World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

Freebies were merely a first line of defense—and relatively innocuous compared with Western Union’s other ploys. Its protective shell was the press. More specifically, Western Union formed an impregnable alliance with the Associated Press (AP)—an organization that had achieved an impressive monopoly of its own. The AP supplied American newspapers with an endless stream of copy that helped them to economically fill their pages. Most American newspapers couldn’t afford to send correspondents to Washington or Europe, and the AP’s network of reporters allowed them to fill that gap. More than 80 percent of the copy in western papers, according to one survey, came from the wire service. Newspapers relied on the AP, and the AP exploited that reliance. It insisted that its clients use no other wire service. Even worse, it insisted that its clients never say a bad public word about the organization.