The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whyte, Kenneth. The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst. Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2009. 546 pp. $30. No prominent figure in American journalism has been so cursed by pitiless biographers as William Randolph Hearst. Among the most unforgiving of his biographers Ferdinand Lundberg, whose vicious little book, Imperial Hearst, came out in 1936, and WA. Swanberg, whose superficial Citizen Hearst (1961) was for years the best of a bad lot. All that began change in 2000 with publication of The Chief, David Nasaw's admirably even-handed treatment of Hearst. In The Uncrowned King, Kenneth Whyte offers a welcome and well-researched revisionist portrait of young Hearst and his rise national prominence in New York City in the 1890s. Whyte, the editor-in-chief of the Canadian newsweekly Macleans, says his goal in The Uncrowned King was to determine how Hearst was able build, almost overnight, a publishing franchise with more than a million readers in a savvy newspaper city served by seventeen major dailies, some of them owned by the most talented and wealthiest editors the United States has ever seen. And he largely succeeds in what is an engaging, readable, and valuable book. He pokes continually and mostly successfully at conventional wisdom about Hearst: the cartoonish image of an unscrupulous, warmongering ringleader of journalism, who sought mainly boost circulation with bizarre, outlandish, and sensationalized content. Whyte bases his revised assessments on close reading of Hearst's provocative and aggressive flagship, the New York Journal, and of other important newspapers in fin de siecle New York: the World, the Herald, the Sun, and the Times. Taking the time read the newspapers is more than can be said for some of Hearst's earlier biographers and having done so allows him offer valuable context and insight. Far from being shady, squalid, or trivial, he writes, the yellow journals were big, rich businesses run out of towering buildings with elevators, telephones, and electric lights. There seemed no limit their potential size and reach. Young Hearst in New York was brash, innovative, fun-loving, and cutting-edge. Whyte says he effectively set the agenda in 1896-98 for the New York press and America's political class on the thorny question of Cuba, which then was in rebellion against Spain's harsh colonial rule. Spain tried snuff the insurgency through the harsh and heavy-handed policy of reconcentration, in which Cuban non-combatants removed from the countryside deprive the rebels of civilian support. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".