The False Correspondent's Real Scene of Writing: Capturing an Elusive Figure in the History of Nineteenth-Century News Work

The Fraught Business of Foreign News

In one of his most polemical and least-read books, Herr Vogt (1860), Karl Marx devotes a few caustic lines to the description of his contemporary Karl Abel, the then Berlin correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph. Outraged by an item in the Telegraph with the dateline "From an occasional correspondent, Frankfort on the Main, February 2 [1860]," Marx, assuming the author to be Abel, sarcastically lauded him for his astonishing ability to supply his employer with dispatches "simultaneously from everywhere under the sun: from Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt am Main, Stockholm, Petersburg, Hong Kong, etc." Abel's writings constituted "a much greater achievement" than Xavier de Maistre's famous 1794 account of armchair travel, A Journey Around My Room (Marx 247). Yet Marx's attack was aimed not only at Abel, but more generally at the journalistic practice that he supposedly embodied: the production of so-called "unreal" or "false" correspondence (unechte Korrespondenzen), a term used by contemporary journalists to describe articles that bore the key features of original correspondents' reports written in some faraway place, but that in reality had been cobbled together by local editorial staff on the basis of secondhand sources, such as old articles published by rival papers and reports in the international press.¹ To make these products of deskwork look and feel like real correspondents' letters, false correspondents fudged datelines, incorporated fictional "eyewitness" observations, or added "exclusive" insider quotations to their articles, posturing as the possessors of "hot" knowledge that had actually already been printed elsewhere or, in more extreme cases, was simply made up (Marx mentions several of these practices; 248).

This peculiar textual genre and practice of reporting began to thrive in the mid-1850s, when several forces reacted with one another to change foreign news reporting forever. New telegraphic cables—from 4,400 kilometers in the middle of the nineteenth century to 406,000 kilometers by its end (Adelman 193)—dramatically shortened the transmission times of international news. Capitalizing on the possibilities of this new communication technology, news agencies—among the pioneers were Agence Havas (later Agence France Presse) in Paris, Reuter in London, and Wolff's Telegraphisches Bureau in Berlin—sprang up in the world's major cities and turned the production and distribution of foreign news into a large-scale business based on syndication and cartel structures (Tworek 18–23). In Britain, Lord Palmerston's repeal of "Stamp Duty" in 1855—a law passed in the early eighteenth century to constrain the circulation of cheap periodicals—established a free trade in newspapers and enabled the growth of the penny press, thereby fostering "an unprecedented expansion of journalism" (Wiener 454) that also served to stoke international competition. Finally, the Crimean War (1853/54–56) galvanized these major new developments. The first war "fought with little or no censorship" (Adelman 193) and under the eyes of a fiercely competitive press, it entered the homes of readers more directly than any previous war and set new expectations of what compelling foreign news coverage ought to look like. The telegraph cable, including an ambitious 300-mile-long underwater connection that stretched across the Black Sea and successfully linked Varna to Balaclava, provided "modern connectivity to the battlefield" (Peterson 31), and the figure of the war correspondent reporting directly from the front lines, epitomized by William Howard Russell, rose to great prominence.

In this new media landscape, it became an important status symbol for a newspaper to offer its readers an up-to-date foreign news section that exceeded the standard coverage of news agencies and had the unique touch of the paper's "own correspondents" (McGillen, "'I Was There Today'" 6–7). Yet the cost of maintaining a corps of foreign correspondents in addition to the fees paid to news agencies and cable companies could be borne only by the largest newspapers, and even they groaned under the expense. The Times of London, whose reputation was staked on excellence and speed in foreign news coverage, ran up...