W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Yellow Journalism’

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Keller no keeper of the flame on famous NYT motto

In 1897, Anniversaries, Debunking, New York Times, Newspapers, Year studies, Yellow Journalism on February 11, 2011 at 8:56 am

Keller

Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, made clear the other day he doesn’t fully understand the derivation and significance of his newspaper’s famous, 114-year-old motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

And he didn’t seem particularly comfortable with the slogan coined (most likely) by Adolph Ochs, who in 1896 acquired the then-beleaguered Times and eventually led the newspaper to preeminence in American journalism.

Ochs, commemorated

Sure, the motto’s smug and overweening, elliptical and easily parodied. But it is the most recognizable motto in American journalism, and it evokes a time now passed when slogans helped define and distinguish U.S. newspapers.

In an appearance not long ago at the National Press Club in Washington, Keller was asked about “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” which took a permanent place of prominence on the newspaper’s front page on February 10, 1897.

Keller rather sniffed at it, saying the motto “harkens back to a day when the aim of the newspaper was to be comprehensive.”

According to a transcript of his remarks, Keller said that nowadays the Times is “going to tell you maybe only a little bit, but a little bit about everything.

“And I think that slogan describes an aspiration, or a mindset. Now we tend to be more selective, and try to give you more depth, to tell you the stories that are not obvious.”

Actually, “All the News That’s Fit to Print” was framed a riposte to activist-oritented yellow journalism that flared in New York City in the closing years of the 19th century.

Ochs clearly meant the slogan to be a rebuke to the flamboyant ways of the  New York Journal of William Randolph Hearst and the New York World of Joseph Pulitzer. Their newspapers were the leading exemplars of the yellow press in fin-de-siècle urban America.

As I wrote in my 2006 book, a year study titled The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, the motto was, and remains, a daily rejection of flamboyant, self-promoting journalism.

And as the Times pointed out in 1935 in its obituary about Ochs, the motto “has been much criticized, but the criticisms deal usually with the phraseology rather than with its practical interpretation, and the phraseology was simply an emphatic announcement that The Times was not and would not be what the nineties called a yellow newspaper.”

I further noted in The Year That Defined American Journalism that the Times, at its 50th anniversary in 1901, “referred to ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’ as its ‘covenant.’ One-hundred years later, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal aptly identified the motto as the ‘leitmotif not merely for the Times, but also, by a process of osmosis and emulation, for most other general-interest papers in the country, as well as for much of the broadcast media.'”

So, no, the motto wasn’t an assertion of intent to be comprehensive — although the Times surely carried a lot of news in the late 1890s. Thirty or more articles, many of them a paragraph or two in length, usually found places on its front page back then.

Ochs’ slogan was more than a daily slap at yellow journalism.

It also represents “a daily and lasting reminder of the Times’ triumph in a momentous … clash of paradigms that took shape in 1897—a clash that helped define the modern contours of American journalism,” as I noted in The Year That Defined American Journalism.

That clash pitted three rival, incompatible models for the future of American journalism.

“As suggested by its slogan,” I wrote, “the Times offered a detached, impartial, fact-based model that embraced the innovative technologies emergent in the late nineteenth century but eschewed extravagance, prurience, and flamboyance in presenting the news.

“Extravagance, prurience, and flamboyance were features typically associated with yellow journalism, a robust genre which, despite its controversial and self-indulgent ways, seemed to be irresistibly popular in 1897. The leading exemplar of yellow journalism was … Hearst’s New York Journal, which in 1897 claimed to have developed a new kind of journalism, a paradigm infused by a self-activating ethos that sidestepped the inertia of government to ‘get things done.’

“The Journal called its model the ‘journalism of action’ or the ‘journalism that acts,’ and declared it represented ‘the final state in the evolution of the modern newspaper.’

“The third rival paradigm,” I wrote, “was more modest and idiosyncratic than those of the Times and Journal. If improbable, it was nonetheless an imaginative response to the trends of commercialization in journalism. The paradigm was an anti-journalistic literary model devised and promoted by J. Lincoln Steffens, who in late 1897 became city editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser, then New York’s oldest newspaper.”

That model, Steffens said, was predicated on the notion “that anything that interested any of us would interest our readers and, therefore, would be news if reported interestingly.”

The Times ultimately prevailed in the three-sided rivalry that emerged in 1897, and “All the News That’s Fit to Print” lives on as a reminder of the outcome of that momentous clash of paradigms.

WJC

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114 years on the front page

In 1897, Anniversaries, New York Times, Newspapers, Yellow Journalism on February 9, 2011 at 7:37 am

Tomorrow makes 114 years on the front page for the best-known slogan in American journalism.

114 years on the front

The slogan, of course, is “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” which first appeared February 10, 1897, in the upper left corner (the left ear) of the front page New York Times.

I’ve called them the most famous seven words in American journalism and they have been endlessly parodied and analyzed since 1897. Even admirers of the Times have conceded that “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is “overweening” and even “elliptical.”

