W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Yellow Journalism’ Category

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More than merely sensational

In 1897, Media myths, Yellow Journalism on February 1, 2010 at 8:36 am

“Yellow journalism” lives on in as ready shorthand for sensationalism, for reckless and lurid treatment of the news.

“Yellow journalism” is a delicious and versatile sneer, a term that first appeared in print in late January 1897 and routinely invoked in the decades since to describe egregious journalistic misconduct of almost any kind.

But such casual, shorthand characterizations are not very accurate.

Young W.R. Hearst

They fail to capture or reflect the complexity and vigor of yellow journalism, the leading practitioners of which were the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and, to a lesser extent, those of Joseph Pulitzer.

Yellow journalism was flamboyant and aggressive, to be sure. Especially so was Hearst’s New York Journal. But to equate “yellow journalism” simply to sensationalism is to misunderstand what a dynamic phenomenon it was.

As I wrote my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, “in its most developed and intense form, yellow journalism was characterized by” these features:

  • the frequent use of multicolumn headlines that sometimes stretched across the front page.
  • a variety of topics reported on the front page, including news of politics, war, international diplomacy, sports, and society.
  • the generous and imaginative use of illustrations, including photographs and other graphic representations such as locator maps.
  • bold and experimental layouts, including those in which one report and illustration would dominate the front page. Such layouts sometimes were enhanced by the use of color.
  • a tendency to rely on anonymous sources, particularly in dispatches of leading reporters.
  • a penchant for self-promotion, to call attention eagerly to the paper’s accomplishments. This tendency was notably evident in crusades against monopolies and municipal corruption.

As defined above and as practiced more than a century ago, yellow journalism, I wrote in the book, “certainly could not be called predictable, boring, or uninspired”—complaints of the sort often raised about contemporary American newspapers.

Moreover, yellow journalism “was a product of a lusty, fiercely competitive, and intolerant time, when newspapers routinely traded brickbats and insults,” I wrote.

“The latter practice was remarkably well-developed at the end of the nineteenth century. The Journal and [Pulitzer’s] World, for example, were ever eager to impugn, denounce, and sneer at each other; so, too, were conservative newspapers.”

More generally, “yellow journalism reflected the brashness and the hurried pace of urban America at the turn of the twentieth century,” I wrote.

“It was a lively, provocative, swaggering style of journalism well suited to an innovative and expansive time—a period when the United States first projected its military power beyond the Western Hemisphere in a sustained manner. The recognition was widespread at the end of the nineteenth century that the country was on the cusp of rapid, perhaps even disruptive transformation.”

Yellow journalism, moreover, “was a genre keen to adapt and eager to experiment.” It took risks; it shook up and even shocked the field.

Were that mainstream news media of the 21st century so inclined.

WJC

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Yellow journalism: A sneer is born

In 1897, Anniversaries, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on January 31, 2010 at 9:30 am

Erwin Wardman, New York Press

It’s a little-recognized, never-celebrated anniversary in American journalism, granted.

But today marks the 113th year since the term “yellow journalism” first appeared in print, in the New York Press, edited by the austere Ervin Wardman.

The phrase “the Yellow Journalism” appeared in a small headline on the Press’ editorial page on January 31, 1897. The phrase also appeared that day in the Press’ editorial page gossip column, “On the Tip of the Tongue.”

“Yellow journalism” caught on quickly, as a way to denigrate what then was called the “new journalism” of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and of Joseph Pulitzer‘s New York World.  By the end of March 1897, references to “yellow journalism” had appeared in newspapers in Providence, Richmond, and San Francisco.

In the decades since then, “yellow journalism” has become a widely popular sneer, a derisive shorthand for denouncing sensationalism and journalistic misconduct of all kinds, real and imagined. “It is,” as I noted in my 2001 book Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, “an evocative term that has been diffused internationally, in contexts as diverse as Greece and Nigeria, as Israel and India.”

