Media-driven myths can be tenacious because they offer simplified, easy-to-grasp versions of complex events of the past.
That’s why, for example, the Watergate myth — that the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency — is so hardy. It’s easy to grasp and easy to retell.
So it is with the Spanish-American War, a brief conflict in 1898 that confirmed the United States as a global power.
The media myth of the Spanish-American War — the simplified but inaccurate account of the conflict’s origins — is that it was fomented by the “yellow press” of William Randolph Hearst, then the publisher of the New York Journal, the New York Evening Journal, and the San Francisco Examiner.
But the notion is absurd, embraced by few if any serious historians of the era — and by no recent biographer of Hearst.
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