EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Yellow journalism. Everybody’s heard of it, but few can define it. What is understood is that yellow journalism is a bad form of a normally good thing, like yellow snow. But that’s about it.
In the old days, calling someone yellow was like calling them chicken. So maybe calling someone a yellow journalist was like calling someone a chicken hawk, which is a term we use today for politicians who wrap themselves in the flag and push for war but avoided the draft themselves in the Vietnam era when their own bacon would have been on the line.
That understanding of yellow journalism rings true to our ears because the cause that is most associated with yellow journalism is the Spanish American War, and the cause most associated with chicken hawkery is the Iraq invasion of 2003.
If you were paying attention in 2002 and 3, you might have heard a few comparisons being made between the looming Iraq war and the long ago Spanish American War. But you had to be paying real close attention; and few people were.
Or maybe the analogy rings true to our ears because of what Dylan said in the lyrics of Tombstone Blues:
Maybe. But in any event, yellow journalism is not chicken journalism.
There really is no definitive answer for where the name yellow journalism comes from, but there are a couple of likely explanations. One is that ‘yellow’ refers to one of the splashy colored inks that daily papers began using in the 1890s to make their papers stand out against the black and white of the competition. So describing a particular publication as yellow journalism would be a way of saying that it put flair over substance; not even style, just flair.
The other explanation is that ‘yellow journalism’ comes from the term ‘yellow papers’, which was a nickname given to the two New York newspapers that both ran a comic strip in the 1890s called the Yellow Kid, and which happened to be the newspapers belonging to William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
We’ll get into the subject of the Yellow Kid in more detail in the next episode. For now, here is a list of the four basic attributes of yellow journalism, according to wikipedia:
* The use of scare headlines in huge print.
* Lavish use of pictures or imaginary drawings.
* Use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and the false testimony of so-called experts.
And 4, dramatic sympathy with the underdog against the system.
Now, that last one stands out, because it sounds like it ought to be a good thing, right? Sympathy with the underdog, against the system.
And if you listened to the last podcast, it should remind you of a person of interest named Joseph Pulitzer. We described him in fairly heroic terms for the way he made journalism for the people, and for the reforms his newspapers were able to bring to the table during the Gilded Age, penetrating its previously impregnable mantra of laissez faire, let it be.
And then, as the story goes, which we will get into, William Randolph Hearst came to town. And suddenly the rules changed. It wasn’t just folksy journalism anymore. It was something more volatile.
This is when the era of Yellow Journalism began.
And, we should make a distinction here between the Era of Yellow Journalism, capital Y capital J, and regular old lower case yellow journalism, the generic term that we still use today to describe a certain type of reportage.
The Era of Yellow Journalism really only lasted from about 1895 to 1898, but its impact lasted far beyond,