Precisely how Wardman and the Press landed on the phrase “yellow journalism” is not clear.

The newspaper’s own, brief discussion of the origins was vague and unrevealing: “We called them Yellow because they are Yellow,” it said in 1898 about the Journal and the World.

In the 1890s, the color yellow sometimes was associated with depraved literature, which may have been an inspiration to the Harvard-educated Wardman, a figure largely lost to New York newspaper history.

Wardman was tall and stern-looking. He once was described as showing his “Calvinistic ancestry in every line of his face.” He did little to conceal his disdain for Hearst and Hearst’s journalism.

His contempt was readily apparent in the columns of the Press, of which Wardman became editor in chief in 1896 at the age of 31. (The Press is long defunct; it is not to be confused with the contemporary alternative weekly by the same name.)

Wardman’s Press took to taunting Hearst, Hearst’s mother, and Hearst’s support for Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential election. Hearst’s Journal was virtually alone among New York newspapers in supporting Bryan’s “free silver” candidacy.

The Press disparaged Hearst, then 34, as a mama’s boy, as “Billy” and “little Willie.” It referred to the Journal as “our silverite, or silver-wrong, contemporary.”

The Press also experimented with pithy if stilted turns of phrase to denounce “new journalism.”

“The ‘new journalism,’” the Press said in early January 1897 “continues to think up a varied assortment of new lies.”

Later in the month, the Press asked in a single-line editorial comment:

“Why not call it nude journalism?”

It clearly was a play on “new journalism” and meant to suggest the absence of “even the veneer of decency.”

Before long, Wardman and the Press seized upon the phrase “yellow-kid journalism,” which evoked the Hearst-Pulitzer rivalry over a popular cartoon character known as the “Yellow Kid.” Both the Journal and the World at the time were publishing versions of the kid.

The Yellow Kid (Library of Congress)

At the end of January 1897, the phrase “yellow-kid journalism” was modified  to “the Yellow Journalism,” and the sneer was born.

After landing on that sneering pejorative, Wardman turned to it often, invoking the term in brief editorial comments and asides such as: “The Yellow Journalism is now so overripe that the little insects which light upon it quickly turn yellow, too.”

The diffusion of “yellow journalism” was sealed when Hearst’s Journal embraced the term in mid-May 1898, during the Spanish-American War. With typical immodesty, it declared:

“… the sun in heaven is yellow—the sun which is to this earth what the Journal is to American journalism.”

WJC

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New Pulitzer biography: An opportunity missed

In 1897, Media myths, Yellow Journalism on January 25, 2010 at 1:35 pm

I recently completed a review of Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, & Power, a forthcoming biography of Joseph Pulitzer, who is routinely—but undeservedly—regarded as an iconic figure in American journalism.

Pulitzer (Library of Congress)

The new biography, by James McGrath Morris, indulges in the cliché of Pulitzer the great innovator. The author calls him the “midwife to the birth of the modern mass media.”

My review, written for the peer-reviewed quarterly journal American Journalism, notes that the book contains ample material for what could have been a long-overdue reinterpretation of Pulitzer, one that would take him down several pegs.

“All the elements are there,” I write, “to depict Pulitzer not as innovator but as a cruel, ruthless, self-absorbed newspaper owner who became a millionaire championing the cause of the dispossessed while eager to rub elbows with the moneyed classes.”

Pulitzer was a hypocrite and an absentee publisher. But the opportunity for a much-needed reinterpretation was missed.

Pulitzer’s correspondence, which Morris tapped extensively, certainly encourages revisionist treatment. As I noted in my 2006 book, The Year That Defined American Journalism:

“Pulitzer’s mean-spirited letters to senior managers do little to support the reputation historians have accorded him, that of a heroic and innovative journalistic icon.”

The new biography also indulges in a media myth in describing William Randolph Hearst, Pulitzer’s rival in New York City journalism in mid- and late 1890s, as an imitator of Pulitzer’s flagship newspaper, the New York World.

