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Correspondence
An International Review of Culture and Society 
 
In This Issue
The World Press: U.S. & Britain
The First Global Newspaper3Journalism—Where It All Began4American Press: Facing the Internet6Who Owns the Media?8British Press: A Golden Age9
Report from Britain
The Devolution of the U.K.11
Intellectuals
Cultural Cold War—50 Years Later12Joseph Rovan13Alexandre Kojève: Russian Agent?15Ignazio Silone: Fascist Informant?16
The World Press: France & Italy
French Press—The Quality Remains17The Italian Press18
The World Press: Germany
German Press—Covering the World20Feuilleton & the Theatre of Politics21Marion Dönhoff at Ninety22
Reports from Russia
The Russian Press23New Russian Theatre24Vladimir Putin, Cultural Maestro26
(continued on next page)
The Double Bind of the World Press
I
n 1793, while hiding in a Parisian garret from Robespierre’s police, the emi-nent French mathematician and Enlightenment philosopher the Marquis deCondorcet wrote the remarkable
Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain 
. In that sketch, Condorcet, who had invented a calculus of probabilities that underwrote the principles of insurance, declared that with thediscovery of printing and the diffusion of scientific knowledge, an enlightenedpublic opinion must ultimately win out: “It is enough for there to exist one cor-ner of the free earth from which the press can scatter its leaves.” Condorcet,unable to find asylum, was arrested and imprisoned at Bourg-la-Reine, and founddead in his cell on the following day.A free press is a condition for liberty and the test for every nation that pro-claims itself to be free. In the United States, the foundations go back to the eigh-teenth century. In 1734, still under English colonial rule, a New York editor,Peter Zenger, was arrested for seditious libel for criticizing the provincial gover-nor. He was acquitted on the then-revolutionary ground that truth was no libel.But there was still the threat of government intimidation. In 1798, during theFederalist presidency of John Adams, the Congress passed the Alien and SeditionActs, which made it a misdemeanor to speak or write against the president orthe Congress “with the intent to defame.” Twenty-five persons were arrested,including a member of Congress, and several opposition Republican editors weresilenced by heavy fines or jail sentences. Two state legislatures, in protestsdrafted by Jefferson and Madison, declared the act to be unconstitutional. Theelection of Jefferson in 1800 quashed the act. Consistently, the Supreme Courthas upheld the freedom of the press, most notably in recent years in
Sullivan 
v.
The New York Times 
(1964), which held that criticism of a public official was notin itself libelous.According to the latest annual survey by the New York-based pro-democracyorganization Freedom House, of 186 countries in the world, only 69 have a freepress, and these are principally in North America (the United States and Canada)and Western Europe. More than half the press in the Middle East, Africa, andAsia are not free. Repressive regimes crack down openly. In Serbia, newspapersare shut down, journalists routinely jailed, and media outlets suddenly expro-priated from their legal owners through mysterious court decisions and put intothe hands of others more loyal to the regime. In Iran, where newspapers hadbravely led the reform movement in support of President Khatami, eight news-papers and four weeklies were abruptly shut down by decisions of the judicialcourt and several editors jailed for defamation of Islam.Freedom of the press is a perennial issue in the world, but in the past two tothree years newspapers have faced an extraordinary technological challenge thatis transforming the character of the press itself. This is why in this issue of 
Correspondence 
we print reports on the press in eight major countries—theUnited States, England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, India, and Japan.The challenge is the Internet, one of the most astonishing and unexpectedtechnological developments of the century, which has revolutionized the infor-mation infrastructure of world society. To illustrate: on January 8, 1815, therewas a Battle of New Orleans in which almost all the British troops were massa-
Issue No. 6 Spring/Summer 2000
An International Project of the Committee on Intellectual CorrespondencePublished by the Council on Foreign Relations
 
2
(continued from previous page)
Language
Spanglish—A New Vernacular27A Spanglish Sampler28Fear of Franglais28Parlez-vous Val?29Yinglish30Who Speaks Romanche?30The Internet—One Tongue or Many?31Japonica: How to Read Japanese33The Death of a Language34
World Literature
African Literature: Old Voices & New35
The Middle East
Christian Migration37
The World Press: India
Press in India: Rise of Vernaculars38
Reports from Asia
In Japan Everyone Reads the Press39Foreign Reporting on Japan40Taiwan’s Knowledge Class41
Ghetto 
and the Japanese42Theatre Necessary in a Graveyard?43Soseki Natsume & “Existence”44Eulogy for Seizaburo Sato45
Miscellany
Scandal in the Israeli Press5The German Business Press10Swamped by Metaphor14Sartre Redivivus22
