Mr. Associated Press

Abstract

This book traces the evolution during the first half of the twentieth century of Associated Press (AP), and the international news system in which it played an increasingly powerful role, through the career of its long-serving general manager and executive director, Kent Cooper. From the time he joined AP in 1910 to his retirement in 1951, Cooper shaped virtually all aspects of AP’s operations. These included the nature of its news service, competition with rivals like United Press, technological innovation, and Cooper’s ultimately successful campaign to free AP from territorial restrictions imposed by the Reuters-led international news cartel, setting the stage for it to become one of a few globally dominant news agencies. The story encompasses AP’s expansion into South America near the end of the First World War and into Japan in the 1930s; Cooper’s and AP’s complicated and ultimately compromised relationship with Nazi Germany after 1933; its embrace of celebrity coverage and soft news under Cooper’s leadership; AP’s relationship with successive U.S. presidents; Cooper’s prominence as a proponent of American “free-flow-of-information” doctrines in the 1940s; and his forceful resistance to cooperation with the Voice of America in the early years of the Cold War. Based on extensive archival research in more than a dozen repositories, the book provides a variety of perspectives on Cooper, AP, and the history of the global news system.