International news, empire, and anti-colonialism in the twentieth century

During the nineteenth century, international news agencies initially followed the cable but later followed the flag. Transoceanic cables had provided the technology through which agencies such as Reuters could provide a global rapid-time news service, but sharpening imperial rivalries for territory towards the end of the century led agencies to become more imperial-minded. By 1900, the ‘Ring Combination’ of Reuters, Havas, and Wolff had partitioned global news along imperial lines, most plainly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the provision of international news mapped neatly to the continent's recent partition into British, French, and German colonies. News-agency reporting in these colonies took two major forms – financial reporting of trade and prices, and politico-diplomatic reporting of events. Particularly on imperial peripheries, the reporting of political news required ‘complex narratives, even in the most perfunctory of dispatches. It involved delicate questions of censorship and diplomacy, which required talent and training for correspondents and editors.’Footnote ¹⁴ The end product of this latter reporting often resembled the values and priorities of the Foreign and Colonial Offices in London.Footnote ¹⁵ Over the twentieth century, a new political map provided global news agencies with new opportunities but also challenges to the extent and form of their global news business, particularly from the perspective of formerly ‘peripheral’ spaces, such as India or Africa.

Alongside these ‘imperial’ news agencies emerged networks of writers who formed a sort of shadow communication world born of anti-colonial activism, most sharply after the First World War.Footnote ¹⁶ In India, this took the form of a competition between the Indian National Congress and its propaganda surrogates on the one hand, and the British Raj and its various information department activities on the other, to control the reportage and imagery of nationalist events as they appeared in newspapers and wire services.Footnote ¹⁷ Looming large in this competition was the role of Reuters, which had been uniquely profitable in British India, owing to its control of the supply of domestic news.Footnote ¹⁸ During India's nationalist decades of the 1920s and 1930s, Reuters’ interest in India had decreased and drifted towards a more independent approach. The Raj feared that Reuters’ reportage had fallen into nationalists’ hands, while nationalists viewed Reuters as ‘virtually a department of the Government’.Footnote ¹⁹ The combination of Reuters and ‘British pipes’ (that is, British-owned telegraph services) had been assumed sufficient to provide imperial information control over British India, at least until the outbreak of Gandhian nationalism around 1919. News service impartiality seemed ‘synonymous with [British] interests’.Footnote ²⁰ Yet Reuters and its internal wing in India, the Associated Press of India (API), endured the growing scepticism of the Raj, and more importantly survived the business assault of its sharply nationalist rival, the Free Press of India (FPI; 1924–35), by retaining Indian newspaper subscribers who could use their editorial hand to adjust for perceived Reuters/API bias, but could not abide FPI's irregularity and unreliability.Footnote ²¹

More durable competition for Reuters in India came first from without, in the form of US news services, the Associated Press and United Press, which together finally broke Reuters’ monopoly in the mid 1930s; and finally from within, in the form of Reuters’ surrender of API to the India government shortly before independence. The Press Trust of India (PTI) marked the institutional fruit of the Indian National Congress's victory of independence. PTI took over API, renegotiated a contract with Reuters in 1948 while being invited to become a company shareholder (only to let the contract expire in 1952), and created what would be a typical ex-colonial ‘national’ news service that served as a gatekeeper between international news agencies and dependent internal newspapers.Footnote ²² Reuters quickly adapted by negotiating directly with the newly extant realities of nationally sovereign entities such as PTI. However, this experience in India of being dislodged by a ‘native’ news agency influenced Reuters’ attitude towards decolonization processes in Africa. Offering assistance to create new national news agencies would become the company's strategic starting point in its attempt to uphold its influence on global news in decolonized spaces.

Colonial Africa experienced a similar dialectic of imperial news control and ‘independent’ media responses. Reuters had enjoyed significant, if never complete, control over international news in East Africa during the colonial decades.Footnote ²³ Its two principal customers were Smith MacKenzie and Company, a general merchant that handled financial news, and the East African Standard Ltd, which owned each ‘newspaper of record’ for Kenya (East African Standard), Uganda (Uganda Argus), and Tanganyika (Tanganyika Standard). The majority of the news carried by these newspapers concerned not East Africa but India, Europe, and North America. But overreliance bred contempt, particularly among the newspapers, and frustration with Reuters’ effective monopoly was regularly evident: the Indian-owned Tanganyika Opinion, for example, accused Reuters of blacking out news about Gandhi after he departed from London in late 1931.Footnote ²⁴ Yet this newspaper became outspokenly loyal during the Second World War, carrying little local news or opinions, and serving instead as a vessel for officially approved wire service reportage. Indeed, until the end of the Second World War, Reuters in Africa served as a pro-British mouthpiece.

