Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism.
Olmsted applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test works remarkably well for my book. The Newspaper Axis examines the Anglo-American media environment in which Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler came to power in the 1930s. In both the U.S. and the U.K., the most powerful media moguls dismissed or appeased Hitler—and in some cases, even published pro-fascist propaganda. Page 99 of the book details the efforts by two of these newspaper publishers, Joe Patterson of the New York Daily News and Lord Beaverbrook of the London Daily Express, which were the most popular papers in their respective nations, to engineer an Anglo-American campaign to ignore Hitler’s aggression. They agreed to publish front-page editorials, public letters, news articles, and letters to the editor to encourage their readers to support the cause of isolationism. As I write on page 99, “The Daily Express ran a story about how the Daily News was printing letters from Express readers about the Express stories about the Daily News. The two publishers created a transatlantic isolationist media echo chamber.”Learn more about The Newspaper Axis at the Yale University Press website.
It is this alliance between the U.S. and U.K. newspaper publishers that I refer to as the “newspaper axis.” I didn’t invent the term: one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s top advisers, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, used it to describe the American isolationist newspaper publishers. But I believe that the phrase captures the transnational cooperation between the media barons of both nations, and page 99 explains the details of their alliance.
These publishers helped shape the responses of their governments to fascist aggression. The six press barons I examine in the book collectively reached tens of millions of readers. Their willingness to appease or even praise the Nazi leader made it much more difficult for their nation’s elected officials to stand up to the fascist threat. The book shows that the embrace of authoritarian dictators by today’s right-wing media has deep roots in the past.
--Marshal Zeringue
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