Book Review: Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson by Amanda Smith

Abstract

Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Patterson. Amanda Smith. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. 696 pp. $37.50 hbk.Once upon a time some mainstream newspapers reaped huge circulations with content that tantalized, trivialized, and even brutalized those with whom opinionated editors and publishers disagreed. This kind of journalistic fare made moralists weep, but the general public lapped it up as daily entertainment. The newspaper business was populated by bizarre characters who were not like you and me, but who had a rare ability to connect with readers.At the top of this pantheon of notables in the first half of the twentieth century stood Eleanor Medill Cissy Patterson, a dominant figure in Washington journalism from 1930 until her death in 1948. A scion of the Chicago Tribune publishing empire, as Amanda Smith points out in this comprehensive biography, Patterson followed her family recipe of giving readers, Dogs! Cats! Murder! along with sexual titillation, personal vindictiveness, isolationism, and mistrust of Franklin D. Roosevelt.In the 1940s, Collier's magazine called Patterson, who is virtually forgotten today, probably the most powerful woman in America, and the most hated. Also known as the Countess Gizycka due to her ill-fated marriage to a depraved Polish nobleman who kidnapped her child to force her family to give him money, Patterson, a glittering socialite, lived a life that actually outdid the fiction that she tried to write about it. Finding herself at loose ends at the age of forty-eight, in 1930 she persuaded press magnate William Randolph Hearst to let her take over his ailing Washington Herald, even though she had almost no newspaper experience.To everyone's surprise, except perhaps her own, as Smith explains in this wellresearched work, Patterson succeeded in reinvigorating the Herald. In 1939, she bought not only the morning Herald from Hearst but also his floundering afternoon Washington Times. She merged the two into an around-the-clock newspaper with ten editions a day and a commanding circulation lead in the capital. Having inherited immense wealth as the granddaughter of Joseph Medill, principal owner of the Chicago Tribune, Patterson demonstrated that she, too, had printer's ink in her veins-like her brother, Joe Medill Patterson, founder of the New York Daily News, her cousin, the redoubtable Colonel Robert McCormick, who ran the Chicago Tribune, and her niece, Alicia Patterson, who founded Newsday. In doing so, Patterson scored as the first woman editor-in-chief and publisher of a major metropolitan daily newspaper in the twentieth century.Smith, a Washington, D. …