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In the late 19th century, New York City was the battleground for a conflict between two great powers. These powers weren't armies or nations. Rather, they were newspaper conglomerates, headed by two of the most powerful figures in the history of American media. The competition between them was furious, and it was fought not just on the pages of their newspapers, but sometimes on the streets. Learn more about Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and the Newspaper Wars on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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The newspaper wars in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries refers to a period of intense rivalry and competition between media moguls who battled for readership and influence. In particular, there were two of them, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. While there were other newspaper owners during this period, none of them had the power or influence of these two men. Before I get into the details of how the newspaper war played out, I should explain exactly who these two people were.
Joseph Pulitzer was a Hungarian immigrant born in 1847 that arrived in Boston at the age of 17 without knowing how to speak English. He served in the Civil War, moved to St. Louis where he passed the bar exam, and held a series of odd jobs despite having limited knowledge of English. Finally, in 1878, he purchased the St. Louis Dispatch newspaper and merged it with the St. Louis Post. He found success in adopting a very populist approach to the news.
Pulitzer's strategy involved making the news accessible to a mass audience by focusing on human interest stories, sensationalistic headlines, and exposes of political corruption. Within four years, he had increased the circulation of the Post-Dispatch from 4,000 to 22,300. He purchased the New York World in 1883 from railroad magnate Jay Gould and turned it into one of the most successful papers of its time.
The only reason Gould even owned it was because it came along with one of his railroad acquisitions and the paper did poorly because of its association with him. Gould had no strong attachment to the paper and was glad to get rid of it as it was a money loser. The New York world catered to the growing working class in New York City, building off the recipe for success that he used in St. Louis.
Within two weeks, he increased the circulation by 6,000, and within three months, he had almost tripled its circulation from 15,000 to 40,000. By the mid-1890s, the New York World had grown to become the largest newspaper in the United States, with a circulation near 600,000. William Randolph Hearst entered the newspaper industry in 1887 when he took over the San Francisco Examiner, a paper owned by his father, a millionaire mine owner and California senator, George Hearst.
The elder Hearst had gotten the paper in payment of a gambling debt. He quickly transformed the paper into a profitable and widely read publication. He invested large sums of money into the most modern printing equipment, as well as some of the most prominent writers of the era, including Mark Twain and Jack London. He looked up to and admired Pulitzer and thought that he was the greatest newspaper man in the country. And so he largely followed Pulitzer's blueprint.
He had sensational headlines, published investigative stories that uncovered corruption, and did exposés on companies. Even those companies that his family held substantial investments in. Hearst was very ambitious, and he wanted success on a par with what his father had achieved. Very early on, he knew that he wanted to create a nationwide newspaper chain. However, to do that, he had to find success in New York City.
In 1895, Hearst moved to New York City and purchased the New York Journal, launching a direct challenge to Pulitzer's New York world. Hearst immediately made an impact in the New York newspaper market. He used the same techniques that Pulitzer used to sell papers, but one of the first things he did was to cut the price of his paper to just one penny, half the price of his competitors'.
Then, he began hiring many of the top writers from the New York world by offering them higher salaries. He also stole two of the most popular cartoonists from the New York world, George McManus and Richard F. Outkalt. Outkalt was the man behind the wildly popular comic The Yellow Kid, one of the first comics ever published in color in the New York world.
The comic focused on characters who were poor children living in tenement buildings. However, because he never secured the copyright on the comic, both newspapers ended up publishing The Yellow Kid. The fact that both newspapers published The Yellow Kid resulted in people calling them The Yellow Kid Papers. And this eventually morphed into referring to them practicing Yellow Kid Journalism, which eventually just became known as Yellow Journalism.
What became known as yellow journalism wasn't invented by either Pulitzer or Hearst. It had been around since the very early days of the American Revolution. Newspapers were primarily propaganda outlets. They were highly partisan and didn't even pretend to provide an objective viewpoint. Pulitzer and Hearst simply refined and amplified the trends in newspapers and took them to their logical conclusion.
The main goal was first and always selling newspapers and doing whatever possible to achieve that goal. The first priority was to write sensational stories and headlines. Much of this involved reporting on crime. They published large, bold headlines with emotionally charged language aimed at grabbing the reader's attention, often at the expense of factual accuracy.
newspapers regularly featured lurid stories about crime, scandal, and sex, which were designed to shock and titillate readers. Crimes were often turned into morality plays. Papers would also focus on personal dramas and individual suffering, especially those involving women or children, to tug at readers' emotions and sell more papers.
They often conducted investigative reports on large companies, which made the papers appear to be on the side of the common man, who was in fact the ones buying all the newspapers. The problem was that they would often exaggerate the truth or outright lie if it made for a better story or headline. And when there wasn't news to report, the papers would go ahead and just create a story. One reporter was ordered to fake a drowning so he could report on the inadequacies of the rescue efforts.
The 1889 trip by Nellie Bly to go around the world in 80 days was an example of a manufactured story. Despite the competition, both newspapers were shockingly similar. They often used the same style of journalism to cover the same stories. Moreover, both papers were Democrat newspapers with the same political leanings, largely because New York at the time was a solidly Democrat city.