As I discussed in my 2006 book, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, the motto has given rise to some lofty claims over the years. In 1901, at the 50th anniversary of its founding, the Times referred to “All the News That’s Fit to Print” as its “covenant.”

In 2001, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal described the motto as the “leitmotif not merely for the Times, but also, by a process of osmosis and emulation, for most other general-interest papers in the country, as well as for much of the broadcast media.”

Adolph Ochs began using the slogan soon after acquiring control of the then-beleaguered Times in August 1896. At first, Ochs made use of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” as an advertising and marketing device.

The slogan’s debut came in early October 1896, spelled out in a row of red lights on an advertising sign the Times had rented at New York’s Madison Square.

Four months later, without fanfare or explanation, the slogan appeared in the “left ear” of the front page. It has appeared in that place of prominence ever since.

In touting “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” Ochs clearly sought to distance the Times from the yellow press of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Their flamboyant newspapers dominated New York City’s media landscape in the late 1890s.

Ochs was nothing if not aggressive in promoting the Times and in seeking to position the newspaper as a sober counterweight to the activism and excesses of the yellow press.

To that end, he launched in late October 1896 a contest inviting readers to propose “a phrase more expressive of the Times’ policy” than “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” which by then had taken a modest place in a corner of the Times’ editorial page.

The Times promised to pay $100 to the person who proposed in ten words or fewer a slogan deemed better than “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

The motto contest, cheesy though it may seem today, stirred a fair amount of attention–and reader interaction–in 1896.

Among the thousands of entries sent to the Times were such clunky suggestions as “All the News Worth Telling,” “All the News That Decent People Want,” and “The Fit News That’s Clean and True.”

Among the others:

“Full of meat, clean and neat.”

“Instructive to all, offensive to none.”

“The people’s voice, good the choice.”

“Aseptic journalism up to date.”

“Yours neatly, sweetly, and completely.”

As I wrote in The Year That Defined American Journalism: “Before the contest ended, the Times altered the stakes by making clear it would not abandon ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print.’

“The Times,” I wrote, “justified this change of heart by saying no phrase entered in the contest was more apt and expressive than ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print.’ The $100 prize would be awarded, to the person adjudged to have submitted the best entry. But the motto would not be changed.”

But the entries kept rolling in. Other suggestions included:

“Bright as a star and there you are.”

“All the news to instruct and amuse.”

“Pure in purpose, diligent in service.”

“You do not want what the New-York Times does not print.”

“All that’s new, true, and clever.”

Another entry was inspired by rival titles in fin-de-siècle New York:

“Out heralds The Herald, informs The World, extinguishes The Sun.” (That suggestion is evocative of the slogan of New York Newsday, a tabloid that ceased publication in 1995 after 10 years:  “On top of the News, ahead of the Times.”)

As the motto contest neared its close in early November 1896, the Times noted that that some people had “sent in diagrams and even pictures.

“While these exhibit both skill and thought,” the newspaper said, “they cannot be accepted, because they are not wanted.”

A committee of Times staffers winnowed the entries to 150 semi-finalists, which were submitted to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century magazine. Gilder selected these as finalists:

  • Always decent; never dull.
  • The news of the day; not the rubbish.
  • A decent newspaper for decent people.
  • All the world’s news, but not a school for scandal.

As I wrote in The Year That Defined American Journalism, Gilder noted “that terms of the contest had changed from the original intent of selecting a slogan that ‘more aptly express the distinguishing characteristics of the New-York Times’ to the more theoretical task of determining which entry ‘would come nearest to it in aptness.’”

That entry, Gilder determined, had been submitted by D.M. Redfield of New Haven, Connecticut. Redfield’s suggestion:

“All the world’s news, but not a school for scandal.”

Catchy, that.

WJC

Many thanks to Jim Romenesko for linking to this post

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Media myth and Truthout

In 1897, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on February 3, 2011 at 6:47 am

It’s at least faintly ironic that an online news site called Truthout — which asserts an embrace of “equality, democracy, human rights, accountability and social justice” — would post a reference to one of American journalism’s most enduring and delicious media myths.

Not Hearst's doing

In its serializing a book by radio host Thom Hartmann, Truthout the other day indulged in the myth that William Randolph Hearst vowed to “furnish the war” with Spain in 1898 — and then made good on the supposed pledge.

The installment Truthout posted Monday said Hearst “had cabled his artist correspondent to Cuba, Frederick[sic] Remington, ‘You provide the pictures, and I’ll provide the war.’

“Hearst came through on his end of the deal, and the Spanish-American War—started largely by his newspapers and the public sentiment they controlled ….”

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the anecdote about Hearst’s vow is almost certainly apocryphal — a media-driven myth.

And so is the notion that Hearst’s newspapers fomented the Spanish-American War.

In the first chapter of Getting It Wrong, I note that the Remington-Hearst tale remains popular “despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation. It lives on even though telegrams supposedly exchanged by Remington and Hearst have never turned up. It lives on even though Hearst denied ever sending such a message.”

