Two stories, neither of them true, color popular conceptions about reporters in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The first story concerns a telegram William Randolph Hearst allegedly sent to Frederic Remington, who was waiting in Havana to illustrate a war that was not happening. Hearst's cable —"You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war"—suggests that the excesses of yellow journalism caused the war. Hearst's New York Journal agitated for American intervention in the Cuban uprising against the Spanish colonial government there and helped to fan the flames of belligerent sentiment. Desire to help the Cuban underdog, the search for overseas markets, and patriotism helped bring on the war. A second story maintains that Sylvester Scovel, the daring correspondent for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, punched the American commander in Cuba, Maj. Gen. William Rufus Shafter, during the ceremony marking...