Confronting The Hearst/`Cosmopolitan' Media Monopoly: The SLA's 1974 Kidnapping of Patty Hearst--Part 1

(The following article first appeared in the 9/9/92 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly newspaper, Downtown.)

On February 4, 1974 the daughter of then-Hearst Corporation Chairman of the Board Randolph Hearst—Patty Hearst—was “arrested” by a few members of the Symbionese Liberation Army [SLA] urban guerrilla group in Berkeley, California. The SLA was led by Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze, an African-American radical who had escaped from a California prison the previous year. “Cinque” DeFreeze had resided in places like Newark, Cleveland and Los Angeles in the 1960s, before eventually hiding out with some white radicals who were active in the Berkeley political scene, after his prison escape.

Influenced, apparently, by reading about the Tupamaros’ urban guerrilla activities in Uruguay and by watching Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege movie, the SLA decided to kidnap the Hearst heiress, who was then living with Steve Weed (who had previously roomed with a Princeton SDS radical activist during the 1960s) in Berkeley.

After placing Patty Hearst in a “People’s Prison”—which apparently was a large closet in a rented Bay Area house—the SLA issued a taped message on Feb. 12, 1974 to the local Pacifica radio station, KPFA, in which “Cinque” DeFreeze demanded that the Hearst Dynasty meet the following demand in exchange for Patty Hearst’s release:

“Each person with one of the following cards is to be given 70 dollars worth of meats, vegetables, and dairy products: all people with welfare cards, Social Security pension cards, food stamp cards, disabled veteran cards, medical cards, parole or probation papers, and jail-or-bail release slips.”

“Cinque” DeFreeze also repeated in his taped message a phrase that has become historically associated with the SLA in U.S. cultural underground circles: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!”

In response to this demand, then-Hearst Chairman of the Board Randolph Hearst agreed to donate $2 million to set up a “People In Need” free-food distribution program for the poor in the Bay Area. But on Feb. 21, 1974 another taped message was received from the SLA in which “Cinque” called Hearst’s $2 million People-In-Need program a “Crumbs To The People” program, read off a list of the magazine, broadcasting, newspaper and real estate holdings of the Hearst Foundation, and asked that $4 million more in free-food-for-the-poor be donated by Hearst in exchange for his daughter’s release.

According to An American Journey: The Short Life of Willy Wolfe by Jean Kinney, however, the following then happened on Feb. 23, 1974:

“Randolph Hearst appeared before the television news cameras to answer Cinque’s latest demand. `The size of this latest demand is far beyond my financial capabilities,’ said the distraught father, his voice hoarse and his face haggard. `The matter is out of my hands.’ Thereupon Mr. Hearst made way for a representative of the corporation, who said into the microphone, `The Hearst Corporation is prepared to contribute to People In Need a total of 4 million dollars to the poor and needy provided Patricia is released unharmed.’ He said that the corporation `…is not controlled by members of the Hearst family.’

But on March 9, 1974, the SLA sent another taped message in which it accused Randolph Hearst of deceit and dishonesty in negotiating for his daughter’s release, and in which Patty Hearst, herself, accused her parents of not doing enough to bring about her release.

(Downtown 9/9/92)

Next: Confronting The Hearst/Cosmopolitan Media Monopoly: The SLA’s 1974 Kidnapping of Patty Hearst—Part 2

Hearst's Joe McCarthy Connection

(The following article first appeared in the 9/9/92 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly newspaper, Downtown.)

The Hearst media conglomerate played a key role in the rise of U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy to national prominence in the late 1940s and early 1950s—during a witch-hunting, “red scare” era of U.S. history, when U.S. citizens in all walks of life were indiscriminately red-baited, blacklisted, or denied their civil liberties, under the pretext of “fighting communism” and “protecting domestic security.” According to The Hearsts: Family and Empire:

“In July of 1948, Bill [Hearst Jr.] and Bootsie [his wife] were delighted to have McCarthy as a guest at their wedding. There they introduced him to [then-Hearst Corporation President] Dick Berlin, who shared the Senator’s…political leanings and fondness for booze. Soon Dick and Joe were friends. Berlin often entertained McCarthy at his Fifth Avenue apartment…and occasionally invited the Senator to spend an interlude at his hunting lodge in Murray Bay, Canada, 90 miles down river from Quebec.”

