There are distinctive parallels between the lives of Kane, the fictional magnate, and William Randall Hearst, the real newspaper scion. Sarah Street (1996) notes that Kane and Hearst both operated newspaper empires, engaged in yellow journalism – distorting the facts of stories, encouraged the U.S. to go to war with Spain in 1898, and died alone in isolated mansions (49). Yellow journalism can be defined as a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news. Instead, yellow journalism uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers and make a greater profit. Techniques of this can include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering or sensationalism (Wikipedia.org). The term was first coined during the
