Face-to-Face, Person-to-Person

Radio and TV journalist Edward R. Murrow, was born Egbert Roscoe Murrow on April 25, 1908 in Greensboro, North Carolina; died of lung cancer, April 27, 1965 in Pawling, New York. 

Edward R. Murrow is recognized as the dean of 20th century broadcast journalism. Before Murrow, broadcast journalism was an unwanted stepbrother of the newspapers, and most radio reporters were writers by trade. Murrow’s high standards for reporting and superb narrative skills -- his aim being to report for the ears, not for the page -- raised the bar for all broadcast reporters who would follow him. 

A student orator at Washington State College who served as president of a national college students’ organization, Murrow backed into radio as an educational radio show producer. His duties took him to Europe in 1937, and with World War II brewing, Murrow found himself on the air feeding the hungry demand for news about Hitler as one of America’s first radio foreign correspondents. 

He first captivated American audiences, though, with his dramatic eyewitness reports from London during the Nazi blitzes of 1940. With bombs and air-raid sirens sounding in the background, Murrow would intone with his deep, rich voice, "THIS is London . . . it’s a bomber’s moon out tonight."  Very quickly his influence as a journalist began to eclipse that of the print correspondents, not only because he was beating their reports by several hours, but because millions of listeners soon began to empathize with this man whose voice was coming to them in their living rooms from the heart of the action. Later, Murrow provided commentary while flying in an Allied bombing run over Germany, and accompanied U.S. troops as they liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. 

After the War, Murrow became CBS news director, and led CBS into the television age with his weekly news program See It Now (1951-58), covering such stories as the Korean War, human rights in South Africa and the polio vaccine. During these programs, Murrow exuded the same kind of cool, casual image that he had developed on radio, typically with a lit cigarette in hand and a cloud of smoke around him. After spending two episodes exposing the abusive red-baiting methods of Senator Joseph McCarthy with snippets from McCarthy’s own speeches, McCarthy demanded equal time and accused Murrow of spreading "propaganda for communist causes." As it turned out, Murrow gave McCarthy the chance to ruin himself; public opinion turned dramatically against McCarthy after his angry response, and within a year McCarthy had been censured by the Senate. 

In 1954, Murrow had also introduced a celebrity interview show, Person to Person (1954-59) which featured in-depth interviews of such people as Eleanor Roosevelt, Groucho Marx, Marilyn Monroe and Duke Ellington. Advertisers began to pull their support from See It Now in 1955 due to the controversial nature of Murrow’s reports, leading Murrow to launch an attack against the institution of television in a speech to TV and radio news directors.  Arguing that commercial interests were using the medium to "distract, delude, amuse and insulate" viewers. In 1958, CBS cancelled See It Now, but Murrow continued to do occasional news documentaries, such as his highly-acclaimed report on the conditions of migrant workers, "Harvest of Shame" (1960). 

In 1961, Murrow left CBS to accept an appointment by John Kennedy as head of the U.S. Information Agency, which had as its mission informing the world about American culture and democratic principles; he served there until 1964. George Clooney’s film about the Joe McCarthy feud, Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), named for Murrow’s sign-off slogan and starring David Strathairn as Murrow, is highly recommended.

"It has always seemed to me the real art in this business is not so much moving information or guidance or policy five or ten thousand miles. That is an electronic problem. The real art is to move it the last three feet in face-to-face conversation." -- Edward R. Murrow. 

Takes a Licking, Keeps on Ticking

Timex watch pitchman and pioneer TV news broadcaster John Cameron Swayze was born on this day in 1906 in Wichita, Kansas.

"It takes a licking and keeps on ticking" is what the affable announcer was remembered for, but early TV viewers were more accustomed to hearing him say, "Ladies and gentlemen, and a good evening to you" as host the first nightly news program, Camel News Caravan on NBC (1948-56). Swayze read the news during a 15-minute broadcast, sponsored by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, in what was little more than a TV picture of a radio news program. Lacking the technology to present film or taped segments, Swayze would simply narrate from notes on paper, with a lit cigarette in an ashtray visible on his desk at the instruction of the sponsor.

In 1956, NBC shed the cigarette company sponsorship (at least in name) and hired Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, recently successful as commentators on televised coverage of the 1956 Democratic and Republican conventions, to replace Swayze.

Giving a tobacco company the "naming rights" to a network news program seems preposterous by today's standards, but in the early days of television, the "news" was mainly concerned with highly visible affairs of state (TV had not yet learned how to rake muck, or wallow in it), and health concerns about cigarettes had not yet entered pop consciousness. The relationship between TV news and big tobacco has remained respectful, however, notably forcing 60 Minutes host Mike Wallace to kill, at least temporarily, the broadcast of an interview with former tobacco research exec Jeffrey Wigand about industry knowledge of the addictive properties of nicotine in 1994.

