The original clickbait king

When we call something "clickbait," we don't mean it as a compliment. But let's be real: we also click. It's hard to resist a spicy story, and 19th-century newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst knew it. At a time when most papers merely reported events, his papers created them, sending reporters out to perform daring rescues, solve sensational murders, and even meddle in geopolitics. Today on the show: the man who brought spectacle and scandal to the news — and changed journalism forever. Guests: Karen Roggenkamp, professor of English at East Texas A&M University and author of Narrating the News and Sympathy, Madness, and Crime W. Joseph Campbell, emeritus professor of communication at American University and author of The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms and Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U. S. Presidential Elections To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Schwab. With the new Schwab Teen Investor Account, teens can gain hands-on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co-owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  While all seemed so dark and helpless to me in my prison, events were shaping towards my delivery.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  For weeks, a brave, strong man had been watching the jail, seeking some weak spot, trying to find some way to rescue me.

• 0:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  The year is 1897. And Evangelina Sisneros, a teenage girl from a well-off family, has been in prison in Cuba for over a year. She doesn't know anything about the welfare of her family, and she's horrified by the conditions. Initially, she lives in what she calls a large cage with other women.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Hundreds of the most terrible women that could be dreamed of.

• 1:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Eventually, she's taken to a more private room, which she shares with other women accused of a similar crime to her: treason against Spanish colonial rule.

• 1:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  Month after month, she sits and looks out the window, awaiting her fate.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  The only windows to be seen from the alley were about 35 feet from the ground and were protected by massive iron bars.

• 1:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Down below, a man from Washington DC looks up at the very window from which Evangelina looks out. For weeks, he and a small group of men have been casing the jailhouse in hopes of breaking her free. They manage to smuggle in a note, asking her for ideas to break out. She writes back.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  My plan is the following: to escape by the roof.

• 2:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Her escape plan included drugging the women in her cell.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  So as to set to sleep my companions.

• 2:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  The men made a few tweaks to her plan. They rent the house next to the jail. And a couple of days later, covered by the darkness of night, they cross between the roofs of the buildings. The prison warden, hearing a sound, appears in the street.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Three .44 caliber revolvers covered him. And his discovery of our position on the roof would have called for his immediate execution.

• 2:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  The warden retreats and the men walk across the roof just above the barred window of Evangelina Cisneros's jail cell, where she's waiting.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  I had many fantastic dreams in my prison, but I never dreamed of liberty coming to me from an American newspaper.

• 2:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  More than 1,000 miles away, in New York City, the man orchestrating this whole jailbreak sits at his desk, awaiting an update. His name is William Randolph Hearst. He doesn't have any connections to Cuba, nor is he part of the US government. He's the owner of the New York Journal, a newspaper man. And he's assigned his reporter, Carl Decker, to break Evangelina Cisneros out of jail. And that's because Hearst has been paying attention to the news out of Cuba, rumblings of a revolution against Spanish rule. And he believes his newspapers and reporters should actively work to correct society's wrongs and make them right. His motto?

• 3:40Speaker 04

  We will be the journalism that acts.

• 3:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Journalism that acts.

• 3:46Speaker 05

  There was a time of print media and daily newspapers were the dominant medium of the day. And competition was extremely intense, especially in urban America, New York City in particular. So into that scene, William Randolph Hearst burst as big as life and upset the apple cart of American journalism.

• 4:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Before Hearst, American newspapers were mostly dull and dry. But he helped create a new style of journalism that leaned into the dramatic flair, stories with narratives and pictures where his reporters were inserted into the action. And he then turned around and sold that drama to his audience. It was a moment that challenged and changed what journalism could look like. And the legacy of that style is all around us today. The term "clickbait" isn't meant as a compliment, but Hearst likely would have approved. Take expressions we've all heard before on the nightly news, like "shocking new development" or "no one saw this coming," or headlines like "How Hurricane Katrina paved the way

• 4:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  for American fascism." They are big and in your face so that you notice. But the need to grab people's attention by any means necessary has come at a cost. Today, trust in the media is low, very low. Legacy news organizations are laying off staff, and what's truth or a fact is debated. Sometimes, the role of journalists seems clear; other times, not so much. And you can see it in the way people talk about journalism.

• 5:25Speaker 06

  When you have mainstream news organizations going along with what appears to be propaganda with no pushback at all, like where is journalism?

• 5:36Speaker 07

  When you're trying to support one narrative instead of trying to actually show the entire picture and what's going on, it's going to absolutely be biased. I have no agenda. I'll tell you what my bias is.

