Fascist-Sympathizing Newspaper Barons Were the Blueprint for Today’s Right-Wing Media
In the 1930s, six right-wing oligarchs used the US’s and UK’s largest newspapers to spout sensationalist xenophobia, and at times even boost fascist propaganda. Today, Fox News and other right-wing mass media outlets are using the very same blueprint.
Adolf Hitler receives Lord Harold Harmsworth, proprietor of the Daily Mail newspaper, at his mountain retreat in Bavaria. (Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)
In the 1930s, the owners of the most widely read newspapers in the United States and Britain married far-right, xenophobic politics with sensationalism. These press lords, as historian Kathryn Olmsted puts it in The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, “trafficked in populist slogans but lived like kings.” Some identified with fascism, while others advocated neutrality toward Adolf Hitler, focusing instead on imperial ambitions in other parts of the world.
Sasha Lilley recently interviewed Olmsted for Against the Grain, a California-based progressive radio show, about her new book. In their conversation, Olmsted explains why these wealthy press moguls sympathized with — and at times even collaborated with — fascist movements, paving the way for right-wing mass media today.
Sasha Lilley
In your book, you argue that far-right media today has its roots in the nationalist, xenophobic newspapers of the twentieth century. Who were these six newspaper barons, and what was the reach of their papers in the 1930s?
Kathryn Olmsted
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