William Randolph Hearst was around at the end of the 19th Century, and virtually invented modern popular journalism and was one of the founders of modernism.
In 1848, Europe was grouping together. It is known as the year of revolutions; Marx predicted one that didn’t happen, the Irish were defeated by the British, the French revolution was suppressed, so the country became economically backwards, and the Russian and Austrian revolutions both failed.
1849 is know for the gold rush in California, which sparked massive European emigration, with New York’s Ellis Island as the entry point. The Europeans were fleeing oppression, backwardness and poverty, and created a cosmopolitan ‘linguistic melting pot’ in New York City.
William Randolph hearst was based in San Francisco, which, in 1849, had over 150 languages. He published the first ever tabloid rumour; the gold rush, creating the hype which led to frenzied settlement of the west and the railway boom. His newspaper the San Francisco Examiner was the first ever sensational circulation newspaper, largely printing articles on rumours of gold. It’s main revenue business was advertising shovels, for those that believed the gold rush rumours. With this newspaper, the gold rush mentality (meaning that they are only interested in greed and fear, the things that sell newspapers) was established and still survives today. The visual style of the newspaper was also very similar to that of today’s papers.
1850s America was characterised by the railway boom, the settlement of the West and the telegram invention, which helped Hearst in setting up the settlement newspapers that were crucial in creating the new communities, and also in establishing WRH’s print empire. He got rich by selling a shot at the gold that was promised in the West.
The American Civil War in the 1860s was partly to liberate black people but mainly to free the Southern states from the government. No new state could be a slave state, which angered many of the people in areas that wanted to be under the federal government. South Carolina left the US and was then invaded by the federal army, which set off an industrial war using modern inventions. It led to the creation of a ‘Yankee’ empire and the future of America was settled; it would be a liberal, trading, industrial nation, based on the ideas of John Locke etc. The already booming cities of the North, such as New York and Boston, gain massively from this as they get cheap cotton and produce, which they can then ship to Britain, from the Southern states which have cheap labour.
America has always been a country of contrasts. William Randolph Hearst built up his newspaper empire in the new towns in the West, while James Coolitzer set himself up as a rival in New York City. He had arrived in the US in 1849 as a Hungarian nationalist-reactionary and taught himself English. He set up the New York Daily World (which the Daily Planet in superman is based on) and was seen as on the side of ‘sod busters’, or poor farmers, because he wanted de-valuation and also because he was seen as a ‘nut breaker’, a penetrating investigative journalist. He spoke out against issues such as oil and railway companies and the terrible working conditions of those that they employed. He was populist, isolationist and not afraid to speak his mind.
At the time, New York City had all the ingredients for rapid growth; there was plenty of cheap labour from the emigrants arriving daily, desperate for work; they had a liberal constitution which meant they had civil rights and rights to ownership; the urban concentration, with a high population density which reduced economic overheads (from this perspective, Cobbett’s views of industrialisation and urbanisation were wrong). This was Coolitzer’s world, and was seen as the “era of the rubber bands” because people went from rags to riches in just one generation. There was vast infrastructure investment, which stimulated the economy, helped by the vast internal market for products. The absence of war was also a key factor in New York’s success, as Europe was engulfed by the Franco-Russian war and other disputes which meant even more people left the continent for the ‘streets paved of gold’. There was also an absence of imperial entanglements and colonies, leaving the government free to focus on infrastructure etc. It is also important to know that the US was very anti-European.
The 1860s saw the newspaper wars, where Coolitzer was on top, then Hearst comes along copying Coolitzer’s paper with the New York Sun, but in a simplified version; simpler headline styles, shorter and simpler articles (articles longer than 250 words would be deleted) and it was the first newspaper to have engraving and therefore appealed visually as well. Hearst also invented the cartoon strip, however, Coolitzer soon developed the Yellow King strip which was the most popular (the Simpsons is an explicit reference to this). Hearst bought this cartoon strip and rocketed ahead of the competition. He was an expert on distribution and was ruthless in the circulation wars, he introduced competitions such as bingo, he headhunted the most popular parts of other papers and used banner headlines. The news was all about crime, creating an over-estimation of danger and feeding on the formula of fear and greed to grab the public’s attention.
The Spanish-American war was about the US wanting an export-import relationship with Cuba, but colonisation could not be considered as an option because they had learnt from World War One that it causes many problems. The people of Cuba wanted independence from Spain, but the Spanish were trying to suppress this. The thing that sparked the war was the singing of an American ship in Habana Harbour, Cuba, this cause the US to declare war on Spain and “support Cuban independence”. However, this decision was very unpopular in the US.
William Randolph Hearst saw this as a good thing, an opportunity for US world power with New York as the capital of the world, at first. He sent reporters to Habana, where they reported that they saw no war. To this Hearst said “you supply the story and I will supply the war”, and within 24 hours the ship had been blown up. This is a prime example of Hearst’s methods.
Now, all tabloid journalists work by this method: 1) think of the story, then 2) stand it up. They would think what they wanted to write about, then they would dig around to find enough evidence to make it plausible. This is because, Chris Horrie says, true stories are less interesting, and this is shown in the fact that big headlines catch peoples attention, and therefore sell more papers.
No comments:
Post a Comment