Yesterday, we talked about the Spanish-American War and the fact that it was a pretty lop-sided affair. Something that I didn’t mention and probably should have, because it’s interesting, is that war kind of spawned the term “yellow journalism.” You may not be familiar with that term today, but if you read any of the newspapers that are left, or news in any format, you are exposed to it every day.
Most newspapers before and around the time the Spanish-American War started were typographically bland — they had narrow columns and headlines and very few illustrations.
Then around 1897, they started incorporating half-tone photographs into most every issue and bold type and multicolumn headlines appeared. And newspapers started to take an activist role in news reporting.
Yellow journalism is a form of journalism that relies on eye-catching headlines, exaggeration and sensationalism to increase sales and it was actually born from a rivalry between the two newspaper giants of the era — Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.
The story goes that Hearst wanted New York Journal readers to look at page one and say, “Wow,” to turn to page two and exclaim, “Holy Moses,” and then at page three, shout “God Almighty!”
That sort of attention-grabbing kind of exploded in the media’s coverage of the Spanish-American War. The newspapers around that time certainly heightened public calls for U.S. entry into the conflict, even though they didn’t cause the war. (There is no evidence that President Williams McKinley paid any attention to the yellow press to get foreign policy guidance.)
But the notion lives on — like most media myths, it makes for a good tale — and — it strips away the complexity of the situation and offers an easy-to-grasp, if badly misleading, explanation about why the country went to war in 1898. It also says that the media at their worst can lead the country into a war it otherwise would not have fought.
No rational person believes that the yellow press instigated or brought on the war with Spain. Newspapers, after all, did not create the real policy differences between the United States and Spain over Spain’s harsh colonial rule of Cuba.
The term yellow journalism, was coined about the time of the Spanish-American War, and that war provided fodder for the practice but the term was actually born from a rivalry between Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s newspapers. In 1895 Pulitzer started printing a comic strip featuring a boy in a yellow nightshirt, entitled the “Yellow Kid.” Hearst then poached the cartoon’s creator and ran the comic strip in his newspaper. A critic at the New York Press, in an effort to shame the newspapers’ sensationalistic approach, coined the term “Yellow-Kid Journalism” — referring to the cartoon. The term was then shortened to “Yellow Journalism.”
Even though you don’t hear it referred to as such, newspapers (and all news media) still practice “yellow journalism.” We’ve grown so use to it, we hardly notice anymore.
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