There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
When Ted Turner presented the United Nations with the promise of $1 billion last September, I was in the midst of rereading W. A. Swanberg's biography of William Randolph Hearst, and the coincidence offered a perspective not only on the character of tycoons and their restless self-promotions but also on the revised purpose and changing practice of American journalism over the last hundred tears. The Hearst newspapers in the early twentieth century occupied more or less the same place on the bandstand of the American news and entertainment media as the one now held by Time Warner Inc., and the proprietor of the former resembled the principal stockholder of the latter in a number of obvious ways: both of them delighting in the joy of money, both collectors (Hearst of European painting and sculpture, Turner of buffalo herds and ranches in Montana), both attached to movie actresses (Turner to Jane Fonda, Hearst to Marion Davies), both scornful of the conventional wisdoms of the day, both fond of the offhand remark and ill-considered phrase both familiar with the farther shores of megalomania.
Turner made known his generous intention in the ballroom of a New York City hotel, to a crowd of maybe 500 people attending a banquet sponsored by the United Nations Association, and the front-page story in the next day's New York Times described an audience "stunned" by the show of munificence, diplomats speechless with amazement, foundation executives bowing their heads in awe. Similarly excited accounts appeared in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and although none of them mentioned Hearst's name, the tone of the reporting cast Turner in the image of a press mogul of ancient and heroic size, the founder of CNN and the owner of the Atlanta Braves who had restored Technicolor to the movies of the 1930s, a giant of the old school and a friend of Fidel Castro, a figure cast in marble or bronze.
For the next several days the news media elaborated the themes of Turner's wealth and iconoclasm, presenting his "brashness" as proof of the genius that he had brought to the reformatting of American journalism. Columnists once inclined to dismiss Turner as "a nutcake" or "the mouth of the South" revised their opinions in the benign glow of $1 billion and discovered that some of Turner's best-remembered remarks (about Rupert Murdoch's likeness to the late Adolf Hitler or the blind stupidity of most American corporate executives) were best understood as eccentric pleasantries. Editors of all denominations cleared a broad expanse of four-color space for a review of Turner's sporting adventures and a listing of Turner's real estate holdings: Turner as duck hunter and bold environmentalist; Turner as yachtsman winning the America's Cup race in 1977 off Newport, Rhode Island, and the Fastnet race in England in 1979, a race in which fifteen competitors (men made of lesser stuff) drowned in rough seas; Turner and his wife, Jane, as the proud owners of eight ranches in Montana, Nebraska, and New Mexico that added to a sum of acreage roughly equivalent to the state of Delaware.
Nothing much was said about the character of the news programming on CNN--not because the panegyrists might not have wished to do so but because there was nothing much to say. The network is a marketing device, not a means of conveying any idea, thought, or opinion likely to disturb the peace of a corporate golf outing or retrieve the conscience of a befuddled congressman. Redefined to fit our own postmodern circumstance, the term "press lord" no longer connotes the presence of an individual. Nor does it suggest the possibility of dissenting or unpopular argument. Conviction rests with the anonymous arithmetic, and for a conglomerate as unwieldy as Time Warner Inc., combining the variables of the film and record business with those of books and magazines and amusement parks, the proof of creative energy and intellect stands revealed as a number so remote from any of its rhetorical components that nobody can be held accountable for what it says or doesn't say. Even Rupert Murdoch, who pretends to a point of view somehow associated with neoconservative politics and Christian orthodoxy, gives over his several newspapers and television syndicates to the direction of the market, which cares as little for the Constitution as it does for the Virgin Mary.
The numbers run the business, but in the meantime appearances must be kept up and somebody must strike the mogul's pose, which is why the media placed their emphasis on the secondary attributes of Turner's image (his expensive toys instead of his intellectual hobbyhorses), and why, as soon as he had astonished the hotel crowd and received the congratulations of the U.N. secretary general for his "noble and extraordinary" largesse, Turner hurried off to his own CNN studios in New York to tell the story to his own Larry King. It was "spur of the moment, you know," he said, "like deciding you're going to buy a new car or something." He hadn't thought to do anything grand or important, he said, but two days before the banquet, on the plane coming into New York, he had been looking over his monthly financial statement and had noticed that since January of this year his net worth had moved upward from $2.2 billion to $3.2 billion. "So, I made it in nine months, it's not that big a deal." But still, because "you're born pretty selfish," it was hard to learn to give money away, harder than most people might think, because "people love money. It doesn't matter how much you've got, you want more. I mean, look at the ball players, look at Bill Gates. I mean, he feels like he can't get by, you know."
