William Randolph Hearst lives on 60 years after his death as the mythical bogeyman of American journalism, the personification of the field's most egregious impulses.

Hearst is typically remembered as the irresponsible media tycoon of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries who set standards by which journalism ought not be practised. 

It's little wonder why Hearst was, and remains, the object of so much myth and misunderstanding. 

As Hearst envisioned it, the "journalism of action" was to be a sustained force, defined by activism on many fronts and fuelled by frequent doses of self-promotion and self-congratulation....