorship would be but a small part of compliance with this condition. Access to the news means freedom to travel at will—to talk with whomsoever one wishes—it means finding communications systems available—it means the right of a business man to see how his product is used or whether a market for it exists.... I say this as a newspaper man, it is true, but in this all-important freedom we in the newspaper profession act as your agents.

What Sulzberger and the news industry are demanding, is acceptance by the Soviet Union of the system of special privileges for private enterprise that prevails here. At the very least, they would require the Russians to agree that information is a commodity to be peddled exclusively by morally irresponsible private organizations. If the Soviet Union could be forced to bow to American private enterprise in this instance, a capitalist wedge would have been inserted in the Socialist system.

Lawful Spies

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.”

Cooper’s “crusade” is nothing more than a drive for world news monopoly. Barriers Down is designed to justify American imperialist news domination by coating it with high moral purpose. The London Economist, organ of battered British imperialism, notes in its issue of December 2, 1944:

Mr. Cooper, like most big business executives, experiences a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage. In his ode to Liberty there is no suggestion than when all barriers are down the huge financial resources of the American agencies might enable them to dominate the world. His desire to prevent another Goebbels from poisoning the wells will be universally applauded, but democracy does not necessarily mean making the whole world safe for A.P. In this, as in other post-war issues—such as civil aviation—commercial practices are habitually confused with such big words as “liberty and the Rights of Man.”

Cooper’s book nevertheless lends the strongest authority to what would otherwise be an almost incredible story of news imperialism. We shall lean on it heavily.