randolph hurst would be the citizen who would be king. william randall hurst wanted his newspapers to be fun to read. this is not a new idea but typical of hurst it was an idea that he seized and pushed to the limit. >>> a hurst newspaper was essentially three things, headline, comics and sports. hurst would latch on to a single story and blast it into the public with relentless glee. for days, the headlines would breathlessly glare out the day's latest. if the news wasn't interesting enough on its own merit then a hurst reporter would make it so. for example, without knowing yet exactly why a preacher ran off with his 18-year-old ward, a hurst reporter wrote that the man was written by a love microbe that strangely enough seemed to exist only in the long island neighborhood where the preacher lived. the preacher wound up killing himself. there is the story of the hurst reporter who sought a photo of a dead girl. the reporter proceeded to set a fire in the back of the house. when the mother fled, he sneaked into the house and stole the dead girl'

you remember william hurst? was the guy, sue can cane, and his model of journalism is first get yourself a gold mine; right? be born into a really, really, really wealthy family, and then, you know, buy up all these quality writers and sort of pursue your ideosin karattic vision, and he started on the left. he got a war going all on his own, you know? amazing man, and then moved way to the right in the 1930s, launched these bizarre red hunting sprees and witch hunts and this stuff. fascinating man, but that model is going to survive and thrive. that model, that's the fox news sort of model. in fact, there's all kinds of ways in which they take pages from the biography of william hurst, and you see them doing this all the time. i had another model that i thought would work. no. [laughter] so -- sorry. [laughter] >> thank you, tom. the -- we had commissioner copps here last week talking about the role of the fcc and in prior decades, the fcc played a role of the public's obligations, and these are in a way lapsed,

you remember william hurst? was the guy, sue can cane, and his model of journalism is first get yourself a gold mine; right? be born into a really, really, really wealthy family, and then, you know, buy up all these quality writers and sort of pursue your ideosin karattic vision, and he started on the left. he got a war going all on his own, you know? amazing man, and then moved way to the right in the 1930s, launched these bizarre red hunting sprees and witch hunts and this stuff. fascinating man, but that model is going to survive and thrive. that model, that's the fox news sort of model. in fact, there's all kinds of ways in which they take pages from the biography of william hurst, and you see them doing this all the time. i had another model that i thought would work. no. [laughter] so -- sorry. [laughter] >> thank you, tom. the -- we had commissioner copps here last week talking about the role of the fcc and in prior decades, the fcc played a role of the public's obligations, and these are in a way lapsed,