"The public? Bah! The public be damned . . ." snorted bullet-headed Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt many years ago.
His great-great-grandson, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, a gangling 26-year-old youth in 1924, set out to pander to the public by founding three tabloid newspapers, against the wishes of his family. He used on his masthead the phrase: "The public be served." Within two years, his tabloids (in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami) went bankrupt (TIME, May 10, 1926, et seq.]. Vanderbilt IV then functioned as special writer for the Hearst...
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