Person:

Tworek, Heidi

A Nazi news editor declared in 1934 that there were indefinable "magic connections" between news and politics. This dissertation demystifies those links between communications and society. An untold story of news networks lies behind the media sources that we mine constantly as historians. In particular, news agencies, the essential bottleneck of news supply, remain obscured behind the newspapers printing their reports. This study explores why news agencies became the intuitive modern form of news collection and dissemination and how they functioned as a central locus for tussles over the creation of news from events, the limits of government or business control over news, and the role of technology in revising communications infrastructures. 1905 to 1945 represented the zenith of German faith in news agencies’ ability to overturn the existing world order. Along with industrialists and academics, politicians and bureaucrats thought that news agencies could change not only Germany’s role in global communications, but politics, economics, and society too. Coupled with technical advances in wireless telegraphy, news agencies seemed the best means to improve Germany’s international reputation, boost foreign trade, and create societal cohesion at home. News agencies seemed the key to controlling public opinion as well as to creating global news networks conducive to Germany. This news agency consensus united German elites of all political stripes in the belief that news agencies provided an ideal outlet to solve political, social, and economic problems. While such schemes did not always succeed, German news agencies often altered the modern infrastructure of global communications. They briefly achieved media dominance on the oceans, challenged Reuters’ and Agence Havas’ control of European news, and became a leading supplier of news to South America and East Asia in the Nazi period. This work illustrates the interdependence of communications and history by integrating approaches from business history, communications studies, sociology, book history, and the history of technology. It shows the spread and success of German news at a moment when news agencies played a central and underappreciated role in the negotiation of a new relationship between politics, economics, and society in first half of the twentieth century.

This article examines the early years of Transocean, a news agency owned and run by the German government, and its use of wireless telegraphy from 1914 to 1922. This investigation of the infancy of wireless technology demonstrates that technology plays a constitutive role in defining news. The German government used the new possibilities innate in the medium of wireless to carve out their own sphere of operation in the seas and on continents where German telegraph news had never played a major role, in particular East Asia. Wireless telegraphy enabled the German government to circumvent the British communications blockade in World War I. Afterwards, Transocean's wireless transmissions to East Asia and ships en route caused an uproar in Britain disproportionate to its circulation. It was the Germans' innovative use of wireless telegraphy that other nations, particularly the British, found most disturbing, rather than the content of the reports themselves.

The League of Nations Assembly passed a resolution in September 1931 to consult the press about the “spread of alse information which may threaten to disturb the peace or the good understanding between nations.” By September 1932, 16 nations and two international associations of journalists had replied with suggestions for the Third Conference of Press Experts in Madrid in 1933. This article uses these proposals from journalists as a springboard to discuss how we can use comparative and transnational history to understand the press’s role during the interwar period. After analyzing the current methodological debates on comparative and transnational history, I address the use of both for histories of the press. How can comparative or transnational history help us to investigate the press? How can scholars think about journalists’ associations and conceptualize their role within the interwar diplomatic framework? More specifically, how did the press fit into the League of Nations’ efforts towards disarmament? Ultimately, an investigation of the two methodologies shows that we cannot class the press neatly into national boxes, but rather have to recognize the messy networks that overlapped, crisscrossed, and intersected to create those apparently national press systems.

This article compares two media multinationals that supplied different genres of news, political and economic. Most media companies provided both genres, and these categories often overlapped. Still, investigating two firms founded in twentieth-century Germany shows how product differentiation affects the organization, geographical orientation, and business models of multinationals. While political news had the greatest impact when it was free and ubiquitous, economic news was most effective when it was expensive and exclusive.