Abstract
In under 40 years, the number of major international news agencies headquartered in the West fell from five to four: Associated Press (AP), Reuters, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and United Press International (UPI). United Press (UP) merged with International News Service (INS) in 1958, thus creating UPI, but this slowly declined. The international agencies of the communist world included both TASS and Xin hua; in a post-colonial, developing world and among non-aligned countries, new international news-sharing agencies emerged (Tanjug, Inter Press Service). Here, AP and its US agency rivals—UP, INS and, once these merged, UPI—are centre stage.
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Notes
- 1.
In 1946, despite habitual Russian secrecy and censorship, Josef Stalin provided Gilmore with a world scoop when he responded to a series of questions posed by letter. AP, Breaking news, op. cit., p. 279.
- 2.
H. Shapiro (UP), E. Gilmore, T. Whitney (AP) and H. Salisbury (New York Times) were the only US journalists in Moscow, 1949–53.
- 3.
Quoted in H. Schiller, “The diplomacy of cultural domination and the free flow of information”, in J. S. Yadava, Politics of news: third world perspective, New Delhi: Concept, 1984.
- 4.
J. Reston, The Artillery of the Press, New York: Harper and Row, 1967, pp. 14–16.
- 5.
A sordid battle between US TV channels for “the seven minutes of celluloid”, an amateur’s film of the shooting, hardly improved US television’s image.
- 6.
Not in Soviet Russia. A Reuters Moscow correspondent, Bob Evans, recalled how TASS and Izvestia gave it a cursory mention and how the printers of Reuters, AFP, AP and UPI went dead during the landing.
- 7.
G. Gordon and R. E. Cohen, Down to the Wire : UPI’s Fight for Survival, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989.
- 8.
AP’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination led to the creation of its books division. The Torch Is Passed recording this, sold over four million copies, and was printed in nine languages. Its book on the Warren report, that examined the evidence about the assassination, over 600,000 copies.
- 9.
On Reuters, Visnews and news-film, see next chapter.
- 10.
The Bettmann Archive, a collection of 19 million photographs and images, dating from the US Civil War, included well-known US historic images and images from Europe and elsewhere.
Otto Bettmann (1903–98), a German, emigrated to the US in 1935, founding his archive in 1936. This contained his personal collection of 15,000 images brought from Nazi Germany. In 1981, Bettmann sold the archive to the Kraus Thomson Organization. Corbis, a digital stock photography company founded by Bill Gates, bought it in 1995. It also acquired the Sygma photo agency archive in 1999. Until 2016, Corbis owned tens of millions of photos. In January 2016, Corbis was bought by the Chinese Visual China Group, which signed a distribution agreement (outside China) with Getty Images.
- 11.
On UPI staffers, cf. Bob Lowry’s, UPI’s ‘Trail of tears’ www.downhold.org/lowry/
- 12.
In April 1961, “JFK” said, as US involvement in Vietnam intensified: “every newspaper now asks itself with respect to every story: ‘is it news?’. All I suggest is that you add the question: ‘is it in the interest of national security?’ ”.
- 13.
Max Hastings, the British journalist and historian, dubs US, often young, journalists in Saigon “B-Team wannabes” (the A-team were in Washington, Paris, Moscow, London). They included: D. Halberstam (New York Times), M. Browne, P. Arnett (AP), F. Sully (Newsweek), N. Sheehan (UPI), Halberstam’s close friend. Vietnam. An epic tragedy 1945–1975, London: William Collins, 2018, p. 133. Dan Hallin, who studied US media, especially TV, coverage of the Vietnam War, noted that of the three main networks varied little. There also seems little variation in that of AP and UPI. D. Hallin, The ‘Uncensored War’. The Media and Vietnam, New York: O.U.P., 1986; We Keep America on Top of the World, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
- 14.
Jean Hatzfeld, the French journalist and author, pays them a moving tribute in l’Air de la guerre, Paris: L’Olivier, 1994.
- 15.
I. Drapalova, Czech translator in AP Prague since 1969, AP world, No. 1, 1979.
- 16.
M. Palmer, Homo informans, op. cit., p. 320.
- 17.
AP Foreign Correspondents in Action, New York: Cambridge U. P, 2016.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 56.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 63.
- 20.
The first AP bureau in Africa opened in 1957 (South Africa). The AP West Africa correspondent arriving in Lagos during a coup d’état in 1966 was responsible for 17 countries. Cf. Dell’Orto, op. cit.
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Palmer, M.B. (2019). The US Agencies 1944–82: Expansionist AP; the Changing Fortunes of UP(I). In: International News Agencies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31178-0_7
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