Moreover, I write:

The anecdote endures “despite an irreconcilable internal inconsistency: It would have been absurd for Hearst to vow to ‘furnish the war’ because war—specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule—was the very reason Hearst sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.”

Given the context of Remington’s assignment, a vow to “furnish the war” simply would have been incongruous, and illogical.

Had Hearst sent such an inflammatory telegram, it surely would have been intercepted by Spanish censors, who controlled incoming and outgoing cable traffic in Cuba. Spanish authorities undoubtedly would have called attention to what would have been a clear case of Hearst’s meddling.

So it’s highly improbable that a cable containing a vow to “furnish the war” would have flowed without interruption between Hearst in New York and Frederic Remington in Havana. (Had the cable been sent, it would have been in mid-January 1897, near the end of Remington’s lone pre-war visit to Cuba.)

Moreover, no one who repeats the purported vow seems to note, or much care, that Hearst denied having sent such a message and Remington, a prominent artist of the American West, apparently never spoke about it.

The related myth — that Hearst’s newspapers brought on the conflict with Spain — is just as hardy as “furnish the war.” Like many media myths, it offers a reductive, simplistic, and easy-to-remember version of a complex historical event.

The Spanish-American War, quite simply, was not caused by the contents of Hearst’s newspapers, of which he had three at the time — two in New York City, one in San Francisco.

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

“The yellow press [of Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer] 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.”

Besides, no one who asserts that the yellow press was responsible for the war with Spain can persuasively demonstrate just how the often-exaggerated contents of Hearst and Pulitzer’s newspapers were decisive in the declaration of war in April 1898.

“If the yellow press did foment the war,” I wrote in Yellow Journalism, then “researchers should be able to find some hint of, some reference to, that influence in the personal papers and the reminiscences of policymakers of the time.

“But neither the diary entries of cabinet officers nor the contemporaneous private exchanges among American diplomats indicate that the yellow newspapers exerted any influence at all.”

When it was discussed within the administration of President William McKinley, the yellow press was dismissed as a nuisance or disdained at as a complicating factor.

The truth is that the yellow press neither drove, shaped, nor  crystallized U.S. policy vis-à-vis Spain in 1898.

Put another way: Hearst did not follow through on a vow he never made.

WJC

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‘Yellow journalism’ turns 114

In 1897, Anniversaries, Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on January 30, 2011 at 8:21 am

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

Wardman of the Press

But tomorrow marks 114 years since the term “yellow journalism” first appeared in print, in the old New York Press, edited by the austere Ervin Wardman (left).

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

“Yellow journalism” quickly caught on, as a sneer to denigrate what then was called the “new journalism” of the New York Journal of William Randolph Hearst and the New York World of Joseph Pulitzer. 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 if nebulous term — derisive shorthand for vaguely 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” isn’t clear.

The newspaper’s own, brief discussion of the term’s derivation was unhelpful 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 decadent  literature, which may have been an inspiration to the Harvard-educated Wardman, a figure now 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 contempt for Hearst and Hearst’s journalism.

His disdain 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 of the same title.)

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. The New York 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 blasts on the editorial page 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.

Yellow kid poster (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 evocative 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 the Journal embraced the term in mid-May 1898, during the Spanish-American War. With typical immodesty, the newspaper declared:

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

WJC

From an essay originally posted at Media Myth Alert January 31, 2010

Many thanks to Jim Romenesko for linking to this post

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On the thin contributions of media rabble-rousers

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Yellow Journalism on January 26, 2011 at 6:39 am

The departure of the bombastic Keith Olbermann from MSNBC’s primetime lineup is no an occasion for mourning.

But it’s to be regretted.

A little.

So suggested Bret Stephens yesterday in hisWall Street Journal column about Olbermann, who abruptly left his “Countdown” show at the end of last week.

Stephens pointed out:

“The ‘Countdown’ host did away with the old-fashioned liberal snigger and replaced it with a full-frontal snarl. Put simply, Mr. Olbermann had a genuine faith in populism, something liberals more often preach than practice.”

Stephens also offered this intriguing observation:

“America does better when its political debates descend, as they so often do on (or between) MSNBC and Fox News, into honest brawls.”

He may be right, although I wish he had elaborated on that point.

The observation about “honest brawls” reminded me of the insults and brickbats that American newspaper editors of the 1890s routinely exchanged in print. These were vigorous, lusty,  often vicious exchanges — and there really was little memorable or lasting about them. Save, perhaps, for an epithet or two.

Like that of “yellow journalism.”

Wardman, father to a sneer

As I discussed in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths Defining the Legacies, the epithet emerged in late January 1897, during the failed campaign of Ervin Wardman, a New York newspaper editor, to drive a stake into the heart of the upstart journalism of William Randolph Hearst and, to a lesser extent, of Joseph Pulitzer.

“Yellow journalism” took hold and spread quickly in 1897; it lives on today, as a vague but handy smear especially favored by letter-writers to newspapers.

Trouble is, the sneer “yellow journalism” is so ill-defined and flabby that it has become synonymous with journalistic sins of all kinds — exaggeration, sensationalism, hype, plagiarism, what have you.

