Yellow journalism alive & well
Mark Greathouse
(4/2022) Welcome to "Tumbleweeds," an opinion column drawing upon the history of America’s Old West to put many of today’s pressing issues into historical perspective.
Yellow journalism, the "fake news" of old, is characterized by sensationalism, scandal-mongering, and inadequately researched and/or purposefully exaggerated news aimed at increasing sales or promoting a narrow ideology to achieve political ends. A frequently cited example of yellow journalism concerned the February 15, 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Manila Harbor, Philippines. It spawned war-mongering headlines like "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain." Public opinion was swayed to demand war. While the cause of the disaster that killed 260 of 355 crewmen remains debated, the newspapers served as catalysts for the Spanish-American War.
Newspapers of the Old West were a signal that a town had become civilized. People were hungry for news. Newspapers had to make money to survive, so when they ran out of ranching, mining, or railroad news; legal notices; local gossip; speeches and sermons; and advertising, it was natural to make up something that would grab reader attention. Gunfights? Feuds? Politics? In the early 1860s, famed Texas Ranger, politician, soldier, and newspaperman John Salmon "Rip" Ford blared public-influencing pro-secession, pro-slavery headlines as editor of the Austin Texas Democrat and later the State Times. How about the headline "Gov Houston Resigns after Rejecting Confederacy!" Houston was actually about to be voted out of office over his views on Texas’ independence and chose to resign. Hard to tell by the "yellow" headline. A headline from the July 12, 1861 edition of the St. Louis Bulletin on the day it was shut down by Union troops under martial
law blared, "The War News (As Permitted by the Lincoln Dynasty)." Doesn’t appear that they especially liked President Lincoln. World on May 18, 1864 shouted out an outright falsehood, "Lincoln Calls for 400,000 new volunteers." In response, Lincoln suspended habeus corpus and simply jailed newspaper editors that disagreed with him. Think on Lincoln’s suspension of fundamental legal rights 160 years ago, when folks consider censoring "fake news" purveyors today.
Are news media so different today? Yellow journalism is alive and well. Our past president frequently called out "fake" news. Like it or not, too much of it was. Recall "He will forever be remembered as the president who traumatized little children," MSNBC 2018 or "Trump is a racist," New York Times 2017. There seem to be a gazillion sensationalistic news reports to draw upon. How about a 1943 New York Times slant, "Reports of Hitler’s systematic Jewish extermination campaign untrue." When forced to actually report news, terminologies are often twisted, redefined, or softened, such as riots described as peaceful protests, public property trespassing redefined as insurrection, and mandates misrepresented as laws all in an effort to make the news palatable to an increasingly ideologically-sensitive readership. Often as not, it’s as tough to sort the lies and distortions of the news source from the news that’s reported.
Technological development from Pony Express to telegraph to today’s internet have served to speed rather than check yellow journalism. More of it is brought far more quickly to a wider audience.
How is it that folks are so often drawn in by sensational yet debatably accurate news? Why does it matter today? I suggest it matters because the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, CNN, CBS, and even to some extent FoxNews too often resort to yellow journalism, and Americans are largely ill-equipped to sort truth from fiction. Fake news is symptomatic of greater problems within a culture, as sources range from news media to private corporations to – gasp! – governments. Many folks – and I’m guilty of it – compare our over-sized central government and the "wokism" happening in America today to the dystopian societies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but I suggest that we are more accurately undergoing an existence closer to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The not-so-subtle difference is that totalitarianism is imposed in Orwell’s and Huxley’s worlds, while citizens willingly succumb to and even
participate in bringing about total government control in Bradbury’s. Whether it’s Oceana’s Newspeak in 1984 recreating history to suit Big Brother’s agenda, or party-line headlines faced by the fireman protagonist Montag in Fahrenheit 451, the news is used to sway citizen perceptions. The good news for Montag, as with Winston Smith in 1984 and Bernard Marx in Brave New World, is assurance that the dystopias will ultimately fail under their own weight though not before severe damages are wreaked.
How do we quell yellow journalism and why should we care? Famed TV journalist Walter Cronkite was a liberal Democrat, but you’d never know it by his unbiased news delivery that respected listeners by enabling them to reach their own conclusions. After retirement, he surprised folks with his true political leanings. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel spell out an Rx against yellow journalism in Elements of Journalism. First and foremost, "Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth." Key principles follow: journalism’s first loyalty is to citizens (readers), its essence is a discipline of verification, practitioners maintain and independence from those they cover (objectivity), it serves as an independent monitor of power (no collusiveness), provides a forum for public criticism and compromise (debate), strives to make the significant interesting and relevant (without sensational exaggeration), and keeps news comprehensive and in proportion.
Kovach and Rosentiel advise that journalists exercise personal conscience and remind us that citizens also have rights and responsibilities when it comes to the news. Notably, none of these provisos work without underlying high moral values ascribed to by the nation.
Has the news media learned from their errant ways of the past, the sensational exaggerations of life in the Old West, the biased reporting aimed at secession, virulent attacks on sitting presidents (Lincoln, Wilson, Clinton, etc.), and more? Not so far as we can tell. If anything, folks begin to turn away from the biased fake news and become increasingly uninformed and vulnerable to even greater lies. As we’re reminded in Rudyard Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook Headings, "As surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn, the Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return." Censorship is certainly not the answer. We need more true journalists like Cronkite and folks following Kovach’s and Rosentiel’s advice.
Tumbleweed believes news media need to respect readers enough to give them the unvarnished facts and let them arrive at their own opinions. Not much has changed since the Old West except yellow journalism can be delivered faster on more platforms. News should be about intellectual honesty not ideological agendas. And readers have a responsibility to intelligently sort opinion from fact, to debate the former and absorb the latter without benefit of biased "fact checkers" and "sensitivity readers." A newspaper that fails to deliver honest news is failing its readership and the very principles that make America exceptional among nations of the world. Experiences of the Old West don’t offer solutions, but they provided warnings that haven’t been heeded. Just sayin’.
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