Book Review: Making National News: A History of the Canadian Press, by Gene Allen

Making National News: A History of the Canadian Press. Gene Allen. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2013. 472 pp. $80 hbk. $36.95 pbk. $25.95 ebk.To the north of America lies a country of thirty million whose news history is quite different from its southern neighbor. Canadian Press (CP), the national news agency of Canada, had to cope with problems that the American wire services such as the Associated Press ( AP) and United Press International (UPI) never had to deal with. For much of its history, Canada was an officially bilingual country spread out over vast distances with population centers on its eastern and western coasts but vast empty spaces in between. In the nineteenth century, midwestern cities such as Calgary and Winnipeg did not have the populations of similar cities to the south. Just how Canada managed to develop its own news agency is the topic of this book. The author is a professor at Ryerson University (in Toronto), who noted in his introduction that a thorough history of Canada's wire service had never been written. He needed six research assistants just to go through Canadian Press' archives, so there was no lack of material.Canadians were dependent on New York for their news because a substantial amount of British and European news was telegraphed from ships arriving from overseas in that city. The first trans-Atlantic cable in 1866 helped bring day-old news to Canada, which meant readers no longer had to wait weeks for it. News was transmitted through Canada via the telegraph department of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the only institution that stretched from Newfoundland to British Columbia. The problem was it cost more to transmit news to western Canada, and there were fewer newspapers in the western provinces to share the cost.Unlike Americans, Canadians were much more interested in British news. And the provinces were less unified than the American states-to the point that the owners of the Associated Press had to lecture the Canadians in 1914 about creating a national wire service. Serious talks about such an entity began around 1910. But it was not until September 2, 1917, that Canadian Press Ltd. was created with the help of a yearly government subsidy of $50,000. Why? The Canadian government wanted substantial coverage of the war effort overseas to help recruit soldiers and maintain enthusiasm for the morass that World War I was becoming. It also wanted a news source independent from those in the United States.The subsidy was short-lived. It was withdrawn in 1923 after the wire service covered news considered unfavorable to government interests. The end of the subsidy helped Canadian Press become less partisan, essentially following a trail toward greater objectivity and professionalism. CP depended on the services of Morse telegraphers, which is how news was transmitted at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then in the 1920s, a new printer technology was introduced that allowed newspapers to get telegraphic dispatches sent to their office printers without the intermediary of a Morse operator.Starting in 1933, CP got into radio news. It also expanded into television broadcasting, for no other reason than American-based stations were expanding into Canadian territory. …