The same book also noted that by the time William Randolph Hearst Jr. became chairman of the Hearst media conglomerate’s editorial board—following his father’s death in 1951—the Hearst organization:

“…had already developed a close working relationship with McCarthy, who remained in the news…largely because the Hearst press kept him there. The Hearst staff had an unfailing pipeline to the Senator—through Don Surine, and later through Roy Cohn; McCarthy would telegraph items about forthcoming targets to the handful of journalists who had done the most to help him…And the grateful Hearstlings…knew how to use the scoops;…they turned McCarthy’s notorious half-truths into their own reckless, raging, ill-informed stories about red infiltration and the betrayal of America.

“Bill [Hearst Jr.] for his part, approved of the McCarthy connection…He defended the commitment as a sound journalistic alliance.”

In addition to revealing in 1980 that “the vast majority of news executives on Hearst papers were rabid anti-Communists and McCarthy admirers,” The Hearsts: Family And Empire also revealed that Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper “organized its own `red squad’ to keep files on local subversives” and “When the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC] visited Seattle in June of 1954, the paper turned its records over to Chairman Harlold Velde, who praised the paper for its diligence.”

(Downtown 9/9/92)

Next: Confronting The Hearst/Cosmopolitan Media Monopoly: The SLA’s 1974 Kidnapping of Patty Hearst—Part 1

`Cosmopolitan's Historic Book Publishing And Real Estate Connection

(The following article first appeared in the 9/9/92 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly newspaper, Downtown.)

Cosmopolitan’s parent company also had a special interest in book publishing during the 1990s. As William Randolph Hearst Jr. wrote in 1991: “We also publish books under William Morris & Company, Arbor House, Avon and other imprints.” Forbes estimated the late 1980s value of Hearst’s book publishing business was about $200 million; and the Hearst media conglomerate received about 11 percent of its $3 billion in annual gross revenues during the 1990s from its book publishing operation.

About $550 million worth of real estate was also owned by Cosmopolitan’s parent company in the early 1990s, including 135,000 acres of timberland in Maine and Canada, about 200,000 acres of ranch land in California, Manhattan office buildings and condos, Bronx warehouses and a San Francisco office building and parking garage. Cosmopolitan’s editorial offices were located at 224 West 57th Street in Manhattan during the 1990s. [2008 Update: But since 2006, Cosmopolitan’s editorial office have been located within the 46-story Hearst Tower skyscraper building at West 57th Street and 8th Avenue.]

The Manhattan corporate headquarters of the Hearst Dynasty’s media conglomerate was located at 8th Avenue and West 57th Street in Manhattan during the 1990s—in a building owned by Hearst that was located just down the block from both CBS News’ TV studio and PBS’s NewsHour’s Manhattan television studio-affiliate. [2008 Update: In the 21st-century, the Hearst media conglomerate decided to use some of its surplus media monopolization profits to convert its Manhattan corporate headquarters into a much taller skyscraper. So since 2006, the corporate headquarters of the Hearst media conglomerate has been located in a reconstructed Hearst building: the 46-story Hearst Tower, on 57th Street near Eighth Avenue.]

(Downtown 9/9/92)

Next: Hearst’s Joe McCarthy Connection

`Cosmopolitan''s Newspaper Connections Historically

(The following article first appeared in the 9/9/92 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly newspaper, Downtown.)

Although magazines like Cosmopolitan have been its most consistent source of profits, the Hearst media conglomerate’s source of special political influence for much of the 20th-century, historically, was its less lucrative chain of newspapers. As Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac noted:

“[William Randolph] Hearst [I] was one of the first publishers to understand the importance of creating a media conglomerate…By 1935 he had 90 newspapers, as well as such magazines as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar.”

