William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst ( April 29 , 1863 – August 14 , 1951 ) was an American Newspaper magnate, born in San Francisco, California . He helped invent " Yellow Journalism " and the modern large circulation newspaper. As Martin Lee and Norman Solomon noted in their 1990 book ''Unreliable Sources'', Hearst "routinely invented sensational stories, faked interviews, ran phony pictures and distorted real events."

Hearst's use of yellow journalism techniques in his ''New York Journal'' to ship up popular support for U.S. military adventurism in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898 was also criticized in Upton Sinclair's 1919 book, ''The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism''. According to Sinclair, Hearst's newspaper employees were "willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war." Sinclair also asserted that in the early 20th century Hearst's newspapers lied "remorselessly about radicals," excluded "the word Socialist from their columns" and obeyed "a standing order in all Hearst offices that American Socialism shall never be mentioned favorably." In addition, Sinclair charged that Hearst's "Universal News Bureau" re-wrote the news of the London morning papers in the Hearst office in New York and then fraudulently sent it out to American afternoon newspapers under the by-lines of imaginary names of non-existent "Hearst correspondents" in London, Paris, Venice, Rome, Berlin, etc.

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William Randolph Hearst