For its part, Reuters emerged from the Second World War as it had entered it – as a limited liability company owned by the British press, but now with additional minority stakes held by Australian, New Zealand, and (briefly) Indian press associations. Anxious to distance itself from being sullied as a British propaganda instrument, the company went on record in 1948 before the British Royal Commission on the Press to announce its complete opposition to any form of government assistance, in the form of direct subsidies or favourable transmission rates.Footnote ²⁵ Company management in London realized that they faced new competition inside British imperial domains, most strikingly from well-capitalized American rivals led by the AP, but also by the French state-backed successor to Havas, AFP, and a host of Eastern bloc news services led by the Soviet Union's TASS, which had been established in 1925 and had previously worked with American agencies to break the cartel's grip.Footnote ²⁶ After the war, TASS entered new news markets in former African colonial states by offering equipment, technical assistance, and cheap or often free news subscriptions, not only to propagandize but to supplement its ambitious material development projects.Footnote ²⁷ By the 1960s, TASS understood that speed was as important as content in appearing to be a competitive international news service – its director, Gennadiy Shishkin, revamped the editorial process around an open newsroom after a visit to Reuters’ London office.Footnote ²⁸

The stakes for supplying international news thus became as much about geopolitics as they were about market shares. Among state actors, the provisioning of global news was seen as the backbone of informational influence in the post-war world. The Second World War had created a global media environment dominated by overtly propagandistic news, in which basic facts about events were routinely contested. Shortwave radio became the era's favoured medium, and its loudest voice was Nazi Germany, whose external broadcasting service at Zeesen offered news reporting that was ‘a mixture of fact, drama, and psychological manipulation’.Footnote ²⁹ While wartime Germany offered an extreme model, a host of other state broadcasting approaches vied for radio news supremacy during the post-war decades. British colonial Africa became a testing ground for these differing approaches, pitting emotive anti-colonial vernacular broadcasts from Egypt in particular – but later also from the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and China – against the more neutral and ‘objective’ radio news of the BBC and colonial government services.Footnote ³⁰ For British policy-makers, the BBC and Reuters provided the twin foundations for maintaining influence over the supply of international news in a rivalrous and often anarchic post-war media environment. Though Reuters and the BBC long had an uneasy relationship – initially over the latter's freedom to contract news from competitors; later over subscription costs that the BBC, as Reuters’ single largest customer, would pay – the British government ensured that the two institutions collectively retained a prominent position in the world by using covert subsidies to help both to compete against their overtly subsidized rivals.Footnote ³¹

Inside post-war Africa, the challenges for British news organizations remained as much political as they were commercial. Reuters’ Africa South and Central African services served newspapers from Freetown to Nairobi. But this service was also dominated – financially and editorially – by the South African Press Association (SAPA), based in Johannesburg. In the post-war years, SAPA increasingly operated as a censor rather than as an equal partner in its relationship with Reuters. SAPA representatives stationed within Reuters ‘assist[ed] in the selection of news sent’ to southern Africa, while Reuters reporters and stringers, rather than SAPA, gathered the bulk of African news sent back to London.Footnote ³² As South Africa enacted apartheid and became a pariah state among Africa nationalist figures over the 1950s, Reuters developed a new strategy that would repackage the form and content of its international news service to both meet and shape the expectations of African leaders who were gradually coming to power over the decade.

In East Africa, a white settler-owned newspaper firm, the Nairobi-based East African Standard Ltd, remained Reuters’ principal partner, and served a similar role as that of SAPA in South Africa, only on a smaller and regional scale. East African Standard provided round-ups of regional news to Reuters in exchange for a reduced subscription. Reuters had secured a lucrative contract with the East African Standard Group during the Second World War and successfully renewed it into the late 1950s, giving the latter exclusive distribution rights of Reuters’ material in East Africa. In turn, Standard Group correspondents could only syndicate their stories to Reuters, and not to rivals UP, AFP, or UPI.Footnote ³³ Good relations with Standard Group had an important defensive element: contractual inclusion within the circle of established local reporters ensured that Reuters would rarely be ‘scooped’ by rival agencies.Footnote ³⁴ But Standard Group newspapers were plainly sympathetic to the colonial governments, and moreover tightly identified with the strident politics of white settlers.

Thus SAPA and Standard Group, previously Reuter's institutional bulwarks in the region, became political liabilities. Commenting on this, Patrick Crosse (see below) acknowledged in 1962 that the SAPA-based Reuters feed that the Standard Group received ‘is unsuitable for Africans in an area as fiercely nationalistic as East Africa, and we shall inevitably have to produce a black man's report to replace the South African service’.Footnote ³⁵ The uncertainty of this future moved Reuters to look for different political and economic partners both to ensure sales of its international news service and to retain access to important news within decolonizing countries.

Securing news hegemony in post-colonial East Africa: Reuters in Kenya and Tanzania

In the 1960s and 1970s, four news agencies – Reuters, AFP, AP, and UPI – dominated the collection and distribution of international news, providing over 90% of what was printed or broadcast around the world.Footnote ³⁶ The core product of each agency was ‘spot news’, the speedy reporting of immediate news, supplemented by lengthier feature reporting. The international operations of all four news agencies were conducted, to varying degrees, on a commercial basis, though, as the historian Jonathan Fenby noted in 1986, ‘they frequently operate in ways not calculated to maximize profits’.Footnote ³⁷ Local clients had their own leverage against the international news agencies – they either shared news or provided tip-offs that agencies relied upon to maintain their international reputations – that militated against profit-maximizing relationships. In general, the agencies’ prime concerns were the lucrative markets of North America, western Europe, and Japan, while the ‘third world’ remained at the periphery of their global news business scheme, because there they made less from news distribution. The value of the final news product, however, relied on comprehensive world news coverage. Thus, integrating the ‘third world’ news organizations such as newspapers, radio stations, and (particularly) government news agencies into each international news agency's larger network enhanced its overall value and prestige.