• 5:45Speaker 08

  Whenever this show is mistakenly called "journalism," it is a slap in the face to the actual journalist whose work we rely on.

• 5:52Speaker 09

  I get the liberal media loves to hate on the Trump administration and anything they do, but in the process, there are so many mistakes that are made along the way.

• 6:01Speaker 10

  There hasn't been a reckoning in how we deal with the media environment that allowed Trump to be birthed into existence.

• 6:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  So what is our job? Are we providing information, galvanizing action? Who are we talking to? And what are we asking of them? I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. We're spending today's show with Evangelina Sisneros and William Randolph Hearst, the man who changed American journalism from a mere record to a verb. And we'll think through what his story tells us about the state of news today.

• 6:43Speaker 11

  Hi, this is Carolyn from Wappinghurst Falls, New York. And you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 6:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  Your email inbox, like mine, is probably full of receipts and ads. But we've got something you'll actually want to open. Subscribe to NPR's books newsletter for book recommendations, reviews, author interviews, and more, delivered straight to you. No paywalls, no digging required. Sign up at npr.org/newsletters.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 7:19Speaker 12

  This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake, ready-to-cook pizza, no antibiotics ever chicken wings, and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better, save through November 3 at Whole Foods Market.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  This message comes from Quo. You run a job, in a meeting, slammed, and a customer calls. If nobody picks up, they go to your competitor. That's why over 90,000 companies choose Quo. The business phone system built for busy teams. Smart call routing sends calls to the right person. Shared numbers let your team cover for each other. And an AI agent picks up when nobody can, capturing every lead so nothing falls through the cracks. Always say hello with Quo. Try it free at quo.com/npr.

• 8:16Speaker 13

  This election season, let the NPR Politics podcast save your time and your sanity. We'll help you understand key races, which polls you can safely ignore, and what might happen if power shifts in Congress. Our short, daily episodes come out every afternoon, so you can spend less time scrolling through each chaotic news cycle. Make NPR Politics your hub for midterm election coverage. Follow our podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 8:42Speaker 14

  Part one, making the news.

• 8:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's a cold, miserable January day in San Francisco in 1890. 26-year-old William Randolph Hearst gets word of a horrible scene unfolding in the bay.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  There was a boat that capsized in the San Francisco Bay.

• 9:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  A crew of five fishermen have been struck by a wave that's caused the boat's bow to shoot up into the air and bring the entire boat under. The men who can swim try to make their way to some nearby rocks. The rest aren't so lucky.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  And a number of the people on that boat were drowned.

• 9:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  One makes it to the rocks, the spray of the rising tide washing over him as he waits for help.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  There was a single man flailing in the water, clinging desperately to the rocks.

• 9:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hearst springs into action.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  Hearst hires a tugboat, sends his reporters out there.

• 9:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  His reporters, because Hearst owns the San Francisco Examiner, a newspaper that had almost tripled its circulation to about 45,000 since he took it over. And out in the bay, he sees an opportunity.

• 9:58Speaker 15

  A naked man was on Point Bonita Rocks crying for help. At 11 o'clock, the high tide would cover the rocks, and he must die unless help was sent.

• 10:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  A Russian fisherman named Antonio Nicholas.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  And they rescue the man.

• 10:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  He's the only survivor. The Examiner writes the whole thing up for the next day's paper.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  In their telling, the lifeguards were refusing to go out. The conditions were rough.

• 10:27Speaker 15

  The surf was too high.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  They, of course, get all sorts of fodder for their paper, talking about how, look, these officials have failed these people.

• 10:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  According to the Examiner, San Francisco's lifeguards had failed. And the only people who had taken action in the face of what the other newspapers had called "an impossible rescue mission" were the Examiner's two reporters.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  Who's the hero? The journalists are the hero. The Examiner has come to the rescue.

• 10:56Speaker 15

  Everywhere were heard praises for the enterprise and heroism.

• 11:01Speaker 04

  This is what you can count on. This is what we stand for. Action on your behalf.

• 11:06Speaker 15

  Copies of the Examiner containing the thrilling account of the rescue were sold almost as fast as they could be printed.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  It really sets the model for what he just explores with so much more vigor and detail in the following years.

• 11:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Karen Roggenkamp.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  I'm professor of English at East Texas A&M University. I'm author of two books, Narrating the News and Sympathy, Madness, and Crime, both of which look at 19th-century periodicals.

