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4 - The “Rationalist Illusion,” the Post Office, and the Press, 1868–1913

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2014

Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

The American state regulated news associations through competition policy to protect newspaper plurality. In Britain, the state also sought to protect plurality but it did so through telecommunications policy. By nationalizing telegraphy, Parliament sought to create and maintain a level playing field for competition among provincial publishers while subsidizing their newsgathering collectively. These policies, the intellectual origins of which may be traced to the Enlightenment, continued until World War I.

Government control of telegraphy delayed vertical and horizontal integration and encouraged the perpetuation of several specialized newsgathering organizations which were loosely combined through various agreements. In this way, the structure of the newsgathering market in Britain was similar to that of British manufacturing. If America was the land of the trust, then Britain was the land of the gentlemen’s agreement; but whereas the attempts of small firms to limit competition in large markets through agreement during the nineteenth century were often ineffective, the influence of government policy ensured that those among news organizations worked.

Type
Chapter
Information
The International Distribution of News
The Associated Press, Press Association, and Reuters, 1848–1947
 , pp. 88 - 124
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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