Cosmopolitan Yellow

Porn at Your Grocery Checkout Counter?

Anyone who has seen Citizen Kane (1941) will have learned a little bit about William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), on whom the movie is loosely based. He founded the Hearst Corporation, a media empire that now boasts 15 daily and 34 weekly newspapers, hundreds of magazines, and 29 television stations. Hearst aided the rise of yellow journalism, a term for exaggerated and often fraudulent reporting that seeks to lure readership with sensational headlines.

Hearst's granddaughter, Patricia Hearst, inspired sensational but true headlines in 1974 when she robbed a bank in San Francisco with members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a leftist radical group, after having been kidnapped,...