The interview was awful to behold, but not for the reasons that I would have guessed, and had I not been keeping company that week with Swanberg's Citizen Hearst, I would have missed the point about the narrow range of Turner's imagination and the smallness of his ambition. Had he the mind to do so, he could have assigned the $1 billion to the making of a lively television network--one that challenged, or at least questioned, the ways of the world about which he was in the habit of making loud and theatrical complaints. Or, in a more romantic vein, he conceivably could have taken it into his head to imitate the example of his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, and by recruiting a troop of latter-day Rough Riders (from a roster of Atlanta Braves, Newport yachtsmen, and Montana rancheros) gone off to invade Mexico or pacify East Los Angeles. But we live in an age that transfers the acts of derring-do from the arena of public event to the sphere of private expression. More often than not, and with the notable exception of George Soros, the change of venue invites our contemporary moguls to select their personae from the L. L. Bean catalogue and to seek the consolations of vanity.
And so here was Turner in September 1997, banging the drum of his own magnificence, challenging other moguls made of lesser stuff (Bill Gates chief among them) to a childhood game of who's afraid of the dark or who's got the biggest frog, and there was William Randolph Hearst, almost exactly a hundred years ago to the day, in September 1897, also in New York but fifty blocks south, on Printing House Square, banging the drum for war with Spain. The American government at the time had no quarrel with Spain, but Hearst hoped to provide it with one--in part because he thought it good imperialist policy for the United States to annex Cuba, in part because he knew that bloodstained headlines boosted the sale of newspapers. He already had made a success of the San Francisco Examiner when he showed up in New York in 1895, thirty-two years old and an admirer of Napoleon. Standing over six feet tall, very blond, speaking in a high-pitched voice, and dressed in the manner of a dandy, Hearst rejoiced in all things loud and extravagant. A spectacular fortune inherited from his father's gold and silver mines permitted Hearst to indulge his enthusiasms--for politics, Ziegfeld girls, walking sticks, and brass bands--which, when joined with his formidable intelligence, resulted in the florid bloom of crime and underwear that soon came to be known as yellow journalism.
For eighteen months the Journal had been printing vivid, first-hand accounts of the cruel suffering inflicted by Spanish brutes and tyrants on the innocent, democratic, freedom-loving Cuban people. The stories were counterfeit, composed by an atelier of thirty-odd artists and writers, among them Frederick Remington and Richard Harding Davis, that Hearst had dispatched to Cuba to dramatize the revolution presumably taking place in the mountains. The revolution was nowhere to be found, and so Hearst's correspondents stationed themselves in wicker chairs on the terrace of the Hotel Inglaterra in Havana, where they sipped iced drinks and received news by telepathy. Borrowing from one another's stores of adjectives, they sent word of imaginary atrocities and nonexistent heroes, descriptions of battles that never occurred, fanciful but stirring tales of Spanish officers roasting Catholic priests on charcoal fires and feeding prisoners to sharks.
When all else failed, they sent an attractive Cuban girl whom they persuaded to travel north with a terrible story of how she had been violated by General Valeriano Weyler, the commander of the Spanish troops, whom the correspondents had never met but whom they routinely described as "the devastator of haciendas," "the destroyer of families," and "the outrager of women." When the fair maiden arrived in New York, Hearst prepared for her appearance at Madison Square Garden with the three concise instructions, always the same and always ready to hand, that expressed his reading of the First Amendment: "Hire military bands. Secure orators. Arrange fireworks."
