Had it occurred, the legendary but unlikely exchange of telegrams between William Randolph Hearst and the artist Frederic Remington–in which Hearst supposedly vowed to “furnish the war” with Spain–would have taken place 114 years ago this weekend.
The uncertainty as to exactly when the purported exchange occurred is one of many signals the tale is apocryphal, a media-driven myth.
As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the Remington-Hearst anecdote is “perhaps the hardiest myth in American journalism.”
It lives on in part because it is a pithy and delicious tale. It corresponds well to the image of Hearst the war-monger, the unscrupulous newspaper published who fomented the Spanish-American War in 1898.
As I point out in the first chapter of Getting It Wrong, the Remington-Hearst tale is often retold “despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation. It lives on even though telegrams supposedly exchanged by Remington and Hearst have never turned up. It lives on even though Hearst denied ever sending such a message.
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