Technology and Culture

Heidi Tworek's engaging and timely book News from Germany mines a particularly important terrain in the study of media, information, technology, and society. Tworek examines news agencies as a key node for mapping networks of information that underpinned "the news" in the early twentieth century. By using this history to explore the power of largely invisible institutions that have shaped international information flows, she undermines the abstraction of a free and independent media and the liberal conceit of "objective" journalism in a context of transnational media ownership and the conditions of information gathering and dissemination. Tworek convincingly argues that Germans harnessed technologies of communication in support of their shifting economic, diplomatic, and political goals at home and especially abroad. German elites' belief in the "news agency consensus … the widespread faith that news could change one's perceptions of reality" (p. 14) led them to technological innovations in the area of wireless technology, experiments with public/private partnerships that enabled both overt and covert state supervision of media with mixed results, and wide-ranging efforts to shape "public opinion" about current events from Germany to Latin America and East Asia. Most important, [End Page 416] Tworek challenges oversimplified and idealistic perceptions of the historical purpose, values, and organization of (liberal democratic) media by revealing the complex infrastructure of information gathering and dissemination that has today, distressingly, been reduced to the problem defined as "fake news." (On the liberal narrative in British media history: James Curran, "Media and the Making of British Society, c.1700–2000," 2002.)

Tworek opens the book with a sketch of the geopolitics and information regime of the mid-nineteenth century, when German elites sought to use "news" (information dissemination) to create public opinion in support of their colonial goals. An existing infrastructure of information dissemination by telegraph cable controlled by the British, as well as a cartel of European news agencies (including Reuters and Havas) with a substantial head start in information gathering, constrained their efforts. German elites embarked on a program of developing wireless technology to circumvent foreign control of information and, increasingly, expand Germany's influence from the colonial sphere to the wider globe. German governments invested heavily in existing communications companies such as Telefunken and the news agency Wolff, while founding new agencies, such as Transocean and the Eildienst subscription news service, to build a reliable information network.

Media could support government elites' goals, as exemplified by Wolff's exercise of its "symbolic power" in supporting the fledgling Weimar Republic against the Kapp Putsch of 1920. That incident, however, fractured the desire for a "common wellspring of news," and Alfred Hugenberg's nationalist agency Telegraph Union (TU) stepped in to serve up right-wing antidemocratic, antirepublican news, including unsubstantiated and even manufactured news. Subsidized by Hugenberg's sprawling media empire, TU pushed content out to provincial newspapers quickly and cheaply, flaunting conventions of accuracy and sourcing and challenging German politicians' program of disseminating measured, comprehensive, "neutral news," which they saw primarily as economic information, to stabilize the government and the economy. TU's market position and tactics, including stirring up German nationalist politics in neighboring countries such as Czechoslovakia, led to greater government control over existing infrastructure through the Postal Ministry, the Interior Ministry, and the Foreign Office, which furtively funded foreign correspondents who engaged in both information gathering and "modern opinion management" (p. 127) in areas as far-flung as Turkey and China. This institutional precedent laid the groundwork for German radio, enabling the Nazis to take even greater control after 1933. The Nazis remade the media system, dismantling public and private agencies in pursuit of their political goals of state ownership of vertically integrated media properties and racialized employment practices, while retaining and consolidating their control over the infrastructure of dissemination. They continued to participate in the European news cartel and fulfill international treaties for information exchange, which "gave the Nazis a broad international [End Page...