This Day in History: 1846-05-22

The Associated Press, the world’s largest wire service,  is formed on this day in 1846,  in New York,  by five newspapers, in order to share the cost of transmitting news about the Mexican war.  The association continued as a way to pool international news from incoming ships.  It became a  monopoly in the 1860s, along with theWestern Union telegraph, but finally faced competition from the United Press and International Press wire services established in the early 1900s.  In 1906, Mark Twain said of the AP: “There are only two forces that can carry light to all corners of the globe—the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here. I may seem to be flattering the sun, but I do not mean to do so.”  Resistance to the AP monopoly was spelled out less humorously in 1911, when Will Irwin  surveyed the news business for Collier’s Magazine.  “Until something happens to break the … AP monopoly, the way to journalism will be barred … for the young man of brains, enterprise and purpose,” Irwin said.  In 1945, the US Supreme Court ruled that AP’s barriers to entry were a violation of the anti-trust law.