After being replaced on NBC, Swayze moved to ABC to anchor its evening news broadcast for a year in 1957 before becoming the on-air spokesman for Timex for 20 years. Swayze died on August 15, 1995 in Sarasota, Florida.

Katzenjammers

Rudolph Dirks was born on this day in 1877 in Heinde, Schleswig-Holstein. He died on April 2, 1968 in New York City.

Until the introduction of rookie cartoonist Rudy Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids in December 1897 in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, newspaper comics were largely one-picture jokes with an ever-changing cast of stock characters. Inspired by Wilhelm Busch’s sequential-picture storybook, Max und Moritz (1865), Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids ("katzenjammer" literally meaning "howling of cats," German slang for hangover) portrayed a regular cast of characters (something only tried before in fits and starts, notably in Outcault’s The Yellow Kid), with action progressing through sequential panels (with or without well-placed dialogue "balloons") to tell a tale, not just a joke. As Dirks’ "comic strips" told tales about the Kids (a pair of mischievous German children, Hans and Fritz, who incessantly played pranks on their Mama Katzenjammer, or later, on the old Captain and his pal the Inspector) on a daily basis, Hearst and his rival newspaper publishers realized that comic strips could be a great promotional tool, even more compelling than the use of recurring characters in a one-frame slice-of-life vignette as Outcault had been doing, as readers would buy the paper to see the Kids in their next mini-adventure.

With a compelling economic reason behind it, Dirks’ comic strip form became the industry standard, inspiring a million imitators. In addition to the basic outline conventions of the comic strip, Dirks was the originator of a number of detail elements which would become instantly understandable comic strip cliches, including sweat beads to indicate exertion, motion lines, and stars to indicate pain.

In 1912, Dirks left Hearst and joined Pulitzer’s World, setting off litigation over the rights to the Katzenjammer Kids which concluded with the ridiculous result of Hearst retaining the name of the strip, and Dirks retaining the likenesses and the names of Hans and Fritz; Harold Knerr lovingly took over the Katzenjammers for Hearst, while Dirks continued to draw Hans and Fritz (later as The Captain and the Kids), the two strips running in parallel for decades, oddly playing off each other’s character developments. The Katzenjammers survived for nearly 100 years, while Dirks drew The Captain and the Kids on and off into the 1950s, when he passed it on to his son John; the strip was discontinued in 1979.

Outside of his newspaper work, Dirks was also a serious artist who established a painter’s colony at Ogunquit, Maine.

The Yellow Kid

Richard F. Outcault was born on this day in 1863 in Lancaster, Ohio.

Originally a painter employed by the Hall Safe & Lock Co. in Cincinnati to paint pastoral scenes on the front of bank safes, Outcault got his big break as a newspaper illustrator freelancing for Electrical World magazine at the 1888 Centennial Exposition. His sketches of an Edison electric light display sufficiently impressed the Franklin Institute to hire Outcault to move to West Orange, New Jersey to work on illustrations for a project on Edison’s life and work. He once startled Edison in his lab late one night when the old inventor was testing his phonograph by singing opera; in the darkness and confusion Outcault whacked the singer with a ruler, thus beginning a lifelong friendship.

He traveled to Paris with Edison in 1889, and on his return became a regular contributor of humorous comics to magazines and newspapers, dwelling on subjects and situations among the urban poor, his single frame comics swarming with motley groupings of kids, dogs and goats in the New York slums. His series called Hogan’s Alley, featuring a little bald, jug-eared, barefoot kid in a soiled nightshirt, became a fixture in the funny pages of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1895, and it became a sensation among World readers.

With the popularity of the series, the World began to print Outcault’s cartoons in color on Sundays, and the little kid in the nightshirt (an Irish lad, not an Asian as is generally assumed, named "Mickey Dugan" by his creator), suddenly became a star, nicknamed the "Yellow Kid" for the color ultimately chosen for his nightshirt. So huge was the Yellow Kid’s popularity, that there were Yellow Kid cigarettes, Yellow Kid crackers, and even a Yellow Kid musical on Broadway. The popularity of Outcault’s street urchin spread across the country as newspapers imitated the World’s Sunday color cartoon supplements.

At the height of Outcault’s popularity, William Randolph Hearst lured him away from Pulitzer to the New York Journal with an outrageous salary increase, giving critics a handy moniker for Hearst’s vulgar, predatory tactics -- "Yellow Journalism." Thereafter, Hearst had a hand in directing the evolution of the Yellow Kid, including sending the Dugans on a ‘round-the-world trip in a highly publicized series of episodes.

