Keeping the News British: the BBC, British United Press and Reuters in the 1930s

Abstract

In May 1931 the news agency British United Press (BUP) offered to supply the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) with their overseas news wire services, supplementing the BBC’s existing agreement with a consortium of British news agencies led by Reuters. In so doing, it unleashed an eight-year dispute that came to involve the BBC, all the major British news agencies, leading figures in the British press industry, and even the Foreign Office. The BBC’s eventual decision during 1936/7 to adopt the BUP news service alongside its established news agency services met with outrage from the other British news agencies, an outrage manifested in a campaign orchestrated by Sir Roderick Jones, chairman and principal shareholder of Reuters, to discredit the BUP in the eyes of the BBC, the government and Parliament. The aspect of the dispute most regularly highlighted was whether a news agency that, despite having “British” in its name, was registered in Canada, and that was widely believed to be a front organization for the United Press of America (UPA), was an appropriate source of news for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Would, in fact, taking the BUP news wires fatally compromise the integrity of British news-broadcasting? This dispute also brought to the surface longstanding rivalries between the British and American international news agencies, and highly vocal concerns about “American” versus “British” news values in the 1930s. Thus it encapsulates a range of tensions in Anglo-American media relations in the mid-twentieth century: as a commercial dispute centering on “news” as a commodity; as a cultural dispute about the “national character” of news; and as a wider international dispute about global American media influence in a time of British imperial decline.1KeywordsNews AgencyTelephone ConversationBroadcast NewsNewspaper SocietyBritish Broadcasting CorporationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.