And the trouble with media rabble-rousers like Olbermann is that their commentary often lacks wit and nuance, and tends to be superficial. It’s not deft, typically, and it’s unheard of for them to invoke media-driven myths–those dubious stories about the news media that masquerade as factual.

I address and debunk 10 prominent media-driven myths in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

On his way out, in announcing his abrupt departure, Olbermann indulged in media myth. He described as “exaggerated” the rescue of Army private Jessica Lynch in Iraq in 2003. Hyped, maybe a bit. But the Lynch rescue, conducted by a U.S. special operations force under combat conditions, was not exaggerated.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, the Defense Department’s inspector general reported in 2007 that the rescue of Lynch from an Iraqi hospital was “a valid mission” to recover a prisoner of war.

There was no evidence to suggest that the rescue “was a staged media event” even though it was videotaped, as such missions often are.

Olbermann had on other occasions invoked the media myth surrounding Edward R. Murrow, whom he sought to emulate by borrowing the legendary broadcaster’s sign-off, “Good night, and good luck.”

In November, Olbermann referred to Murrow as “a paragon of straight reporting” while claiming the American press “stood idly by” as Senator Joseph R. McCarthy pursued his communists-in-government witch-hunt.

On March 9, 1954, during a 30-minute CBS television show called See It Now, “Murrow slayed the dragon,” Olbermann declared.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, neither Murrow nor his producer, Fred Friendly, embraced the dragon-slaying interpretation. (Friendly wrote in his memoir, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control: “To say that the Murrow broadcast of March 9, 1954, was the decisive blow against Senator McCarthy’s power is as inaccurate as it is to say that Joseph R. McCarthy … single-handedly gave birth to McCarthyism.”)

And it’s quite clear that the American press did not stand “idly by” as the scourge of McCarthyism emerged.

As I point out in Getting It Wrong:

“Long before the See It Now program, several prominent journalists—including the Washington-based syndicated columnist Drew Pearson—had become persistent and searching critics of McCarthy, his record, and his tactics.”

By the time Murrow took on McCarthy in March 1954, Americans weren’t waiting for a white knight to tell them about the toxic threat the senator posed.

Thanks to the work of Pearson and other journalists, they already knew.

WJC

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Finding hints of Hearst in the Tucson aftermath? What a stretch

In Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on January 15, 2011 at 11:32 am

Hearst's Evening Journal, April 1898

The deadly shootings in Tucson a week ago touched off intense efforts by the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets to link the attacks to views and rhetoric of conservative politicians and activists.

But the smear failed to take hold, given the dearth of evidence tying the suspected shooter to political causes of the right and given the vigor of the pushback against what were outrageous characterizations.

The pushback was not without inaccuracy, however.

The conservative Red State blog the other day likened the media meme of the Tucson shootings to the historically incorrect view that the overheated content of William Randolph Hearst’s yellow press brought about the Spanish-American War in 1898.

The Red State item asserted that in the Tucson shootings, the mainstream media “smelled opportunity in the proud and honorable tradition of William Randolph Hurst [sic].”

The item further declared:

“Hearst earned well-deserved infamy for his manipulation of the explosion of the USS Maine to enhance the likelihood of a war between The United States and Spain. He wrote inflammatory articles, based on biased and insufficient evidence that implicated the Spanish for having an infernal machine to sink US vessels. The Spanish-American War broke out in 1898. Historians believe that it may not have happened with the rhetorical justifications Heart’s dishonest journalism provided.”

There’s a lot of error and imprecision to unpack in that paragraph. Take the last line first: Few serious historians would argue that Hearst or the content of his newspapers were factors at all in the Spanish-American War.

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

“The yellow press … 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.”

No one making the argument that the yellow press fomented the war can demonstrate adequately or persuasively how its content influenced American policymaking during the weeks between the destruction of the Maine and the declaration of war in April 1898.

As I wrote in Yellow Journalism:

“If the yellow press did foment the war, researchers should be able to find some hint of, some reference to, that influence in the personal papers and the reminiscences of policymakers of the time.

“But neither the diary entries of cabinet officers nor the contemporaneous private exchanges among American diplomats indicate that the yellow newspapers exerted any influence at all.”

When it was discussed by officials of in the administration of President William McKinley, the yellow press was dismissed as a nuisance or disdained at as a complicating factor. But the yellow press neither shaped, drove, nor  crystallized U.S. policy.

Besides, the yellow press wasn’t alone in implicating Spanish authorities for the destruction of the Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. The   warship exploded at anchor, killing 266 officers and sailors.

A U.S. court of naval inquiry found that the warship’s destruction was caused by a mine, set by persons unknown. The court of inquiry rejected the theory that an unnoticed coal bunker fire set off explosions that destroyed the Maine.

The court of inquiry’s most telling piece of evidence: The inward thrust of the warship’s keel. Such damage could only have been caused by an external explosion.

