The distinguished American journalist AJ Liebling wrote that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”. How such freedom was used, or abused, by six newspaper proprietors in the decade before the second World War is the subject of this book by Kathryn Olmsted, a professor of history at the University of California.
The six were: lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere in Britain, owners of the Daily Express and Daily Mail respectively; William Randolph Hearst, who at his zenith controlled 28 newspapers spread throughout the United States; Robert McCormack of the Chicago Tribune; Joseph Medill Patterson of the New York Daily News; and Eleanor Medill Patterson of the Washington Times-Herald. McCormack and the two Pattersons were grandchildren of Joseph Medill, an early owner of the Chicago Tribune.
Olmsted’s thesis is that these press barons “worked together to pressure their respective governments to dismiss and ignore the fascist threat” in the 1930s. This was to some extent because of their anti-Semitism and/or anti-communism, but essentially their concern was that their countries – Britain and America – should not become entangled in European affairs. They feared challenging European fascism would endanger their formal (British) or informal (American) empires. Even after Pearl Harbour, the four American press barons opposed United States involvement in the war in Europe; they argued that defeating Japan should be America’s priority.
Shaping public opinion
Politicians at that time regarded newspapers as of critical importance in shaping public opinion, a concept more nebulous then than today. While the publications in focus here were – as Olmsted states – “overtly anti-intellectual”, they were by far the most popular newspapers in their respective countries. This gave their proprietors clout in the corridors of power. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic struggled to counteract the “divisive politics and sometimes hateful messages” of these press barons.
Olmsted concludes her book by reminding us, as if reminding were required, that we have the same politics and messages now “in the anti-European headlines of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, in the angry populism of Fox News and Breitbart”. Stanley Baldwin famously accused the press barons of the 1930s of seeking “power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”. Our latter-day media tycoons are guilty of that too.
