Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

Other critiques bubbled up as well, voiced by reporters like Wells-Barnett and Matthews. Newspapers implicitly make a claim that they represent reality—the world as it is. Over the previous decade, these urban, northern papers expanded to include more single women, working-class people, and certain groups of immigrants. In another way, though, the reality portrayed was false. Concerns of Black citizens, Chinese immigrants, American Indian tribe members were almost entirely absent, except as curiosities. But these observations gained far less traction than the “yellow journalism” outrage.

A narrative began to harden that the press coverage caused the war and that World and Journal reports were marked by outrageous, deliberate fiction.*

Those who criticized the World and Journal most vociferously were, as was the case in New Bedford, rival newspapers. Yet their word was accepted as the unbiased truth. “Yellow journalism” became a cry of “fake news.” Powerful people complained that negative reports were “yellow journalism.” Politicians dismissed critical editorials, claiming “yellow journalism.” Southern papers referred to accounts of lynchings as “yellow journalism.”

At times, it seemed that objections had to do more with class (cheap newspapers aimed at the “masses”) than subject matter. One writer pointed out in the Arena that there wasn’t really much difference in the tastes of yellow journalism readers and its high-brow critics: “The latter simply prefer scandal, crime and combat that deal with imaginary or historical characters. They are indifferent to the tragedy enacted yesterday in a slum tenement; but they follow with vivid interest the investigations of Sherlock Holmes; and thrill with the horror of Poe’s tales or Balzac’s gruesome stories or Stevenson’s morbid, ghoulish, dual creature, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” What was Boswell’s Life of Johnson, she said, but gossip?

Caricatures of Pulitzer and Hearst in Puck, surrounded by readers devouring headlines like “Nellie Spy as a Flower Girl” and articles by “Fanny Fake”

Frederick Burr Opper, artist. The fin de siècle newspaper proprietor / F. Opper, 1894. N.Y.: Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann, March 7. Illus. from Puck, v. 35, no. 887, (March 7, 1894), centerfold. (Library of Congress)

Even Hearst, who had seemed impervious to arrows of scorn, began to feel the sting. For the first time in years, he turned down stunt suggestions. And when, in 1901, the anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot and killed President McKinley, and the Journal was blamed (two Journal editorials several months before had hinted that political assassination could be justified), the paper defended itself but sounded chastened. Of its critics, the often-raging editorial page commented sedately, “The Journal has too sincere a sympathy for the President, too much self-respect, to reply to such men now.” And in a rebuke in the language Hearst would most understand, circulation declined. He changed the Journal’s name to the American. In the early years of the twentieth century, Hearst continued to build his newspaper empire, buying two newspapers in Chicago in 1902, and a Boston paper and a Los Angeles paper in 1904. But his fervor for journalism at this juncture may have been more of a prop for a new passion for politics. The same year found him running for president and losing the Democratic nomination to Alton Parker, who would lose to Teddy Roosevelt.

By today’s standards, the crimes of the yellow journals were minor. Things that seemed outrageous at the time—large headlines, vivid illustrations, newspapers running holiday charity drives and sponsoring contests—are now commonplace. And what is wrong with a paper solving a murder or putting together a committee to investigate a bad law? These are things we now value, though they go under different names—activist journalism, solutions journalism, immersion journalism. But the notion that yellow journalism was uniquely terrible and worthy of censure lingers like ancient varnish.

Condemnations of “yellow journalism” included the work of the female undercover reporters, neatly folding their writing into a genre that some were eager to toss into the trash. After the war, the history of these bold journalistic experiments began to be erased. The task was made easier by the fact that, in the case of quite a few reporters, no one knew their real identities. While the anonymity of pseudonyms offered a refuge for stunt reporters, giving them privacy initially, it contributed to the ultimate disintegration and critical dismissal of the genre.

Sometimes the stunt reporters themselves were eager to assist in the erasure. In August 1898, Elizabeth Banks published a piece on “American ‘Yellow Journalism’” in Nineteenth Century magazine, condemning undercover work and women’s role in it. In particular, she blamed editors who would put a reporter in danger and then claim desire for reform as an excuse. Her essay argued that these stunts represented a man taking advantage of an inexperienced writer rather than, as was her case, a journalist choosing to write for a venue that paid well and hired the best talent. Her words echoed, reprinted in papers across the country: “I have yet to meet the woman engaged in even the mildest sort of sensational journalism who loved, indeed, who did not hate her work.”

But even she would be dismayed by the eagerness with which her critiques were adopted, the way the journalism establishment was ready to rid itself of its tradition of female-led investigations. A way in to the profession had been sealed off, marked as a scandal or a joke. Several years later, in 1901, when Banks was trying to sell her book Autobiography of a “Newspaper Girl” to an American publisher, she sensed that her agent wasn’t happy with the manuscript. He wanted her to stress the “seamy side” of the female journalist’s life, but she resisted. She’d written the book she wanted and wouldn’t make any major changes: “I approve of journalism as a career for women who have talent, strong characters and are obliged to support themselves. I would never dream of ‘warning off’ aspirants who had what we Americans call ‘good stuff’ in them.”

Sensing the change in the tides, male writers studded their work with negative female journalist characters. A