In any case, the warship was sunk in a harbor under control and supervision of Spanish authorities which, to the McKinley administration, was further evidence of an intolerable state of affairs in Cuba, where an islandwide rebellion had periodically flared over the previous three years.

Spain’s attempts to crush the rebellion had largely failed, but its harsh policies had precipitated a humanitarian crisis in which tens of thousands of Cuban non-combattants –old men, women, and children–fell victim to disease and starvation.

The humanitarian crisis, and Spain’s inability to exert control over Cuba, were the proximate causes of the war in 1898. The content of the yellow press, as well as other U.S. newspapers, reflected those realities, but certainly did not cause them.

As historian David Trask has written, Americans in 1898 “went to war convinced that they had embarked upon an entirely selfless mission for humanity.”

But they didn’t go because they were moved to do so by Hearst and his yellow press.

In the end, to indict Hearst and the yellow press for instigating the Spanish-American War, is I wrote in Yellow Journalism, “to misread the evidence and thus do disservice to the broader understanding of a much-misunderstood conflict.”

Much as the post-Tucson media smear has done a disservice to the vigor and legitimacy of political discourse in a democratic society.

WJC

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NYTimes practices ‘yellow journalism’? How so?

In 1897, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Year studies, Yellow Journalism on January 14, 2011 at 8:03 am

The “Best of the Web” roundup yesterday accused the New York Times of practicing “yellow journalism” for suggesting that conservative activists and politicians bore collective responsibility for last weekend’s murderous rampage in Arizona.

“Best of the Web,” an online compilation prepared by the Wall Street Journal, assailed the Times for having “seized upon a horrific crime to demonize its political opponents,” for having “instigated” an uproar “with its yellow journalism.”

The Times certainly deserves criticism for hasty and politically charged commentary about the violence in Arizona that killed six people and left Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords severely wounded.

But to accuse the Times of “yellow journalism“?

Well, that’s absurd.

For starters, the “Best of the Web” item didn’t explain what it meant by “yellow journalism.”

The term is convenient but imprecise; it’s often invoked (though not entirely accurately) as a shorthand for the sensational treatment of the news.

More broadly, as I noted in my 2001 book Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, “yellow journalism” is an amorphous epithet that has been applied to all sorts of journalistic misconduct. It’s a term favored by letter-writers to newspapers who denounce bias, distortion, and other presumed misdeeds in journalism.

“Yellow journalism” also finds expression in international contexts, often emerging, for example, as a complaint about press performance in India.

Wardman: Coined 'yellow journalism'

This impressively dexterous term emerged in early 1897. That was when a New York newspaper editor named Ervin Wardman coined “yellow journalism” to disparage the flamboyant newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.

Hearst claimed to practice “new journalism” but came to embrace Wardman’s term. In so doing, Hearst’s flagship New York Journal was typically immodest, likening itself to the sun–“the sun which is to this earth what the Journal is American journalism.”

“Yellow journalism” became a recognizable, even bold genre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As I wrote in Yellow Journalism, the genre in its most developed and intense form 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.

And as I noted in Yellow Journalism, the genre as practiced more than a century ago “certainly could not be called predictable, boring, or uninspired”—complaints of the sort that often are raised about contemporary American newspapers.

Interestingly, the New York Times established itself as the antithesis of yellow journalism of the late 1890s. It often condemned the excesses of the genre, especially those of Hearst’s Journal.

Under the ownership of Adolph Ochs, who acquired the newspaper in 1896, the Times nominally sought to position itself as a staid, impartial, fact-based model of journalism that eschewed extravagance and flamboyance in presenting the news.

And as I wrote in my 2006 book–a year-study titled The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms–the Times under Ochs lacked the resources of Hearst’s Journal and seldom competed in expensive and far-flung newsgathering ventures. (Hearst spent lavishly to gather the news; in 1897, he paid Richard Harding Davis the contemporary equivalent of $50,000 to report from Cuba for a month on the uprising against Spanish colonial rule.)

The Times instead sought to position itself as the sober, moral counterweight to the Journal, and periodically challenged the wisdom and ethics of that newspaper’s forays into activist journalism—such as the case of jailbreaking journalism in 1897. That was when a reporter for the Journal organized the escape of a 19-year-old Cuban political prisoner named Evangelina Cisneros.

“Yellow journalism” has a long, varied, but not distinguished pedigree. It is to be sure a handy and supple pejorative.

But when invoked in criticism, definitional vagueness doesn’t cut it. “Yellow journalism” ought to be used with precision.

WJC

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Many thanks to Jim Romenesko for linking to the post.

n its most developed and intense form, yellow journalism was characterized by:

· 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.[i] Such layouts sometimes were enhanced by the use of color.

· a tendency to rely on anonymous sources, particularly in dispatches of leading reporters (such as James Creelman, who wrote for the Journal and the World).

· 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 a century ago, yellow journalism certainly could not be called predictable, boring, or uninspired—complaints of the sort that were not infrequently raised about U.S. newspapers at the turn of the twenty-first century

[i]. See, among many other examples, “Remington and Davis Tell of Spanish Cruelty,” New York Journal (2 February 1897): 1. The front page was almost entirely devoted to a sketch by Frederic Remington to illustrate a dispatch by Richard Harding Davis about a Cuban rebel’s execution by Spanish firing squad.