Necrology
In Passing46Noel Annan46Francis Haskell47Louis Castro47João Cabral48Emanuel R. Piore48Edward H. Levi48C. Vann Woodward49Walter Jackson Bate49Benjamin Schwartz50Zvi Grilliches50Raymond Vernon50Myron Weiner51Adam Ulam51
cred by American forces led by Andrew Jackson. Peace between the U.S. andBritain had been signed two weeks earlier on Christmas Eve, but the news hadnot reached the contending armies by that time. In 1846, during the Mexican-American War, for the first time news reached officials immediately, by tele-graph. Today the Internet is available in “real time” every minute.What is more, it is selective, interactive, and immediate. When the plane of John F. Kennedy, Jr., went down off Martha’s Vineyard island, the Web site of the
Boston Globe 
that evening reported one million hits. The
Boston Globe 
itself,the next day, had nothing to add. When the prurient Starr report on the pecca-dillos of President Clinton was released, over six million hits were reported onthe Library of Congress Web site, and in twenty-four hours, the report wasdownloaded 750,000 times, just as the daily press began printing its 445 pages.(For details, see “The Digital Age Takes Off,” in our Issue No. 3).Every major newspaper in the world has its own Web site. Paradoxically, theWeb site becomes competitive with the paper itself. The
New York Times,
for exam-ple, provides a twenty-four-hour continuous news service, including any break-ing news and updating stories first reported in the morning newspaper. More thanthat, one no longer even has to buy the print edition of the
Times 
: an individualin any part of the world can simply “plug into” the Web site and select any storyor column he or she wishes to see and even, odd as it might be, print out the entireedition of the paper. A magazine such as the
Weekly Standard 
advertises that whencrucial political events have taken place after the magazine has gone to press, onecan get an analysis of the results by its editor William Kristol on its Web site.Cross-media alliances are taking place. MSNBC (the cable news network owned jointly by Microsoft and the NBC network, itself owned by General Electric)have created an alliance with the
Washington Post 
and
Newsweek 
magazine(which the
Post 
owns) to share Web content and reporting resources. Throughsuch Internet alliances a new national press is developing.The emergence of new daily online periodicals such as
Slate 
(owned byMicrosoft and edited by the savvy Michael Kinsley) and the jazzy
Salon,
with itscolumns and news reports, in effect creates alternative national newspapers. Theweekly paper edition of 
Slate 
provides a comprehensive set of summaries of themajor magazines of the country, of the international press, movie reviews, conver-sations on books, first-rate political reporting by Jacob Weisberg, and punditrygalore. One might even say that a weekly issue of 
Slate 
with the more comprehen-sive worldwide economic and political coverage of the
Economist 
, also availableonline, may suffice for any educated reader. And if one is an expatriate from, say,New Zealand, one can click onto a Web site which offers weekly coverage and gos-sip of all events back home — if there is any longer such a place as “back home.”
x
—Daniel Bell 
Note: 
For Freedom House’s full, country-by-country Annual Survey of PressFreedom, cited below, see its Web site: www.freedomhouse.org.
The World PressFreedom of Press by Region
RegionFree PressPartly FreeNot FreeNo. of Countries
Africa6173053Asia641424Europe (E&W)2910948Latin America1714233Middle East121114U.S./Canada2002Pacific84012
 
3
The World Press: U.S. and Britain
I
nevitably, with globalization there is a race to create aglobal newspaper. As is now readily apparent, the Internetmakes it possible for any newspaper to be read everywhere.The
New York Times 
or
Le Monde 
can be read in Timbuktoo (if there is a phone modem there) or by the little lady in Dubuque.In speaking of a newspaper, we mean, first the physicalprint paper that one has in one’s hands. To that extent, thefirst global paper has been the
International Herald Tribune 
which prints in twenty different plants and circulates in 187different countries. The
IHT,
based principally in Paris, hasits own staff, but also draws heavily from its co-owners, the
Washington Post 
and the
New York Times 
. (The
Herald Tribune 
, an original sponsor, fell by thewayside many years ago.)The
IHT 
is crisply written and merci-fully short (thirty to forty pages) againstthe elephantine bulk of its parent papers,but it does cover the major political andcultural news, and to a lesser extent thebusiness world. But the readership of the
IHT,
by and large, is primarily amongAmericans living abroad, or some of thebusiness elites in Europe who want aquick reprise of American events, and,in the summertime, American travelerswho want a comfortable reminder of their nationality. The
IHT 
is now tryingto enlarge its scope, and (as we report inour article on the German press), the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 
, Germa-ny’s largest newspaper, now puts out an English-language sec-tion on Germany that is folded into the
IHT.
