Newspaper Titan by Amanda Smith

Author:Amanda Smith [Smith, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-70151-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

“You were looking right at me,” she persisted to the elderly, ailing publisher, “and two or three times you nodded your head in apparent agreement.”

“I am not mad at you at all or in the least for ANY reason,” Hearst sniffed unconvincingly in response. “I did want to warn you not to overdo the News editorial policy, because it does not gee [sic] with ours. I definitely am NOT a New Dealer or a News dealer,” he scolded, adding tersely, “I admire Joe and respect him as an OPPONENT.”

If the New York Daily News editorials were a source of rancor from within the Hearst organization, the Chicago Tribune’s comics and features became a source of heated dispute from without. Disappointed that her earlier efforts to buy the Washington Post had fallen through, Cissy continued to keep abreast of the paper’s status through her Hearst, News, and Tribune connections. In November 1930, Brisbane wrote her of renewed rumors that the Post might be for sale in light of the suit for separate maintenance and charges of adultery that Evalyn Walsh McLean had recently brought against her husband, the paper’s owner, Ned McLean. His “wild behavior,” Evalyn McLean would later dictate to her ghostwriter, “was at last revealed to be a progressive madness caused by dissipation.” By March 1931, Brisbane had had another idea on the subject of Cissy’s eventually publishing the Post: “The great thing now is economy, and economy always helps a newspaper’s circulation.” He was proposing not only to continue using the Chief’s money rather than her own, but also, in effect, to promote economy among Washington newspapers in the form of consolidation. If Hearst bought the Post, merged it with the Herald, and allowed Cissy to edit the resulting publication, the paper would have no competition in the morning field and, as an employee rather than a boss, Cissy would remain hardworking and ambitious, Brisbane contended: “When you don’t use the owners’ money you are obliged to use your brains. Brains, not money, make a paper.”

“I am afraid that the chance to get the Post is gone now,” Brisbane lamented to Cissy two years later, in late March 1933, as the paper entered receivership and the lurid details of Evalyn and Ned McLean’s troubles and dissipations issued from the several jurisdictions where they now faced each other in court on matters ranging from the dissolution of their marriage to Evalyn McLean’s efforts to salvage control of her husband’s woefully mismanaged Washington daily for their minor children. “Somebody will have intelligence enough to know how useful that paper could be made,” Brisbane reflected shrewdly, very likely “one of the cowed Wall Street crowd.” It was “a great pity” not to have been able to acquire the Post, he ventured to Cissy, ignoring their boss’s mounting financial troubles. “I could have got it, raised the money most easily, but I could not interest Mr. Hearst in the proposition. I don’t quite know why, since I wanted to turn it over to him, and combine it with the Herald.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.