Analysis Of The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise Of William Randolph Hearst

Ainsley Anderton

Dr. Wainer

History and Philosophy

Term Paper

April 11, 2017

The news and the media impact the world in significant ways and the news has come a long way from when it first started out. Many people do not know how far it has really come. The history and the growth of the news is the past that changed the future. News comes in all different shapes and forms today, but a century ago news was mainly transported by paper. One of the largest impacts on the news world was a man by the name of William Hearst. He was a man who had a driven heart. He wanted to win and to succeed in his business. Hearts was a man with money and with competitive spirit. Hearst transformed the world of news by outdoing Pulitzer, creating entertaining

He was born on April 29th 1863 but sadly due to the San Francisco Earthquake his birth certificate was lost (Whyte, pg 14). He inhearited a significant amount of money from his father and also his father’s news company. His father’s name was George Hearts and his mother’s name was Phoebe Hearst. William Heart’s parents were highly ambitious and so he gain that characteristic too. Kenneth Whyte in his book, The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, he states, “Though one of the richest families in America, and a small one at at that, the three Hearts were diversely ambitious and variously extravagant; there was not enough money to go around…they were spending at a pace of almost $1 million annualized” (pg

“…Willie was quite intelligent, but his forte was an irrepressible imagination. He loved mischief…Willie wasn’t easy to discipline. He was courteous one minute and exploding firecrackers the next. He liked acting and singing, but once sprayed his dancing teacher with the water hose” (pg 9). This attitude stayed with him all his life and his newspaper thrived because of his imagination. William Hearst was so full of himself he had to finish high school at home (pg 11). Later on in his life he would become Joseph Pulitzer’s rival in the newspaper world but in 1866 William worked as a reported for Pulitzer to gain understanding of the journalism world (pg