• 11:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  According to Karen, what Hearst did with the San Francisco Examiner was just the beginning of how he would infuse action into journalism. Because remember, at the time of the shipwreck rescue, Hearst was only 26, and he'd only been at the helm of the paper for three years. This would be a good time to stop and explain how a guy in his 20s ended up with a newspaper, which, for the record, was a huge deal in the 19th century because newspapers were the main way people got news. There was no radio, no television, no social media. Print was king. So Hearst sees the power in newspapers and wants in. And if you wanted to get into politics, there was no quicker way to do it than buying your own newspaper.

• 12:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Luckily for Hearst, his dad had one. But Hearst thought it needed a makeover, from boring to sensational.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Hearst, for a long time, pitches to his dad, hey, let me take this paper over. Let me turn this into something really exciting and fantastic.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  Hearst, by all accounts, always had a flair for the dramatic and kind of approached life itself in melodramatic terms. He wasn't a good student. He rather famously was expelled from Harvard, partly because of academic reasons, but also because he was a terrific prankster and just kept getting into trouble. But he wanted to be the West Coast Pulitzer.

• 13:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  Pulitzer, as in Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the New York World, which at the time was the leading national voice of the Democratic Party. Hearst idolized him. Pulitzer was a big deal, and he'd already spearheaded a movement called New Journalism.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  The premise of New Journalism is to revive what people think the news should do, make it something more exciting and more accessible for the common reader. Much of journalism at that time was dry.

• 13:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Newspaper articles were text-heavy, rows and rows of dense columns with no pictures, and many of them weren't accessible to everyone.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  The audience was not welcoming of people perhaps whose first language was not English or who did not have the level of education that would make them want to pick up the current newspapers.

• 14:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  So reinventing journalism also meant reinventing what newspapers looked like and how they read.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  Things like huge headlines, stacked headlines that are using very colorful language, the use of ample illustration. It would tell stories rather than just provide information. You've got recognizable plot points, you've got characters. It's written in a style that uses dialogue and imagery. So it's constantly blending the techniques of fiction writing with the techniques of reporting.

• 14:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  William Randolph Hearst was all in.

• 14:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  He told his reporters that if stories on the front page of his paper didn't elicit a gee whiz, well, they failed. On the second page, readers should say, "Holy Moses," and on the third, "A God Almighty." And his vision wasn't limited to San Francisco. He wanted his newspapers in the hottest market in the country.

• 15:16Speaker 05

  And William Randolph first realized that he had to succeed in New York City.

• 15:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is W. Joseph Campbell. He's an emeritus professor of communication at American University. And he's written about Hearst and journalism in the 19th century. And you know that saying, "If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere." That was definitely true for newspapers at the time. Hearst knew it and moved east. And right away-

• 15:40Speaker 05

  Just shook up the place, just shook up the city.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  And right from the get-go, he sets out to challenge Pulitzer's world.

• 15:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  His flagship paper, that is, the New York World.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  It's a crowded marketplace. There are lots of newspapers in New York, but the world is the big boy.

• 15:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hearst purchased a failing newspaper called The New York Journal. Gone were the days of hero-worshipping Pulitzer. Now Pulitzer was his competitor, and Hearst wanted to win.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  And he basically sweeps into New York with a bottomless pocketbook and does everything in his power to undermine Pulitzer. He sells his paper, The Journal, for one cent a day, while Pulitzer is still charging two cents a day. He is brash. He is outrageous. He goes in and he steals away all of Pulitzer's best reporters and editors.

• 16:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  And commissioned work from big names, like Mark Twain.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  And so Hearst just goes in with guns blazing.

• 16:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  And as part of this competition, Hearst wanted more eyeballs. And he went to increasingly outrageous lengths to get them. Before long, the age of new journalism was over, and in its place came yellow journalism.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Yellow journalism is like new journalism, but with a massive dose of steroids. It takes that line between fact and fiction and blurs it even further, and in many cases, just throws it out the window. Now, you have to understand that audiences of the time didn't mind if not every little detail in a news story was based on fact. There are advice manuals for journalists at the time that say, "Make sure the essential facts of your story are there, but your audience is going to forgive you if you are a little loosey-goosey with some of the less important details.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  Make it colorful. Make it engaging. The worst thing you can do is to write a dull story."

• 17:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Of course, there were some people who didn't like the style of journalism.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  Yellow journalism was a term that was developed by a rival newspaper editor, Irvin Wardman, who ran the New York Press. He really resented Hearst's wealth, resented Hearst's flamboyance, and resented the innovations that Hearst was bringing to newspapers, including color comics. One of the comics that Hearst was publishing at the time was colloquially known as "The Yellow Kid", and the centerpiece of the comic was a young bald street urchin in New York City who wore a flamboyant yellow nightshirt. Irvin Wardman found this just awful and resented that kind of intrusion

• 18:45Speaker 05

  of frivolous characters into American journalism. And this is early 1897. Wardman comes up with the term "yellow kid journalism", sort of indirectly drawing on the comic strip character, the yellow kid. And then soon after that, just called it "yellow journalism", and it just stuck, and it lives on to this day.

