The October, 1898 edition of Scribner's Magazine celebrated the exploits of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.

Arguably, the Spanish American War of 1898 was the first conflict that the news media actually helped start. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, in league with empire-building politicians and business moguls who saw the remaining Spanish colonies as ripe for the taking, did his best to stir up trouble between the United States and Spain.

While Hearst denied ever cabling Frederic Remington the infamous message to fake his illustrations of fighting between the Spanish and Cuban rebels ("You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."), Hearst's New York World did publish lurid accounts — some real, some imagined — of Spanish atrocities in Cuba and blamed the explosion that destroyed the USS Maine on a Spanish torpedo, despite a lack of evidence. ("Nothing so disgraceful as the behavior of ... these newspapers in the past week has been known in the history of American journalism," wrote Edwin L. Godkin in the Nation weekly.")

The most celebrated correspondent of the war was Richard Harding Davis, who worked initially for the World before switching over to Joseph Pulitzer's New York Herald and Scribner's Magazine. It was Davis — dismissed today by historian Frank N. Schubert as Teddy Roosevelt's "personal publicist" — who created the romantic legend of T.R. and his Rough Riders' charge up San Juan Hill. ("It was a miracle of self-sacrifice, a triumph of bulldog courage, which one watched with breathless wonder," wrote Davis.)

After Spain's surrender, the correspondents got a chance to stay on the job, as the U.S. military regime in the Philippines suppressed a four-year-long revolt by Filipinos, who didn't want to become an American colony. While the press remained supportive, a dispatch by correspondent H.L. Wells of the New York Evening Post acknowledged the ugly racism that lurked beneath the glorious rhetoric of Manifest Destiny. "There is no question that our men do shoot [Filipinos] somewhat in the sporting spirit," Wells noted, "but that is because war and their environments have rubbed off the thin veneer of civilization ... the soldiers feel they are fighting with savages, not with soldiers."