International news agencies’ business engagement in these ‘less remunerative regions’ was characterized by long periods of collusion, punctuated by short bursts of wasteful competition. In the 1950s, Reuters had found itself slipping behind its better-funded American rivals, and so resorted to a policy of new investment to retain its leading presence in Anglophone Africa, as well as aggressive expansion into Francophone Africa, to sustain its reputation as the leading authority over the continent. By 1972, Africa constituted 7% of Reuters’ total revenue – a small proportion but far larger than that of any of the other three agencies.Footnote ³⁸ Finally, in the post-war world, global news remained technologically path-dependent, with ‘instant’ news flowing cheapest along long-standing telegraph lines to and from hubs in London, Paris, and New York rather than, for instance, across African or Middle Eastern borders. The old empire cable rate of a penny a word ‘still makes it cheaper to send news from former British colonies directly to London … Little news in Africa moves laterally by merely crossing the nearest border.’Footnote ³⁹ Reuters’ headquarters in London regularly chastised bureau reporters in these ‘peripheral’ regions only loosely connected to the old imperial network for exceeding monthly cable budgets, urging shorter items of posted letter for second-order news.Footnote ⁴⁰

New sovereign nation-states thus had to negotiate complex global news arrangements while simultaneously seeking recognition and legitimacy from them. Struggles over news in East Africa ran parallel to decolonization processes in the 1960s. Owing to its high visibility in the print and radio media of late-colonial British Africa, Reuters enjoyed a prestige in Anglophone Africa that well-financed newcomers from the United States and Eastern bloc could not duplicate. The Reuters name was attached to international news reporting not only in the upmarket newspapers of the regional press but also in the region's radio broadcasting. Paul Sozigwa, who served as the Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere's press secretary, as well as Director of Radio Tanzania in the 1960s, valued Reuters for its high reliability. Reuters was ‘the first place’; Tanzanian news agents ‘trusted Reuters’ (in contrast to Tanzanian politicians) to a degree that they thought that ‘whatever came from Reuters, it must be true [laughter] … you add all the colour, or whatever, or if it is about Tanzania you phone up the minister responsible and ask him … But Reuters, you trust it, I don't think there is a network so correct.’Footnote ⁴¹ Although this attitude was not universally shared, in the 1960s there was a wide sense among East African politicians and their press directors that Reuters provided something essential that other services did not. To maintain this reputation and perception of indispensability, Reuters competed vigorously at local and international levels, transforming its colonial service into a plausible ‘African’ service that few independent countries in Africa felt comfortable doing without. This marked a further step in the company's post-war regionalization of its editorial policy, in which sub-editors on regional desks ‘concentrated on selection and treatment, giving Africa a predominantly African news file’.Footnote ⁴² But this ‘African’ news file was also being shaped and redefined by the newly acquired powers of African nationalist politicians to negotiate contracts.

The declared goal of independent African states such as Kenya and Tanzania was to facilitate political, economic, and social development. For most governments, this meant the redeployment of late-colonial bureaucratic structures and appropriation of largely bilateral aid and loans to facilitate agricultural production, marketing, small-scale industrialization, and infrastructural improvements. In addition to these material development goals, leaders viewed news as a critical component of development and nation-building, and understood the creation of national news agencies as the most effective method to gather, distribute, and control news. Kenya and Tanzania, for instance, independent since 1961 and 1963 respectively, both subscribed to the informational developmentalist priorities famously theorized by Daniel Lerner and Wilbur Schramm. These two American media theorists argued that mass media ‘should be harnessed to the engine of social and economic development … media becomes a tool for exhorting positive social change by encouraging and promoting development initiatives’. State media was to be development cheerleader rather than political watchdog.Footnote ⁴³ Consequently, national news agencies were ‘typically set up in capital cities to distribute news from the international wire services to the various media which might use them’. Their purpose was ‘to cut costs, and sometimes to cut stories deemed inappropriate for the national interest’, including slanting the tone and even content of international wire service materials.Footnote ⁴⁴

In this context of state-led information provisioning, Reuters wagered that negotiating first with new African leaders to obtain government contracts, rather than with independent media inside newly independent territories, would best secure their position in post-colonial Africa. The mistake of India, where Reuters had stood aloof from nationalist leaders for too long, was not to be repeated. The company's strategic premise was that ‘in order to finance the creation of a special regional service for the countries of Eastern Africa, we had to sell the service to Governments rather than to local newspapers and Radio stations’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Their successful campaign to secure contracts with newly independent African states ranks among the most impressive sales triumphs conducted during Africa's decolonization. The two key figures in this campaign were Patrick Crosse, a British former war correspondent and widely admired manager, and Shahe ‘Gubby’ Guebenlian, an Armenian Cypriot of titanic energy who had joined Reuters as a reporter during the Cyprus emergency, and quickly ascended the managerial ranks to become head of the company's Middle East and Africa section in 1968.Footnote ⁴⁶ Both aspired to climb to the top of the corporate ladder, though both were to be disappointed – Crosse was passed over for managing director in 1963 and soon after left the company; Guebenlian rose no further than head of the Middle East and Africa region, where he remained in the 1970s as the company decisively shifted away from general news to financial news services.

