It was on Feb. 15, 1898, that the U.S.S. Maine, more of an armored cruiser than a battleship, blew up in Havana's harbor, provoking a feeding frenzy among the media giants of the time -- William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer -- that helped create an appetite for war with Spain, then holding onto its remnants of empire in Cuba and the Philippines.

The speculation at the time was that a Spanish mine had destroyed the Maine -- prompting the battle-cry "Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!" But the cause of the explosion is still subject to debate, with later opinion attributing the cause to some mechanical failure.

But it still stands as a monument to the power of the press -- back in the day when the big media wanted to get us into a war instead of out of one.

And there's an anecdote that's embedded in the public mind about an alleged exchange of telegrams between Hearst and the New York Journal's artist-correspondent Frederic Remington who was in Cuba more than a year before the Maine blew up.

"Everything is quiet," Remington supposedly wired Hearst. "There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return."

Hearst's reply: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war."

The anecdote was repeated in Orson Welles' famous caricature of Hearst in "Citizen Kane," in which Kane tells his underlings "I'll make the war."

And it has been called one of the most famous stories in journalism.

But, according to some scholars, it probably isn't true.

In an online article in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, W. Joseph Campbell says the telegrams probably were never sent and that the story came from a sole source, James Creelman, who was trying to demonstrate Hearst's reckless arrogance and the baneful influence of a powerful press.

All that said, what on earth are we going to do about this?

Is it time to say "Remember Col. Sanders"?

And there have been photos floating around on the Web of Pakistani mobs protesting last year's Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad by burning effigies of Ronald McDonald! Truly nothing is sacred.

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