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William Randolph Hearst was one of the most powerful news tycoons the world has ever seen. The circumstances surrounding his rise to greatness were such that we are unlikely to see such a phenomenon again any time soon.
His father was George Hearst, a miner who accumulated millions of dollars in the California Gold Rush in the mid-1840s. During his career, George Hearst acquired a newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner (reports of how exactly he acquired it vary, but I like to think the story about him winning it in a poker game is true), which he later passed on to his son in 1887.
William Randolph Hearst became a newspaperman aged 23. But while it was the wealth of his family that resulted in his ownership of a paper, he could not have taken his news empire to such heights if it weren’t for the time in which he lived.
In addition to the Gold Rush, W.R Hearst’s rise came in the centre of a period of mass emigration to America. The prevention of revolution in Ireland, and the destruction of the nation’s economy, saw floods of Irish people heading to America, along with many Europeans seeking a new life. New York was the gateway to the New World and so became a centre for multiculturalism. Hearst purchased a newspaper in NYC and capitalised on the melting pot in a manner which did much to shape the tabloids we know today. When Hearst decided to conquer Pulitzer’s empire, he created a paper called the Sun. The range of languages spoken along with poor literacy levels meant that in order to sell papers, the language in them was simplified as much as possible and many large pictures were used, and the paper championed the working class. Comic strips also proved popular, and Hearst purchased ‘The Yellow Kid’ from his rival, Joseph Pulitzer, and placed it among ten pages of ‘the funnies’. The presence of this cartoon in a paper of this type gave birth to the term “Yellow Press”. These changes saw a massive upsurge in circulation.
It must be remembered that newspapers were the only source of news at this time, and so they didn’t have to share their audiences with other media like they do today. Rapid news of any kind was a new thing; the railway boom and the introduction of the telegraph meant that news began to travel fast, information no longer took a week to cross America and people loved it. In addition to this, the victory of the Union in the American Civil War meant that the state was now run on liberal ideas, and so the press could speak more freely.
The booming cities of the North continued to flourish, buying cheap products from the South. NYC was the centre of the world, both culturally and economically. The cheap labour from the poor but free people, the liberal constitution and the high polulation density all worked in favour of the city. The newspapers here were owned by Pulitzer, the main paper being the New York Daily World. Pulitzer was a ‘muckraker’, and investigative journalist specialising in digging up dirt on oil and railway companies. He was a populist and a isolationist.
Hearst took Pulitzer’s method and added to it: Paranoia, competitions, pictures and cartoons. A news agenda of fear and greed. Hearst disagreed with Pulitzer’s isolationist ideas and said America should have more power. He encouraged war with Spain, and successfully triggered it when the US battleship Maine was destroyed in a Cuban harbour by an unexplained explosion. The cause of the explosion remains a mystery to this day, but Hearst wasted no time in reporting that the Spanish were the culprits. He sent reporters to Cuba to cover the war, but an named Remington artist sent a telegraph to Hearst stating: “There is no war. Request to be recalled.”
Hearst’s famous response: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”
Constant fabricated reports of deplorable Spanish behaviour soon saw the American public demanding war with Spain, and within weeks Hearst had the “splendid little war” he wanted. The W.R Hearst Method is now the common method of tabloid journalists. First think of the story, then gain enough evidence to make it true. The British Sun exemplified this by thinking of the story, “Gun Found In Prison”, then throwing a gun over a prison wall and into the grounds.
See also: The Spanish-American War
