Sensationalism

“Yellow” Origins

Yellow journalism achieved its peak fame in 1896 with the journalistic practices of competing New York City daily newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Newspaper sensationalism dated back much earlier.

In a sense, the idea of sensational treatment of news was introduced by Benjamin Day and James Gordon Bennett during America's penny press era in the 1830s, thanks to their reliance on human interest stories. Everything and everyone, especially the underdogs of society, the butcher, the baker, the shoemaker, and especially the mistress or prostitute, was considered (and thus made) newsworthy. What Day and others did was to place emphasis on the common or unusual person (including those rarely covered in the news to that point) as he or she reflected the political, educational, and social life of the day. Their formula was to blend stories of murder, catastrophe, and love with elements of pathos to produce the human side of news. Pulitzer and Hearst would build on this model decades later.

In the late nineteenth century the development of yellow journalism reflected a society in transition. America was shifting from a predominantly rural to largely urban society. Fueled by a wave of immigrants from Europe, the nation's cities grew by nearly one-third. At the same time, the United States flexed its military might as the army evolved from a small frontier force to the army and navy that in 1898 challenged the remains of Spanish power in the Western hemisphere. As a result of war with Spain—one heavily promoted by Pulitzer and Hearst—the United States collected Puerto [Page 1281]Rico, Cuba, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Philippine Islands. The victory had one unintended effect—it helped promote the belligerent nationalist tone of much of the American press.

Sensationalist yellow journalism became synonymous with the journalism practiced by Pulitzer and Hearst, and soon others as well. Pulitzer's successful St. Louis Dispatch allowed him to enter New York journalism in 1883 with purchase of The World. Pulitzer's World utilized modest typography with headlines in small light-face type that appeared above stories of murder, mayhem, and mystery, every bit as sensational as those of one of the then-popular police gazettes.

...