Gene Allen. Making National News: A History of Canadian Press.

Abstract

The United States has always cast a long shadow over Canada; indeed, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau famously likened the Canada-U.S. relationship to a mouse lying next to an elephant. Yet, the overwhelming American presence in the Canadian reality has also paradoxically helped to form a distinct Canadian identity. A good example lies in the origins and development of one of modern Canada's nation-building institutions, the news agency Canadian Press (CP). As described by Gene Allen in Making National News: A History of Canadian Press, CP originated as a vehicle to transmit news via the Associated Press (AP) to Canadian newspapers over the telegraph wires in the late nineteenth century. In this detailed, exhaustively researched account, Allen, a professor and former professional journalist, describes how newspaper owners created the news cooperative to reduce the high costs of receiving American telegraphic news transmissions. Allen makes a good case for his argument that the growth and development of CP often mirrored Canada's coming of age as a twentieth-century nation. Canada's internal French-English conflict and the external Great Britain-U.S. dialectic for influence within the English-language population was evident in CP's attempts to accommodate the French-language press and the decades-long rivalry between the British news agency Reuters and AP. Moreover, CP's development was also beset by the overall Canadian issue of regionalism, whereby the Western Canada and Maritimes newspaper publishers were frustrated by the predominance of central Canadian interests.