AI Demand-Shaping And The Frictionless Rub Of Solipsistic Efficiency
By Emil Steiner
In 1897, painter Frederic Remington wired New York Journal publisher William Randolph Hearst from Cuba with bad news. There was nothing to see, no war to illustrate. Hearst’s infamous reply: “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” The apocryphal anecdote endures as a cautionary tale of media’s power to shape reality to its owners’ interests.
Broadly speaking, historians agree that the sensationalist reporting of Spanish atrocities in Cuba and the mysterious sinking of the USS Maine, which typified the Yellow Journalism era, contributed to the U.S. decision to enter the Spanish-American War in 1898. Hearst and other publishers, like Joseph Pulitzer, saw circulation spikes from their vivid, lurid, and constant coverage, facilitated by new technologies that brought battlefield color to readers at telegraphic speed. Narrative precedes truth. Sensation succeeds substance.