By 1898, however, the Kid had become outdated; Outcault returned to the World for awhile and continued the series, but he eventually moved on, creating the Buster Brown comic for the New York Herald, featuring a mischievous boy in a little Lord Fauntleroy suit and his scrappy little dog named Tige.

Although he was not the father of the comic strip form as some have claimed, it would be accurate to say that he was the father of the Sunday funnies, being the artist at the center of the newspapers’ adoption of that tradition. Outcault died on September 25, 1928 in Flushing, New York.

The Howard Hughes Hoax

On December 7, 1971, McGraw-Hill Book Co. announced that "The Autobiography of Howard Hughes," compiled by Clifford Irving based on over 100 hours of secret interviews with billionaire Hughes (which Irving claimed took place in park cars and hotel rooms in Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas and other exotic locales), would soon be published; Life magazine simultaneously announced that it had purchased the rights to excerpt the book beginning in early 1972.

Irving (born on this day in 1930 in New York City), a former Middle East correspondent for NBC-TV and a freelance writer and novelist, was previously best known for his non-fiction book, Fake!, about the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory, and had no particular credentials to have been selected as Hughes' ghost-writer. Nevertheless, when he came to McGraw-Hill with what purported to be an unfinished manuscript with Hughes' margin notes, McGraw-Hill was ecstatic -- finally, the elusive, eccentric tycoon Hughes would be breaking his silence in print.

However, shortly after McGraw-Hill's announcement, the Hughes organization disavowed the announcement and Irving's manuscript, vowing to halt the book's publication. The publishers stood by Irving; spokesmen for Life's corporate owner, Time, Inc., said "We've checked this thing out. We have proof," and that Irving "would have to be a near genius of a writer" for the manuscript to have been a hoax.

Hughes' publicist, William R. Hanna, arranged an unusual press conference to disavow the manuscript: seven reporters, all chosen for their personal connections with Hughes prior to his self-imposed isolation, were invited to interview Hughes over a speaker phone as TV news cameras recorded the event. A disembodied voice fielded "test" questions from the journalists over the phone in order the confirm his identity as Hughes, and then proceeded to deny any involvement with Irving. "This must go down in history," said the voice, "I don't remember any script as wild or as stretching the imagination as this yarn turned out to be . . . I don't know Irving. I never saw him. I never even heard of him until a matter of days ago when this thing first came to my attention." The journalists concluded that the voice did indeed belong to Hughes.

Meanwhile, Irving began to crumble as government investigators closed in: Irving confessed that the manuscript was of his own authorship, and that he and his wife Edith had taken checks from McGraw-Hill for $650,000 made out to "H.R. Hughes" and deposited them in Swiss bank accounts under the name "Helga R. Hughes." A Danish pop singer, Nina Van Pallandt, testified that she was with Irving constantly during his trips to Mexico, and that it would have been impossible for Irving to have met Hughes at the times he claimed.

The manuscript itself, written in a voice which fooled McGraw-Hill as authentically Hughes', was an amalgamation of old press clippings, well-known anecdotes and appropriations from an unpublished manuscript by Hughes' former aide, Noah Dietrich, which Irving had obtained surreptitiously through a mutual friend. Irving, his wife and his researcher Richard Suskind pleaded guilty to grand larceny; Irving served 16 months of a 2-1/2 year sentence, and returned to writing mystery novels thereafter.

For his own part, Irving claims he never really intended any criminal behavior, just a great gag-- he banked on Hughes never emerging to repudiate the work (due to illness or otherwise), and that McGraw-Hill would have made good money on a well-written book which would have given greater stature to Hughes as a wise and heroic man.

Lasse Halstrom has directed a film based on Irving's account of the matter, called The Hoax, which is scheduled for release in the U.S. in April next year, starring Richard Gere as Irving.

"When Hughes finally repudiated the book the way he did, at that press conference, with all those reporters, I thought, 'How could you do that to me, Howard?'" -- C. Irving.

When Reporters Knew How to Write

"I remember watching the CBS Morning News one day thirty-two years ago and hearing Hughes Rudd refer to something that had happened during what the Pentagon had described as a 'routine B-52 raid.' At the end of the item, Rudd looked up and said, 'There is nothing routine about a B-52 raid. From a mile away it looks like the end of the world; if you happen to be any closer than a mile away, it is the end of the world.' I knew even then that I would never, ever forget that moment nor how perfectly it illustrated the power of effective use of our language." -- "Reiser," Sept. 16, 2005, on Banned for Life.

Hughes Rudd was born on this day in 1921.

Rudd was best known as the anchorman of the CBS Morning News (1973-77; co-anchor with Sally Quinn, 1973-4). Prior to that, Rudd served as a foreign correspondent for CBS News, including stints in Berlin, Bonn and Moscow, during the 1950s and 60s. Regarding his TV presence, columnist Brooks Peterson recalled, "In addition to being a superlative journalist, Rudd had another quality that especially endeared him to legions of hollow-eyed non-morning-persons: Rumpled, a little grouchy, and defiantly un-chipper, he looked and sounded every bit as crabby about having to be up at such an hour as the rest of us."