Between 1935 and 1979, however, the Hearst Corporation reduced the size of its chain of newspapers because many of its daily newspapers—while politically influential—had become heavy money-losers. At the time of William Randolph Hearst I’s death in 1951, though, the Hearst newspaper chain still contained 16 big city newspapers, whose combined daily circulation still exceeded five million.

But in the 1950s and 1960s, eleven Hearst newspapers were sold to a corporate buyer who was the publisher of a previously-competing newspaper in the same city. In Chicago, for example, Hearst sold its Chicago American for $11 million to its previous-competitor, The Chicago Tribune, in 1956. In Pittsburgh and Detroit, Hearst’s Pittsburgh Sun-Telegram and Detroit Times were also sold to their main competitors in these cities in 1960. In the early 1960s, Hearst also stopped publishing newspapers like the New York Mirror, the New York Journal-American and the Milwaukee Sentinel. According to The Hearsts: Family And Empire, “In virtually every Hearst newspaper sale of the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Justice Department investigated for possible antitrust violations.”

Despite the further reduction during the 1950s and 1960s of the number of big city newspapers it owned, Hearst’s newspaper chain was still the 8th-largest in the United States at the time the SLA “arrested” Patty Hearst in 1974. And in 1980, Hearst newspapers like the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the Baltimore Herald-American, the Boston Herald-American, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the San Antonio Light and the Albany Times-Union and Albany Knickerbocker News still reached 1.4 million readers daily.

Although it stopped publishing its money-losing Baltimore and Boston newspapers during the Reagan Era, Hearst also decided in 1987 to increase its newspaper holdings in Texas by spending $375 million to purchase Texas’s biggest daily newspaper, the 407,000-circulation Houston Chronicle. During the 1990s, about 25 percent of the Hearst media conglomerate’s gross annual income came from the 12 daily and 5 non-daily newspapers it still put out in San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, San Antonio, Albany and in smaller cities in Texas and Illinois. And Hearst’s Newspaper Division was worth about $900 million in the 1990s.

[2008 Update: In the 21st-century, Cosmopolitan’s parent company still owns 15 daily and 31 weekly newspapers such as the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Albany Times Union. In addition, the 44 daily and 38 non-daily newspapers of the MediaNews Group chain, including the Denver Post and the Salt Lake Tribune, are also now partially owned by the Hearst Corporation media conglomerate].

Hearst has, historically, not been too popular with unionized labor because, despite the media conglomerate’s great wealth, it has shown little reluctance, historically, to sell and/or shut down individual Hearst newspapers and to lay off many newspaper employees without much notification. And it also has attempted to bust an employee’s union on occasion, In 1968, for example, William Randolph Hearst I’s grandson—George Hearst Jr.—provoked a long strike by his Los Angeles Herald-Examiner employees when he tried to break their union and, as a result, the AFL-CIO endorsed a nationwide boycott of all Hearst publications for awhile. Despite the union-busting at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, however, the newspaper continued to be economically unprofitable in the 1970s and 1980s and Hearst eventually shut down the newspaper in November, 1989.

(Downtown 9/9/92)

Next: Cosmopolitan’s Historic Book Publishing And Real Estate Connection

`Cosmopolitan''s Television, Radio and Cable TV Connections In The 1990s

(The following article first appeared in the 9/9/92 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly newspaper, Downtown.)

One reason you didn’t see or hear too much satirical criticism of either Cosmopolitan’s editorial politics, the Hearst media conglomerate or the Hearst Dynasty on the TV screen or over the radio airwaves during the 1990s was that besides then owning many Big Media monthly magazines, the Hearst Corporation also then owned television and radio stations and had special interests in the cable TV industry. As William Randoph Hearst Jr. wrote in his 1991 book, The Hearsts: Father And Son:

“Our organization owns six TV stations. These include WCBV in Boston, WTAE in Pittsburgh, KMBC in Kansas City, WBAL in Baltimore, WISN in Milwaukee and WDTN in Dayton. We also have 7 radio stations in Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and San Juan, Puerto Rico. We are expanding continuously in cable television. These holdings include joint ventures in cable television’s Arts and Entertainment (A&E); Lifetime, an advertising-supported network addressing women’s interests; the ESPN sports network; the New England Cable Newschannel, covering regional news and events; Ellipse Programming, a French TV production company; and various other television production companies.”