Part of the initial impetus for this scramble to distribute news in Africa, however, came not from Reuters’ Fleet Street headquarters in London but from nearby Whitehall, the heart of the British government. Since the First World War, when the Foreign Office played a key role in restructuring Reuters’ ownership to include a powerful government vote, the company had had to balance the security and revenues of state support with the need to be seen as an independent and objective news agency. In 1959, Crosse responded to a new call from the Foreign Office, which stated ‘We want more news – more Reuter news – into Africa’. Reuters replied to this government request by securing ‘a large increase in British Government and Central Office of Information subscriptions for delivery of news services to their African outlets’, which provided an indirect rather than direct government subsidy.Footnote ⁴⁷ So anxious were British and American information officers to ensure that Reuters won out against communist competition that the Foreign Office had to remind its information officers ‘of the need to be extremely discreet in the way that you help Reuters, particularly so that their reputation for independence is in no way compromised’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This episode brings to light how strongly Reuters was still invested as an imperial news company, on the one hand, and how effectively it managed to conceal this fact from African statesmen, on the other. In 1960, Crosse conducted a survey across sub-Saharan Africa which concluded that

Over five years (1960–65), Crosse and Guebenlian secured contracts with thirty-five African states, failing only to do so with Rwanda, Burundi, and Gambia among the newly independent states. Reuters policy was to work solely with governments ‘as the only sure points; and to assist the desire of most African states to establish their own national news agencies’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Western news salesmen, as with other forms of expertise and capital concentrated in wealthy metropoles, had to be sensitive to the sovereign sensibilities of the new nationalist gatekeepers. According to Crosse, it was ‘mortifying for Africans that news of other African countries must reach them via white intermediaries’. Possessing an astute awareness for these local political sensitivities, however, he used them to Reuters’ advantage. He recognized that ‘the very political inspiration behind the new agency [i.e. Reuters’ new African service] may be its strength, producing a service different in spirit from the others, but one which the others will wish to buy’.Footnote ⁵¹According to Guebenlian, Crosse had done the ‘original shopping around and concluded that African statesmen wanted a tailored service to Africa, 28,000–30,000 words a day, but with their own priorities’.Footnote ⁵²

For Reuters, supporting the development visions and political vanities of state leaders while appealing to the cultural integrity of African nations proved the surest path to securing post-colonial business. Crosse and Guebenlian were quicker than their American and French rivals to repackage news to meet African leaders’ expectations and self-conceptions. Guebenlian eagerly traded on his own Armenian identity. Vividly, he recalls an interaction with Kenya's interior minister Oginga Odinga thanking him ‘for telling [him] [he was] not English’. In the sequence of events, ‘Oginga then turned to his wife and said “look, our time has come”’. Reuters’ managers also strictly kowtowed to rules of African diplomacy in order to sell their news. Guebenlian stressed in his personal recollections of the time that African ministers did not answer letters or telegrams – ‘you had to show up face to face’. In his meeting with Hastings Banda, President of Malawi, Guebenlian further emphasized the importance of integrating Reuters’ international news service to meet nationalist aims when he appealed to his sovereign sensibilities:

Providing direct feeds to State House became a standard part of Reuters’ contracts with African governments. This special service satisfied leaders’ curiosity and sense of importance on the world stage – heads of state were regularly provided with personal teletypes to receive Reuter's unfiltered news service direct – while securing Reuters’ reputation as an indispensable world news source with the most important decision-makers. The service also facilitated mutual recognition among sovereign African leaders. A company report explained that ‘It is through the REUTER report that African countries have news of one another’, stressing that leading Africans understood that the news they received ‘is substantially the same as that available, also from REUTERS, to the leaders of every country in Africa’. Yet this network effect of interconnected recognition was also fragile – ‘were we forced to withdraw from even a small number of countries’, the report warned, ‘our whole structure in Africa would be gravely threatened’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Another anchor point in Reuters’ business strategy was to integrate newly formed African national news agencies, which gathered and edited news within a given country, into Reuters’ international service. Crosse and Guebenlian made clear that they had no interest in serving as a domestic news agency, which neatly matched the desire for due recognition among the new generation of African rulers. Reuters produced six regional African services, and ensured that at least 50% of all material distributed to each service was either from the continent or directly concerned it.Footnote ⁵⁵ These regional African packages were more economical in scale. By the 1970s, Reuters services to Africa by radio ran between 25,000 and 30,000 words a day, or roughly one-third of the size of subscriptions to developed countries.Footnote ⁵⁶ But Reuters’ domination of international wires expressly did not mean editorial control. The journalist and historian Jonathan Fenby observed in 1980 that

