William Randolph Hearst

John Hearst, with his wife and six children, migrated to America from Ballybay, County Monaghan, Ireland, as part of the Cahans Exodus in 1766.

The family settled in South Carolina.

Their immigration to South Carolina was spurred in part by the colonial government's policy that encouraged the immigration of Irish Protestants, many of Scots origin.

The names "John Hearse" and "John Hearse Jr."

appear on the council records of October 26, 1766, being credited with meriting 400 and 100 acre of land on the Long Canes in what became Abbeville District, based upon 100 acre to heads of household and 50 acre for each dependent of a Protestant immigrant; the "Hearse" spelling of the family name was never used afterward by the family members themselves, nor any family of any size.

Hearst's mother, née Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson, was also of Scots-Irish ancestry; her family came from Galway.

She was appointed as the first woman Regent of University of California, Berkeley, donated funds to establish libraries at several universities, funded many anthropological expeditions, and founded the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.

Hearst attended preparatory school at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire.

William Randolph Hearst Sr. (April 29, 1863 – August 14, 1951) was an American businessman, newspaper publisher, and politician known for developing the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications.

His flamboyant methods of yellow journalism influenced the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human interest stories.

Hearst was born in San Francisco to George Hearst on April 29 1863, a millionaire mining engineer, owner of gold and other mines through his corporation, and his much younger wife Phoebe Apperson Hearst, from a small town in Missouri.

The elder Hearst later entered politics.

He gained admission to Harvard College, and began attending in 1885.

While there, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the A.D. Club, a Harvard Final club, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and the Harvard Lampoon prior to being expelled.

His antics at Harvard ranged from sponsoring massive beer parties on Harvard Square to sending pudding pots used as chamber pots to his professors with their images depicted within the bowls.

He served as a U.S. Senator, first appointed for a brief period in 1886 and was then elected later that year.

Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 with Mitchell Trubitt after being given control of The San Francisco Examiner by his wealthy father, Senator George Hearst.

After moving to New York City, Hearst acquired the New York Journal and fought a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.

Hearst sold papers by printing giant headlines over lurid stories featuring crime, corruption, sex, and innuendos.

Hearst acquired more newspapers and created a chain that numbered nearly 30 papers in major American cities at its peak.

He later expanded to magazines, creating the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world.

Hearst controlled the editorial positions and coverage of political news in all his papers and magazines, and thereby often published his personal views.

He served from 1887 to his death in 1891.

His paternal great-grandfather was John Hearst of Ulster Protestant origin.

Searching for an occupation, in 1887 Hearst took over management of his father's newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, which his father had acquired in 1880 as repayment for a gambling debt.

Giving his paper the motto "Monarch of the Dailies", Hearst acquired the most advanced equipment and the most prominent writers of the time, including Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Jack London, and political cartoonist Homer Davenport.

He sensationalized Spanish atrocities in Cuba while calling for war in 1898 against Spain.

Historians, however, reject his subsequent claims to have started the war with Spain as overly extravagant.

He was twice elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives.

He ran unsuccessfully for President of the United States in 1904, Mayor of New York City in 1905 and 1909, and for Governor of New York in 1906.

During his political career, he espoused views generally associated with the left wing of the Progressive Movement, claiming to speak on behalf of the working class.

After 1918 and the end of World War I, Hearst gradually began adopting more conservative views and started promoting an isolationist foreign policy to avoid any more entanglement in what he regarded as corrupt European affairs.

He was at once a militant nationalist, a staunch anti-communist after the Russian Revolution, and deeply suspicious of the League of Nations and of the British, French, Japanese, and Russians.

Following Hitler's rise to power, Hearst became a supporter of the Nazi Party, ordering his journalists to publish favourable coverage of Nazi Germany, and allowing leading Nazis to publish articles in his newspapers.

Hearst's publication reached a peak circulation of 20 million readers a day in the mid-1930s.

He poorly managed finances and was so deeply in debt during the Great Depression that most of his assets had to be liquidated in the late 1930s.

Hearst managed to keep his newspapers and magazines.

He was a leading supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932–1934, but then broke with FDR and became his most prominent enemy on the right.

His life story was the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, the lead character in Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane (1941).

His Hearst Castle, constructed on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon, has been preserved as a State Historical Monument and is designated as a National Historic Landmark.