American Genius - Hearst vs. Pulitzer | National Geographic Documentary
“Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts.” • Arthur Schopenhauer
Yellow Journalism
“Fake news, as it turns out, is no recent phenomenon. But what we’re talking about when we talk about fake news requires some clarification. In a 2017 paper published in the journal Digital Journalism, researchers at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University came up with six distinct definitions of fake news after examining 34 academic articles that studied the term between 2003 and 2017 in the context of the United States, as well as Australia, China and Italy.” • Jackie Mansky, Smithsonian Magazine
“Yellow journalism and the yellow press are American terms for journalism* and associated newspapers that present little or no legitimate well-researched news while instead using eye-catching headlines for increased sales.* Techniques may include exaggerations* of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism*. By extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.*”
“In English, the term is chiefly used in the US. In the UK, a roughly equivalent term is tabloid journalism*, meaning journalism characteristic of tabloid newspapers*, even if found elsewhere. Other languages, e.g. Russian*, sometimes have terms derived from the American term. A common source of such writing is called checkbook journalism*, which is the controversial practice of news reporters paying sources for their information without verifying its truth or accuracy. In the U.S. it is generally considered unethical, with most mainstream newspapers and news shows having a policy forbidding it. In contrast, tabloid newspapers and tabloid television shows, which rely more on sensationalism, regularly engage in the practice.*” • Wikipedia
“It is perhaps not so surprising to hear that the problem of "fake news" — media outlets adopting sensationalism to the point of fantasy — is nothing new. Although, as Robert Darnton explained in the NYRB recently, the peddling of public lies for political gain (or simply financial profit) can be found in most periods of history dating back to antiquity, it is in the late 19th-century phenomenon of "Yellow Journalism" that it first seems to reach the widespread outcry and fever pitch of scandal familiar today. Why yellow? The reasons are not totally clear. Some sources point to the yellow ink the publications would sometimes use, though it more likely stems from the popular Yellow Kid cartoon that first ran in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, and later William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, the two newspapers engaged in the circulation war at the heart of the furore.
Although these days his name is somewhat synonymous with journalism of the highest standards, through association with the Pulitzer Prize established by provisions in his will, Joseph Pulitzer had a very different reputation while alive. After purchasing The New York World in 1884 and rapidly increasing circulation through the publication of sensationalist stories he earned the dubious honour of being the pioneer of tabloid journalism. He soon had a competitor in the field when his rival William Randolph Hearst acquired the The New York Journal in 1885 (originally begun by Joseph's brother Albert). The rivalry was fierce, each trying to out do each other with ever more sensational and salacious stories. At a meeting of prominent journalists in 1889 Florida Daily Citizen editor Lorettus Metcalf claimed that due to their competition “the evil grew until publishers all over the country began to think that perhaps at heart the public might really prefer vulgarity”.
The phenomenon can be seen to reach its most rampant heights, and most exemplary period, in the lead up to the Spanish-American War — a conflict that some dubbed "The Journal's War" due to Hearst's immense influence in stoking the fires of anti-Spanish sentiment in the U.S. Much of the coverage by both The New York World and The New York Journal was tainted by unsubstantiated claims, sensationalist propaganda, and outright factual errors. When the USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor on the evening of 15 February 1898, huge headlines in the Journal blamed Spain with no evidence at all. The phrase, "remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain", became a populist rousing call to action. The Spanish–American War began later that year.” • Public Domain Review.org
National Geographic: American Genius - Hearst vs. Pulitzer – “American Genius is an American documentary series focusing on the lives of inventors and pioneers who have been responsible for major developments in their areas of expertise and helped shape the course of history. Consisting of eight episodes, it was telecast on the National Geographic Channel* from 1 June 2015 to 22 June 2015.” • Wikipedia
The True Color of War
Yellow Press
“The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's* New York World* and William Randolph Hearst's* New York Journal*. The battle peaked from 1895 to about 1898, and historical usage often refers specifically to this period. Both papers were accused by critics of sensationalizing the news in order to drive up circulation, although the newspapers did serious reporting as well. An English magazine in 1898 noted, "All American journalism is not 'yellow', though all strictly 'up-to-date' yellow journalism is American!"*”
“The term was coined by Erwin Wardman, the editor of the New York Press.* Wardman was the first to publish the term but there is evidence that expressions such as "yellow journalism" and "school of yellow kid journalism" were already used by newsmen of that time. Wardman never defined the term exactly. Possibly it was a mutation from earlier slander where Wardman twisted "new journalism" into "nude journalism".* Wardman had also used the expression "yellow kid journalism"* referring to the then-popular comic strip* which was published by both Pulitzer and Hearst during a circulation war.* In 1898 the paper simply elaborated: "We called them Yellow because they are Yellow."*”
Source: Wikipedia
The Yellow Kid*, published by both New York World and New York Journal • Wikimedia Commons
19th-Century Fake News Defined
“Joseph Campbell describes yellow press newspapers as having daily multi-column front-page headlines covering a variety of topics, such as sports and scandal, using bold layouts (with large illustrations and perhaps color), heavy reliance on unnamed sources, and unabashed self-promotion. The term was extensively used to describe certain major New York City* newspapers around 1900 as they battled for circulation.*”
“Frank Luther Mott* identifies yellow journalism based on five characteristics:*
scare headlines in huge print, often of minor news
lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings
use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience*, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts
emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with comic strips*
dramatic sympathy with the "underdog" against the system.”