Most international news agencies engaged African nation-states not merely as customers but as business partners. Reuters secured expensive contracts with poor African governments in part by convincing them that they might recoup most of their subscription costs from the internal sales of their news service. Governments were to act, in effect, as Reuters agents, but agents who carried the risks of high-cost, long-term contracts. In everyday routine, this meant that these governments purchased international news from Reuters by subscription and then distributed news to the newspapers and radio stations within the country. In 1963, Uganda and Tanganyika were the first in East Africa to sign such contracts, both for the large sum of £12,000 per year plus equipment costs, with subscription rates gradually rising over the length of the contract.Footnote ⁵⁸ Reuters’ strength of reputation, tailored African service, and promise of internal subscribers were all required in Tanganyika (which in 1964 became Tanzania following union with Zanzibar) to beat off far cheaper offers from the American UPI (£2,400 p.a.) and the French AFP (£7,000 p.a., including equipment). The American AP made no offer, refusing to enter into government-based subscriptions.Footnote ⁵⁹ Tanganyika's contract was signed based on an optimistic accounting of £9,000 in subscriptions from radio, newspapers, and embassies, the last of which proved unfounded.Footnote ⁶⁰

As it had in other African countries such as Ghana, Reuters hoped to solidify its national subscriptions by helping to design Tanganyika's national news agency, tasked with providing a national news service to local newspapers and radio, which, the company explained, would play ‘prime roles of nation-building and creating the country's image abroad’.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet early plans about a national news agency were frozen by competing agreements: the country's ambitious foreign minister, Oscar Kambona, had signed a separate agreement with the Czechoslovak Četeka service, and the Ministry of Information had signed with Reuters to form what would some fifteen years later become Shihata, or the Tanzanian News Service. Četeka and TASS, both seeking to exert ideological influence in East Africa, followed Reuters’ strategy of dealing directly with governments rather than news organizations, and moreover ‘embellish[ed] [this approach] with ideas of their own as to how foreign news should be doctored before being distributed’.Footnote ⁶² As elsewhere in Africa, TASS secured their position by offering free equipment and subscriptions, and secured a coveted spot for its teleprinter newsfeed in Tanzania's state radio newsroom by late 1964.Footnote ⁶³ The Tanganyika government at last realized a profit as a news agent by accepting free subscriptions of international news from TASS and Četeka and passing them along to the Standard, its major national newspaper, for £1,000 per annum.Footnote ⁶⁴

Finally, Reuter's success in East Africa relied not only on striking lucrative contracts but also on maintaining a global reputation for accuracy through effective local reporting. In doing such effective reporting, the work and routine of agency reporters often resembled that of intelligence agents. Reuters correspondents worked diligently to develop independent networks of informants in addition to close relations with local newspapers. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's capital and largest city, the Reuters reporter Graham Lovell explained that he had ‘managed to establish a fairly effective collection of contacts at such places as the airport, the police departments, embassies and within government. But most of these have to be approached rather than they doing the approaching; and in all cases it is a non-remunerative arrangement because of their positions.’Footnote ⁶⁵ The hidden abode of ‘remunerative arrangements’ was wrapped within payments to stringers, for Reuters reporters could not afford to be seen paying officials cash for information themselves. While many early reporters for TASS and the Chinese news agency Xinhua in East Africa were openly and unapologetically engaged in conventional espionage work, Reuters was keen to be seen to avoid such activities, to protect the agency's reputation for objectivity. Paradoxically, the ‘Africanization’ of Reuters’ full-time reporting staff in the region fell victim to local fears of espionage. Arthur Maimane, a highly skilled South African journalist who had worked on Drum before fleeing the country, lasted only four months as Reuters’ first and only African staff correspondent in Dar es Salaam, which was rapidly becoming a haven for nationalist exiles and liberation movements. He was expelled in August 1963 following ‘a spy scare that now seems to be sweeping the entire country’, on the grounds that African staff correspondents ‘are suspected of knowing too much’. When a Ghanaian replacement was suggested, Tanganyikan officials rejected the suggestion, and instead requested a European staffer be appointed.Footnote ⁶⁶

The trajectory of Kenya's relationship with international news agencies was more sharply influenced by Cold War rivalries. Unlike Tanganyika, Kenya committed early to creating its own national news agency, forming it during the months before independence in December 1963. This work, carried out in secret by the minister of information, Achieng Oneko, a close ally of the leftist politician Oginga Odinga, was premised on accepting assistance from TASS and Četeka, who both delivered free teleprinters to the news agency, along with free subscriptions to their news services. The arrangement was revealed just days before independence to prevent counter-lobbying from BBC and Reuters.Footnote ⁶⁷ The revelation of Communist bloc aid to something as fundamental as news provision set off alarms in Whitehall: ‘To open the door to communist infiltration into the business of disseminating news is a sinister development’, the colonial secretary, Duncan Sandys, observed, for it would be universally interpreted ‘as a reflection on Kenya's political re-orientation’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The manoeuvre had escaped the attention of the (increasingly pro-British) prime minister, Jomo Kenyatta, and moved Britain to call on the United States to work in concert in order to ‘keep in discreet touch with [Kenya] Information Ministry with view to preserving as much Western influence as can be secured in rapidly changing circumstances’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Objections from Cable and Wireless and the East African Posts and Telegraph, who constituted the region's communication providers, against being required to connect Soviet equipment to their networks were met with veiled threats of deportation.Footnote ⁷⁰ Even more jarring was the government's simultaneous decision to cease relaying BBC news bulletins over state radio. Radio news would instead be gathered through the multi-sourced and ‘non-aligned’ Kenya News Agency (KNA).Footnote ⁷¹

