Information Strategies at the League of Nations in the 1920s

The next paper in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Arne Gellrich, who focusses on reporting about the League of Nations in the 1920s. The League changed the reporting of international affairs by shifting interest from national politics to international relations, and the role of journalists in this evolution has remained underresearched.

The present project is interested in reconstructing the professional sphere of League journalism as well as the institutional sphere of League diplomacy itself, building on document analysis and biographical materials.

What emerges from this is an archetype of ‘Geneva correspondent’, specialist across all types of international politics and often themselves politically engaged. But many other journalists only came to Geneva once, and were note genuinely committed to the League’s cause themselves.

The Secretariat Information Section for the League is also critical here: operating on languages from French to Japanese, it established an international press centre and perpetuated the ‘Geneva atmosphere’ which was critical to the League’s operation. Some 13% of the members of the Section were women, which is notable for the time.

Through the Section, communication power between the League and the journalists covering it was negotiated. There were widely diverging views about the involvement of the press; some diplomats sought to exclude it altogether, while others felt that news coverage of the League was critical to its activities.

The original model of the institutional and professional spheres describes the intended structure of the League’s information processes, but in practice the roles of actors were much less clearly separated, and some of the diplomats had been journalists while some journalists were also pursuing a political agenda.