A talented storyteller, Rudd's 1966 book, My Escape from the CIA (And Other Improbable Events), was praised by none other than Thomas Pynchon, who wrote: "Without copping out behind idle metaphors or irrelevant plot devices, Mr. Rudd has succeeded in telling, with all his reporter's love of accuracy, and mastery of detail, and irony, and grace, and sometimes terrifying precision, exactly what the hell having to be an American, now, during the years of total war, epidemic anxiety and mass communications whose promise has been corrupted, is really about; where it's really at."

Given Rudd's "reporter's reporter" misgivings about the modern media, it is perhaps a little surprising that he would be invited to anchor the CBS Morning News; it has been suggested that he got the job by being a good drinking buddy to William Paley. After leaving CBS in 1979, he worked as a correspondent for ABC's World News Tonight until retiring to France in 1986. He died on October 13, 1992 in Toulouse, France.

Think Pink!

Fashion editor and arbiter Diana Vreeland was born on this day in 1903 in Paris. As fashion editor and later editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar (1936-62) and editor of Vogue (1963-71), Vreeland was for many years a most forceful, charismatic, flamboyant and keeningly witty author of the last word on contemporary fashion and design.

Beginning with her "Why Don't You . . .?" columns in the 1930s, she drew dynamically upon images from a variety of exotic and old world sources -- from bullfighting to dance to gypsies to equestrians -- to juxtapose and astonish in the service of creating sophisticated image fantasies for a sophisticated audience of society dames, New York intellectuals and Broadway chorines. As Richard Avedon observed, "Vreeland invented the fashion editor. Before, it was society ladies who put hats on other society ladies."

Her observational bon-mots were legendary: "Pink," according to Vreeland, "is the navy blue of India"; and blue jeans, in her opinion, were "the most beautiful things since the gondola." But the wacky glibness of her commentary sometimes overshadowed the deliberateness of her visual sensitivities and propensities. Delighting in contrast, she sought in the visible world around her a balance between the refinement that had long been a hallmark of upper-class fashion as an indiom, with a sense of wildness and lively exploration, inviting cultural pluralism into women's wardrobes -- enticing smart women to wear "bright yellow shantung pyjamas," or dark red Louis XIV pumps "with a bright red handkerchief printed with wall-paper roses," or "little striped boleros trimmed with gold beadings and fringes," or an Italian driver's coat, or black astrakhan booties, or "a black wool skirt split to the knees, revealing a flask of [splendorous Hindu] parlor-pink pants" -- as a way to liberate and inspire.

Her expansive approach was easily parodied, and she was lampooned by Kay Thompson in Funny Face (1956, with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire), as the fashion editor who tells her followers to "Think pink!"

She died on August 22, 1989.

"She's a genius but she's the kind of genius that very few people will ever recognize because you have to have genius yourself to recognize it. Otherwise you just think she's a rather foolish woman." -- Truman Capote.

Hemingway

Here was a man with giant mandibles, biting great chunks out of the first half of the 20th century everywhere he went (and he did go almost everywhere) and chewing up forests-worth of newsprint with his gargantuan appetite for self-promotion. Despite being filled with noisy boxing matches, bullfights, safaris, deep-sea fishing jaunts, love affairs, bar binges and the occasional war, Hemingway's life might not be the sort that should have survived in legend -- there were so many contemporary "sportsmen" with disposable incomes competing for immortality in seeming worship of Teddy Roosevelt's setting the bar for manhood at the turn of the century -- but the manner of Hemingway's self-promotion set him apart. Populating his fiction with thinly-disguised autobiographical portraits and fantasies, he is now considered to be one of the greatest writers in American English.

Yet, perhaps for his chutzpah and his increasingly unpopular machismo, he has been and continues to be maligned by some within the literary establishment for his supposedly guttural, terse writing style -- an unfair assessment of what is often lyrical, understated and rhythmic writing. Hemingway made no bones about acknowledging his debt to journalism, calling his style "cablese," a variation of the prose written by foreign correspondents in transatlantic cables to their home papers: literate, if sometimes staccato, the overall effect being the result of polish rather than decorative elaboration, his aim being to imbue each word with its own equal weight within finely balanced sentences. The Annual "Bad Hemingway" contest notwithstanding, it is very difficult to imitate his style. It is actually much easier to write "bad Faulkner." I do it all the time.

