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University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2013 455 pp., illus., $36.95 paperback

Thanks to the books of Pierre Berton, the nineteenth-century struggle to build a railway to the Pacific and unite a new nation is well-known. Making National News explores a nation-building exercise that was perhaps even more crucial — the establishment of a wire service to deliver news from coast to coast.

Author Gene Allen, a former journalist and a professor of journalism and communications studies at Ryerson University, has produced the first comprehensive history of Canadian Press from its creation in 1917 to the 1970s. CP has been — and remains — a major source of what Canadians know about the outside world as well as what they know about themselves.

Day in, day out, Allen writes, CP’s editors and reporters have decided “what counted as news and how it should be treated,” giving Canadians from Vancouver to St. John’s “a common base of information.” This steady stream of shared words, he argues, has been more influential than the CBC in forging a distinct Canadian identity and culture.

CP’s founders had less-lofty goals. Publishers of more than one hundred newspapers formed the co-operative during the First World War to share the cost of delivering news via telegraph to far-flung cities and towns. Just as importantly, small-town editors could tap into American and foreign news from New York-based Associated Press.

But there were stirrings of nationalist sentiment from the start, as member papers chafed at the pro-American bias of AP’s reports and sought access to unfiltered foreign news. As one of CP’s founders, M.E. Nichols of the Winnipeg Telegram, noted in 1919, events in Britain and the Empire “should not be presented to the Canadian people through United States spectacles.”

This is an institutional history, and Allen devotes much of the book to internal debates over budgets cuts, union drives, and how to compete with radio and rival news services. This will be tough slogging for readers more interested in how CP covered the news than the challenges the organization faced and how it survived and changed over time.

Some personalities emerge, most notably Ross Munro, who often accompanied Canadian troops into battle during the Second World War and scooped his fellow correspondents with some of his coverage from the front lines. He went ashore during the disastrous Dieppe raid in 1942 and described how “a rain of German machine-gun fire” wounded half the men in his landing craft, and “only a miracle saved us from annihilation.” Despite his gripping reports, Munro would always regret how wartime censorship had prevented him from telling Canadians the true extent of the debacle.

While CP took an objective approach to political stories in the pre-Second World War era of partisan and party-owned newspapers, Allen reveals that it sometimes ruffled feathers in Ottawa. Coverage of Cape Breton’s bitter coal strikes of the 1920s irked Liberal Labour Minister James Murdock, and Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Meighen once chewed out a CP manager for “play[ing] up to the opposition” Liberals.

CP’s failure to please either side of the political spectrum proves it found the middle ground. More importantly, Allen concludes, its coverage fostered a sense of nationhood in its country-wide news audience, “systematically and permanently drawing Canadians more closely together in an increasingly integrated national cultural space.”

And CP helped to shape a Canadian identity on another, more practical level. CP’s style book, the news industry’s bible on word usage for decades, decrees that American terms and spellings must stop at the border. So Murdock was the minister of labour, not labor. And that ribbon of steel that tied our nation together is not an American railroad — it’s an all-Canadian railway.