What Happens When Billionaires Control the Media?

While living in a lavish hilltop castle on the California coast, a wildly rich media mogul recruits charismatic foreign dictators as columnists, criticizes one of his own reporters for being too anti-Nazi, and tries to interest America’s president in a scheme to acquire much of Mexico. When not publishing fake and incendiary news stories, he enjoys acquiring beautiful, often looted antiquities and creating a private zoo with lions, kangaroos, monkeys, and an elephant named for a character played by his alcoholic movie-star mistress in a film.

Add in a crypto heist and some gratuitous sexual deviance, and you might have the premise for a (somewhat predictable) streaming series that dramatizes the billionaire-owned media landscape, exploding wealth inequality, and autocracy-curious politics of our age.

In fact, these details are all documented biographical facts from the life of William Randolph Hearst, whose empire of newspapers at its peak in the 1920s reached roughly one in four American families. Hearst successfully provoked a war with Spain, recruited both Hitler and Mussolini to write columns for his papers, and kept a living bestiary of exotic animals at his vast estate on the central California coast, including an elephant named for a character played by his mistress, the movie star Marion Davies. He was an avid collector of ancient artifacts, many of dubious provenance.

Hearst was probably the most successful muddier of the line between fact and fiction in the history of American journalism,; so it’s fitting that many facts about his own life seem like the inventions of novelists. Historian David Nasaw’s definitive 2000 biography The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst reads like a novel, and two actual novels, Aldous Huxley’s 1939 After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Gore Vidal’s 1987 Empire, feature a fictionalized version of Hearst as a major character.

The basic themes of Hearst’s life and the novels that dramatize it remain distressingly relevant. A handful of the superrich still own much of the American media, and many outlets still present a picture of the world based less on truth than on what will please the aging plutocrats who control them. Reckless American intervention in foreign countries is flourishing, though we have not yet fulfilled one long-cherished dream of Hearst’s—to acquire much of Mexico. The hero of Vidal’s novel is straightforwardly based on Hearst, while the wealthy, castle-dwelling Californian in Huxley’s novel bears a more veiled, but still unmistakable, resemblance to him. Huxley’s character is also obsessed with escaping death, a fixation that Hearst did not seem to share, though it’s uncanny how precisely Huxley anticipated the mortality-terror of many billionaires today.

In their very different novels, Huxley and Vidal explore the psychology of a wealthy, powerful man who denies some fundamental reality—that he cannot live forever, that he cannot annex foreign countries. They also examine what happens when much of society begins to share these delusions, and whether we might transcend the egomaniacal fantasies of these rich old men. Both novels reward rereading during our own age of plutocratic media ownership and resurgent imperial folly.

Reckless American intervention in foreign countries is flourishing, though we have not yet fulfilled one long-cherished dream of Hearst’s—to acquire much of Mexico.

Empire’s heroine, a young woman named Caroline Sanford, cheerfully ignores the expectations of polite society by buying a struggling newspaper in Washington D.C. She wants power and to spite her half-brother Blaise, who works for Hearst and is trying to seize her half of their late father’s estate. (The half siblings are inventions, but most of the characters are not, and Vidal, like Hilary Mantel, uses the actual names of historical figures.)

Caroline soon realizes that the surest path to a larger readership is to emulate the newspapers of Hearst, whose “crime and underwear” focus lets him compete successfully with publications such as Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and Adolph Ochs’ New York Times. In one amusing scene, she watches with fascination as Hearst, crawling about the floor of the offices of his New York Journal, maneuvers strips of text and squares of illustration into the layout of the next morning’s news. He moves the drawing of a murdered woman, “idealized to a Madonna-esque purity,” front and center on the first page, while a major address by President McKinley and a statement by the Secretary of  State are relegated to less valuable visual real estate. “‘But is it always murder first?’ Caroline asks. “‘Rape’s better,’” Hearst replies.

It’s one thing to concoct some spicy details in a murder case; it’s another to print groundless accusations of military sabotage and launch America into a war with Spain, as Hearst did in 1898. Blaise tells Caroline that “practically nothing Mr Hearst prints is ever true, including the story about how the Spaniards blew up the Maine.” In Vidal’s telling, the trashy sensationalism of Hearst’s proto-clickbait conceals a tremendous political power. After watching Hearst at work, Caroline thinks that the ultimate power is not “to preside in a white house… but to reinvent the world for everyone by giving them the dreams that you wanted them to dream.”

