Hearst's `Cosmopolitan' Magazine's 20th-Century Newspaper/TV Connections Revisited
"...The parent company of `Cosmopolitan' magazine is still being allowed by the Federal Communications Commission [FCC] to own 35 television stations in the USA..."
Although Hearst-owned magazines like Cosmopolitan were, historically, the most consistent source of Hearst Corporation profits, the Hearst media conglomerate’s source of special political influence for much of the 20th-century, historically, had been its less economically lucrative chain of newspapers. As the Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac book 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 [equal to around $123 million in 2023]] 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. But according to The Hearsts: Family And Empire book, “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 when a Hearst Dynasty family member named Patty Hearst was abducted 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 then 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 [equal to around $1 billion in 2023]] 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 still then worth, historically, about $900 million [equal to around $1.9 billion in 2023] in the 1990s.
During the first decade of the 21st-century, Cosmopolitan’s parent company still owned, historically, 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, were also then partially owned, historically, by the Hearst Corporation media conglomerate in the first decade of the 21st-century. And in the current decade of the 21st-century, 24 daily and 52 weekly newspapers—including the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Antonioa Express-News, the New Haven Register, SFGate and Seattlepl.com—are still owned by the Hearst Corporation.
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, historically, to bust an employees’ 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 that newspaper in November, 1989.
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, historically, was that besides then owning many U.S. corporate mainstream media monthly magazines, the Hearst Corporation also then, historically, owned television and radio stations and had special interests in the cable TV industry. As William Randolph 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, historically, the 16th-largest owner of television stations in terms of the audience its stations could reach in the early 1990s. And during the 1990s, Hearst Cablevision also owned six cable television stations in California.
Around 16 percent of Hearst’s 1980s gross income, historically, 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 [equal to over $2.4 billion in 2023] in the late 1980s, when it then only owned 6 television stations.
Hearst’s Kansas City and Dayton television stations were purchased between 1979 and 1987 as part of a $1.5 billion [equal to around $4.2 billion in 2023]] 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, historically, to coverage of either the Hearst Dynasty or the Hearst media empire during the 1990s.
By the first decade of the 21st-century, the Hearst media conglomerate had sold the 7 radio stations it had still owned during the early 1990s. 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, then owned, historically, television stations in Tampa, Orlando, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Louisville, Des Moines, Honolulu, and Omaha. In addition, the Hearst media conglomerate then owned, historically, 2 television stations in Sacramento, California. As a result, about 18 percent of all U.S. television viewers could then be reached and politically manipulated, historically, by a Hearst Corporation-owned television station during the first decade of the 21st-century.
West Palm Beach, Florida’s WPBF-TV was purchased by the Hearst Broadcasting subsidiary of the Hearst Corporation in 1997. And after Hearst Broadcasting merged with Argyle Television in 1997, Hearst-Argyle purchased 9 television stations from the Pulitzer Publishing Co.’s broadcast group and Sacramento, California’s KCRA-TV from Kelly Broadcasting Co. in 1999; during the same year in which Hearst-Argyle swapped its “WDTN-TV, Dayton, Ohio and WNAC-TV, Providence, Rhode Island for KSBW-TV, Monterey-Salinas, California and WPTZ-TV/WNNE-TV, Burlington, Vermont/Plattsburgh, New York.” according to the Hearst Corporation website.
Then, according to the same corporate website, in 2000, Hearst-Argyle acquired Sacramento’s KQCA-TV in order to create “successful duopoly'“ with the KCRA-TV station that Hearst-Argyle had purchased in 1999. And after Hearst-Argyle was allowed to purchase Manchester, New Hampshire’s WMUR-TV from Imes Communications in 2001 and Portland, Maine’s WMTW-TV in 2004, 28 U.S. TV stations were then owned or managed by Hearst-Argyle.
In addition, in 2006 Hearst-Argyle was allowed to form another tv media “duopoly” in Orlando, Florida when it purchased its 29th TV station, Orlando’s WKCF-TV, despite already also owning WESH-TV in the same U.S. city. And after Hearst-Argyle became a wholly owned subsidiary unit of Hearst Corporation in 2009 and changed its name to Hearst Television, it purchased Birmingham, Alabama’s WVTM-TV and Savannah, Georgia’s WJCL-TV in 2014; while in Portland, Maine another Hearst-owned tv station “duopoly” was allowed to be established when Hearst purchased Portland’s WPXT-TV in 2018—despite already owning Portland’s WMTW-TV station.
So in the current decade of the 21st-century, the parent company of Cosmopolitan magazine is still being allowed by the Federal Communications Commission [FCC] to own 35 television stations in the USA, as well as its 24 daily and 52 weekly newspapers—despite the purported existence of U.S. anti-trust laws.