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William Randolph Hearst Quotes

William Randolph Hearst Sr. was an American businessman, politician, and newspaper publisher who built the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company Hearst Communications and whose flamboyant methods of yellow journalism influenced the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human interest stories. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 after being given control of The San Francisco Examiner by his wealthy father. Moving to New York City, he acquired The New York Journal and fought a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World that sold papers by giant headlines over lurid stories featuring crime, corruption, graphics, sex, and innuendo. Acquiring more newspapers, Hearst created a chain that numbered nearly thirty papers in major American cities at its peak. He later expanded to magazines, creating the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world.

He was twice elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives, and ran unsuccessfully for President of the United States in 1904, Mayor of New York City in 1905 and 1909 and for Governor of New York in 1906. Politically he espoused the left wing of the Progressive Movement, speaking on behalf of the working class. He controlled the editorial positions and coverage of political news in all his papers and magazines and thereby broadcast his personal views. He sensationalized Spanish atrocities in Cuba and called for war in 1898 against Spain. After 1918, he called for an isolationist foreign policy to avoid any more entanglement in what he regarded as corrupt European affairs. He was at once a militant nationalist, a fierce anti-communist, and deeply suspicious of the League of Nations and of the British, French, Japanese, and Russians. He was a leading supporter of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932–34, but then broke with FDR and became his most prominent enemy on the right. His peak circulation reached 20 million readers a day in the mid-1930s, but he was a bad money manager and was so deeply in debt that most of his assets had to be liquidated in the late 1930s; he managed to keep his newspapers and magazines.

His life story was the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, the lead character in Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane. His famous mansion, Hearst Castle, on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon, is now a State Historical Monument and a National Historic Landmark.

✵ 29. April 1863 – 14. August 1951
William Randolph Hearst photo
William Randolph Hearst: 12 quotes1 like

Famous William Randolph Hearst Quotes

“According to American principle and practice the public is the ruler of the State, and in order to rule rightly it should be informed correctly.”

William Randolph Hearst

N.Y. Journal-American (November 11, 1954)

“What has become of the descendants of the irresponsible adventurers, the scapegrace sons, the bond servants, the redemptionists and the indentured maidens, the undesirables, and even the criminals, which made up-not all, of course, but nevertheless a considerable part of-the earliest emigrants to these virgin countries?
They have become the leaders of the thought of the world, the vanguard in the march of progress, the inspirers of liberty, the creators of national prosperity, the sponsors of universal education and enlightenment.”

William Randolph Hearst

Communication to the American Crime Study Commission (May 19, 1929)

“Whatever is right can be achieved through the irresistible power of awakened and informed public opinion. Our object, therefore, is not to enquire whether a thing can be done, but whether it ought to be done, to so exert the forces of publicity that public opinion will compel it be done.”

William Randolph Hearst

Advertisement, N.Y. Herald Tribune (August 19, 1946)

“We hold that the greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong, that in the exercise thereof people have an inviolable right to express their unbridled thoughts on all topics and personalities, being liable only for the abuse of that right.”

William Randolph Hearst

Platform, Independent League; N.Y. Journal (February 1, 1924)your mom stinks

“We hold that no person or set of persons can properly establish a standard of expression for others.”

William Randolph Hearst

Platform, Independent League; N.Y. Journal (February 1, 1924)

“The NARROW-MINDED BIGOTS have given to this country and to the world freedom of speech, freedom of thought and action and religious liberty.”

William Randolph Hearst

Communication to the American Crime Study Commission (May 19, 1929)

William Randolph Hearst Quotes

“Please realize that the first duty of newspaper men is the get the news and PRINT THE NEWS.”

William Randolph Hearst

Quoted in Editor & Publisher (August 12, 1944)

“Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing to endure disaster.”

William Randolph Hearst

Interview, Cleveland Plain Dealer (October 24, 1932)

“When free discussion is denied, hardening of the arteries of democracy has set in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and the death of the republic is at hand.”

William Randolph Hearst

"In the News" (June 13, 1941)

“A politician will do anything to keep his job-even become a patriot.”

William Randolph Hearst

Editorial (August 28, 1933)

“You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.”

William Randolph Hearst

Alleged cable to illustrator Frederic Remington while Hearst was covering the Cuban War of Independence (1898). Campbell, W. Joseph (Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C.) questions the sources of the alleged quote in both his books Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies (2003), p. 72 and Getting It Wrong: Debunking the Greatest Myths in American Journalism (2016), also in a respective blog entry https://mediamythalert.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/furnish-the-war-media-myth-infiltrates-npr-tribute-to-evelyn-waughs-scoop/.

“SEVENTH, the text of a newspaper must tell the news.
The headlines must tell the news.
The pictures must tell the news.
The subheads and subtitles must tell the news.
Please see that the newspapers perform this function.”

William Randolph Hearst

Instructions to E.D. Coblentz (March 1, 1938)

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