Reuters

Type	Division
Industry	News agency
Founded	October 1851
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Owner(s)	Thomson Reuters
Website	www.reuters.com

Reuters (pronounced /ˈrɔɪtərz/) is an international news agency headquartered in London, United Kingdom and a division of Thomson Reuters. Until 2008, the Reuters news agency formed part of an independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data. Since the acquisition of Reuters Group by The Thomson Corporation in 2008, the Reuters news agency has been a part of Thomson Reuters, forming part of its Financial and Risk Division. It transmits news in French, English, Arabic, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese.

History [edit]

The Reuter agency was established in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter in Britain at the London Royal Exchange. Paul Reuter worked at a book-publishing firm in Berlin and was involved in distributing radical pamphlets at the beginning of the Revolutions in 1848. These publications brought much attention to Reuter. He later developed a prototype news service in 1849 in which he used electric telegraphy and carrier pigeons. The Reuter’s Telegram Company was later launched. The company initially covered commercial news, serving banks, brokerage houses and business firms.^[1]

The first newspaper client to subscribe was the London Morning Advertiser in 1858. Newspaper subscriptions subsequently expanded.

Over the years Reuter's agency has built a reputation in Europe and the rest of the world as the first to report news scoops from abroad. Reuters was the first to report Abraham Lincoln’s assassination among other major stories. Almost every major news outlet in the world currently subscribes to Reuters. Reuters operates in more than 200 cities in 94 countries in about 20 languages.

The last surviving member of the Reuters family founders, Marguerite, Baroness de Reuter, died at age 96 on 25 January 2009, after having suffered a series of strokes.^[2]

Journalists [edit]

Reuters employs several thousand journalists, sometimes at the cost of their lives. In May 2000, Kurt Schork, an American reporter, was killed in an ambush while on assignment in Sierra Leone. In April and August 2003, news cameramen Taras Protsyuk and Mazen Dana were killed in separate incidents by US troops in Iraq. In July 2007, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed when they were fired upon by a US military Apache helicopter in Baghdad^[3] after having been mistakenly identified as carrying weapons.^[4] During 2004, cameramen Adlan Khasanov in Chechnya and Dhia Najim in Iraq were also killed. In April 2008, cameraman Fadel Shana was killed in the Gaza Strip after being hit by an Israeli tank using flechettes.^[5] The first Reuters journalist to be taken hostage in action was Anthony Grey. Detained while covering China's Cultural Revolution in Peking in the late 1960s, it was said to be in response to the jailing of several Chinese journalists by the colonial British government of Hong Kong.^[6] He was considered to be the first political hostage of the modern age and was released after almost 2 years of solitary confinement. Awarded an OBE by the British Government in recognition of this, he went on to become a best selling author.

Fatalities [edit]

Criticism and controversy [edit]

Policy of objective language [edit]

Reuters building entrance in NYC

Reuters has a strict policy towards upholding journalistic objectivity^{[citation needed]}. This policy has caused comment on the possible insensitivity of its non-use of the word terrorist in reports, including the 11 September attacks. Reuters has been careful to only use the word terrorist in quotes, whether quotations or scare quotes. Reuters global news editor Stephen Jukes wrote, "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist." The Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz responded, "After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and again after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Reuters allowed the events to be described as acts of terror. But as of last week, even that terminology is banned." Reuters later apologised for this characterisation of their policy,^[8] although they maintained the policy itself.

The 20 September 2004 edition of The New York Times reported that the Reuters Global Managing Editor, David A. Schlesinger, objected to Canadian newspapers' editing of Reuters articles by inserting the word terrorist, stating that "my goal is to protect our reporters and protect our editorial integrity".^[9]

However, when reporting the 7 July 2005 London bombings, the service reported, "Police said they suspected terrorists were behind the bombings." This line appeared to break with their previous policy and was also criticised.^[10] Reuters later clarified by pointing out they include the word "when we are quoting someone directly or in indirect speech," and the headline was an example of the latter.^[11] The news organisation has subsequently used "terrorist" without quotations when the article clarifies that it is someone else's words.

