Setting the record straight on Hearst

COLIN MCCONNELL/TORONTO STAR
Kenneth Whyte's book on William Randolph Hearst's early years redeems the publishing magnate's reputation.


You might call Kenneth Whyte's book chronicling the early years of media tycoon William Randolph Hearst a sort of "Kane" mutiny.

Whyte, publisher and editor-in-chief of Maclean's magazine, chose as the subject of his first book the titanic clash between the young upstart Hearst and venerable newspaper giant Joseph Pulitzer during a golden age of newspapers in the late 19th century in New York City.

Over the course of three years – from 1895 to 1898 – the West Coast playboy poured millions into the underdog Journal, poached much of Pulitzer's top talent and eclipsed his rival's World in the process.

But what The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst also does – even to Whyte's surprise – is partly redeem Hearst's reputation as a gifted newspaperman and a genuine champion of the public good, a view that runs counter to his biographers and late actor/director Orson Welles's negative portrayal of the barely disguised Hearst in his film classic Citizen Kane.

Biographies of Hearst and Pulitzer glance over that crucial period: an aging, petulant Pulitzer in declining health and a tireless Hearst on the cusp of creating a 20th-century media empire, Whyte said.

"I wanted to read a lot more about what happened back then when Hearst comes into New York virtually unknown and takes on Pulitzer, who's as big as any publisher's ever been in any city. And within three years, Hearst has supplanted him as the leading force in the New York newspaper world. I wanted to know how he did it. That's what got me started," Whyte said.

"(The book) was going to be about the conflict, but the more I looked into it, the more Hearst began to emerge as the central character, mostly because he just wasn't anything like what I'd been led to expect in reading other biographies and journalism histories, and watching films like Citizen Kane and all of the other cultural baggage around (Hearst)," Whyte said.

Part of the problem was that Hearst himself, the only child of a wealthy California senator and a socially ambitious wife, remained enigmatic throughout his long life.

"There's no autobiography, there's very few interviews that he did during his life and he rarely answered his critics," Whyte said.

But Hearst left behind a trove of personal letters, particularly to his mother, Phoebe, who tightly controlled the purse strings after his father's death.

Whyte also managed with difficulty to read every copy of Hearst's Journal, as well as his competitors and the various trade journals, which tracked the struggle between the two titans.

The term "yellow journalism" was first coined at the time and applied in equal measure to both Hearst and Pulitzer, criticizing their coverage of crime as unseemly and immoral and their willingness to bend the truth to beat the competition.

Whyte quotes (and debunks) the most famous allegation against Hearst – levelled by one of his own reporters, James Creelman – who cites a telegram in which Hearst allegedly tells illustrator Frederick Remington to stay put in Cuba: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

In fact, Hearst's Journal was instrumental in persuading a reluctant U.S. administration to declare war on Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, to rescue Cuba where ordinary people were dying by the tens of thousands in "reconcentration camps."

"It was a heroic fight that Hearst led ... and should be looked at as one of the great moments in journalism history rather than dismissed as this horrible episode in which Hearst mindlessly led a country to war. That just bears no relation to the facts," Whyte said.

Whyte, founding editor-in-chief of the National Post when it launched in 1998, shows no hesitation in commenting on parallels between Hearst and other 20th-century media moguls, such as former boss Conrad Black, currently serving time in a U.S. prison for fraud.

"They both (Hearst and Black) loved the business and they both had a strong sense of personal destiny and saw themselves as great men," Whyte said.

And while Hearst was somewhat reclusive, "Conrad has a much larger and more pugnacious personal profile," Whyte said.

"Conrad liked journalism a lot and was good at it and knew good from bad, but he was, I think, a businessman first," Whyte observed.

"Hearst, no matter how bad things got, never let his newspapers go. Even in the worst times, no matter how bad his balance sheet was, how bad the economy was, he held on to his newspapers. They were his first love and nothing came between them."

[quote="Tony"]Setting the record straight on Hearst


Whyte quotes (and debunks) the most famous allegation against Hearst – levelled by one of his own reporters, James Creelman – who cites a telegram in which Hearst allegedly tells illustrator Frederick Remington to stay put in Cuba: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

In fact, Hearst's Journal was instrumental in persuading a reluctant U.S. administration to declare war on Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, to rescue Cuba where ordinary people were dying by the tens of thousands in "reconcentration camps."

"It was a heroic fight that Hearst led ... and should be looked at as one of the great moments in journalism history rather than dismissed as this horrible episode in which Hearst mindlessly led a country to war. That just bears no relation to the facts," Whyte said.

Whyte, founding editor-in-chief of the National Post when it launched in 1998, shows no hesitation in commenting on parallels between Hearst and other 20th-century media moguls, such as former boss Conrad Black, currently serving time in a U.S. prison for fraud.

"They both (Hearst and Black) loved the business and they both had a strong sense of personal destiny and saw themselves as great men," Whyte said./quote]

This sounds like many of these revisionist works that have appeared in the last two decades like David Irving's "historical" studies of the Holocaust, Ann Coulter's defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and a recent biography defending the right-wing tendencies of John Wayne. I also see parallels between the "weapons of mass destruction" ploy and Hearst's own version of a pre-emptive strike,

Perhaps this author will soon work on a positive biography of George W. Bush, facilitated by Oliver Stone's weak, politically vacuous bio-pic? I'm sure if he works on late Hearst we will see the resurrection of the "crazy Welles" discourse.

Tonyw:

Is it possible that this guy has done a lot of research and is pretty objective? It seems that he was surprised by the facts he discovered which debunked many of the stories around Hearst; how much original research have you done so that you can hold such an unbending attitude toward Hearst?

Is it possible that he may be correct?