As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. In The Newspaper Axis (Yale University Press, March 2022), history professor Kathryn Olmsted shows how these media titans worked in concert to influence public opinion in a right-wing populist direction, echoed fascist and antisemitic propaganda, and weakened and delayed both Britain’s and America’s response to Nazi aggression. Named to Foreign Affairs magazine's list of "The Best of Books 2022."

Kathryn Olmsted, the associate Dean of the College of Letters and Sciences , studied the cultural and political history of the United States since World War I. Her first book, Challenging the Secret Government, examined the congressional and journalistic investigations of the CIA and FBI after Watergate, while her second book, Red Spy Queen, analyzed the origins and significance of the spy scare of the 1940s. Her third book, Real Enemies, explored the dynamic relationship between real government conspiracies and anti-government conspiracy theories. Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (The New Press, 2015), analyzed the conservative reaction to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Her most recent book, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, looks at the isolationist media in the US and the UK in the 1930s and 1940s. Professor Olmsted also co-edited a book on the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and has published journal articles and book chapters that highlight her overlapping areas of expertise: conspiracy theories, government secrecy, espionage, counterintelligence, and anticommunism.

View the book at Yale University Press London