'Yellow Journalism' still colors news media world
By Namrata Savoor
freedomforum.org
04.18.01
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ARLINGTON, Va. — "Yellow journalism," a phrase coined in the late 19th century because of its smear appeal, still lives on as a derogatory term for some types of publications, panelists at an Inside Media program last month agreed.
Although the term is widely used, its exact definition has been elusive from the time of its origin, according to W. Joseph Campbell, an American University professor and a consultant at The Freedom Forum.
Campbell is the author of a recently published book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, which debunks several legends of the yellow press period.
A hundred years ago, " 'yellow journalism' was used as a shorthand term to associate with the 'new journalism,' which was characterized by the aggressive use of graphics, photographs, big headlines and a more sensationalized treatment of the news," Campbell pointed out at the March 29 Newseum program.
The label was used by some of the more conservative newspapers of the day who were looking for a way to insult such practitioners of the "new journalism" as William Randolph Hearst's The New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's The New York World, he said.
However, the label has lost a lot of its original meaning over the years and is now associated with "journalistic malpractice … and cases of journalistic misconduct. It has become a catch-all smear phrase," Campbell said.
Yellow journalism is now synonymous with tabloids like the National Enquirer, which do not command as much respect as their mainstream counterparts, said moderator Joan Mower, director of African and Latin American programs at The Freedom Forum.
Yet tabloids have recently broken important stories, such as the scoop on Jesse Jackson's mistress, Charlotte Hays, a former New York Daily News gossip columnist, said.
"They (tabloids) have a really old-fashioned sense of morality. I love yellow journalism," Hays, the editor of The Women's Quarterly magazine, added.
People read the tabloids in a different way than such mainstream newspapers as The Washington Post, Hays noted, yet a tabloid story is only lauded "when it makes it into the mainstream (media)."
On the other hand, she pointed out, tabloids don't shy away from writing about scandals and revelations while mainstream journalists are elitist and assume that the public does not need to know about certain types of stories.
Their "idea of a scandal is [President] George W. Bush mispronouncing a word," she said.
Yellow journalism has different connotations worldwide and it is still "invoked in an astonishing number of countries," Campbell said.
It "has taken on a life far beyond the borders of the United States, but it's very much an American idiom," he said.
When yellow journalism was the rage, The New York Journal and The New York World spent lavishly and concocted stories to distinguish themselves from the less-enterprising, sedate journalism of the time, Campbell said.
For example, "one of the most famous purported boasts of American journalism" was made during Cuba's civil war, which took place in 1896 and 1897, Campbell said.
Hearst reputedly sent a cable to New York Journal illustrator Frederic Remington, who was then in Cuba and wanting to return to the United States. Supposedly the cable said: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."
But Hearst's sending such a message would have made no sense, Campbell said, because there was already a war under way at the time.
"Hearst vowing to furnish the war just was incongruous with what his own newspapers were saying at the time," he said. "That anecdote deserves to be relegated to the closet of historical imprecision."
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