Born on this day in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway was the son of a physician. After high school he moved to Kansas City and briefly worked as a reporter on the Star, learning the writing lessons from the Star style guide which would become his artistic credo: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English, not forgetting to strive for smoothness. Be positive, not negative." Kept out of the Army due to bad eyesight, he apparently could not be kept from driving ambulances in World War I, and was seriously wounded at 18, dubbed by the newspapers as the first American casualty in Italy. His experiences recuperating in an Army hospital in Milan , and his affair with an American nurse, formed the basis of his later novel, A Farewell to Arms, 1929.

He returned to the U.S. as a minor celebrity with a talent for storytelling, and soon caught on as a European correspondent with the Toronto Star. He plunged headlong into the expatriate community of writers and artists swirling and posing around Paris, befriending some of them, including Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. With their encouragement, in 1923 he published his first collection of short stories, featuring one of his many alter egos, "Nick Adams," followed by two novels in quick succession: The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises (both 1926). The Sun Also Rises made him America's star novelist abroad, yet one critic scoffed that it was one of the "filthiest books of the year."

Hemingway's preoccupation with Spain -- particularly with bullfighting -- was revealed in Death in the Afternoon (1932), but Spain would become more than just a canvas for him. His return to reporting, coincident with the publication of an adventure novel about political commitment, To Have and Have Not (1937), led him to campaign in sympathy with the Loyalists against Francisco Franco and the fascists during the Spanish civil war: he raised money for them and tirelessly publicized their cause with newspaper reports, a play (The Fifth Column, 1938) and the most popular of his novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He covered World War II, and settled in Cuba after the War, swimming and fishing and drinking, and writing less frequently.

In 1952, he published The Old Man and the Sea, the last significant piece he would release in his lifetime, and for it he won the Pulitzer Prize. Two years later, while hunting in Africa, he was severely injured during the crashes of not only his own chartered plane but the plane which came to rescue him, and thereafter suffered from severe headaches and decreasing mobility. A lifetime of other accidents (he seemed to be prone to them), heavy drinking and tough living had also taken its toll on him, leaving him gloomy and increasingly banished from the kind of life he preferred to live. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but was too ill and injured to attend the ceremony. His exile from his beloved Cuba after Fidel Castro's revolution played itself out in Cold War politics between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in 1960 was also a bitter disappointment. He was suffering from extreme depression and had made two suicide threats before, when on July 2, 1961, Hemingway shot himself in the forehead with a shotgun in his home in Ketchum, Idaho.

Since his death, several books have been patched together from his notebooks, including a memoir of Paris during the 1920s (A Moveable Feast, published in 1964) and the novel The Garden of Eden (1986). There have, of course, been numerous films based on his works, perhaps the best among them (although not the most faithful to their sources necessarily) being Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not (1944, with Bogart and Bacall) and The Killers (1946, with Burt Lancaster). Understanding that his life had threatened to overshadow his work, Hemingway wrote in 1950: "I want to run as a writer; not as a man who had been to the wars; nor as a bar room fighter; nor a shooter; nor a horseplayer; nor a drinker. I would like to be a straight writer and be judged as such."

The Devil's Lexicographer

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

Ambrose Bierce -- misanthrope, hack journalist, critic and the devil's lexicographer (as author of The Devil's Dictionary, 1881-1906) -- was born on this day in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio.

He disappeared in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. He was last heard from in December 1913 in Chihuahua, where he was covering Pancho Villa and his army. In one of his last letters, the 71-year old Bierce wrote: "Good-by — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia."

Put One Foot in Front of the Other, and Step Off the Edge

Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post (1969-79) and chairman of the Washington Post Company (1973-91), was born on this day in 1917 in New York City.

After she left her job as a reporter with the Washington Post in 1945, Katherine Graham probably had no reason to believe that she would be anything other than a Washington hostess, mother and housewife. Her father, Eugene Meyer, had bought the Washington Post in 1933, and Katherine took a job there at age 20. Shortly thereafter, however, Katherine married Philip Graham, and left the Post to raise their family. Philip bought out Katherine's father and proceeded to expand the company, buying Newsweek and the Washington Times-Herald.

Philip Graham suffered from manic depression, however, and in 1963, he committed suicide, leaving Katherine in control of the Washington Post. In her memoirs, published in 1997 (for which she won a Pulitzer Prize), Graham wrote: "I had very little idea of what I was supposed to be doing, so I set out to learn. What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and step off the edge."

During the 1960s and 70s, the Post became known for its tough investigative reporting under Graham's leadership, as she brought on Ben Bradlee as editor-in-chief; published the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg, in 1971, against the advice of attorneys; and pressed the polices that resulted in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's reports on the Watergate scandal, and ultimately in the resignation of President Nixon -- despite the fact that at the time the Nixon administration was threatening to pull the FCC licenses for her TV stations in Florida. When Carl Bernstein called to inform John Mitchell, Nixon's campaign chair and former Attorney General, that the Post would be printing an article linking him to the fund which paid for the Watergate burglary, it was perhaps a measure of Graham's personal power and charisma within the corridors of power in Washington when Mitchell testily responded "Katie Graham's gonna get her t*t caught in a big fat wringer if that's ever published." Mitchell was later convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice and perjury, and served 19 months of a 2-1/2-to-8 year prison sentence in a minimum-security federal prison in Alabama.

