| (Of course I am posting this in response to Newsweek's irresponsibly seditious 'investigative reporting', now read on...)
http://home.comcast.net/~inrev/yj.jpg
Yellow journalism is a term given to any widespread tendencies or practices within media organizations which are detrimental to, or substandard from the point of view of, journalistic integrity. "Yellow journalism" may for example refer to sensationalized news reporting that bears only a superficial resemblance to journalism.
The sensationalized human-interest stories of the yellow press increased circulation and readership heavily throughout the 19th century, especially in the United States. Early practitioners, such as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, seem to have equated the sensational reporting of murders, gory accidents, and the like, with the need of the democratic common man to be entertained by subjects beyond dry politics. Two early yellow newspapers were Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's New York Journal American.
The term derived from the color comic strip character The Yellow Kid, who appeared in both these papers.
While most early newspapers tended toward expressing a viewpoint, the prototypical example of yellow journalism was the late 19th century Hearst Newspapers' consistent and deliberate falsification of whole incidents, claiming a humanitarian crisis among Cubans at the hands of Spanish troops. Hearst had personally written or directed the production of a number of sensational stories that exaggerated the claims of Spanish cruelty toward their Cuban subjects. The stories, combining both a sense of urgency and moral outrage, were wildly popular, and Hearst directed his papers to market and exploit this trend to the fullest.
Having been successful not only in convincing the public for the cause for war, Hearst had managed to sway the political vote as well. This reporting sparked a public outcry that led to the Spanish-American War, wherin American intervention proved to be disastrous. Americans would soon find themselves occupying both Cuba and the Philippines, and Hearst found himself courted by politicians seeking his powers of influence.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism | |
