Possibly less than two-dozen newspapers around the entire world could make a reasonable claim to independence in the gathering of a comprehensive international news file. Most of these are situated in a small handful of countries: e.g. the UK, Japan, West Germany, and France. The others are wholly or at least heavily dependent on the world agencies news reports or both. Even those media, which might seem to have their own sources to survive without the agencies do in fact subscribe to them and at high cost. The more extensive the international news gathering operations of any individual ‘retail’ news medium, in fact, the greater the range of news agency services to which, as a general rule, it subscribes.
The services of the ‘Big Four’ agencies eventually affect, to a g lesser degree, a total world daily newspaper circulation in excess of 450m and a world broadcast audience well in excess of 1.283m persons. The extent of media dependence on the world agencies has been documented in dozens of academic and professional studies over the past quarter century. Dependence takes a variety of forms. The most visible is the quantitative extent to which media around the world depend on the world agencies not only for general world news but also for news of their own geopolitical regions and in the case of the US, France and one or two other countries, for their national news as well.
Western Europe: The US and Western Europe are the world’s most well endowed regions for media facilities. In 1971 they accounted for 62% of the world’s daily newspapers (excluding China). It is their circulation revenue and volume of advertising which helps provide the resources for extensive foreign newsgathering. Yet in the US by far the most important sources of domestic and international news for most dailies are AP and UPI.
Increasingly, US dailies leave even local State House news to agencies. The London Fleet Street press is particularly well endowed-with its own foreign correspondents. Yet all national papers subscribe to Reuters (and either AP or UPI or both) while most provincial dailies rely on an edited service of Reuters and AP news from the UK’s national agency, the Press Association (PA). Though the world agencies may be less visible to the public on the pages of the UK press than in most other countries, their importance as initial spot-news tipsters, providing ‘wholesale’ input for editorial reprocessing is enormous. In most other parts of the world, where individual media rarely have substantial alternative sources of their own and where there is insufficient community wealth to support large, collectively owned world news agencies, the scope for western-based world agency influence is potentially all the greater. Japan is almost the only non-western and noncommunist country, which could claim to be self-sufficient in terms of international newsgathering resources, though its principal national agency, Kyodo, does subscribe to the ‘Big Four’ agencies. Likewise Tass and Xinhua, use ‘Big Four’ agency reports in compiling their international news services for Russia and China respectively.
Economic News: The agencies do not supply newspapers merely with general news, and they do not merely serve newspapers. Each of the western agencies has a specialist economic news service. Most important of these are Reuters Economic Services (RES), and Associated Press-Dow Jones, which is run in conjunction with North America’s leading domestic economic news agency. Both these services are distributed internationally, not only to media clients but also to non-media clients like banks, brokers, and commercial houses. Well over 80% of Reuters’ revenue now comes from such sources. The American agencies, AP and UPI, have news photo services unequalled by the European agencies or any other institution. AP, UPI and Reuters all provide various forms of communication and technical assistance to other media via the sharing of communications networks and consultancy services for smaller news agencies. UPI and Reuters, through their involvement with UPITN and Visnews respectively, are leading providers of international news film for television. And all the major agencies sell to radio and television stations. Increasingly, they sell to data banks.
