These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Political consulting’s origins in journalism lie with William Randolph Hearst. Whitaker, thirty-four, started out as a newspaperman, or, really, a newspaper boy; he was already working as a reporter at the age of thirteen. By nineteen, he was city editor for the Sacramento Union and, two years later, a political writer for the San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst paper. In the 1930s, one in four Americans got their news from Hearst, who owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities. Hearst’s papers were all alike: hot-blooded, with leggy headlines. Page one was supposed to make a reader blurt out, “Gee whiz!” Page two: “Holy Moses!” Page three: “God Almighty!” Hearst used his newspapers to advance his politics. In 1934, he ordered his editors to send reporters to college campuses, posing as students, to find out which members of the faculty were Reds. People Hearst thought were communists not infrequently thought Hearst was a fascist; he’d professed his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. Hearst didn’t mind; he silenced his critics by attacking them in his papers relentlessly and ferociously. Some fought back. “Only cowards are intimidated by Hearst,” Charles Beard said. In February 1935, Beard addressed an audience of a thousand schoolteachers in Atlantic City and said, of Hearst, “No person with intellectual honesty or moral integrity will touch him with a ten-foot pole.” The crowd gave Beard a standing ovation.71