• 19:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hurst's style of journalism worked. The paper quickly became popular.

• 19:15Speaker 05

  Another feature of yellow journalism in the 1890s was the tendency to self-promotion. And Hurst was big into self-promotion, not for himself necessarily, but for his newspaper, because he wanted to make sure that this was the newspaper that people were speaking about, the newspaper that people wanted to buy.

• 19:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hurst sent his reporters to look for the stories that would grab people's attention: crime, drama, heroism. But reporting news was just one part of his approach. He also started to explore the possibilities for what kind of news he could make. He'd already sent reporters to save the Capsize boats in San Francisco, but he wanted to do something bigger and bolder. And he got his chance in the summer of 1897, when-

• 20:02Speaker 05

  Great murder mystery that absorbed New York City in that summer.

• 20:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  A human torso was found floating in the East River. And now it seemed like everyone in the city wanted to know who this person was and what had happened.

• 20:16Speaker 15

  The mystery of the headless, haggled, mutilated body, which was found Saturday afternoon by two East Side boys floating along the floodtide in the East River at the foot of 11th Street, is doubly a mystery now, more than ever a horror.

• 20:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hurst sees how captivated the city is by this mystery, and he decides it's not enough to report on the police investigation. Why leave the case to the police when he has a whole newsroom at his disposal? So he assembles his special team of journalists that he called-

• 20:50Speaker 04

  His murder squad in New York, whose role was to look at cases that were in the news and try to solve the mystery of what's going on here. And Hurst sends his reporters out, first to identify, who is this person?

• 21:13Speaker 15

  The journal establishes the disappearance of Golden Sub.

• 21:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  The dead man is named William Goldensepp. The Journal identifies him as a German immigrant who works at a Turkish bathhouse.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  Not only that, they, through their reporting, detect who the likely murderer is, and they go and confront this person and perform a citizen's arrest.

• 21:39Speaker 15

  The Journal's reporters arrest Nak, the husband, who had threatened Goldensepp's life.

• 21:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  He turns out to be innocent. But Hearst's reporters parse through clues and find that there are two culprits behind the murder: Goldensepp's lover and her other boyfriend. In a tale made for, and in this case, reported out by the tabloids, the murder is a result of a love triangle.

• 22:04Speaker 05

  They were far ahead of the police in solving this pretty heinous crime.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  And of course, they get to tell the story over and over again. It's almost like a serialized novel that they're writing. And they are actively participating in solving the mystery.

• 22:25Speaker 05

  It veered into kind of an activist or participatory journalism. Hearst called it the journalism of action, or the journalism that acts. His newspapers would take an active role in solving the problems of contemporary life. It wouldn't just comment on it. They just wouldn't call attention to it. They would actually go out and try to resolve these problems.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  And in essence, the whole paper becomes a melodrama of the city in which common people are the innocents at the mercy of corrupt government officials or the police who bungle their cases. And the hero is the journal and the newspaper reporters who come in and rescue the damsel in distress, the common people.

• 23:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hearst had done what he set out to do: transform journalism, first in San Francisco and now New York City. But he wasn't satisfied. Coming up, Hearst puts his thumb on Cuban politics and tips the scale.

• 23:46Speaker 11

  Hi, I'm Hazel Velvors from Seattle, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. I love your guidebooks so much. It's like watching a movie in my mind. Thank you.

• 23:58Speaker 12

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake, ready-to-cook pizza, no antibiotics ever chicken wings, and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3 at Whole Foods Market.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  This message comes from Quo. You're on a job, in a meeting, slammed, and a customer calls. If nobody picks up, they go to your competitor. That's why over 90,000 companies choose Quo, the business phone system built for busy teams. Smart call routing sends calls to the right person. Shared numbers let your team cover for each other, and an AI agent picks up when nobody can, capturing every lead so nothing falls through the cracks. Always say hello with Quo. Try it free at quo.com/NPR.

• 25:00Speaker 16

  The 2026 midterm elections are upon us. On November 3, voters will determine what the next two years of their local leadership and the balance of national government will look like. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast for all the updates you need ahead of and after November 3 from NPR News.

• 25:24Speaker 14

  Part two, jailbreak journalism.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  What was happening in Cuba was of great interest to readers in the United States and especially to Hearst.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  Cuban revolutionaries had decided to challenge the authority of the Spanish government.

