Publisher, editor, and politician, born in San Francisco, California, USA. The son of George Hearst, publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, he left Harvard without taking a degree, and in 1887 took over the ailing paper. Combining sensationalism with a civic reform campaign, he made the paper highly profitable, and in 1895 he bought the New York Morning Journal and successfully fought a circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Once again, his approach combined sensational elements (giving rise to the phrase, 'yellow journalism') with a populist stance. He is regarded as having aroused the public opinion that called for war with Spain in 1898. He moved on to start or acquire other newspapers in Chicago (1902), Boston and Los Angeles (1904), and many other cities, and also built such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Town and Country, and Harper's Bazaar into profitable successes. At its peak his empire included 20 major newspapers, telegraphic news facilities, radio stations, and news and motion-picture syndicates.

Meanwhile, he had turned his ambition to a political career, but although he served two terms as US Representative (Democrat, New York, 1903–7) he could never attain the other offices he sought, including the presidential nomination in 1904 and the nomination for senator from New York in 1922. Fairly progressive in his early years, he had become increasingly conservative, isolationist, jingoist, and stubborn, eventually becoming a staunch anti-Communist. In 1927 he gave up on New York and moved to his vast estate in California, San Simeon, where he built a fabulous castle and assembled art and architecture from all over the world, including whole buildings he had dismantled and sent to him. During the Depression he had to sell some of his art collection, and he spent his final years as a recluse. Ironically, he would take on a new life as the man who tried to suppress Citizen Kane in the 1941 film Orson Welles based on him.