Press barons
fell into fewer hands, circulation expanded
dramatically. Between 1920 and 1939 the circula-
tion of national dailies went from 5.4 million to
10.6 million, while Sunday paper circulations
rose from 13.5 million to 16 million. In the US,
Hearst, by 1942, ran seventeen daily and twelve
Sunday papers, at the time the biggest media
business in the world.
Almost to a man, the press barons were
autocratic, eccentric and immensely ambitious,
exerting far-reaching editorial control and
involving themselves minutely in the day-to-day
running of a newspaper business. Competition
was savage and unrelenting. Politics were impor-
tant, but profi ts came fi rst. In fact the British
political establishment viewed the press barons
with dislike and suspicion, for they were not as
easily ‘bought’ or persuaded as their predeces-
sors had been.
Of course this did not stop them meddling in
politics. Between 1919 and 1922 Rothermere and
Northcliff e put all their press backing behind
policies advocating public-spending cuts. Th eir
Anti-Waste League won three parliamentary
by-elections in 1921. During the 1930s Rother-
mere’s papers the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail
supported the British Union of Fascists for a
brief period and were rabidly anti-Red. Patrio-
tism, a deep emotional attachment to Empire,
ill-concealed racialism, hatred of foreigners;
these – along with their inveterate antisocialism- characterized the ‘voice’ of press baronage in
the inter-war years.
Th e post-war period saw new styles of press
leadership as the one-product newspaper
tycoons gave way to multi-marketing trends,
conglomerate ownership and more self-eff acing,
though no less far-reaching, control. Today,
‘baronialism’ is more powerful because it is
more global in reach and infl uence, and barons
such as Rupert Murdoch think and act glob-
ally, aiming to extend ownership and control
across the whole fi eld of mass communication,
including the internet. In addition to owning
newspapers worldwide, the Murdoch empire
counts among its portfolio of ownership film
studios, publishing houses, TV stations such as
Sky TV, and satellite broadcasting. Compared
to Murdoch’s holdings in 175 newspapers world-
wide, nine TV networks and an estimation that
his media reach one in three of the world’s popu-
lation, the imperialism of Hearst and Northcliff e
(with whom Murdoch developed a close friend-
ship) pale in comparison. See berlusconi
phenomenon; commanders of the social
order; conglomerates; global media
off ered Harmsworth editorship of the World for
one day, 1 January 1900. Harmsworth produced a
twelve-page four-column ‘tabloid’, about half the
World’s normal size. Of this publication, William
Randolph Hearst confessed, ‘We all thought it
was a clever stunt, but few of us realized the vital
importance of the principle’; and this was – by
any means – to provide reading material that
would attract and hold the interest of the masses.
In 1888 Harmsworth had launched a weekly
journal, Answers, modelled on George Newnes’s
Tit-Bits, comprising jokes, puzzles, ‘sound-bites’
of odd news and information but, advancing
on Tit-Bits, encouraging reader involvement, in
particular, with competitions for prizes. In 1890,
Answers, which had now reached a circulation of
over 200,000, was supplemented by Comic Cuts,
followed by Illustrated Chips, Home Chat, Th e
Marvel, Wonder and Union Jack. Harmsworth
bought and rejuvenated the Evening News in
1898, and in 1896 he founded the Daily Mail,
following the ‘Harmsworth way’, containing
condensed news, gossip, sports reports and
striving to prove through rising circulation
Harmsworth’s dictum that ‘most of the ordinary
man’s prejudices are my prejudices’.
Harmsworth was a publicist of genius but he
owed much to the business acumen of his brother
Harold, later Lord Rothermere, who eventually
inherited and continued the Northcliff e media
stable. For his services to the Conservative party,
in particular the support offered the Tories
by the Daily Mail, Harmsworth was off ered a
peerage, becoming Lord Northcliff e in 1905. By
1921 he controlled Th e Times, the Daily Mail, the
Weekly Despatch (later a Sunday paper) and the
London Evening News. Brother Harold controlled
the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Pictorial, the Daily
Record and several other papers. Together they
owned the large magazine group Amalgamated
Press, while brother number three, Sir Lester
Harmsworth, owned a string of papers in the
southwest of England. Between them these baro-
nial brothers owned papers with an aggregate
circulation of over 6 million. Th eir dominance
was rivalled by another larger-than-life press
baron, Lord Beaverbrook (1879–1964). His Daily
Express led all its competitors in the late 1930s.
His four papers reached a joint circulation of 4.1
million by 1937.
Regional newspaper chains displayed similar
baronialist tendencies. The Berry brothers,
Lords Camrose and Kemsley, pushed their tally
from four daily and Sunday papers in 1921 to
twenty daily and Sunday papers by the outbreak
of the Second World War in 1939. As newspapers