• 25:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  Since the mid 19th century, Cubans had been rebelling against Spanish colonial rule. But in 1895, a new and stronger rebellion broke out into full-on revolution. Three years later, the conflict was at a breaking point.

• 26:00Speaker 15

  At no time since the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution has the tension and anxiety been so great as it is at present. We are now on the very verge of war with Spain.

• 26:12Speaker 05

  Spain still ruled Cuba in the late 1890s, and the Spanish were trying to put down a rebellion against their colonial rule. It was not going well.

• 26:23Speaker 05

  For two years it had been going on. The Spanish had not been successful in shutting this down.

• 26:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Spain was getting a lot of bad press in the US. Regional papers like The Macon Telegraph in Georgia painted grisly scenes with headlines saying things like, "Thousands perish there for lack of food, which is denied by Spain." And the bad press came with a point of view. A story in The Sun read, "We do not pretend to be neutral between Spain and Cuba, and that the Cubans may suffer grievously from our withholding neutral rights." The newspapers reflected the US's vested interests in Cuba. The US did not want European influence so close to its shores, and it saw the island as an economic opportunity for US business.

• 27:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  On top of that, many people felt there was a moral imperative to care about Cuba as a humanitarian crisis unfolded there.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  In fact, they had attracted a lot of negative attention through one of their policies, which was called reconcentration, forerunner of concentration camps in which the Cuban noncombatants, old men, women, children, were herded into garrisons in towns under Spanish control. Thousands and thousands of Cuban noncombatants died from...

• 27:44Speaker 05

  Starvation and disease, and this was the way in which Cuban women were treated by Spanish rulers.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  And Hearst saw this unfolding and recognizing it, this perfect paradigm of the narrative he loved most, damsel in distress, people in distress, being controlled by evil overlords. Who's going to rescue them? The Journal is, of course.

• 28:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  Leading the way in the US's coverage of Cuba was William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, which had already established itself as one of the leading newspapers in the US. And in true Hearst fashion, the Journal recounted the Cuban people's travails in lurid detail, a written telenovela for the American people.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  And so you have article after article after article positioning and framing the tale of what is happening in Cuba as this exciting, heroic, romantic narrative.

• 28:53Speaker 05

  And Evangelina Sisneros, her case fit quite well into that paradigm.

• 28:58Speaker 15

  The Cuban Girl Martyr.

• 28:59Speaker 04

  Fortuitously, there's this woman that Hearst learns about.

• 29:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Evangelina Sisneros.

• 29:08Speaker 04

  This young Cuban teenager.

• 29:11Speaker 15

  This true daughter of the revolution.

• 29:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  Who was locked up for being an insurrectionist.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  They discover her in a Cuban women's prison. And what they say is that she is in this prison because she has fought off the advances of the Spanish official. And now she's being imprisoned for simply trying to defend her honor. And isn't it tragic? Isn't it horrible? Somebody's got to do something about this.

• 29:42Speaker 05

  She was jailed in Havana at Casa de Recolheres, which was a notorious prison for women who were really down on their luck. The Spanish authorities had placed her in that jail in the center of Havana, held her without trial. Hearst's reporters in Havana sometimes would pass by the jail and Hearst's reporters noted this young woman. She was, at the time, seventeen or eighteen years old and was striking in her looks and was quite different from the other inmates of this prison.

• 30:14Speaker 15

  Young, beautiful, cultured, guilty of no crime save that of having in her veins the best blood in Cuba.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  They present her as having the best blood. What they mean by that is that she's not of mixed race. If you look at her photos, she certainly looks white. And in their stories, in fact, they differentiate between Cisneros and the other women she is imprisoned with, who are described in very racialized, quite ugly terms. So very clearly, there's colorism going on here. There's classism. She's presented as being more of an aristocratic nature.

• 31:02Speaker 05

  The Cisneros case was a great way for Hearst to call attention to and really kind of exploit this story for his newspaper and his newspaper's prominence. So Hearst's newspaper, The Journal, began to report, who was this woman? And what is she doing there and why?

• 31:22Speaker 15

  This true daughter of the revolution is now undergoing trial by a military tribunal at Havana on the charge of rebellion after a hideous imprisonment of nine months in a jail.

• 31:34Speaker 05

  She was a symbol of Cuban resistance.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  So Hearst encourages the women of America to get involved.

• 31:41Speaker 05

  The Journal mounted a nationwide, international, actually, campaign petition drive to get the Spanish to release her.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  He appeals directly to the Queen of Spain. He convinces President McKinley's mother.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  And thousands and thousands of American women.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  To engage in letter-writing campaign.

