Vol. 14 No. 23 · 3 December 1992
pages 24-25 | 3167 words
‘No, no,’ replied the fat man
Michael Davie
- The Power of News: The History of Reuters by Donald Read
Oxford, 330 pp, £20.00, October 1992, ISBN 0 19 821776 5
The first thing that must strike anyone opening this well-produced book – and they may do so with apprehension, since company histories are notoriously bland – is the wonderful harvest of illustrations, ranging from No 1, a photograph of the founder and his son, the strangely whiskered Julius Reuter and Herbert, circa 1870, to No 63, a Reuters news picture of the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. No 17 shows an outpost of the Reuters empire in 1900: Kalgoorlie, Australia, with men in suits and one in a straw hat lounging outside the Miners Institute, which also serves as the office, as a notice says, of the Reuters Telegram Company Limited. No 27 shows the substantial Delhi office circa 1920 (India was a prime source of Reuters’ profits), with a camel and driver passing by. Thus the imperial nature of Reuters is at once established in the mind of the reader.
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 15 No. 1 · 7 January 1993
From Gerald Long
Michael Davie’s implied commiseration (‘the unfortunate Gerald Long’) over my absence from the Reuters flotation bonanza is kind, but undeserved (LRB, 3 December 1992). I had no part in the operation, which was undertaken after I left Reuters, and so obviously had no shares. It seems odd to describe me as ‘the loser’ because I did not gain what I had never sought. Mr Davie loftily judges that I might well have felt unease about some aspects of Reuters finances in the earlier part of my 18 years as chief executive. No doubt he has never had any occasion to feel unease about the financing of the newspapers for which he has worked, in which case he is fortunate. It was my first duty to keep Reuters free from outside influence of any sort on its reporting, and then to ensure the company’s survival, which was not at that time a certainty, a fact that Reuters’s present position tends to obscure. The state in which I left Reuters shows, I think, that I did something to remove the source of any unease. I would not have described my successor as shadowy, but Mr Davie found him so in the book, which is no doubt why he could not get his name right.
Gerald Long
Paris
Vol. 15 No. 3 · 11 February 1993
From Gerald Long
Michael Davie’s implied commiseration (‘the unfortunate Gerald Long’) over my absence from the Reuters flotation bonanza is kind, but undeserved (LRB, 3 December 1992). I had no part in the operation, which was undertaken after I left Reuters, and so obviously had no shares. It seems odd to describe me as ‘the loser’ because I did not gain what I had never sought. Mr Davie loftily judges that I might well have felt unease about some aspects of Reuters finances in the earlier part of my 18 years as chief executive. No doubt he has never had any occasion to feel unease about the financing of the newspapers for which he has worked, in which case Mr Davie is fortunate. It was my first duty to keep Reuters free from outside influence of any sort on its reporting, and then to ensure the company’s survival, which was not at that time a certainty, a fact that Reuters’s present position tends to obscure. The state in which I left Reuters shows, I think, that I did something to remove the source of any unease. I would not have described my successor as shadowy, but Mr Davie found him so in the book, which is no doubt why he could not get his name right.
Gerald Long
Paris