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The ‘anniversary’ of a media myth: ‘I’ll furnish the war’

In 1897, Anniversaries, Debunking, Furnish the war, Media myths, Newspapers, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on January 13, 2011 at 7:31 am

Remington, Davis in Cuba for Hearst

Had it occurred, the legendary but improbable exchange of telegrams between William Randolph Hearst and the artist Frederic Remington–in which Hearst supposedly vowed to “furnish the war” with Spain–would have taken place in mid-January 1897.

The uncertainty as to exactly when the purported exchange occurred is one of many signals the tale is apocryphal, a media-driven myth.

As I discuss in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, the Remington-Hearst anecdote is “perhaps the hardiest myth in American journalism.”

It lives on in part because it is a pithy and delicious tale. It corresponds well to the image of Hearst the war-monger, the unscrupulous newspaper published who fomented the Spanish-American War in 1898.

As I point out in the first chapter of Getting It Wrong, the Remington-Hearst tale is often retold “despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation. It lives on even though telegrams supposedly exchanged by Remington and Hearst have never turned up. It lives on even though Hearst denied ever sending such a message.”

Moreover, I write:

The anecdote “lives on despite an irreconcilable internal inconsistency: It would have been absurd for Hearst to vow to ‘furnish the war’ because war—specifically, the Cuban rebellion against Spain’s colonial rule—was the very reason Hearst sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.”

The sole original source for the “furnish the war” quotation was On the Great Highway, a slim volume of reminiscences that came out in 1901. The author was James Creelman, a portly, cigar-chomping journalist prone to pomposity and exaggeration.

Creelman did not explain in On the Great Highway how or where he learned about the purported Remingt0n-Hearst exchange. Creelman–who was in Madrid at the time Remington was in Cuba–recounted the anecdote a not as a rebuke but as a compliment to Hearst and the activist “yellow journalism” he had pioneered in New York City.

Nor did Creelman say exactly when the presumed exchange took place, writing only that it was “some time before the destruction of the battleship Maine in the harbor of Havana” in mid-February 1898. The only time Remington was in Cuba before the explosion that destroyed the Maine was in January 1897.

Creelman: Sole source

Remington, an accomplished artist of the American West, went to Cuba in 1897 to draw sketches of scenes of the uprising against Spanish rule. He traveled with Richard Harding Davis, who then was burnishing a reputation as one of American journalism’s leading correspondents.

Hearst recruited Remington and Davis for a month, and the plan was for them to reach a force of Cuban rebels under the command of Máximo Gómez.

But Remington and Davis never reached the rebels. What’s more, they proved to be an oddly matched team. In Matanzas on January 15, 1897, they parted ways. Remington returned to Havana and the next day boarded a steamship bound for New York.

Legend has it that before leaving Havana, Remington sent Hearst a telegram that supposedly said:

“Everything is quiet. There will be no war. I wish to return.”

Hearst purportedly cabled Remington in reply:

“Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

Had it occurred, the exchange would have taken place late on January 15, 1897, or early on January 16, 1897.

Remington disregarded Hearst’s purported instructions to “remain” in Cuba. The artist was one of seven passengers aboard the Seneca when it sailed from Havana on January 16, 1897. The steamer reached New York four days later and soon afterward, Hearst’s New York Journal began publishing Remington’s sketches drawn in Cuba.

“The work was given prominent display,” I note in Getting It Wrong. Headlines in the Journal hailed Remington as a “gifted artist”–hardly the sort of accolade Hearst would have extended to someone in his employ who had brazenly disregarded instructions to remain on the scene.

That’s further reason for doubting that Hearst ever sent a telegram vowing to “furnish the war.”

And yet another reason is that Spanish censors, who controlled all incoming and outgoing cable traffic in Havana, surely would have intercepted Hearst’s inflammatory message, had it been sent. It’s highly improbable that cables such as those attributed to Hearst and Remington would have flowed readily between New York and Havana.

Additionally, the correspondence of Davis gives lie to the anecdote.

Davis wrote frequently to his family, especially to his mother, Rebecca Harding Davis. His letters make clear that  Remington did not leave because they found “everything is quiet” in Cuba.

In fact, Davis wrote on the day he and Remington parted ways:

“There is war here and no mistake.”

His correspondence offered detailed descriptions of what he called the grim process “of extermination and ruin” in Cuba.

More important, Davis’ letters make clear that Remington left for home not on the pretext that “everything is quiet,” but because Davis wanted him to go.

“I am as relieved at getting old Remington to go as though I had won $5000,” Davis wrote to his mother on January 15, 1897. “He was a splendid fellow but a perfect kid and had to be humored and petted all the time.”

Davis added that he “was very glad” Remington left “for he kept me back all the time and I can do twice as much in half the time.”

