Quote 1
Kane: “Don't
believe everything you hear on the radio. Read the Inquirer!”
Early in the movie, during the newsreel
detailing Kane’s life, Charles Foster Kane arrives from Europe to
a phalanx of reporters who bombard him with questions, and this
is his first reply. This quote is undoubtedly one of the lines added
to the script by Welles and is a dig both at himself and at William
Randolph Hearst. Just before coming to Hollywood to make movies,
Welles achieved notoriety through his War of the Worlds radio
broadcast, when he had people all over America believing that Martians
were invading. He was nearly arrested during the broadcast and was
investigated subsequently by the FCC. The panic that resulted from
the event led to stringent new rules for radio broadcasts. Welles
probably felt a certain amount of resentment toward these rules
since newspapers had no such controls placed upon them and often
printed material that was sensationalist and simply untrue.
The comment's mockery of Hearst also derives from the
fact that newspapers were no longer the rivals Hearst had to worry
about—the advent of radio and of photo magazines threatened newspaper circulation.
Because these media provided a new outlet for news and information,
people read their papers more critically. Credibility became increasingly
important in the news media. Just as Hearst had been able to reach
into people’s homes and influence them through his newspapers, Welles
could now do the same through radio. However, neither Welles’s radio
broadcasts nor Hearst’s papers could be counted on as reliable sources,
simply because the men behind them were so manipulative. When Kane
tells the reporters to read the Inquirer instead
of listening to the radio, he says it with tongue firmly in cheek.