The sober newspapers of the day deplored the bald-faced fabrication of the news with a fulmination of pious editorials in defense of journalistic virtue. Hearst, who had been educated both at Harvard and in Europe and who, unlike the proprietors of our own media syndicates, knew good writing when he saw it, replied in an editorial that a hundred years later still stands as the incomparable summing up of the tabloid press: "The Journal realized what is frequently forgotten in journalism, that if news is wanted it often has to be sent for.... No other journal in the United States includes in its staff a tenth of the number of writers of reputation and talent. It is the Journal's policy to engage brains as well as to get the news, for the public is even more fond of entertainment than it is of information."
President William McKinley's reluctance to declare war confirmed Hearst's suspicion that he was either a traitor or a Wall Street profiteer, but when the American battleship Maine exploded and sank in the Havana harbor in February 1898, drowning 260 officers and men, the President had no choice but to accede to what had become a loud, public outcry in favor of punishing the insolent Spaniard. Hearst was overjoyed, and on learning that Theodore Roosevelt meant to go to Cuba at the head of his own troop of cavalry, he volunteered his steam yacht Buccaneer to the service of the American Navy. He put the proposition in a letter to McKinley, describing the length and size of the ship, assuring the President that it was in perfect order, offering to provide competent sailors, a sufficient number of guns, and a "suitable supply of ammunition, to be renewed at my expense whenever needed." Hearst also assumed that he would remain aboard as the Buccaneer's captain, "with the knowledge, of course, that certain examinations are necessary to qualify as commander of a ship."
The Spanish-American War presented Hearst with the first of numerous grand occasions for which he secured orators and arranged fireworks. Throughout his long reign as a sovereign publisher, he retained his liking for writers of "reputation and talent," sending Stephen Crane to the Greco-Turkish War, Ambrose Bierce to Washington, Mark Twain to London, Joaquin Miller to the Klondike Gold Rush, and Damon Runyon to the Kentucky Derby. The reach of Hearst's imagination matched the scale of his ambition, and he never tired of dragooning his papers into the service of his political enthusiasms. Although he failed in his own three attempts at the American presidency (in 1904, and again in 1908 and 1912), his providing of the Spanish-American War promoted Teddy Roosevelt to the rank of hero (and thus to the waving of his hat and sword on the balcony of the White House), and when the Democratic Party couldn't agree on a presidential candidate at its Chicago convention in 1932, Hearst instructed the delegates beholden to the backing of his papers in Texas and California to make up the necessary weight of votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Hearst's convictions often carried him against the currents of both popular and respectable opinion. His ferocious polemics against the Wall Street trusts, and against President McKinley for siding with those trusts, resulted in violent and unanimous defamations of his character when McKinley was murdered in Buffalo in 1901 and the Hearst papers were held responsible for having poisoned the assassin's mind with incitements to anarchy. Opposing America's engagement in World War I (because he didn't much care for the British, detested Woodrow Wilson, and took seriously George Washington's advice about avoiding foreign military adventures), Hearst was vilified as an unspeakable blackguard without a grain of patriotism or conscience.
But whatever his faults, which were as numerous as the contradictions in the character of a man who professed sympathy for the American working classes while at the same time wrapping himself up in the luxuries of medieval castles and private railroad cars, Hearst placed his money at the service of something other than his own self-aggrandizement.
The grandees of the American press in the first half of the twentieth century--not only Hearst but Henry Luce and Robert McCormick--meant to have a hand and a say in the shaping of events, and they imposed on their publications the force of their own character and the sound of their own voice. Their heirs and assigns leave the choice of topics to the hired help. As long as the statements of profit and loss meet the standard of corporate expectation, the editorial staff (more like wine stewards and gamekeepers than writers of reputation and talent) remain free to say whatever the polls say their audiences wish to hear.
Before presenting $1 billion to the U.N. (to help children, clear land mines, and cure disease) Turner didn't mention the grand gesture to his accountants, one of whom was quoted soon after the event to the effect that although the intention was marvelous to behold, an inspiration to us all, it was, perhaps, a trifle "impetuous." Other analysts in other countinghouses thought that when the pledge had been run through the mill of the tax laws, the U.N. would be lucky to salvage 10 cents on the dollar.
If what was important was the effect, then maybe the lesson to be learned is one about our latter-day moguls having become, at long last and all thanks to the IRS and the L. L. Bean catalogue, harmless and domesticated creatures, incapable of making wars or presidents.
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