I note in Getting It Wrong that the Remington-Hearst tale was “Creelman’s singular contribution to American journalism.” The anecdote has proven to have timeless appeal, in part because it promotes what I call “the improbable notion the media are powerful and dangerous forces, so powerful they can even bring on a war.”

WJC

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Fact-checking WaPo columnist on the ‘McKinley moment’

In Debunking, Media myths, Spanish-American War, Washington Post, Yellow Journalism on January 12, 2011 at 7:42 am

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank offered up a glib and flabby column yesterday, arguing that the false charges of incitement raised long ago in the McKinley assassination should serve as a cautionary reminder to the likes of Sarah Palin and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck.

They should experience what Milbank vaguely termed a “McKinley moment.”

McKinley

He recalled–and not entirely accurately–the efforts in 1901 to link the contents of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers to the fatal shooting of President William McKinley.

I discussed that topic in a post Monday at Media Myth Alert, noting how extreme and wrong-headed attempts to exploit and politicize the weekend’s shooting rampage in Tucson was reminiscent of the smear campaign against Hearst following McKinley’s slaying.

The rampage in Arizona left six people dead, including a federal judge. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was severely wounded.

Milbank’s column seizes on the shootings in Tuscon as a pretext to condemn the views and rhetoric of Palin and Beck, neither of whom I much care for.

Milbank began his column by declaring:

“If any good can come of the horror in Tucson, it will be that this becomes a McKinley moment for Sarah Palin and her chief spokesman, Glenn Beck.”

A “McKinley moment”? Meaning what? An occasion for self-censorship because of the insinuations and false allegations raised against them in the aftermath of the shootings in Tucson–much as false allegations were raised against Hearst following McKinley’s slaying?

Not only is “McKinley moment” an imprecise construct: It suggests that using smears to batter foes into silence is somehow worthy or admirable.

Milbank in his column briefly reviewed the false and improbable charges of incitement leveled against Hearst after McKinley was fatally shot in September 1901 and wrote:

“The outcry against Hearst’s incitement–there were boycotts and a burning in effigy–dashed his presidential ambitions.

“A similar, and long overdue, outcry has followed the Tucson killings.”

“Maybe,” Milbank added, “Beck and Palin will be good enough to show us what a real moment of silence is–by having themselves a nice long one.”

A more fitting and appropriate response from the violence in Tucson would be not to seek to mute the rhetoric of foes, but to condemn the smear, to call attention to the hazards of battering opponents with indirect and groundless allegations of incitement.

Hearst was so battered in 1901.

He, not unlike Palin and Beck, was a brash and controversial figure, easy to dislike.

Hearst’s aggressive, activist-oriented approach to newspapering–his yellow journalism–shook up New York City’s media scene in late 1890s and served as a platform for his political ambitions during the first decade of the 20th century.

But Hearst was no villain, no violence-monger. As I write in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, Hearst almost surely never vowed to bring on the Spanish-American War of 1898, although that hardy myth is often invoked and readily believed.

His newspapers were known to publish intemperate commentary, as were rival newspapers at the turn of the 20th century. And ill-advised surely defines the column written in 1900 by Ambrose Bierce, who ruminated about a bullet “speeding here to stretch McKinley on his bier.”

Milbank’s column suggested that Bierce’s commentary was published in the Hearst papers some six months before McKinley was shot.

In fact, it appeared 20 months before the assassination, in a quatrain about the fatal shooting of William Goebel, the governor of Kentucky. Bierce said he meant to call attention to risks of not finding and prosecuting Goebel’s killer.

Milbank’s column, moreover, erred in claiming the uproar that followed McKinley’s assassination “dashed” Hearst’s presidential ambitions.

Not so.

Hearst mounted a serious bid for Democratic nomination for president in 1904. He was by then a congressman, and his presidential bandwagon  gathered some momentum during the first months of that year.

In the end, though, his candidacy was doomed–not by the smears and fabrications raised after the McKinley assassination but by the reluctance of William Jennings Bryan to embrace Hearst’s bid.

Bryan, who lost presidential elections to McKinley in 1896 and 1900, had been expected to endorse Hearst for Democratic nomination in 1904. After all, Hearst had supported Bryan’s ill-fated campaigns for the presidency and had even financially supported Bryan’s travels in Europe following the 1900 election.

When Bryan did not deliver the hoped-for endorsement (thinking, perhaps, he might again emerge as the party’s standard-bearer), Hearst’s candidacy was faded, according to David Nasaw, Hearst’s leading biographer.

“Without Bryan’s endorsement,” Nasaw wrote in his 2000 work, The Chief, “Hearst had no hope of securing the votes [of convention delegates] he needed for the nomination.”

Still, Hearst pursued his bid for the nomination to the Democratic convention in St. Louis in 1904. He lost by a wide margin to Judge Alton B. Parker.

Parker in turn lost the 1904 election in a landslide to Teddy Roosevelt, who as vice president had succeeded McKinley to the presidency.

The “McKinley moment,” as Milbank used the term, seems a misnomer.

