In his heyday, William Randolph Hearst controlled 28 newspapers—and used them all to spew a furious isolationism ahead of the U.S.’s entry into W.W. II.

Mixed Media

By Richard M. Cohen

The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn S. Olmsted

On December 11, 1941, four days after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Joseph Medill Patterson went to see President Roosevelt at the White House. Appropriately enough, it was high noon—and F.D.R. was ready for a showdown.

Patterson was the owner of the New York Daily News, the largest-circulating newspaper in the country (4.5 million on Sundays), which he had devoted to increasingly rabid attacks on Roosevelt’s foreign policy.