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"One of the greatest and ... best presidents that this country ever saw has been shot by a dastardly human beast. Isn't it a fact that sheets like the New York Journal are in large measure responsible for this miserable act?" Letter to the editor, Joseph Kestler, Passaic, New Jersey. New York Sun, Sept. 13, 1901.1
"Any person who has the nerve to accuse the New York Journal of inciting the assassination of President McKinley is evidently not of sound mind, and is otherwise savagely opposed to the principles of right, education, Christianity and everything that has a tendency to the upbuilding and enlightenment of mankind." Letter to the editor, G.W. P. Garrison, New York City. New York Journal, Sept. 27, 1901.2
After the shooting death of President William McKinley in September 1901, the New York Journal and a rival newspaper, the New York Sun, promptly engaged in a letters to the editor war over who inspired the assassin. The seeds of that war were planted April 10, 1901, when William Randolph Hearst's Journal attacked McKinley in an editorial that ended with the following words: "Institutions, like men, will last until they die; and if bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done."3 In June Hearst published another editorial that suggested "assassination can be a good thing." Hearst gave an example: "The murder of Lincoln, uniting in sympathy and regret all good people in the North and South, hastened the era of American good feeling."4
Three months later, Leon Czolgosz, 28, a self-- described "socialist anarchist" shot McKinley in the stomach in Buffalo, New York. The president lingered for a week before dying.
Several scholars have studied news coverage of McKinley's assassination. In 1988 historian Don Sneed, in particular, looked at the way many New York and Washington, D.C., papers created anarchist stereotypes in 1901 news reports about the trial of Czolgosz. Using a cultural history approach in 1992, Peter Ausenhus investigated narrative devices used in McKinley assassination news coverage.5
In addition, there are many studies of Hearst that include discussion of the McKinley episode.6 This article takes a different approach and looks at the coverage of the assassination from the perspective...