The Real Citizen Kane

Anyone who has read the biography of William Randolph Hearst by W.A Swanberg, Citizen Hearst, will welcome Kenneth Whyte’s The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, which reveals much new information about the media baron who launched himself into the aggressive newspaper market in New York at the end of the 19th century. Whyte’s book is impeccably researched and gives a much more professional insight into Hearst’s remarkable rise, his battle with Joseph Pulitzer and the outrageous editorial promotions that launched the derided but phenomenally successful “yellow journalism” in New York.

It may seem surprising that a new biography of Hearst should have been written by a Winnipeg-born Canadian, but this is not so. A former editor of Saturday Night (1994) and now publisher and editor-in-chief of Maclean’s magazine, Whyte was the editor-in-chief of the National Post, founded in 1994, which exploded...