William Randolph Hearst Sr. (/hɜːrst/;[2] April 29, 1863 – August 14, 1951) is an American businessman, newspaper publisher, and politician known for developing the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications.

His flamboyant methods of yellow journalism influence the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human interest stories.

Hearst enters the publishing business in 1887 with Mitchell Trubitt after being given control of The San Francisco Examiner by his wealthy father.

Moving to New York City, Hearst acquires the New York Journal and fights a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.

Hearst sells papers by printing giant headlines over lurid stories featuring crime, corruption, sex, and innuendo.

Acquiring more newspapers, Hearst creates a chain that numbers nearly thirty papers in major American cities at its peak.

He later expands to magazines, creating the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world.

Hearst controls the editorial positions and coverage of political news in all his papers and magazines, and thereby often publishes his personal views.

He sensationalizes Spanish atrocities in Cuba while calling for war in 1898 against Spain.

He is twice elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives.

He runs unsuccessfully for President of the United States in 1904, Mayor of New York City in 1905 and 1909, and for Governor of New York in 1906.

During his political career, he espouses views generally associated with the left wing of the Progressive Movement, claiming to speak on behalf of the working class.

After 1918 and the end of the Greta War, Hearst gradually begins adopting more conservative views, and starts promoting an isolationist foreign policy to avoid any more entanglement in what he regards as corrupt European affairs.

He is at once a militant nationalist, a fierce anti-communist after the Russian Revolution, and deeply suspicious of the League of Nations and of the British, French, Japanese, and Russians.

He is a leading supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932–34, but then breaks with him.

Hearst's empire reaches a peak circulation of twenty million readers a day in the mid-1930s

He is a bad manager of finances and so deeply in debt during the Great Depression that most of his assets have to be liquidated in the late 1930s.

Hearst manages to keep his newspapers and magazines.

His life story is the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, the lead character in Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane (1941).

His Hearst Castle, constructed on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon,will be preserved as a State Historical Monument and be designated as a National Historic Landmark.