The hazards of Reuters’ government-first sales policy had become plain, but there was no going back. Suddenly inserted between Reuters and the deeply distrusted East African Standard, the KNA declared itself the only official distributor of Reuters and any other news service.Footnote ⁷² It was a bold assertion of gatekeeper authority, designed to strengthen state control over global news at the expense of ‘imperial legacy’ organizations. Reuters’ strategy of contracting its news service directly through governments gave rise to charges from reporters in both East Africa and Britain that the company had supported state press censorship. Expatriate journalists such as the Standard reporter Eric Marsden felt that they ‘had been sold down the river by Reuters’.Footnote ⁷³ Struggling to acquire reliable international news, the Standard pleaded for a return to the direct feed of Reuters’ South African (SAPA) service that it had enjoyed before independence. Reuters refused, explaining that to ‘feed this copy into a newspaper office in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, when African sub-editors are now beginning to be trained, would of course have led to very serious trouble’ – that is, any accusations of importing South African editorial control over Kenyan news.Footnote ⁷⁴

The root of the news struggle in Kenya, however, was not primarily between white and black but rather between rival political factions within the Kenyan government playing out along the East–West frontline of the Cold War. From independence in late 1963 until the leftist Oginga Odinga's formal break with the more conservative President Kenyatta in 1966, Kenya's Ministry of Information was dominated by Odinga's ally Achieng Oneko, who, unlike Kenyatta, warmly welcomed Soviet and Chinese support.Footnote ⁷⁵ The East African Standard was distraught to find that the KNA's new international news service supplied half the wordage of its Reuters predecessor, and much of it was filler on the comings and goings of African ministers. To ‘balance’ its news, KNA accepted a free subscription from TASS and distributed a daily service comprised of 50% Reuters and 50% TASS material.Footnote ⁷⁶ KNA stood as a sort of ‘black box’ to repackage wire service copy around state ideological priorities, which in practice usually meant adding or changing descriptors of regional political figures, such as inserting ‘arch-traitor’ before the Congolese secessionist Moise Tshombe and ‘racist’ before the Rhodesian leader, Ian Smith. By removing all reference to Reuters in their reports, KNA circumvented the legal breeching of a clause that was specially added to all East African government contracts that prohibited government services from materially altering Reuter reports that went out under the Reuter name.Footnote ⁷⁷

Larger continental patterns of international news-agency consumption and politicization prevailed in Kenya. In early 1964, TASS occupied between 15% and 30% of the KNA product, while the remainder was overwhelmingly Reuters, often deliberately anonymized, and the rest some local KNA items.Footnote ⁷⁸ Reuters was content to have locked in a typically lucrative subscription service – £13,000 per year from 1964, rising £500 p.a. over five years – and looked on as the percentage of TASS items gradually declined over the following years, falling nearly to zero by mid 1966.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Ministry of Information's permanent secretary, J. N. Oluoch, complained that he was being pressured to insert more Četeka service in the KNA, but he was mainly interested in the free equipment that the Russians had sent before independence to build up the agency's provincial reporting network.Footnote ⁸⁰ His political rivals within the ministry who were hostile to Reuters’ effective dominance decried the fact that ‘Some of our staff have been nursed so well by the imperialists that it is not possible for them to see all the changes.’Footnote ⁸¹ Oluoch's successor, the staunch Kenyatta ally P. J. Gachathi, welcomed Reuters and more broadly challenged the ‘non-aligned’ political arrangement of the KNA from the inside, arguing that ‘there has been no clear directive as to what should be the function of Government-controlled Information media in Kenya’. This led staffers to either excessive caution or risky guessing in reporting the controversial statements made by government officials.Footnote ⁸² Factional competition over news did not last long. Kenyatta eventually wrestled control over the ministry back from Oneko by appointing a committee to investigate the Ministry of Information in 1965 that led to Oneko's resignation; the latter soon joined Odinga's opposition party, and later followed him to jail for political activities.Footnote ⁸³

The Cold War often made itself felt across post-colonial Africa more through the news it generated than the news it controlled. African news sensitivities were sharpest around the principal crisis of Africa's decolonization, the collapse of the government in Congo, and the subsequent Cold War-fuelled civil wars, from 1960 to 1966. Reuters touched off a continent-wide controversy by describing Tshombe government's invading forces in the formerly colonial Belgian Stanleyville in 1964 in Eurocentric rhetoric as ‘rebels’ rather than ‘nationalists’ or freedom fighters. The KNA withheld all Reuters dispatches following the events in Stanleyville on the grounds that such reporting would damage the delicate diplomacy of President Kenyatta's attempted mediations in Congo.Footnote ⁸⁴ Guebenlian investigated the matter and found that the choice of ‘rebel’ was used by local British expatriate editors who politically viewed the ‘rebels’ as working for the communist world.Footnote ⁸⁵ The KNA purposely withheld all Reuters reporting on the subject, effectively ending the East African Standard's coverage, while its chief rival, the Nation, had fortunately retained a direct AP subscription that enabled it to be the only Kenya newspaper to publish on the story.