Not only did Graham help to make the Washington Post an internationally respected newspaper, but by the mid-1970s she was being hailed as the most influential woman in the U.S. When she retired as CEO of the Washington Post in 1991, she was one of only 2 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. She died on July 17, 2001 in Boise, Idaho, from head injuries after a fall on a sidewalk while attending a conference.

Hearst

"I have never known a person to throw wealth around in such a dégagé manner as did Hearst. Rockefeller felt the moral burden of it, Pierpont Morgan was imbued with the power of it, but Hearst spent millions nonchalantly as though it were weekly pocket money." -- Charlie Chaplin.

In the half-century since his death, William Randolph Hearst has become almost indistinguishable in the public memory from "Charles Foster Kane," the protagonist of Orson Welles' classic film Citizen Kane (1941). Kane was based on Hearst, but Kane was a cartoon -- a wondrous and compelling cartoon, but a cartoon nonetheless. Hearst himself was one of the great showmen of the century, much more shrewd and self-conscious than Welles' monstrous child-man, a P.T. Barnum who found his outlet in newspapers, media and politics (the latter being only a stone's throw from Tom Thumb and the Cardiff giant, after all).

Born on this day in 1863 in San Francisco, the son of mining magnate George Hearst (who later became a U.S. senator), William Randolph Hearst attended Harvard where he concentrated on improving the financial condition of the Lampoon (Harvard's satirical rag); he was suspended for staging a too-boisterous celebration of President Cleveland's victory in 1884, and thrown out for a practical joke involving the delivery of chamber pots to professors.

After an apprenticeship with Joseph Pulitzer, Hearst persuaded his father to give him control of a Democratic newspaper which the elder Hearst operated at a loss, the San Francisco Examiner. Here Hearst employed the turn-around tactics which would mark his publishing style throughout his career: he paid high prices for writing and administrative talent, and spared no opportunity for getting attention, valuing cheap emotional appeal (even faking the news in the service of his slant) over balance and accuracy. In his hands, the Examiner became the leading paper in San Francisco, making a profit despite high overhead.

It was a natural next step for Hearst to expand to meet Pulitzer's New York World in head-to-head competition in 1895, raiding the World for its star cartoonist R.F. Outcault (creator of the "Yellow Kid") and continuing his shrill style of "yellow journalism," targeting the vast immigrant masses for his readership with stands against corporate exploitation and a presentation-style best described as "dumbing-down." He capitalized on his success with new newspapers around the country as well as magazines (Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Harper's), and eventually he even entered radio and motion pictures to build the first modern diversified media empire.

It is generally agreed that Hearst precipitated American involvement in the Cuban revolt against Spain by sending correspondents to Cuba to trump up news of Spanish atrocities. When Hearst artist Frederick Remington complained that the situation was quiet, Hearst purportedly answered, "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Due in large part to the pressure brought by Hearst's papers and his gigantic readership (1.25 million copies sold per day in New York alone), Republican president McKinley reluctantly declared war against Spain in April 1898.

Feeling his political oats, Hearst bandied his own name as a possible Democratic vice-presidential nominee with reform-minded principles in 1900, but within a year he was being branded as a traitor. Shortly after the assassination of Kentucky governor William Goebel, Hearst published an editorial by Ambrose Bierce which caustically prophesied that the assassin's bullet was "speeding here to stretch McKinley's bier." After McKinley's own assassination in September 1901, Hearst became a target of hatred for the editorial, and he was burned in effigy around the country. Surprisingly, he survived the incident to be elected to 2 unremarkable terms in Congress from Manhattan, and to make a nearly successful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904; he was beaten by the nonentity Alton J. Parker, the Democrats perhaps having had an overreaction against Hearst's notoriety. Hearst then nearly beat George McClellan for mayor of New York, and lost the New York governorship to Charles E. Hughes by less than 600,000 votes. He ran for mayor of New York one last time in 1909, placed 3rd, and relegated himself to the role of kingmaker and molder of public opinion.

His mildly pro-German views during World War I, however, were unpopular, and it became increasingly clear that Hearst's ability to start and stop wars single-handedly was no longer what it used to be. He still wielded tremendous influence over public perceptions, however, helping to foment anti-immigrant and increasingly anti-union sentiment throughout the 1920s.

