This article contributes to the debate on globalization and the mass media. 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 category and in its commodification. The article then goes on to argue that this new global news space was not, as some postmodern enthusiasts have argued, frontierless but that, on the contrary, the news agencies, in pursuit of their commercial ends, erected a series of impermeable barriers which they controlled.
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