In true Hearstian style, Caroline lectures an editor at her paper who believes in the quaint notion that newspapers should confine themselves to the truth. On the contrary, she says, beyond a few exceptions where facts are needed, “the rest of what we print is literature, of a kind that is meant to entertain and divert and excite our readers so that they will buy the things our advertisers will want to sell them. So we must be—imaginative.” She cynically reframes fake news as just another genre of imaginative literature, then inverts the usual hierarchy of articles and ads. Few journalists see their work as a way to sell new cars, heartburn pills, and hamburgers. But that, Vidal suggests, is just what it is.

Beyond this general critique, Empire illuminates two specific dreams that the American media promotes. Explaining American culture to his older French lover, Blaise says that it’s possible here to keep the unlucky poor “forever content with stories of the fortunate and their extravagances,” so long as they believe that a few of them might get rich (as did Hearst’s father, who began life as a semi-literate miner before literally striking it rich.) “They could daydream, their imaginations fed by the Journal,” Blaise notes. The second dream is the myth of an infinite frontier, which justifies a global American empire. Blaise, still musing, thinks that, “Although the frontier had ended with the invention of California, the newly acquired Caribbean sea and Pacific Ocean were now American lakes, filled with rich islands and opportunities.” Both elements of Vidal’s media critique—that it glamorizes the rich and defends American empire—remain all too apt.

In some ways, a Hearst newspaper from the early 20th century feels like the swampy chaos of the internet itself. In the Sunday papers, Nasaw writes, “readers were treated to lengthy illustrated stories on dinosaurs, extraterrestrials, or medical cues; several pages on Broadway personalities and shows; short stories and excerpts from the best or most popular current fiction; fully illustrated features on ballet dancers, chorus girls, actresses, and other scantily clad performers.”

At points the historical record is more fantastical than Vidal’s fictional retelling. Without reading Nasaw’s biography, you might struggle to believe that Hearst, eager to gain readers and inflame public feeling against Spain in 1897, ordered one of his reporters to sail to Cuba and help the young and beautiful daughter of a jailed insurgent escape. With bribes and luck, the man somehow succeeded. Vidal covers this briskly but omits the surreal postlude in which Hearst had the young woman dressed like a princess in a long white gown and paraded her through New York City to a rally at Madison Square Garden before a reception with President McKinley at the White House.

Stranger yet, Hearst donated his yacht the Buccaneer, fully armed, to the U.S. Navy. Impatient to see combat himself, he then chartered a steamer and sailed into Cuban waters with friends, editors, reporters, chorus girls, cooks, and enough ice that he could resupply the American Military Hospital in Cuba. In an episode that gives new meaning to the term participant observation journalism, Hearst ignored requests by American marines to stay out of the way and instead boarded a burning Spanish warship to collect souvenirs before racing to shore on a small boat, a revolver in one hand and his notebook in the other, and capturing some Spanish sailors who had fled the burning ships.

Imagine if Jeff Bezos got bored just owning The Washington Post, firing hundreds of writers and squashing the freedom of its opinion section, and decided to join the American forces parachuting into Venezuela or Iran, only to ignore their orders and seize some prisoners on his own. As Vidal has Henry Adams say in a line that is fiction: “truth is bizarre enough for the mere historian.”

*

In 1931, shortly after finishing the novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley was offered a gig as a columnist. “It seems good money for not much work, and of a kind that might be rather interesting,” he wrote. In the next four years, he penned more than 170 pieces for Hearst, covering everything from drugs to entomology to fascism.

His 1939 novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan is a strange and fascinating book. Unlike the brilliantly researched world of Vidal’s Empire, Huxley’s novel is a philosophical satire that dramatizes ideas more than historical events. The target of his satire is not just the wealthy, castle-dwelling Jo Stoyte, clearly modeled on Hearst, but American society writ large, with its trashy consumerism and childish veneration of riches. By the novel’s end, the mark of his satire broadens even further, beyond American culture to the persistent delusions of human consciousness itself.

The book begins as a British scholar named Jeremy Pordage is being chauffeured north along the California coast from Los Angeles to stay with Stoyte. On the drive, the passing billboards become a kind of surreal distillation of American values. CLASSY EATS. MILE HIGH CONES. JESUS SAVES. HAMBURGERS. MALTS SPIRITUAL HEALING AND COLONIC IRRIGATION BUY YOUR DREAM HOME NOW. Huxley’s critique is clear; America mistakes body for spirit, promiscuously confusing the physical with the metaphysical.