• 32:03Speaker 15

  Many hundreds signed petitions to the Pope in behalf of the fair Cuban girl.

• 32:08Speaker 05

  That campaign went nowhere.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  And when none of that works, Hearst comes up with this plot to break her out of jail himself, via his own reporters.

• 32:23Speaker 05

  Jailbreaking journalism, as one rival newspaper called it.

• 32:29Speaker 05

  Hearst sent a guy from the Washington Bureau named Carl Decker. He's ostensibly there as the Journal's man in Cuba.

• 32:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  Carl Decker reported a few stories while in Cuba, but he really had one main job.

• 32:43Speaker 05

  He was there, under instructions, to break out of jail and bring to New York City successfully Evangeline Sisneros.

• 32:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  There is some debate about how the jailbreak really went down. But according to the book that Sisneros and Decker wrote afterwards, it happened like this.

• 33:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  On the night of the escape in October of 1897, the men walk from the roof of the house they rented to the roof of the jail. They locate the window of the jail cell holding Sisneros. A man tells her.

• 33:17Speaker 15

  Don't be frightened. We will soon have you out of here.

• 33:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  They try to cut through the jail bars. The man began to saw on the bars. The saw made a terrible noise. But they wake up Evangeline's cellmates and don't make it too far. So then the men leave and come back the following night.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  He asked me if I were ready, and I said I was. Then he began to work on the bars of the window. He twisted and turned the bar with something which he had in his hand. Click. It broke.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  Carl Decker and two of his accomplices used steel wrenches to break the bars and smuggle her out of the prison.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  We climbed down from the roof into the patio of a little house and then went into the house itself. Oh, it was good to be free. One of the men took me by my hand and led me quickly into the street. There, a carriage was waiting. In a moment, we were in the carriage and being driven away, away to freedom. I don't think any of us spoke. When we had ridden quite a little way, the carriage stopped, and the two men took me into a house. I do not know whose house it was, nor even in what street it was, nor if I did know, should I tell.

• 34:29Speaker 05

  And into the home of a collaborator, and he hid Evangelina for a couple of days in his home before they dressed her up as a... she was a petite, maybe not even five feet tall, dressed her as a boy, and then walked her to the passenger steamer to the docks in Havana, where she was smuggled aboard the boat and escaped Cuba that way.

• 34:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  A few days later, on October 13th, 1897, she arrived in New York City.

• 35:04Speaker 15

  Evangelina Cisneros reaches the land of liberty.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Now, what really happened is somewhat open to debate. What's of more interest to me is how the Journal told the story. And in the Journal's telling, the Journal breathlessly relates that Evangelina Cisneros has been broken out of jail. And who has done that? The knight in shining armor, of course, the Journal itself.

• 35:37Speaker 15

  One week ago last night, the Journal correspondent broke the bars of her cell and led her to liberty over the flat roofs of the Cuban capital. It is the memory of those thrilling few minutes that meant for her a lifetime of captivity or a future of peace and liberty that most often recurs to her now.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  They frame this as a story that directly draws upon some of the most popular literary genres of the time. The prison break narrative. The medievalist romance is an extremely popular kind of fiction in the 1890s. And they'll even have comics where they'll show Evangelina coming away from the prison, and there's a knight standing by the boat. It's a knight in shining arbor, and across the front it says, "Journal." So quite explicitly, they say, "This is a tale that belongs as a medieval romance rather than just the regular news." But this is reality, right?

• 36:40Speaker 04

  It's like fiction, but it's more exciting than fiction because it's real. And who's the hero of the story? The journal.

• 36:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, the legacy of harsh journalism of action.

• 37:02Speaker 11

  Hi, I'm Hazel Velvos from Seattle, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 37:08Speaker 12

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake, ready-to-cook pizza, no-way-antibiotics-ever-chicken wings, and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3 at Whole Foods Market.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  This message comes from Quo. You run a job, in a meeting, slammed, and a customer calls. If nobody picks up, they go to your competitor. That's why over 90,000 companies choose Quo. The business phone system built for busy teams. Smart call routing sends calls to the right person. Shared numbers let your team cover for each other, and an AI agent picks up when nobody can, capturing every lead so nothing falls through the cracks. Always say hello with Quo. Try it free at quo.com/NPR.

• 38:10Speaker 16

  This week on the NPR Politics Podcast, the midterm elections are wrapping up and millions of people have already voted. We're taking one final check of the electoral pulse with a new NPR PBS News Marist Poll. It shows Democrats still poised to make gains, but also with some warning signs for just how many. We'll explain on the NPR Politics Podcast.