Hearst's private attentions shifted away from New York back to California in 1917 coincident with the beginning of his long-term, open extramarital relationship with actress Marion Davies (despite the fact that he was still married to his wife, a former showgirl), whose career Hearst handled with Svengali-like control and enthusiasm, mobilizing his media resources to make her a star of sorts. With the construction of his elaborate estate at San Simeon (known as "Hearst's Castle"), he and Davies became the reigning hosts to the Hollywood elite, everyone from Chaplin to Pickford to Elinor Glyn to John Gilbert.

He had a hand in securing Franklin Roosevelt's nomination for president in 1932, but turned against Roosevelt as Hearst's own politics became ever-more reactionary and protective of his own millions. His erratic and arbitrary management tactics, along with his liberal personal and corporate spending habits, threatened to destroy his empire, and after pulling back a public bond offering due to charges of private use of company funds, Hearst turned the company over to a receiver in 1937 with the condition that he would maintain some measure of editorial control. Downsizing prepared the Hearst empire for the post-War boom, to the point that by the time Hearst died (on August 14, 1951 in Beverly Hills, California), Hearst managed to regain economic control over the empire and left an estate of $59.5 million. Today, the Hearst Corporation is still a large media conglomerate.

Baxter's Choo-Choo

Baxter Ward -- TV newsman and Los Angeles County supervisor from 1972 to 1980 -- was born on this day in 1919 in Superior, Wisconsin.

A swaggering, silver-throated anchorman and news director at KHJ, KCOP and KABC-TV in Los Angeles, Ward ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Los Angeles against Mad Sam Yorty in 1969, but ultimately won election as a supervisor representing the Santa Clarita area in 1972. He became a vocal supporter of a $7-billion light rail system in Los Angeles. To diffuse the issue, Ward's fellow supervisors approved the $2-million purchase of an old train for refurbishing as a commuter train, which came to be derisively known as "Baxter's Choo-Choo."

The hopeless concentrations of cars on Southern California highways and carbon monoxide in Southern California skies at the end of the 20th century were nightmares-come-true, as predicted by Ward in the 1970s. By 1987, traffic saturations had forced the County to move forward on an $877 million, 22-mile light rail system, the Blue Line, which finally opened in 1990. By 2004, the Los Angeles County MTA was operating 73 miles of light rail public transportation services, at an overall construction and operating cost of $3.2 billion.

Nevertheless, Southern California remains a car culture. Worse yet, the 2001 Long Range Transportation Plan for Los Angeles County observes that in the next 25 years, the population of Los Angeles County is expected to increase by between 2.7 and 3.5 million people, increasing the time spent in daily trips on Los Angeles County streets and freeways by 30 percent. The Plan also recognizes that $94.8 billion that was already committed toward transportation projects in Los Angeles County through 2025 was not enough to solve the future capacity needs, and that even the unfunded projects proposed in the Plan will result in peak highway speeds of less than 20 miles per hour.

Ward passed away in 2002, having retired to the Seattle area -- but you can bet that if he were still around LA today, on TV or in the County chambers, he wouldn't be missing any opportunities to remind Los Angelenos to face up to worsening traffic and air quality conditions amid explosive population growth, and that putting off the spending now only makes it worse later.

Good Night, Good Luck -- and What’s Stephen Colbert Up To, Anyway?

George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck reminds us that some of the best movies come from short stories rather than novels. Not that an actual short story was actually the inspiration of this film about CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow’s courageous battle against the witch-hunting tactics of Senator Joe McCarthy -- but the historical incidents which form the basis of Clooney’s little tale are far better suited to short-story treatment rather than being decked out in the trappings of an epic.

Writer/director Clooney (who also plays Fred Friendly, Murrow’s producer and later the sage convener of some lively and provocative televised seminars on journalism ethics) and co-writer Grant Heslov (who plays staffer Don Hewitt, later 60 Minutes’ producer) center most of the action of the film within the walls of one building, CBS’ Madison Avenue headquarters, over a span of what ultimately shakes out as several weeks during 1953 and 1954. The compressed space and schedule of storytelling within the film, of course, enhance the atmosphere of terror that must have pervaded the hallways of CBS, like many other corridors in America, during the height of McCarthy’s influence – the tension wafts through each pressure-cooked scene like the omnipresent cigarette smoke of each of the film's characters.

Yet the film still has the feel of an old newshound’s reminiscence over the aforementioned cigarettes and a few glasses of scotch – something which emerges from the depiction of the courtly camaraderie among the people in Murrow’s newsroom, and also from Dianne Reeves’ beautiful soundchecks (in which she sings such tunes as “Who’s Minding the Store,” “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” and “You’re Driving Me Crazy”), coming at natural resting spots along the way, commenting on the newsroom behind-the-scenes action with a kind of gleeful yet un-judgmental detachment, not unlike the way real New York reporters of yore might have commented on Washington behind-the-scenes action. She functions, in a way, as the reporter on the reporters.

