The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., includes a portrait of New York Times publisher and former owner Adolph Ochs, and a biography that could have come straight from President Donald Trump.
“Adolph Ochs began his career as a newspaper boy for the Knoxville Chronicle, rising at 3:00 a.m. to fold and deliver newspapers for $1.50 per week,” the biography that accompanies the portrait reads. “His disciplined work habits led to rapid promotions on several newspapers, and by 1878 he was able to purchase the Chattanooga Times.”
Ochs Bio: Screenshot from Smithsonian website
“In 1896, he acquired the failing New York Times,” the bio says, using the same adjective for the paper that the president employed regularly throughout the campaign.
(YouTube via ABC15 Arizona)
The New York Times Company, which has published the “newspaper of record,” continuously since Sept. 18, 1851, has been in the Ochs family for four generations, with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. serving as the current publisher and chairman of the board.
Ochs coined the slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” in 1896, according to the Times, and refused to run comics, according to the Smithsonian.
“Ochs refused to run comics and made book reviews and letters to the editor prominent features,” the bio explains, which was groundbreaking at a time when comics were a prominent feature in papers.
“Despite the fierce competition from the ‘yellow press’ during the Spanish-American War, Ochs succeeded in making the Times the ‘newspaper of record’ for the English-speaking world,” according to the Smithsonian.
The “yellow press” is a reference to sensationalized journalism that actually influenced American foreign policy in the late 1800s.
The Spanish-American War is sometimes referred to as the first “media war,” since competing newspapers fought for readers by drumming up hyperbolic tales that were not based in fact, but dramatic enough to capture the attention of the public.
The portrait was painted in April, 1926, by Philip de Laszlo and was gifted to the Gallery by the Ochs/Sulzberger family.
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