William Randolph Hearst

William Randolph Hearst was an American newspaper publisher who built the Hearst Corporation into one of the largest newspaper and media empires in the United States, beginning with his takeover of the San Francisco Examiner in 1887 and expanding into major markets including New York. Hearst's aggressive, sensationalized style of reporting, competing directly with Joseph Pulitzer's newspapers, became closely associated with the term yellow journalism, and his papers' coverage is often cited as having helped inflame American public support for the Spanish-American War in 1898. Hearst's life and outsized public persona were a significant inspiration for Orson Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane, though Hearst himself strongly objected to the association.