Kathryn S. Olmsted, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0-300-25642-0.
The six news barons are:
- Lord Harold Rothermere (UK).
- Lord Max Beaverbrook (UK).
- William Randolph Hearst (US).
- Robert McCormick (US).
- Joseph and Cissy Patterson (US)
Before television and social media, newspapers were how people got their news. They would even publish multiple daily editions to satisfy demand and keep up with the fast news pace. Keep in mind that newspapers competed also with newsreels and the emerging radio. In fact, Hearst owned a newsreel company. But radio was fairly free at this point, so Americans trusted it more. This allowed FDR to use it well to counter the isolationists and their newspapers.
The book includes an introduction, eleven chapters, and an epilogue.
The book looks at two news barons in Great Britain and four in the United States. These moguls not only did their best to stifle the war effort when war came, but they also planted the seeds of the right wing extremist media machine we have today. A strength of the book is in how it allows readers to see parallels to today. The question is if people will ever heed the lessons. Looking at the current media landscape, the situation is not encouraging.
By the way, the book is not just dry history. There are some juicy bits like Lord Rothermere's involvement with Princess Stephanie Hohenlahe, a likely Nazi spy according to British Intelligence. Rothermere kept her on salary. When he later cut her salary off, she sued, and it gets more intense from there.
The book overall is pretty interesting. The narrative alternates between Great Britain and the United States, and it is well balanced from both sides of the pond. The narrative pace is good. This is a book that you pick up and want to keep reading. For many readers, myself included, this is a part of history not often addressed. It is a history of journalism, but it is also a look at history in the early to mid-20th century.
I really liked this one. The narrative is interesting, and the history is well researched. I found particularly interesting the parallels to today, and that makes it a very good reason to pick this book up.
4 out of 5 stars.
Additional reading notes:
What their newspapers favored, not unlike so much media today:
"These modern newspapers favored spectacle over substance, celebrity over leadership, and polemics over sober debate. The most successful publishers discovered that they could attract readers by highlighting race, nation, and empire-- themes that their advertisers could also support" (3).
Amount of readers at one time:
"Estimating four readers per copy, it is likely that the McCormick/Patterson press reached more than 12 million Americans daily and 20 million on Sundays. Hearst had 30 million readers, and the Mail and the Express together counted about 16 million British readers. As tensions in Europe reached crisis levels in the late 1930s, more than 60 million people in both countries got their news from those isolationist papers" (8).
What the book does:
"This is the first book to analyze how British and American press lords worked together to delay and undermine the Anglo-American alliance against Hitler. A transnational approach, as opposed to a focus on a single nation, reveals common arguments, beliefs, and language in the debate about resisting Nazism. An Anglo-American analysis can help us better understand where 'isolationism' comes from, how the term was used, and what it meant" (8).
It is important to note here, and the book discusses this further, that the barons actively coordinated with each other. They even published each others' editorials in their own newspapers to sway public opinion on both sides of the pond.
A challenge to scholars, and this reinforces something I often tell my students: not everything is online nor digitized. Note that access can often dictate what can be researched or not:
"Scholars have found it challenging to evaluate the coverage of these newspapers because of the difficulty of accessing them. Despite the immense reach of the Hearst press and of the New York Daily News, for example, archivists only recently digitized these papers and added them to major databases. Some important newspapers, such as the Washington Times-Herald, are still available only on microfilm as of early 2021. Thus researchers have, quite understandably, focused more on the digitized Washington Post than the better selling Times-Herald" (13).
And that does not even address that those databases are commercial products that can be prohibitively expensive for libraries and/or archives to provide. So even if it exists digitally, access may or not be available.
And then, there are researcher biases:
"Historians have also tended to dismiss the more popular papers because they were rowdier, angrier, and generally less respectable than their more sedate rivals. Because these publications were overtly anti-intellectual, it's easy to overlook them as key sources of ideas" (13).
Another lesson there may be you ignore certain media at your peril.
Even in the 1930s, folks, conservatives like Hearst, worried about those lefty professors:
"He was particularly worried about left-wing professors who, in his view, spewed hate and had too much power to mold young minds. Almost two decades before Senator Joe McCarthy began his Red hunts, Hearst ordered 'that names, pictures, and activities of disloyal professors and others should be printed continually and commented upon' in his papers" (45).
And you still see that sort of thing today.
Book qualifies for the following 2024 Reading Challenge:
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