The
IHT 
has anew editor, David Ignatius, a
Washington Post 
columnist withbroad international experience, especially in the Middle East,but also a novelist and thriller writer, and so may enliven itsfeature reporting.The English
Guardian 
puts out an English-language weeklywith translated pages from
Le Monde 
and the
Washington Post 
,but the pages from
Le Monde 
are few and the pages from the
Washington Post 
mostly its reviews, so the
Guardian Weekly 
remains principally a U.K. paper with international pretensions.But it is the business press that is making the major effortsto become global, largely because business advertising isglobal, and that is where the riches lie. Among the businessweeklies, the strategies differ.
Business Week 
, the most com-prehensive of the business publications, has gone online,allows its readers to download the magazine before the maga-zine comes to the mailbox, is updated every business day, andprovides detailed daily briefings on dozens of different sub- jects (with extensive dossiers the paper edition never fea-tures). It is, if one so wishes, a daily business magazine.The London
Economist 
has a Web edition, free to paid sub-scribers, organized thematically so that readers can quicklyselect which stories interest them most, while providing de-tailed statistical analysis on more than sixty countries for readyreference. Its most ingenious innovation is a “mobile edition,”so that anyone with a handheld device, such as a Palm Pilot,can click into the magazine, wherever they are, and read pagesfrom the magazine. Increasingly, other publications are usingthe same system. One gets free software from a company calledAvantGo, specifies which publication one wants to subscribeto, connects their personal computer to the Web site, and thehandheld device is synchronized with the PC.But the main competition, the global duel, is between thetwo behemoths, the American
Wall Street Journal 
and theEnglish
Financial Times 
. The
WSJ 
has by far the biggest cir-culation in the world, totalling 2,400,000in its regular print editions, as againstthe
FT’s 
440,000. But most of the
WSJ 
circulation is in the United States, whilethe
FT 
is much stronger in Europe, letalone in the United Kingdom, where the
FT 
sells about 190,000 copies daily.The
Wall Street Journal 
has long hadworldwide regional editions, such as the
Asian Wall Street Journal 
, or
Wall Street Journal Europe 
. Its strategy seems to beto expand its
print 
editions, but to tailorthem more to regional considerations. InFebruary, a redesigned
Wall Street Jour- nal Europe 
, on which the company saysit will spend $60 million, appeared onthe newsstands. The old
WSJE 
lookedexactly like the American edition. Thenew one introduces color photographs, and feature storiesspring out boldly across three columns in a more horizontal“European” layout. The
Wall Street Journal 
has special edi-tions where bannered pages from the American edition aretranslated and appear in local languages in twenty-six coun-tries. The
Wall Street Journal Americas 
, a set of special edi-tions, is translated into Spanish and Portuguese.The
Financial Times 
, with its distinctive salmon-coloredpages, seems to have a different strategy. While the
FT 
has anaffiliate in France, has acquired the
Economic Times 
of India,and now puts out a complete
Financial Times Deutschland 
, onsalmon-colored paper (both reported on in this issue), thepaper now, as it states, produces
two versions 
of the
Financial Times 
, one available on paper, one on the Web. With a newtechnology, it has become a full global business portal, and thesite has seven channels covering everything from businessnews to leisure. The
FT 
now claims a roster of two million reg-istered users and more than one million pages delivered daily.What the
Financial Times 
is saying is that it is not a newspa-per with a Web site attached, but a journalistic enterprise “thatoperates freely across media boundaries” and not committedto any one form of publication. Which strategy will win out isone of the fascinating questions in journalism today.
x
—Daniel Bell 
 
The First Global Newspaper—Which?
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