The control of market power has been and still is a vexing issue faced by modern capitalist economies. One historical variation of this problem was the emergence of cartels and their controls since the late nineteenth century. Existing cartel research has well documented that, starting in the 1920s, European established their cartel legislations around the principle of mandatory publicity. The core tenet here was that the disclosure of internal workings of cartels and their dissemination through the media would prevent abuses of their market power. On the other hand, it is less known that the nexus between cartel practices and media-driven publicity was already emerging before 1914. In the context of rapid cartelization across industries and the rise of daily newspapers as the first mass medium, cartels faced constant scrutiny from the press and adjusted their strategies accordingly.
This paper examines the role of the media as a mechanism of cartel governance. It does so by focusing on the case of the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate, the paradigmatic coal cartel in turn-of-the-century Germany. By building this cartel in 1893, coal producers in the German Ruhr region came to dominate half of the nation’s coal supply at the time. At the same time, due to its enormous influence, the cartel faced vigorous scrutiny from the press throughout from the early 1890s to the onset of World War I. This research argues that the media fulfilled three functions in controlling cartels before 1914. Firstly, it challenged the secrecy of cartel operations. Secondly, it raised the cartel problem as an agenda for economic policymaking through intensive reporting. Thirdly, the media represented and channeled public opinion toward the cartel leadership. By formulating these three modalities of control function—disclosure, agenda setting, and opinion representation—this paper aims to present the media as an indispensable component of cartel and monopoly regulation in the age of big business.