Summer has come to an end and year two of University has begun as we start the year with the third part of our History and Context of Journalism module with a lecture on William Randolph Hearst.
America went through a huge transformation during the 1840s and 1850s as hundreds and thousands of people drove West; 55,000 were said to have travelled to the Californian Gold Fields. This period of time is what was known as the Gold Rush to find their fortune in the mining industry. Along with the migration West in America, there was more mass migration as millions fled Europe and the Irish famine during the 1840s. One in ten people died as they fled
West across the continent. It was said that the further West you went the more American you were.
George Hearst, father of William Randolph Hearst, was one of the tens of thousands of men who were lured to California by the promise of gold. His hard won success in the mines brought him the political career that he was so set on having for both himself and his son. Following this George bought the San Francisco Examiner (we are unsure as to whether he bought or won it through poker). He used the paper to enhance his political career. Newspapers such as these were at the time known as, 'penny papers' were either political or commerical and objective journalism was not seen as important. The political papers were financed by political parties, this suited George as he wanted The Examiner to act as a cheerleader for his campaign. It was not until 1846 that the New York papers organised the Associated Press, this is where objective journalism began as they supplied content for a variety of political papers.
William Hearst took over The Examiner in 1887 and transformed it from a paper filled with text and advertisements to a paper with more illustrations, bigger, bolder headlines and less stories. The Examiner turned into a paper which would have been suitable for non-educated people to read and understand as William himself was not very well educated. William belived that illustrations, "attract the eye and stimulate the imagination of the lower classes and materially aid comprehension." Clearly he did not want his paper to be centrally and solely focussed on walls of text, like his father did.
After William took over The Examiner was pro-labour, anti-capitalist and anti-railroad. It supported the unions but was occasionally guilty of virulent racism. It used a simpler form of language and accounted for the 'slang' that was used by the lower classes at the time and without a doubt became more accessible to a wider range of people. New York, at the time had a growing population mainly due to cheap labour, urban concentration and new technology, low commoditiy prices for example, food, capital accumulation from the export trade and lastly vast infrastructure investments.
In 1896 Hearst began The New York journal, which was in competition with Pulitzer's The World. Hearst poached "The Yellow Kid" from Pulitzer as he tried to keep up with the competition. In retaliation Pulitzer employed another cartoonist to copy the 2Yellow Kid's" work and it wasn't before long that these papers were soon known as the "Yellow Papers". Theses papers were very accessible and understandable to the non-educated; these people were clearly immigrants from Ireland, China, and Germany. Today the "Yellow Paers" are now known as the "Red Tops" and include papers such as The Sun, The Mirror and The Star.
The Journal and The World battled to solve crimes and they were both very interested in crime and "underwear journalism", also referred to as sex stories as both these topics sold papers. It was often that the papers would offer rewards to anyone who could solve the crime they published in their papers or they would send their reporters to investigate further. At one time a sum of $1,000 was offered to whoever could identify a dead body of a man. This kind of investigative journalism was also called, 'muckraking', Nellie Bly was the orginal muckraker and managed to tackle corrupt politians and sweat shops as well as her famous, "Ten days in the Madhouse" which was published in The World.
In 1897 Hearst wanted war and so he sent one of his reporters and illustrators to Cuba and wanted them to return with a story for his paper. Unfortunately for Hearst there was nothing very interesting happening and a telegram was sent to him, "Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war." In reply Hearst asked them to stay, "Please remain, You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war." We cannot be sure if he actually did instruct them to do this as he denied allegations. However, from other behaviour it has been suggested that he is capable.
Hearst has also interferred with many other events such as the setting free of Evangelina Cisneros, who was at only eighteen considered the most beautiful woman in Cuba and was imprisoned as she refused to sleep with a Spanish Captain. Hearst created a petition to free her and managed to get the US President's wife to sign it. When this failed he sent his reporter to Cuba with money to bribe the prison guard to free her and when he succeeded he paid for her to stay in New York. Not much later the USS Maine was sent to Havana Harbour where it soon exploded, thus creating war: Hearst's plan all along. He proceeded to write about this in his paper and it was the first time that circulation broke the one million mark. Hence showing how, war sells papers even more so that crime and sex. Referring to it as "A splendid little war" Hearst celebrated by letting fireworks off from the roof of The Journal and offered $1,000 for the best war strategy. The Spanish war proved to be a huge success for The Yellow Papers.
Hearst successfully created models for modern popular, tabloid journalism which was later copied by The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror and The sun.