It’s quite conventional to make such a claim.

And misleading, too.

Hearst’s significant model was a British journalist named William T. Stead, who in the mid-1880s offered a vision of “government by journalism.” Stead argued that the journalist was “the ultimate depository of power in modern democracy.”

Hearst clearly borrowed from Stead in developing his model of the “journalism of action,” which sought to do much more than gathering, printing, and commenting on the news. As Hearst’s New York Journal put it in 1897, the “journalism of action” obliged a newspaper to inject itself conspicuously and often into public life, to “fitly render any public service within its power.”

It was a breathtaking model of activism that went well beyond the stunt journalism of Pulitzer’s World.

Oddly, the new biography fails to acknowledge Pulitzer’s nod to Hearst’s success with the Journal.

As infirm and disagreeable as Pulitzer had become by 1897, he was not without moments of keen insight. In a letter late that year to his business manager, Pulitzer invoked “Geranium,” his code name for Hearst’s Journal, and declared:

“I personally think Geranium a wonderfully able & attractive and popular paper, perhaps the ablest in the one vital sense, of managing to be talked about; of attracting attention; of constantly furnishing something which will compel people wherever they meet, whether in the drawing room, or in the poor house, elevated car or dinner table, to talk about something in that paper. That is the sort of brains the World needs. Pardon me for saying also, that with all its faults, which I should not like to copy—though they have been exaggerated—it is a newspaper.”

WJC

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The ‘new yellow journalism’? Hardly

In Debunking, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on December 18, 2009 at 3:52 pm

The blog Secondhand Smoke yesterday likened coverage of the global warming debate to “a new yellow journalism,” arguing:

“When journalists so emotionally choose sides, they cease to be journalists.”

The blog author may be right about U.S. media coverage of the global warming phenomenon. It’s hardly been searching, or challenging, in any sustained way.

But he’s quite incorrect in saying the coverage represents “a new yellow journalism” (which he vaguely defines as “using all the tricks of the trade to panic the world into granting tremendous power to an unelected and unaccountable global warming scientocracy, that will ‘save the planet’ via anti human and economy  killing policies”).

Yellow journalism, he further writes, “helped push the USA into war back in the 1890s.”

Well, that’s a media myth. A delicious and enduring one, too.

As I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies:

William Randolph Hearst in 1896

“The yellow press is not to blame for the Spanish-American-War. It did not force—it could not have forced—the United States into hostilities with Spain over Cuba in 1898. The conflict was, rather, the result of a convergence of forces far beyond the control or direct influence of even the most aggressive of the yellow newspapers, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.”

I also wrote that claims that the yellow press fomented the war “are exceedingly media-centric, often rest on the selective use of evidence, and tend to ignore more relevant and immediate factors that give rise to armed conflict.

“In the case of the Spanish-American War, the policy objectives between the United States and Spain ultimately proved irreconcilable. Months of intricate diplomatic efforts ultimately failed to resolve what had become an intolerable state of affairs in Cuba, dramatized by the destruction of the Maine in [February 1898] in a harbor under Spanish control and supervision. To indict the yellow press for causing the Spanish-American War is to misread the evidence and to ignore the intricacies of the diplomatic quandary that culminated in the spring of 1898 in an impasse that led to war.”

Yellow journalism has been equated (as Secondhand Smoke suggests) to lurid and sensational treatment of the news. It’s often the term of choice for egregious journalistic misconduct of almost any kind. And sometimes, yellow journalism is seen as synonymous with Hearst, himself.

None of those shorthand characterizations is adequate, revealing, or very accurate. None of them captures the genre’s complexity and vigor.