• 38:35Speaker 14

  Part three, a shared reality.

• 38:41Speaker 15

  The rescue of Miss Evangelina Cisneros from her prison in Havana brings forth hearty congratulations from every section of the United States.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  When she arrived in New York City, Hurston organized this rapturous celebration, this rapturous reception for this young woman, Evangelina Cisneros.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  The Journal promotes the story of Cisneros arriving. They host a huge parade for her and this enormous celebratory rally.

• 39:13Speaker 15

  A crowd estimated at 75,000 persons thronged in and about Madison Square to formally welcome Evangelina Cosio Isisneros, the escaped Cuban prisoner.

• 39:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Within a few months.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  She publishes her version of the story.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  A man stood on the roof and was looking in at the window. He asked me if I was ready and I said I was.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  Carl Decker writes a story of what happened.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  The fever of hurry was all in our veins. I quickly grasped Evangelina about the waist and lifted her through the bars. In a moment, she was out upon the roof and was bursting into a joyous carol of freedom when I clasped my hand over her mouth.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  She gets to go to the White House and meet President McKinley. She just becomes this important figure in selling not only the idea of Cuban independence, but in selling the newspaper as well and selling the story of this journalism that acts.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  It's widely covered by other newspapers in New York and elsewhere. The celebration of a newspaper's triumph over Spanish colonial rule. I mean, it seems astonishing to this day.

• 40:31Speaker 15

  One of the really great achievements in American journalism. An event that will stand as a landmark in the history of nations as well as newspapers.

• 40:41Speaker 05

  Journalism publications, including one titled "The Fourth Estate", really thought this was a great coup for American journalism and really praised what Hearst and his newspaper and his reporters had done in freeing Cisneros and bringing her to freedom. Now, not all newspapers were saying this was a great feat of American journalism. Some people thought it should never have been done. One in Chicago referred to this as a case of jailbreaking journalism, which I think is a great way to describe it.

• 41:11Speaker 15

  The Chicago Times Herald terms the feat "jailbreaking journalism", and concerning it, the Times Herald makes the following sensible remarks. "Think of the brainless volley of the act. It might upset all negotiations and make the efforts of the president to win independence for Cuba by peaceful means absolutely useless."

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Audiences love the story. It's very popular, it's very exciting, but it's also so excessive that more and more people start to recognize things as being out of control. When you've got the two most important newspapers in America's largest city competing in such unfettered ways to be ever more exciting, ever more appalling, ever more exhilarating, that train has to stop somewhere. And what is going on as well during this time is you have a new owner of the paper

• 42:14Speaker 04

  that ultimately comes out of this whole thing as victor, and that's the New York Times.

• 42:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1896, Adolf Ochs purchased The New York Times.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  And he, of course, puts forward the famous masthead saying, "All the news that's fit to print." So he positions his paper as standing in direct opposition to the kind of excess that the world and journal are putting out there.

• 42:48Speaker 05

  The New York Times thought it was just unlawful and illegal and just contravened international law and international authority. And they weren't necessarily calling for Hearst to return eventually to Cuba and the Spanish authorities there, but thought that this was a very reckless thing for a newspaper to do, to undertake. This was also an example of how Hearst's journalism could make a difference. The journalism of action. This is not just some sort of passing commentary on daily activities. This is journalism taking an active role in making a difference and righting wrongs of society. There has never been a case, at least in my view,

• 43:30Speaker 05

  of American journalism participating in a primary role in an international jailbreak. So this was an astonishing case, unprecedented case, and a case of, really, the zenith of the journalism that acts, the journalism of action that William Randolph Hearst was an advocate of.

• 43:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Of course, after the zenith comes the fall. And Hearst's big intervention in Cuba pushed other people in the industry to reassess their journalism's purposes and methods.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  More and more critics of the press start to say, "This is too far. We do need news standards." And ironically enough, one of the things that happens as we move into the 20th century is the rise of journalism schools and the credentialing of newspaper reporters as people who've gone through some sort of training that upholds a certain level of standard.

• 44:36Speaker 05

  I think that detached role that the New York Times pursued for many, many years detached an authoritative reporting, but without taking a role in the reporting, without showing your partisan colors, it was it was meant to be a little more neutral, even-handed, detached, dare I say, objective.

