THE GLOBALIZATION OF ELECTRONIC NEWS IN THE 19TH-CENTURY

This article contributes to the debate on globalization and the mass m edia. It argues that news agencies played a key role in globalization, using the early submarine cable networks, as early as the latter half of the 19th century; that manipulation of time and space on a global scale was an essential component in the construction of news as a cate gory and in its commodification. The article then goes an to argue tha t this new global news space was not, as some postmodern enthusiasts h ave argued, frontierless but that, on the contrary, thr news agencies, in pursuit of their commercial ends, erected a series of impermeable barriers which they controlled.