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51
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
49/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Kathryn S. Olmsted
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Date:
March 22, 2022
As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the airwaves with their isolationist views. Meanwhile in England, Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail extolled Hitler's leadership and Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express insisted that Britain had no interest in defending Hitler's victims on the continent. Kathryn S. Olmsted shows how these media titans worked in concertâincluding sharing editorial pieces and coordinating their responses to eventsâto influence public opinion in a right-wing populist direction, how they echoed fascist and anti-Semitic propaganda, and how they weakened and delayed both Britain's and America's response to Nazi aggression.
What The Reviewers Say
Ms. Olmsted documents how, throughout the 1930s and even into the ’40s, these proprietors, who controlled both the editorial and news content of their papers, consistently and purposefully minimized the Nazi threat and opposed American or British intervention against it.
A damning indictment.
Olmsted has herself a clever book title, but it’s a bit of a stretch. The various media barons really had little to do with one another. A greater handicap is her intellectual integrity: she has to acknowledge that her 'axis' members, while hugely mighty and important, nevertheless kept failing in their main objective—defeating Roosevelt.
