The Battle Over Citizen Kane was released as an episode of the eighth season of the television series American Experience, airing on PBS on January 29, 1996.

In 1939, based partly on the strength of his imaginative and successful New York plays, which were produced under the aegis of the Mercury Theatre (such as an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth, which featured an all-black cast and was set in the jungle), and the infamy of his October 30, 1938, radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds,[2] which sent residents of Grover's Mill, New Jersey into a panic, Orson Welles was able to negotiate a virtually unheard-of two-picture deal with RKO Pictures, the smallest of the 'big five' major studios in this era.

During this period, however, William Randolph Hearst was actually millions of dollars in debt, mainly owing to his excessive spending, particularly on his continuing construction of his already sprawling mansion near San Simeon, California, which was located on a property approximately half the size of the state of Rhode Island.

After the release of Citizen Kane to relatively positive critical reviews and largely indifferent popular response, Orson Welles moved on to his second project, The Magnificent Ambersons.

"Perhaps the cardinal failing of The Battle Over Citizen Kane, a 1996 Oscar-nominated documentary, is its nearly groundless argument that Hearst and Welles had a lot of things in common," Rosenbaum wrote.

… Among the many things it ignores or obfuscates is the fact that Welles was a political progressive who used most of the money he earned in the movies to create some of the most important works of art of the twentieth century (including the films he directed after Kane).