Within such a fraught climate, international news-agency copy was easily politicized. Reuters and other Western agencies were loudly and repeatedly upbraided for referring to armies that opposed Tshombe's government as ‘rebels’, reflecting the deep antipathy of previous Western support for Tshombe's efforts to detach Katanga from Congo, and their generally violent interventions in that country's tragic decolonization. Indeed, it became formal policy for Kenyan state media to describe the rebels challenging Tshombe's government ‘as ‘Nationalist forces’ in English news bulletins, and as ‘Wajeshi ya Wananchi’ (‘Army of the People’) in Swahili.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet TASS reporters proved to be similarly clumsy political operators: when a TASS item claimed that a leading Kenyan politician, Njoroge Mungai, stated his regret at having received his medical education in the United States, Mungai and other government officials furiously contested the account and denounced the distortion as ‘an affront to the African personality’, forcing an apology from the Soviet ambassador.Footnote ⁸⁷ Such political alienation from dependence on news copy that seemed plainly ‘imperialist’ grew in tandem with frustration at slow economic growth and increasing technological dependence on institutions of the industrialized North, inspiring African countries to seek alternative informational arrangements from Reuters and TASS to gather and distribute international news.

Hegemony challenged: East Africa, NANAP, and NWICO in the 1970s

Reuters could accurately boast of its dominance over East Africa's print and radio media by the mid 1960s. Its Tanzania staffer reported: ‘I estimate that up to 80 percent of the Nationalist and the Standard is Reuter’, and estimated that Radio Tanzania ran seventeen Reuters items per day, compared to three from AFP.Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet such dependence on news from an ex-imperial source bred resentment. The Tanzanian Nationalist attacked Western news agencies for their subtle spread of ‘pernicious propaganda’ in order to make Africans ‘the intellectual slaves of the Capitalist press’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Reuters’ high subscription costs – widely known to be over twice the rate of any competitor – sharply irked African editors who wanted greater budgetary discretion. Radio relied even more heavily on the agency. By the 1970s, Radio Tanzania's external services were, according to the head of Reuters’ Dar es Salaam bureau, ‘almost exclusively Reuter, frequently the story read out as written by London headquarters, although credits only slightly less rare – a “told reuter” within the text of a story is likely to be left in, but otherwise all is anonymous’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Usage of AFP or AP material had grown negligible – indeed, this Reuters’ employee recommended slipping in more ‘told reuter’ phrases within stories to take credit for radio broadcast stories, as this ‘seems to get past the eagle eye of the man whose job it is to strike Reuters name off the stories’.Footnote ⁹¹ Such anonymizing and editorializing of Reuters copy had become second nature, confirmed by Radio Tanzania's reluctance to accept Reuters’ audio service, which as an un-malleable product would be resistant to ‘the need for angling stories to make their views clear’.Footnote ⁹²

The confluence of developing nations’ anxieties surrounding Western economic and cultural domination moved a critical mass of non-aligned state actors to develop schemes to ‘rebalance’ the content and flow of international news.Footnote ⁹³ The mechanisms of this global North–South informational imbalance had been popularized in the 1960s by analysts such as Wilbur Schramm, who optimistically stressed the high positive correlation between levels of mass media communication and levels of economic development: expand mass media in less developed countries, Schramm suggested, and economic development would follow.Footnote ⁹⁴ But UNESCO's founding principles concerning the free flow of information, analogous to the trading conceits of Bretton Woods, were now actively challenged in the post-Bretton Woods era by a new majority of ‘Global South’ members within UNESCO. This group also championed a New International Economic Order (NIEO) through UNCTAD that challenged the hegemonic role played by Western economic and financial institutions by using UN forums to wield state-based economic rights.Footnote ⁹⁵ Most worrying for these ‘third world’ actors was the recent emergence of satellite communications technology and the gloomy prospect of greater Western monopolistic control.Footnote ⁹⁶

At the root of this new international communications vision was an assertion of informational sovereignty – that nations had a right to speak directly to other nations rather than be mediated through global news agencies based in the West, and, by extension, the right to determine what was said about them, and the responsibility for internal news-gathering, raising Western objections about government censorship.Footnote ⁹⁷ Western news agencies in particular were seen by critics as gatekeepers and agenda-setters rather than objective news organizations.Footnote ⁹⁸ This harmonized well with the then-ascendant dependency theory, which located the roots of ‘third world’ poverty within long-standing international inequities in terms of trade and divisions of labour. Through a host of declarations at UNESCO and numerous international conferences, Non-Aligned Movement states announced their intent to create a ‘New International Information Order’, later rephrased as the ‘New World Information and Communication Order’ (NWICO). Led by UNESCO's polarizing secretary-general, Amadou Mahtar M'Bow (1974–86), supporters of NWICO sought to correct the Western-dominated ‘one-way flow’ of news with a ‘two-way flow of news through cooperative measures, and in particular by protecting regional news agencies’, and used the machinery and funds of UNESCO to begin enactment of these principles.Footnote ⁹⁹