The newspaper wars are best remembered for their coverage of the Spanish occupation of Cuba. Both papers found that stories about the Spanish in Cuba always sold well. In 1897, Hearst's New York Journal created a media sensation when it orchestrated and publicized the dramatic rescue of Evangelina Cisneros, a Cuban woman imprisoned by Spanish authorities. Hearst sent a team down to Cuba to arrange her escape, portraying her as a victim of Spanish tyranny.
The story used many of the techniques of yellow journalism. The paper reported the rescue and actively participated in creating the story. The event was heavily sensationalized, with Hearst's paper positioning itself as the champion of oppressed Cubans. In 1898, another instance occurred when Hearst's New York Journal falsely reported that a Spanish fleet had been sighted off the coast of New Jersey, suggesting an imminent attack on the United States.
The journal also ran stories detailing gruesome acts allegedly committed by Spanish forces against Cuban civilians, again, often without any verification. Stories of women being mistreated and max executions were common, designed to provoke outrage. Headlines such as, "'Spanish cannibalism' or, "'Refined young women stripped and searched by brutal Spaniards' were printed in large type, grabbing attention and inciting readers' emotions."
Artists like Frederick Remington were employed by Hearst to create vivid and often misleading illustrations of Spain's actions, making them appear more graphic than they actually were. A famous, albeit probably apocryphal, story involves a telegram supposedly sent by William Randolph Hearst to his illustrator Frederick Remington, who was stationed in Cuba to cover the rebellion.
Remington reported that there was no war to cover, to which Hearst allegedly replied, quote, You furnish the pitchers, I'll furnish the war. While that quote is of dubious origin, the fact is both papers stoked public opinion against Spain over the Cuba issue for several years. On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. Both Pulitzer and Hearst printed sensational headlines suggesting Spanish sabotage without any evidence.
Hearst's paper famously published the headline, quote, Destruction of the warship Maine was the work of an enemy. Subsequent investigations into the matter indicate that the Maine explosion most probably came from a fire and explosion inside the ship. The United States declared war on Spain on April 25th, in no small part due to the pressures created by two of the country's largest newspapers.
Not surprisingly, the war increased sales of newspapers. The circulation of both newspapers rose significantly during the build-up to and subsequent war. However, the war planted the seeds for the end of the open warfare between the two papers. The primary method of distribution for both newspapers at the time were newsboys. Newsboys were often children from immigrant families who sold the papers in the late afternoon and early evening after school.
The publications would sell a bundle of 100 newspapers to newsboys for 50 cents, or a half penny each. The newsboys would then turn around and sell them for a penny. However, during the war, when sales were increasing, the papers increased the price to 60 cents per hundred. The increase in price was offset by the increase in sales, so initially no one really complained.
However, after the war ended, both papers kept their prices at 60 cents, even though sales then declined. And they were the only two newspapers in the city that didn't reduce their price. On July 18, 1899, a group of newsboys on Long Island kicked over a wagon filled with newspapers and went on strike against both the World and the Journal. Newsboys in Manhattan and Brooklyn quickly followed suit.
The Newsboy strike was unusually violent for a young group of boys. They found any newsstand selling either the World or the Journal, and they would mob the stand, beating up the proprietors and destroying the newspapers. For two weeks, the strike almost shut down both papers. They tried to get adults with police protection to sell them, but that didn't work because the Newsboys would just distract the police. The strike was devastating to the newspapers because the public sided with the Newsboys.
Years of populist outraids that the papers had fostered were now aimed at them. The papers eventually settled by keeping the prices at 60 cents per bundle, but agreeing to buy back any unsold newspapers, which ensured that the newsboys wouldn't take a loss. The strike in many ways ended the war between the New York World and the New York Journal.
Hearst had spent millions of dollars competing with the world. Despite having increased circulation to the point of becoming one of the top newspapers in the country, the paper wasn't profitable. Hearst turned his attention to launching papers in other cities, where he often had to fight newspaper wars with other established publishers. Hearst launched the Chicago Evening American in 1900, and its competition with the Chicago Tribune led to actual violence in the streets, killing as many as 20 people.
More newspapers in New York became competitive as yellow journalism papers started to wane in popularity. Hearst went on to build a massive media empire consisting of newspapers, magazines, wire and photo services, newsreels, radio stations, and film studios. And most famously, he was the subject of the movie Citizen Kane. Pulitzer repudiated yellow journalism later in his life and ended up endowing the Columbia School of Journalism in New York and establishing a prize for journalism which bears his name.
Oddly enough, Pulitzer's newspapers probably would have never won a Pulitzer Prize. The public eventually soured on yellow journalism. However, it never disappeared completely. The tabloids of the late 20th century and the clickbait online articles of the 21st century are both the legacy of yellow journalism of the 19th century. For better or worse, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the central players in the newspaper wars of the late 1800s,
ended up shaping American journalism forever. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiefer. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters.
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