Mystery Man: Wm. Randolph Hearst
Horrors! Batboy’s been pitched onto tabloid history’s scrap heap! We billion bored shoppers, standing in a million supermarket check-outs, stare blankly at our eggs and our lettuce. Why? Because our wacky beloved Weekly World News (“The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper”), and with it Batboy, Ed Anger and Hillary’s Alien Offspring—have vanished from our supermarket news racks.
Elsewhere, Rupert Murdoch, the grand poobah of agenda news, gobbles down the Wall Street Journal, sending investors, who require objective, truthful financial reports, into mass hysteria.
But that’s not all.
Deregulation sweeps locally owned radio and television stations into vacuuming maws of rapacious media conglomerates. News agencies, like UPI, vanish. Newspapers, magazines, film studios and publishing houses are subsumed into honeycombed bowels of multi-national corporations. They’re then downsized, or liquidated. The sticky tentacles of media consolidation reach deep into virtually every American media resource.
All this seems to run contrary to an American democracy conceived, created, nurtured and taught to speak its many minds freely, via an vast array of media outlets. Suddenly our proud and fiercely independent national media sounds like the monotone dirge of the authoritarian propagandist.
Yet long before Rupert Murdoch’s quest for media hegemony reached Fox; long before some fantasy rag called the Weekly World News was birthed from old National Enquirer presses, and yes, even long before the words media and consolidation were first paired as one—our nation marveled at a vast media empire built by San Francisco’s own prodigal son, William Randolph Hearst.
I know it’s a terrible cliche, but history does occasionally repeat. William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow press” publications made zany claims and invented bizarre stories, ala the Weekly World News. His drive to acquire still more media outlets, like media conglomerate Clear Channel has following media deregulation, was only halted with financial collapse forced upon Hearst by the Great Depression. And as for pre-dating Rupert Murdoch, well, as Hearst’s youthful populist/progressive sentiments faded, he turned ever more reactionary. Ultimately, Hearst espoused national policies akin to fascism.
Hearst entered the media game, gifted with the failing San Francisco Examiner when he was just twenty-fours years old. At his pinnacle Hearst owned 28 newspapers in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. He published scads of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazaar. Hearst owned a Hollywood film company, two news services and the King Features Syndicate. These media sources provided him a platform with which to launch his own political career, and to promote his many other ambitions.
Let’s face it—unimaginable wealth fascinates us. With wealth comes power, and the ability to mold one’s life into legend, whether it be true or not. William Randolph Hearst was one such wealthy man of distorted legend. Hearst’s legend stands largely at odds with who he really was and what he set out to accomplish.
William Randolph Hearst inherited vast tracks of land not only in the United States, but in Mexico and Central and South America as well. While his quarter million-acre San Simeon property remains impressive, “the ranch” was dwarfed by Hearst’s seven-plus million acres in Mexico, alone. Add to this his Central and South American holdings. Then there were the diversified stocks, innumerable gold, silver and other mines, including the Comstock Ophir and Montana’s Anaconda, vast stretches of timber, oil, and uncounted properties in major U.S. metropolitan areas from San Francisco to Manhattan.
While William Randolph Hearst never realized his dream to make the White House his own, he took credit for his media-muscle creating bogus wars with Spain and in the Philippines. Hearst sent author Stephen Crane and famed illustrator Frederick Remington to Cuba shortly after the U.S. Maine sank in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. When Remington informed Hearst that there was no war to record, Hearst reportedly wired back “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”
“The interests of (Hearst), his mother, and his nation were, in his own mind, identical, and he believed that he knew how to motivate his fellow citizens to realize those ends. His policy of America First… effectively erased distinctions between national defense and offense… he employed a limited palette of proven adjectives and a liberal application of the nouns ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty. A child could understand him; Hearst’s enemies often caricatured the publisher as a spoiled brat,” wrote Gray Brechin, in his recent classic and superlative book, Imperial San Francisco.
A most egregious example of Hearst’s using his press power to promote his own self interest was in urging our nation to mount a second war with Mexico. The first war with Mexico, according to Ulysses S. Grant, was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Hearst’s reprise was meant to be more of the same. It’s particularly instructive considering our country’s ongoing immigration debate.
Hearst once relegated Mexicans to “that mongrel mixture of Aztec, Indian and Spanish buccaneer.” Hearst’s aim was to both protect his own Mexican financial interests, and in doing so to grab the entire nation for “The Greater United States.”
Hearst didn’t stop there. According to him:
“If we have no right in Mexico we have no right in California or in Texas, which we redeemed from Mexico.
“If we have no right in Mexico we have no right anywhere in the U.S., for this whole country from ocean to ocean, has been rescued from savagery and redeemed for civilization….”
If he’d had his way William Randolph Hearst would have been president. He’d have trumped up wars with Mexico, Japan (he hated the Japanese), and who knows who else. He’d have swept up every mass media outlet he could afford in order to shape and frame our shared national perceptions—to suit his own opinions and self interests. Something eerily similar is happening to our media and our country today.
That’s why you, dear reader, might well appreciate that you hold in your hands a precious and vanishing treasure—a truly independent locally owned news source. Would but it flower and seed, from which endless fields of new voices sprout up in the grand tradition of American democracy. And let these voices be heard, a cornucopia of news and opinion playing the exquisite cacophonic symphony that is American democracy.
Filed under: Ambrose Bierce, Bay Time Detective, Jack London, Media, San Francisco, San Francisco Bay Area History, San Francisco Phax & Phikshun, William Randolph Hearst, imperialism, legend, mystery, news, politics, thieves & scoundrels, wealth, yellow press | Leave a Comment
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