The most ambitious project in this vein was the launch of the Non-Aligned Press Agencies Pool (NANAP; 1975–95), which was the culmination of several international conference discussions during the 1960s and early 1970s to provided news to non-aligned member states free of ‘imperialist’ content. NANAP, a news exchange rather than a news service, was effectively operated from Belgrade by the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug. Beginning with only twelve members, it had expanded to eighty-three by 1981.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In Africa, this same critique helped to launch the UNESCO-subsidized Pan-African News Agency (PANA) at an meeting of the Organization of African Unity in 1979. PANA only became operational in 1983, and remains today a reliable if modest agency for African news.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But pooling enormous amounts of national agency reports raised pressing questions of editorial choice that no figures at NANAP or PANA felt confident to confront, fearing possible dissatisfaction from contributing countries’ leaders. Each member agency was left to produce its own national report. Fenby notes that ‘State sovereignty reigned supreme, reducing news exchange to a mechanistic, one-way process without much regard for the recipients.’Footnote ¹⁰² NANAP, in particular, could hardly be viewed as anything other than a mouthpiece presenting official government views on a given story, removing journalistic credibility as an approach for debate over international news.

Such criticisms annoyed the big four Western news agencies, who themselves felt financially fragile and did ‘not feel like monopolists’; they ‘neither maximize[d] profits nor manipulate[d] markets, and [were] powerless to prevent subscribers from signing up with competitors’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Furthermore, neither of the two American-based agencies, AP and UPI, had made much of an impact in Africa, owing to their lack of sales knowledge and overly ‘American’ style and content, which served American audiences well but was poorly suited to African needs. Both beat a partial retreat from the continent over the 1970s and 1980s, upon concluding that operation costs would always outpace customer revenues.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Within Reuters, NWICO generally and NANAP in particular were viewed with some concern. Yet Guebenlian, by this time the head of Reuters’ Middle East and Africa desk, confidently allayed company fears that increasingly vocal non-aligned conferences might replace the current international news system with a genuinely NWICO one. In July 1976, following a major NWICO conference in New Delhi, Guebenlian offered his view of the motivations and limits of African actors: PANA, first mooted in 1963, was ‘the Africans’ principal desire’ – much more so than NANAP. Howeer, PANA had yet to exist beyond a series of resolutions, bedevilled by divisions between ‘black’ sub-Saharan African countries and those of North Africa, selection of a primary language, weak inter-African communications, editorial selection of news, and general lack of funds. Reuters should not be complacent and should listen to these complaints of ‘one-way flow’, he counselled, but he also highlighted the core strengths on which Reuters could still rely to secure future contracts. In African countries where state news agencies ‘processed’ raw copy from Reuters and other agencies, newspapers still sought and obtained direct feeds; heads of state and ministers were ‘even more anxious to have access to the full story’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The failure of these new independent institutions to be trusted to deliver the ‘full story’ not only underlines the advantages of capital and expertise that Western news agencies wielded but also echoes the paradox of sovereignty itself: that its main significance lie in its recognition by former colonial powers. The ‘full story’, it seemed, would only come with recognition from Western reporters and editors of a given event's objective truth.

It was the rapid and regular provision of this ‘full story’, to presidents, newspapers, and radio stations on a capitalist basis, that secured Reuters’ place across East Africa as it entered the even more troubled 1980s. Such success demonstrates the greater disconnect between how UNESCO, now dominated by ‘Global South’ members, understood communications networks as fundamentally political, and news agencies’ more capitalist approach to information. Guebenlian explained that ‘Our philosophy in the past has been to counter public attacks on the role of the international agencies with quiet diplomacy and cultivation of the people who rant in public but in private cease politicking and accept realities.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Reuters continued to busy itself providing free development assistance ‘to as many as thirty-four agencies on a bilateral, confidential basis’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The international news business remained primarily a capitalist enterprise sustained through diplomacy.

Debates over NWICO proved paradoxically distant from the new direction that Reuters itself had come to embrace by the 1970s. Frustrated at the poor prospects to enlarge a barely profitable world news service, the managing director, Gerald Long (1963–81), opted to reorient Reuters towards computerized financial information. He struck it rich with Reuter Monitor, an instant currency-price service that seized advantage of rising demand for foreign exchange news following abandonment of Bretton Woods in 1971.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Success utterly transformed the company: in 1963 Reuters had an annual turnover of £3.1 million and net profits of £26,789; by 1981 its turnover was £138.8 million with profits of £16.3 million, most of it attributable to financial information services.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Both general international news and Africa had come to be seen by management as areas of unpromising growth. African governments struggled to pay subscriptions, while Reuters organized special debt collection campaigns to bring delinquent accounts to order.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In 1981 the company removed its bureau correspondent from Dar es Salaam, as Tanzania was deemed to generate too little international news. Yet both Tanzania and Kenya retained their long-standing subscriptions, increasingly falling behind on payments but unwilling to relinquish access to the pulse of the world's daily occurrences.