What's past is present

A recent re-viewing of Citizen Kane prompted me to pull an old book off the shelf, one that I should have read ages ago: George Seldes' classic 1938 expose of press bias and manipulation, Lords of the Press. In an eye-opening chapter on William Randolph Hearst (available online; see here), Seldes includes a passage pertinent to our own day:

The year 1935 marked the height of the Hearst Red-baiting campaign in the universities. It must be remarked here and now that there is no Red teaching in the schools and colleges of the United States, but the institutions of learning of our country still attempt to give their students a liberal education. It is inconceivable that they should do anything else. No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a Fascist education, as these terms are contradictory. Liberalism and education are one, and all Hearst did was to call liberal education "Red" education.

What has changed since those days? The attacks remain the same, but nowadays we don't have a Seldes bold enough say without apology: "No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a Fascist education, as these terms are contradictory."

Citizen Kane includes a scene in which Kane loses control over many of his assets. This scene reflected a real-life downturn in Hearst's fortunes. Both the film and many biographers ascribe this reversal of fortune to the Great Depression.

But Seldes reminds us of another factor:

From California to New York, labor and liberals, the unions and the universities, notable men including the President and Senators and the head of the Society of Newspaper Editors, hundreds of organizations and thousands of men and women who are the leaders of the intelligent minority, have taken a forthright stand against Hearst. There has been a great boycott of his newspapers, his magazines, his newsreels and his radio stations. There has been repudiation in Congress, in the press, on the platform and from the pulpit.

(Emphasis added by me.)

The specific cause for Hearst's great loss was a brouhaha which arose in 1936, when the notorious press baron "applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to float $22,500,000 in bonds for Hearst Publications and $13,000,000 for Hearst Magazines." A CPA named Bernard Reis took a close look at this application, and did not like what he saw.

[H]e did not like the fact that four Hearst magazines lose money and six dailies made less in 1936 than ten years earlier; he particularly questioned the financial record of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Chicago Evening Examiner; he did not like circulation losses on six newspapers which he suspected were due to the growing boycott.

(Again, my emphasis.)

I remind readers of this "ancient history" to drive home one lesson, a lesson which even Orson Welles neglected to mention: The boycott worked. The mightiest pressfaker of his generation was brought low by organized action.

The mightiest pressfaker of our generation is, of course, Rupert Murdoch. Can the same tactics used against Hearst also work against him?