Number of words: 195

‘How do you like the Journal’s war?’ asked the front page of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal for two days in 1898. This evocative question likely elicited a common response from his readers of the day: ‘Just fine.’
In April of that year, war broke out in Cuba between Spain, who controlled Cuba, and the United States. This war, which lasted 113 days and resulted in an American victory, would eventually become famous for what is said to have helped cause it, and for a single piece of communication that supposedly sums up this period in journalism. That communication was a telegram exchange between Hearst and illustrator Frederic Remington, who had been sent to Cuba in January 1897 with correspondent Richard Harding Davis. They were there to report on the Spanish rule of Cuba and provide the Journal with images and reports from the volatile colony. After their arrival, Remington is said to have cabled Hearst that “everything is quiet. There will be no war. I wish to return.” Hearst famously replied, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
Excerpted from page 39 of ‘Regret the Error’ by Craig Silverman