In 2011, the Journal of Applied Business Research published research by Henry I. Silverman, of Roosevelt University which concluded that 'Reuters engages in systematically biased storytelling in favor of the Arabs/Palestinians.^[12] Reuters denied the allegations.^[13]

Photograph controversies / Accusations of anti-Israel bias [edit]

Reuters was accused of bias against Israel in its coverage of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, in which the company used two doctored photos by a Lebanese freelance photographer Adnan Hajj.^[14] On 7 August 2006, Reuters announced^[15] it had severed all ties with Hajj and said his photographs would be removed from its database.

In 2010, Reuters was criticised again for 'anti-Israeli' bias when it cropped the edges of photos, removing commando's knives held by activists and a naval commando's blood from photographs taken aboard the Mavi Marmara during the Gaza flotilla raid, a raid which left 9 Turkish Activists dead. It has been alleged that in two separate photographs, knives held by the activists were cropped out of the versions of the pictures published by Reuters.^[16] Reuters said it is standard operating procedure to crop photos at the margins, and replaced the cropped images with the original ones after it was brought to the agency's attention.^[16]

Controversies about crediting other media / Retaliation against smaller media [edit]

In 2012, Reuters' UN bureau chief Louis Charbonneau became involved in a controversy about not providing credit to a smaller media organization's prior exclusive report about US State Department official Jeffrey Feltman become the UN Under Secretary General for Political Affairs. Such credit was given in Foreign Policy's The Cable ^[17], but not, as noted in the World Policy Journal, by the Reuters' piece involving Charbonneau. ^[18]

At the UN in 2012, Reuters' bureau chief Charbonneau complained to the UN Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit about the competiting media involved in the crediting controversy. ^[19]

Later, documents obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act revealed that Reuters supported ^[20] and works to further ^[21] a request to get the accreditation of this competing media "reviewed" with which the New York Civil Liberties Union took issue. ^[22]

This is a wider issue at Reuters: as revealed by Talking Biz Business, Reuters Americas executives in 2010 told their correspondents to increase the number of stories labeled "exclusive," accurately or not, as one of the performance goals on which they would be compensated. ^[23]

See also [edit]

• Agence France-Presse
• Anadolu Agency
• Associated Press
• Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata
• Deutsche Presse-Agentur
• Interbank market
• United Press International
• Caribbean News Agency
• Morley Safer - briefly employed in London

Notes [edit]

References [edit]

• Read, Donald (1992). The Power of News: The History of Reuters 1849–1989. Oxford, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-821776-5.
• Mooney, Brian; Simspon, Barry (2003). Breaking News: How the wheels came off at Reuters. Capstone. ISBN 1-84112-545-8.
• Fenby, Jonathan (February 12, 1986). The International News Services. Schocken Books. p. 275. ISBN 0805239952, ISBN 0-8052-3995-9. 
• Schwarzlose, Richard (January 1, 1989). Nation's Newsbrokers Volume 1: The Formative Years: From Pretelegraph to 1865. Northwestern University Press. p. 370. ISBN 0810108186, ISBN 0-8101-0818-9. 
• Schwarzlose, Richard (February 1, 1990). Nation's Newsbrokers Volume 2: The Rush to Institution: From 1865 to 1920. Northwestern University Press. p. 366. ISBN 0810108194, ISBN 0-8101-0819-6. 
• Schwarzlose, Richard (June 1979). The American Wire Services. Ayer Co Pub. p. 453. ISBN 0-405-11774-4. 

Further reading [edit]

• Reuters Interactive launches on BTX Enterprise as Reuters Interactive community site
• Editorials on Reuters' use of 'terrorist': The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, Norman Solomon, Institute for Public Accuracy/U.S. columnist
• Criticism of references to the Holocaust
• Reuters photo caption of New York City's World Trade Center site after 11 September causes controversy
• Reuters Investigation Leads To Dismissal Of Editor

External links [edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Reuters Group

• Official website
• Times of Crisis—multimedia interactive charting the year of global change
• Bearing Witness award-winning multimedia reflecting on war in Iraq
• Reuters – The State of the World—News imagery of the 21st century
• Thomson Reuters Foundation—philanthropic foundation
•  "Reuter Agency". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920. 

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