William Randolph Hearst – 1863-1951

The renegade son of a California senator and gold miner, Hearst took over the ailing San Francisco Examiner in 1887 and transformed it into a runaway success by combining genuinely reformist investigative journalism with outright sensationalism. He repeated this success on a grander scale when he bought the moribund New York Morning Journal in 1895, hired the best writers and reporters to work on it, then reduced its price to a penny—thereby obtaining spectacular circulation. Hearst engaged in a circulation war with rival publisher Joseph Pulitzer and, together, the two publishers created a new brand of muckraking sensationalism dubbed “yellow journalism.” Hearst went on to build a nationwide news chain and became an opinion maker of unprecedented power, typically making news as well as reporting it—as when he heightened the war fever that led to the Spanish-American War.