• 45:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Over time, the standards created and enforced by the New York Times became the default for serious journalism. Journalists weren't there to make the news. They were there to document what was happening with discernment and impartiality. The goal was not to have skin in the game. Doing that quickly became dismissed as advocacy journalism, but rather to be objective, so audiences could make up their own minds. Objectivity and the pursuit of it has been a big debate in the industry ever since. And lately, it's front and center as newsrooms are once again reevaluating their role and purpose in the face of new information outlets like Instagram and TikTok.

• 45:43Speaker 05

  When the internet became a thing, became a reality, became a real challenge for mainstream media, for conventional news media, they responded pretty poorly, pretty ineptly and pretty sluggishly to the digital challenge, beginning in the mid 1990s. And that challenge continues to this day. Some, a few media outlets have been able to surmount the challenge. Most of them have not. One that has surmounted the challenge and has done, is very profitable, is the New York Times.

• 46:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  All the news that's fit to print is part of the picture.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  Its other interests, including games, including puzzles, including recipes, including ancillary elements that it owns and have proven to be very popular, are successful and help keep the New York Times a profitable entity.

• 46:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's right. The New York Times' biggest source of revenue is its digital subscriptions, which can include the news, along with games and recipes. You could call those distractions or smart business. A 2026 Pew Poll found that over 50% of Americans are worn out from the news, and trust in news has been on the decline for years.

• 47:02Speaker 05

  Americans don't have a whole lot of trust in the news media to tell the story accurately, to tell it fairly. Those levels of trust have really cratered in recent years. Gallup began doing these trust in media surveys back in the 1970s. At that time, the news media was kind of buoyed by the Watergate scandal, that the news media had a conspicuous, if not decisive, role in uncovering reporting on. And so the trust level of the news media was very high back in the mid 1970s, at least according to Gallup's polling on this topic.

• 47:41Speaker 05

  It has subsequently dropped off pretty consistently since then, driven largely by Republicans and independents, who far less trust in the news media than their Democratic counterparts. But nonetheless, it's headed downwards, pretty strikingly, and continues to crater in recent years.

• 48:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  A big reason for this crater is because we in the US are in a moment of extreme division, and many people blame the media and newsrooms for this.

• 48:09Speaker 05

  American journalism might be reaching back to its deeper roots of very partisan, very politically oriented news organizations. It was that way, way back in the early days of the American Republic.

• 48:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Whatever his other motivations, it's clear that Hearst felt there was some unmet need, and he had ideas about how journalism could meet that need.

• 48:35Speaker 05

  The Galveston hurricane of 1900 took place. It was a devastating natural disaster, and Hearst organized food aid to be sent by train to Galveston to help support the victims of the hurricane. And that's the kind of journalism of action that he had in mind, that he would take an active role to sort of perform the safety net role that was otherwise missing in American life at the time.

• 49:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  So what's missing today that journalism could help solve? In a world where it feels like we have endless information, or news, or AI content accessible immediately, so much feels like it's out of our control. What role can facts and truth and stories play in a world where it feels like anything and everything is possible?

• 49:25Speaker 04

  I worry that the American public no longer cares as much if something is made up, or if there's a level of fabrication or stretching of the facts, provided the narrative fits their social and political biases.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  And with the rise of the world of citizen journalism, where anybody can start a YouTube channel, you can make up whatever you want, and provided you have people who are helping to support you, you can just keep going. But people who are interested in that kind of sensational news, they want more, and then they need more, and they need even more than that. And so, sort of like what we saw with the Yellow Press, it just becomes this snowball rolling down the hill. I worry, I worry greatly about the state of news. We no longer seem to have a shared reality in some way across the nation.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  And, you know, as a literary historian, I've always been open to the fact that the news is constructed in the same way that history is constructed. Yes, you have a set of facts, but the way that is conveyed is a narrative. It is a construction. And that means that things are subject to storytelling. I'm fine with that. But if there is no set of facts from which to work, then where are we? Where do we go with that?

• 51:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR. Next week on the show...

• 51:18Speaker 17

  I think for a long time, tech considers itself sort of searching for new frontiers. And in recent years, they're starting to look for literal frontiers.

• 51:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  The fantasy cities of the ultra-rich and their very real effects on the rest of us.

• 51:32Speaker 17

  Rather than kind of reform or change existing institutions, a lot of tech elites want to either replace them entirely or create their own alternatives.

• 51:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me and Ramtin and... Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 51:51Speaker 15

  Devon Katayama.

• 51:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  Irene Noguchi. Kiana Mulratham.

• 51:55Speaker 15

  Thomas Coltrane.

• 51:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Thank you to Johannes Derge, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Farrar, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

• 52:14Speaker 18

  Navid Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.

• 52:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected]. And make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

• 52:46Speaker 12

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 53:16Speaker 19

  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.