More appropriate and accurate would be to call it the “Hearst moment,” given that Hearst was the target, the victim, of distortion and falsehood.

The “Hearst moment” offers a useful and pertinent reminder about the use and effect of the smear.

WJC

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Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds
at Instapundit for linking to this post.

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Blaming assassination on overheated commentary: No new tactic

In 1897, Debunking, Media myths, New York Sun, Spanish-American War, Yellow Journalism on January 10, 2011 at 7:56 am

The extreme attempts to politicize the weekend shootings in Arizona were dismaying and wrong-headed, but not without parallel.

Efforts to link the attack on Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to overheated political rhetoric and, more explicitly, to Republican Sarah Palin and the conservative Tea Party movement were evocative of a campaign more than a century ago to blame the assassination of President William McKinley on the yellow press of William Randolph Hearst.

Czolgosz, assassin

McKinley was fatally shot in September 1901 by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, who, according to Hearst’s finest biographer, was unable to read English.

Even so, Hearst’s foes–notably, the New York Sun–sought to tie the assassination to ill-advised comments about McKinley that had appeared in Hearst’s newspapers months earlier.

One especially ill-considered comment helped fuel the allegations: That was a quatrain written by columnist Ambrose Bierce 20 months before McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901, while greeting well-wishers in Buffalo.

Bierce’s column of February 4, 1900, closed with a reference to the assassination a few days earlier of the Kentucky governor, William Goebel. Bierce, a prickly and acerbic commentator, wrote:

The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast
Can not be found in all the West.
Good reason: it is speeding here [to Washington]
To stretch McKinley on his bier.

As I pointed out in my 2005 work, The Spanish-American War: American Wars and the Media in Primary Documents, “The quatrain attracted little notice or comment until Czolgosz shot the president in 1901.”

Bierce later wrote, ‘The verses, variously garbled but mostly made into an editorial, or a news dispatch with a Washington date-line but usually no date, were published all over the country as evidence of Mr. Hearst’s [supposed] complicity in the crime.”

The Sun led the assault on Hearst and his flagship newspaper, the New York Journal.

Beneath the headline, “A Menace to Our Civilization,” the Sun on September 12, 1901, accused the Journal of having provoked “an atrocious Anarchistic assault on the President” and declared that yellow journalism had “graduated into a serious and studied propaganda of social revolution.”

Never, the Sun declared, “was an instrument of disorder and sedition used so effectually and none ever had so great opportunities for its malign propaganda.”

Advertisers in the Journal, said the Sun, were “feeding a monster which is using the strength they are giving nutrition to in an effort to strike down the civilization upon which they depend.”

It was of course absurd to claim that Czolgosz’s mind had been poisoned by the contents of the Hearst press. Few other New York City newspapers were inclined to pick up the cudgel, even though not many admired Hearst’s activist-oriented journalism.

And as media scholar Brian Thornton noted in a fine journal article in 2000, “most of the attack against Hearst” in the aftermath of the McKinley shooting was sustained by letters to the editor of the Sun, not by the newspaper’s editorials.

The Sun, it should be noted, had long campaigned against Hearst, having urged in early 1897 a readership boycott of the yellow press, an effort that drew attention but ultimately collapsed.

Hearst

Still, the uproar in 1901 stunned Hearst. David Nasaw, Hearst’s leading biographer, wrote that perhaps for “the first time in his life, Hearst was forced onto the defensive.”

In response, Hearst renamed the Journal the Journal and American, to assert the newspaper’s patriotism. Eventually, he dropped the “Journal” from the nameplate altogether.

Hearst could take a measure of comfort in the insightful and level-headed commentary of journals such as The Bookman, which dismissed the criticism as preposterous.

“As a matter of fact,” The Bookman said in its December 1901 number, “it cannot be shown that any President ever lost his life because his assassins were influenced by the reading of newspaper denunciation.”

The Bookman also noted:

“Indeed, the most severe attacks on President McKinley’s policy were not attacks for which the so-called ‘yellow journals’ were responsible, but they were attacks uttered by such sincere and high-minded men as Senator [George] Hoar and ex-Secretary [Carl] Schurz–both of them Republicans–and by newspapers of great ability, such as the Evening Post” of New York.

The Bookman added:

“It is unthinkable that a press censorship should ever be established in our country; for in its practical operation it would mean that the opposition would have to abstain from all newspaper criticism of the party in power.”

There are in The Bookman commentary echoes of well-reasoned and insightful commentary written in the aftermath of the rampage in Arizona that left six people (a federal judge among them) dead and Giffords clinging to life.

Notably, media critic Jack Shafer pointed out in a column posted yesterday at slate.com that only “the tiniest handful of people—most of whom are already behind bars, in psychiatric institutions, or on psycho-meds—can be driven to kill by political whispers or shouts.

“Asking us to forever hold our tongues lest we awake their deeper demons,” Shafer wrote, “infantilizes and neuters us and makes politicians no safer.”

He’s absolutely right.

And to seize on political shootings to score political points is as appalling as it is unworthy.

WJC

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