When Giants Ruled takes the reader behind the scenes of a century of
newspaper life. It relates how Benjamin Day, a job printer desperate for
more money, started The Sun and inadvertently established the first
successful daily for the masses. His main rival was James Gordon Bennett
the Elder, whose innovations and success culminated in the most unusual
war in journalism: an attempt by rival publishers to halt his efforts to
revolutionize the press and to exterminate his Herald.
During the Civil War, with only Lincoln excluded, no person had greater
sway upon the nation's thinking than Horace Greeley. Venom spewed
between Bennett and Greeley reached unprecedented heights until Charles
Anderson Dana became overlord of Park Row and tangled with the crusading
Joseph Pulitzer. Bennett's eccentric son did not wait for news to
happen; he made it. The devastating circulation war between Pulitzer and
William Randolph Hearst reached a climax with the Spanish- American War.
Hearst's sensationalism remained foremost with the masses until Joseph
Patterson produced the most successful tabloid of the twentieth century.
An epilogue connects the Park Row era to today's New York press.