Among U.S. television broadcasters, Cosmopolitan’s parent company was the 16th-largest owner of television stations in terms of the audience its stations could reach in the early 1990s.

[2008 Update: Since the 1990s, the Hearst media conglomerate has apparently sold the 7 radio stations it then owned. But by 2008, the number of television stations that the Hearst media conglomerate owned in the United States had jumped from 6 television stations to 29 television stations, following Hearst’s 1997 merger with Argyle Television to create its Hearst-Argyle Television subsidiary division. Besides owning TV stations in Boston, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Baltimore and Milwaukee, Cosmopolitan’s parent company, for example, now also owns television stations in Tampa, Orlando, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Louisville, Des Moines, Honolulu, and Omaha. In addition, the Hearst media conglomerate now owns two television stations in Sacramento, California. As a result, about 18 percent of all U.S. television viewers can be reached and politically manipulated by a Hearst Corporation-owned television station.]

During the 1990s, Hearst Cablevision also owned six cable television stations in California. Around 16 percent of Hearst’s 1980s gross income came from its radio and television media operations, and Hearst’s Broadcast Division was about three times more profitable than the media conglomerate’s Newspaper Division during the 1990s. Forbes estimated that Hearst’s broadcasting properties were already worth around $1 billion in the late 1980s, when it then only owned 6 television stations.

Hearst’s Kansas City, Boston and Dayton television stations were purchased between 1979 and 1987—after the Symbionese Liberation Army’s 1974 “arrest” of Patty Hearst—as part of a $1.5 billion media property buying spree that the then-cash-rich media conglomerate went on during the Reagan Era. According to an April 1987 issue of the New York Times:

“Hearst was particularly savvy in its purchase of television stations, limiting itself to network-affiliate outlets in Top-50 markets…Network affiliates have higher profit margins.”

According to a December 1987 issue of Forbes, Hearst had “the country’s largest collection of non-network-owned ABC television affiliates” in the 1980s, “giving Hearst considerable clout over network programming.” And this might just be one reason why ABC News’ Nightline program, for example, rarely devoted any of its airtime to coverage of either the Hearst Dynasty or the Hearst media empire during the 1990s.

(Downtown 9/9/92)

Next: Cosmopolitan’s Newspaper Connections Historically

Magazines And The Hearst Media Conglomerate In The 1990s

(The following article first appeared in the 9/9/92 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly newspaper, Downtown.)

Of the $3 billion in gross annual income that the Hearst media conglomerate earned each year during the 1990s, about 50 percent came then from Hearst’s Magazine Division. [In the 21st century, the Hearst media conglomerate’s gross annual income is now between $4.1 billion and $4.5 billion.] Besides Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire, Hearst’s Magazine division also marketed Town & Country, House Beautiful, Sports Afield, Popular Mechanics, Colonial Homes, Country Living and Motor Boating & Sailing in the early 1990s. [In the 21st century, the Hearst media conglomerate now also markets O, The Oprah Magazine.] In the late 1980s, Forbes magazine estimated that Hearst’s magazine business was then worth over $1.1 billion and that around 250 million copies of Hearst magazines were then being sold each year. Cosmopolitan was generally the Hearst media conglomerate’s biggest money-maker during the last thirty years of the 20th century, although Good Housekeeping and Redbook had larger circulations.

Hearst’s Magazine Division also made money during the 1990s from marketing seven magazines in Britain and 56 foreign editions of its U.S. magazines (including South African editions that it had sold in South Africa during the apartheid era), and from operating two U.S. magazine distribution companies—Eastern News Distributors and International Circulation Distributors—and two U.S. subscription fulfillment companies. Because Hearst owned its newsstand distribution operation it had more special power to get one of its newly-created or newly-acquired magazines onto newsstands and keep it there during the 1990s than competing magazine publishers did. Magazines like Cosmopolitan were also produced in Spanish-language editions by publishers who paid to be specially licensed by Hearst to reproduce its magazines in Spanish.