The performances handily sell Clooney’s vision of the piece – David Strathairn’s Murrow is note for note correct, as dry and determined and alone as one would expect, and Ray Wise, as the pathetic news anchor Don Hollenbeck, manages to embody the pervading fear in his few scenes, smiling so hard it hurts behind eyes peeled back with gulping dread. The only misfire in the cast seems to have come in the form of documentary footage of Joe McCarthy – who, as one of my friends observes, is “just too over-the-top to be believable.”

A number of reviewers have observed that Good Night, and Good Luck’s depiction of the goings-on of a real TV newsroom is unrivalled, although I would submit that while its depiction of a newsroom that produces a show with the intelligence and integrity of Edward R. Murrow’s programs is spot-on, such activity in actuality bears little resemblance to what goes on in today’s TV newsrooms. In fact, it is much more likely that the activity in today’s newsrooms is better suited to turn out the kind of broadcast that Stephen Colbert parodies in his new 4-nights-a-week program, The Colbert Report, on Comedy Central.

While Jon Stewart’s Daily Show (of which Colbert is an alum) parodies a newscast, Colbert is taking on the Alpha-male, self-righteous commentators that take up space between news breaks on cable news networks. But mostly, he’s taking on Bill O’Reilly -- because, let’s face it, O’Reilly’s the ripest of the bunch.

Colbert is a deft and clever writer, and as a performer, he manages to carry off his portrayal of “Stephen Colbert, host” without the slightest wink to his true identity. It’s a fearless approach, a real high-wire act, that makes his show much more akin to the productions of Ali G than of Jon Stewart – and while critics seem to love what’s going on, as quickly as they give praise they wonder if it all can be sustained.

Jon Stewart’s success came as a complete surprise to those who watched him fill the shoes of The Daily Show’s founding “anchor,” Craig Kilborn. In fact, however, it was Kilborn’s stridently detached hipness – all sarcasm, without the mitigating goofiness of Kilborn’s progenitor, David Letterman – that shut down Kilborn after he left The Daily Show. Stewart showed up Kilborn by being a genuinely good-natured human being and by permitting himself to be humiliated from time to time. He is also, unexpectedly to those of us who had our doubts (recalling his ill-fated tenure at MTV), a consummate performer of the old school – a superior mimic, and a take-artist to out-Benny Jack Benny.

So far, Colbert’s real strength comes as an interviewer. In a recent segment with CNN’s Lou Dobbs, Colbert ran roughshod over Dobbs’ pet issues – immigration and outsourcing – by suggesting to him that the U.S. should just outsource all those jobs that those illegals keep coming here for. Even Dobbs had to laugh. Colbert’s schtick -- which combines a singleness of satiric purpose with a disarming (though non-winking) playfulness -- does require otherwise serious people to play along, but when it happens, it is as satisfying as anything on TV these days.

I do not worry so much about Colbert’s ability to keep his on-screen characterization afloat over the long term. I worry more about the defensive humorlessness of those he would hope to book for his show. While Stephen Colbert is having as much fun as anyone should be allowed to have on TV, I can imagine that his booking agent is walking around looking like Ray Wise as Don Hollenbeck in Good Night, and Good News – dodging the post-McCarthyite terror and precious image management that pervades American political TV today.

Exclusive Interview with Iraqi President

My friend, FNC's man in Baghdad Gordon Robison, reports about his exclusive interview with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani (on his Mideast Analysis site and on the Fox News site). He and another Fox News representative were invited to dine with Talabani, his chief of staff and two Iraqi cabinet ministers at the end of the Ramadan fast. As reported by Robison, Talabani expressed his frustration with U.S. forces on turning security responsibilities over to the Iraqi police, and predicted that the U.S. would be required to maintain a presence in Iraq for the long term, to assist Iraq in dealing with potential threats from Syria, Iran and perhaps Turkey.

Robison did live spots on FNC about the interview at 5 and 7pm EST on Sunday.

Hotel Palestine Photos

Gordon Robison (see my previous post, "'Too Close for Comfort'") has posted photos of the aftermath of the Hotel Palestine bombing.

'Too Close For Comfort'

My good friend Gordon Robison, currently Baghdad bureau chief for Fox News, gives his account of today's deadly bombing of the Palestine Hotel, where international journalists huddle in Baghdad these days -- see "Too Close for Comfort" on Gordon's blog, Mideast Analysis.

I spoke to him this evening by phone, and he reports that all of his people are safe and sound, though quite shaken. A glass of scotch comes in handy at times like these.

See also TVNewser: FNC's Baghdad Bureau Chief. . ..