The Father of Tabloid Journalism - The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Dec, 2002 by George Evans

The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. David Nasaw. Gibson Square Books. [pounds sterling]20.00. 687 pages. ISBN 1-903933-07-2.

William Randolph Hearst was, as the author of this magisterial study rightly says, a major force in American politics and journalism for half a century. He served two terms in Congress and although he failed to win the Democratic presidential nomination, he continued to influence public and political policy at national and state level throughout his life. Internationally recognised as America's most powerful publisher he was, like Northcliffe, accorded the privileges of a head of state on his travels, readily given private audiences with national leaders wherever he was. Foreign statesmen such as Aristide Briand, the French foreign minister, sought him out. What did Hearst stand for? He was in all things, as David Nasaw writes, defined by contradiction. He condemned racism and anti-Semitism without reservation but refused to demonise Hitler or Germany despite the Nazi persecution of the Jews in the late 1930s. He was against political and military intervention in Europe but not in Cuba or Mexico. He made enem ies in high places more easily than friends. President Theodore Roosevelt, who in a fit of pique coined the term 'muckraking', called him a potent influence for evil.

Hearst began his career in journalism after he dropped out of Harvard and at the age of twenty-four took over the San Francisco Examiner which had been owned by his father, who made a fortune in the Californian mining boom. At the height of his power he owned twenty-six newspapers in eighteen cities across America, including New York and Chicago as well as leading magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan, radio stations, film studios and an international news agency. A master hand at creating news from nothing, he could be said with some justification to have invented popular journalism for the masses, the tabloid culture as we know it today so to speak. His most successful newspapers, locked in battle with equally determined rivals such as Joseph Pulitzer in New York and Colonel McCormick in Chicago, were sensational and brash with four-inch headlines, big pictures, cartoons and trenchant leaders which he often wrote himself.

Hearst papers were nicknamed the yellow press by his enemies, not that he cared. It was a formula that worked wonders for circulation as it still does closer to home. He launched a supplement for his Sunday papers, a new medium for 'Writers of Note' holding forth on topics of interest and world events. He said its main purpose was to create prestige but he knew better than most that 'names' made news and sold papers, even when they had nothing to say that mattered about anything. His highly paid columnists in the 1930s included Adolf Hitler, Goering and Mussolini as well as Churchill, Shaw, Kipling, H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley.

The Chief, as he was known to his staff, was tall and dark-suited, looking, Churchill said, like a Quaker or Mormon elder. He was a hard taskmaster and a bully. 'You will please conduct the paper in all its editorial departments in accordance with the instructions you receive from me', he told one of his editors, adding that such instructions must be obeyed to the letter. He read his papers from end to end, regularly dictating from wherever he happened to be what he wanted on the front page or in the leader columns, calling to mind, Beaverbrook, another 'hands-on' proprietor, renowned in Fleet Street of old for having sent 147 separate instructions to the Daily Express in one day.

Hearst's lifestyle, memorably portrayed in the 1942 Orson Welles classic film, Citizen Kane, was self-indulgent and extravangant. He spent millions on his art collection, yachts, and palatial homes, including a castle in Wales, reining in only when his media empire was threatened with bankruptcy. There was too, an element of hypocrisy in his private life. He remained married and close to his family but despite a narrow streak of puritanism in his make-up, lived openly for years with his mistress, a chorus girl and minor actress, less than half his age.

William Randolph Hearst, who died aged 88 in 1951 is, for all that, assured a place in the history of journalism. He was as Lord Black, chairman of the Telegraph Group, writes in a perceptive foreword to this uniquely interesting book, a talented media proprietor, an epochally stylish titan and a considerable though erratic influence on public policy. His legend as, he says, is deservedly great.