As practiced in the late 19th century, yellow journalism was defined by these features and charactersitics:

  • the frequent use of multicolumn headlines that sometimes stretched across the front page.
  • a variety of topics reported on the front page, including news of politics, war, international diplomacy, sports, and society.
  • the generous and imaginative use of illustrations, including photographs and other graphic representations such as locator maps.
  • bold and experimental layouts, including those in which one report and illustration would dominate the front page. Such layouts sometimes were enhanced by the use of color.
  • a tendency to rely on anonymous sources, particularly in dispatches of leading reporters.
  • a penchant for self-promotion, to call attention frequently to the newspaper’s accomplishments. This tendency was notably evident in crusades against monopolies and municipal corruption.

As so defined, yellow journalism certainly could not be called predictable, boring, or uninspired—complaints of the sort that are frequently raised about U.S. newspapers of the early twenty-first century.

Jack Shafer, the inestimable media critic at slate.com, put it well in a column early this year:

“I wish our better newspapers availed themselves of some of the techniques of yellow journalism and a little less of the solemnity we associate with the Committee of Concerned Journalists.” Well said.

WJC

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Debunking the debunking

In Media myths, Yellow Journalism on November 20, 2009 at 3:04 pm

There’s undenial appeal in busting myths.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book on media-driven myths, “Debunking can be an entertaining and even faintly mischievous pursuit.”

A hint of that appeal can be detected in a commentary posted recently at fairfieldweekly.com, the online site of a free weekly newspaper in Connecticut.

The author writes: “In recent weeks, while researching a publishing project on the myths of American history, I have combed through an unending supply of stories that, upon closer scrutiny, simply do not hold, or even add, up.”

He says “the swiftness with which Americans are willing to accept, believe and disseminate myths would be touching if it wasn’t so dangerous.”

To illustrate that point, he cites “the sinking of the battleship Maine, the immediate cause of the Spanish-American War. The explosion was caused by a fire in the ammunition hold, not by Spanish sabotage. Doesn’t matter; we wanted the war, so [William Randolph] Hearst sold the sabotage myth to the American people, they quickly bought it hook, line and sinker, and we ended up an empire.”

Wreckage of the Maine, 1898 (Library of Congress)

In addressing a purported myth, the author indulges in and reiterates another, even more profound myth — that Hearst’s coverage of the Maine‘s destruction in Havana harbor in early 1898 was decisive to the U.S. declaration of war against Spain.

It’s a tempting and very tidy explanation about why the United States went to war. But it’s decidedly in error.

As I wrote in Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies (2001),  Hearst and his newspapers are “not to blame for the Spanish-American-War.” They did not force—they could not have forced—the United States into hostilities with Spain over Cuba in 1898.

The destruction of the Maine may have focused American public opinion on Cuba, but it was scarcely the principal reason in the decision to go to war.

Rather, the conflict was result of a convergence of forces that were far beyond the control or influence of Hearst and his papers.

The war with Spain was the consequence of a prolonged, three-sided impasse: Spain, for domestic political reasons, could not agree to grant independence for Cuba. The rebel movement in Cuba, which had been fighting Spanish forces for three years before the United States declared war, would accept nothing less than independence. And the United States, for political and economic reasons, could tolerate no longer the disruption and the human rights abuses caused by Spain’s harsh and ineffective efforts to put down the rebellion.

A Cuban rebel executed by Spanish firing squad, 1897

By early 1898, the Spanish had forced thousands and thousands of Cuban non-combatants — women, children, and old men — into garrison towns, in an attempt to deprive the rebels of support. Many thousands of these civilians died of disease and malnutrition, at what the Spanish called “reconcentration” centers.

This human rights disaster was well-known to, and often a topic of coverage by, U.S. newspapers, including Hearst’s. In many respects, the U.S. war with Spain was a humanitarian crusade, to end the abuses on Cuba.

In addition, there is no agreement among historians that the Maine blew up because of “a fire in the ammunition hold.” A study commissioned by the National Geographic Society and released in 1998 reports that chemical analysis pointed to an external source, such as an underwater mine, as the cause of the deadly explosion that destroyed the battleship.

WJC