International News Agencies by Michael B. Palmer

Author:Michael B. Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030311780
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Agence France-Presse, 1944–57; AP and Reuters Post-World War II

First called Agence Française de Presse, the agency set up in the heady atmosphere of liberated France was quickly called Agence France-Presse. Initially dependent on state funds, this “provisional” period, lasted until 1957. Partisan politics in a regime—the fourth republic—of many short-lived governments and unstable parliamentary majorities, did not favour the emergence of a visibly independent French international agency: AFP had seven director-generals in 13 years, most of whom were political appointments.32

Three options emerged: a state-controlled and funded agency; an agency on the lines of a newspaper cooperative, for which the French press argued, pressing for good coverage of French rather than international news; AFP journalists and other employees wanted a truly world agency, capable of holding its own against the US and British agencies. The last solution was not impossible: in the 1944–57 period, the number of foreign correspondents increased worldwide—not just in Europe and the French empire, but also in the British empire (even if both empires were disintegrating).

By the end of World War II, the US agencies were truly present worldwide, Moscow included—AP’s E. Gilmore covered the Russian side of World War II from there33—but not throughout what became known as “the Soviet bloc”. In France, AFP noted how, by early 1945, AP and UP had many staffers in Paris and newspaper clients across France. Reuters and AFP’s top men—C. Chancellor and C. Martial-Bourgeon—talked in 1947 about possible collaboration, but nothing came of it. Reuters noted the success of AP reporting styles “brights”, and so on.

Major international stories saw the US agencies in pole position—AP’s Max Desfor was the first civilian photographer to cover the return of the bomber “Enola Gay”, at the US base, Tinian, returning from Hiroshima after dropping the first atom bomb at 8:15 (local time), on 6 August 1945. UP’s “Pat” Conger had a scoop on the suicide of the Nazi leader, Herman Goering, the night before he was due to be hanged, 5 October 1946. The list of US agencies’ “firsts” was considerable in the immediate post-World War II years; AP covering the Korean war, for example. And this was the period when AP’s Kent Cooper, who published his Barriers down: the story of the news agency epoch , in 1942 pressed on with the rhetoric of “freedom of information” celebrating the end of cartel arrangements and the freedom of news agencies to act as they wished. An “AP of AP’s” remained his dream. US agencies were then the dominant international agencies. In 1944, UP’s Hugh Baillie also promoted freedom of news dissemination, an open system of news sources and transmission with minimum government regulation. At the Geneva Conference on Freedom of Information in 1948, Russia and France blocked such proposals.

Diplomatic moves of successive US secretaries of state, including J. F. Dulles, championed “free flow of information” in international fora; associations of US media echoed this. In Britain, The Economist noted that Cooper’s arguments just happened to coincide with the interests of US media giants: “democracy does not necessarily mean making the whole world safe for the AP”.

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