In America, even the mountains appear monetary: “Far off, the mountains traced their uninterpretable graph of boom and slump.” Once Pordage arrives at the huge castle—a kind of “stony efflorescence”—there’s some droll humor in his horror at its tacky excess. “He was appalled at the prospect of meeting the person capable of committing such an enormity.”

That person is Stoyte, whose defining characteristic is a burning desire to possess more of everything. An oil rather than media baron in Huxley’s novel, the Hearstian Stoyte wants more money he doesn’t need, more antiquities he does not appreciate (he uses an Etruscan sarcophagus as an umbrella stand), and much more time on earth. Stoyte is ready “to submit to practically anything short of vivisection without anesthetics, provided it offers some hope of keeping him above ground a few years longer.”

In an aquarium of exceptionally long-lived carp, Huxley describes how “a few inches from their staring eyes, a rosary of bubbles streamed ceaselessly up towards the light and all around them the water was spasmodically silver with the dartings of smaller fish. Sunk in their mindless ecstasy, the monsters paid no attention.”

Immortality would also be lost on Stoyte, who rivals the carp in his mindless incapacity to notice anything interesting. Dr. Obispo, a sinister figure attempting to extend Stoyte’s life, has only succeeded in doing so for some baboons, who pass their time fighting, feeding, and fornicating. Made immortal, Huxley suggests, the rich would do the same: live forever only to live like apes.

The cultivated Pordage, whose mind is well-stocked with quotations from Shelley and Goethe, would not spend a longer life acting like a baboon. “‘There’s a lot of books in the British museum,’” Pordage says to Propter, reflecting on how he might use a 300-year lifespan. Yet even if we passed centuries living the life of the mind, Propter argues, we would get bored, and we’d also face a deeper problem: the nature of the mind itself.

Imagine if Jeff Bezos got bored just owning The Washington Post, firing hundreds of writers and squashing the freedom of its opinion section, and decided to join the American forces parachuting into Venezuela or Iran, only to ignore their orders and seize some prisoners on his own.

Huxley might easily have written a simpler novel glorifying intellectuals while mocking Stoyte’s greed and indifference to suffering. Instead, Huxley suggests that all of the characters except Propter are suffering from various delusions. Historians are just “cataloguing bits of fossil evil,” while literature is just a “huge collection of facts about lust and greed…with no coordinating philosophy.” Those campaigning for political and social change are “laboriously deflecting evil from old channels into new and slightly different channels.” Scientists, like Dr Obispo, are all too easily purchased by the rich, who will use their discoveries and inventions foolishly.

The deepest reason for this near-universal futility is that most of us remain imprisoned by the delusions of the ego, suffering from alternating cravings and revulsions. We fail to achieve what Huxley calls “a consciousness liberated from time and appetite.” In Huxley’s view, the human mind, with its endless proliferation of wants and fears, is the original source of fake news: it systematically misleads us about the world and ourselves. Liberation requires a radically different way of being in which the ego is seen as a “fiction, a kind of nightmare, a frantically agitated nothingness capable, when once its frenzy had been quieted, of being filled with God, with a God conceived and experienced as a more than personal consciousness,” as Mr. Propter says in one of many dazzling flights of metaphysics. The desire for immortality is really a desire for liberation from the claustrophobia of our own minds, not a physiological discovery about how to keep our bodies running longer.

Huxley suggests that the only people on whom immortality would not be wasted are those who have already ceased desiring it. This view has the political implication that any revolution must first be internal. Changing the world will change nothing unless human nature itself is radically renovated. As Propter says, “You seem to imagine that people can remain as they are and yet be the inhabitants of a world conspicuously better than the world we live in.”

If we remain as we are, a massively extended human lifespan will just be a much longer nightmare of capitalist accumulation and jingoist fervor. “You’re threatening to prolong our lives, so that we can go on being stimulated, go on desiring possessions, go on waving flags and hating our enemies and being afraid of air attack,” Propter says.

If Huxley is correct, it’s not sufficient to limit the acquisitions of the superrich. Even if we stop them from controlling newspapers, invading countries, amassing art, or seeking physiological immortality, we will still remain imprisoned by that “frantically agitated nothingness” of the ego, which is perhaps the most believable and dangerous fiction of all.

If historians exist in a century, they will easily be able to match the 600 pages of Nasaw’s Hearst biography by chronicling the deranged exploits of figures like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Yet valuable as such books would be, imaginative fiction will always have a singular power to make us truly feel and understand the havoc wreaked on souls and society by the insatiable egos of a few small men.