Another reason Hearst’s most consistently profitable division had been its magazine division was that it had been able, historically, to reduce genuine economic competition in the U.S. magazine industry. As The Hearsts: Family And Empire—The Later Years by Lindsay Chaney and Michael Cieply noted in reference to the businessman who managed the Hearst media conglomerate for the Hearst family from the early 1930s to the early 1970s, Richard Berlin:

“Dick Berlin had a philosophy about competition in the publishing business—it wasn’t good for business…Competing magazine publishers frequently engaged in rate-cutting in order to lure advertisers away from each other…Berlin summarized his attitude in 1941 when he wrote to [William Randolph] Hearst [I] telling him that he had just met with the publishers of McCall, Curtis and Crowell in an effort to pound some reason into them and get them to increase their rates. In that case, Berlin was successful, and the other publishers eventually did increase their rates to match the Hearst publications.”

(Downtown 9/9/92)

Next: Cosmopolitan’s Television, Radio and Cable TV Connections In The 1990s

`Cosmopolitan''s Historic `Esquire' Connection

(The following article first appeared in the 9/9/92 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly newspaper, Downtown.)

Although Hearst’s Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Redbook and Harper’s Bazaar all pose as magazines which express a competing “female” editorial viewpoint to that generally found in magazines like Esquire magazine—which was marketed to 700,000 primarily male subscribers in 1992—Hearst also has owned Esquire magazine, historically.

After briefly attempting to market a new men’s fashion magazine called Men’s Bazaar to compete with Esquire for men readers, Hearst decided it would be more profitable to spend more than $60 million [in 1980s money] to buy the competing publication. And after it purchased Esquire in 1986, Hearst discontinued its publication of Men’s Bazaar.

Coincidentally, six months before Esquire was sold to Hearst, Esquire’s then-chief operating office [CEO] and one of its then-major shareholders—Wilma Jordan—married a top executive in Hearst’s Magazine Division at that time, George Green. And after negotiating the deal to sell Esquire to her new husband’s company, Esquire’s former CEO, coincidentally, received between $6 million and $7 million of the $60 million Hearst dished out to purchase Esquire.

Although in April 1987, Esquire’s then-editor, Lee Eisenberg, told New York magazine that Esquire’s new corporate owner was “uniquely right for us—nonbureaucratic, with no desire to impose a monolithic `Hearst culture,’” by the Fall of 1990, Esquire’s editor was Terry McDonell, not Eisenberg. McDonell was the first Hearst magazine editor-in-chief to be hired by then-Hearst Magazine Division President Bahrenberg. Esquire’s then-managing editor, Ellen Fair, was also shifted out of Hearst’s Esquire office in 1992 and into the managing editor slot of one of Hearst’s women-oriented magazines after 14 years of working for Esquire.

Asked by Downtown in an August 1992 telephone interview if Hearst’s purchase of Esquire had affected the magazine much, the then-editor, Terry McDonell, noted he “wasn’t around” the magazine at the time Hearst purchased it, but “I believe that Hearst had made the magazine more profitable and, editorially, we’ve done well.” The then-Esquire editor asserted that “the magazine is driven by journalism” and not by the special interests of the Hearst Corporation.

Asked by Downtown in 1992 whether he felt being part of the Hearst conglomerate created possible conflicts of interest for Esquire, McDonell replied: “Their interests are those of a media company and we are not a media watchdog publication. And we don’t do articles on women’s magazines, which is what Hearst publishes.”

The then-Esquire editor said he had never experienced interference from the Hearst Corporation or the Hearst family with regard to editorial content and felt no pressure with regard to coverage of the Hearst family. According to McDonell, the only concern of the Hearst Corporation with regard to Esquire magazine was that it continue to be an economically profitable publication. And McDonell felt that—despite its Hearst corporate connection—Esquire still was “very unique” as a magazine.

(Downtown 9/9/92)

Next: Magazines And The Hearst Media Conglomerate In The 1990s