Source: Wikipedia
Public relations or fake news?
“In October 1990, a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl gave a harrowing testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, recounting inhumane atrocities committed by Iraqi soldiers in her country. It was credited for helping draw the U.S. into the Gulf War later that year. Her claims were ultimately refuted by evidence to the contrary, exposing deceptive motives and sources behind the ploy.
Known as “Nayirah”, the girl told the caucus that Iraqi soldiers had removed scores of babies from incubators and left them to die. Her story was originally corroborated by Amnesty International and other evacuees of Kuwait at the time.
According to the New York Times in 1992, the girl’s testimony was actually orchestrated by the big public relations firm Hill & Knowlton on behalf of a client, the Kuwaiti-sponsored Citizens for a Free Kuwait. The client’s aim was to secure military support from the U.S. through raising awareness about the dangers posed to Kuwait by Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.
The girl who gave the testimony was also revealed to be not just an ordinary civilian but the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S.
What led to the contested testimony? In 1990, after the firm was approached by a Kuwaiti expatriate in New York and agreed to collaborate with Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a $1 million study was conducted to determine the best way to win support for strong action.” • Jack Xiong, Citizen Truth.org
"Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see." • Edgar Allen Poe
Perry requires details about Superman | Superman (3 Hour TV Version)
News From Nowhere
“The public image of American journalism has always included a good proportion of myth. Well before the Second World War, Broadway and Hollywood had made the stereotype of the Intrepid Reporter—dogged in his pursuit of the truth, fearless in his determination to see it printed—nearly as familiar as the white hats that identified the good guys in a Western. The war made legends out of such foreign correspondents as Ernie Pyle and Margaret Bourke-White; in the cold-war years that followed, with their prolonged emphasis on foreign affairs, the image of the newspaper correspondent came to be fixed in a new stereotype, but one every bit as solid, and as favorable, as the old one of Hollywood.
Television was at first merely an instrument of this myth, but in the mid-1950s it grew to be something more. With the development of national network news programs, the legend came to life. Combining the events of the day with the actual faces and voices of individual correspondents, television brought forth the Intrepid Reporter before our eyes, and in the process created a new kind of journalism. Today TV news is an American institution, and in Edward Jay Epstein’s latest book it has now received a serious study of its operation. In News from Nowhere Epstein examines the processes by which network news programs are created and the institutional factors which shape those processes. His discoveries are thoroughly deflating to the myth of the Intrepid Reporter.
Epstein’s two previous books were on headline-making topics (the first was Inquest, the most sensible of the critiques of the Warren Commission; the second dealt with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his purported discovery of the plotters of President Kennedy’s assassination) and consequently he has sometimes been considered a journalist himself. Not here. News from Nowhere, which began as a doctoral dissertation at Harvard, is a first-rate example of most of the qualities which make scholarship more than journalism.”
To begin with, the book is based on extraordinarily thorough research. Epstein spent four months of 1968-69 in daily observation of the NBC Evening News, then two more months at ABC and CBS conducting interviews and searching for differences from NBC. He held formal interviews with 93 correspondents, technicians, producers, news editors, and news-division executives, and more than a hundred less formal discussions with such other sources as FCC officials, managers of affiliate stations, and executives and specialists at the parent networks. He studied Congressional committee reports, FCC documents, and the memoranda, logs, and scripts of the early evening news programs at each network.
The distinction between scholarship and journalism is made clear in what Epstein does with all this material. His analysis does not deal with the ephemeral aspects of his subject, the changes in personnel and passing issues which constitute so much of the news-reporting system itself. His major conclusion is that “the pictures of society which are shown on television as national news are largely—though not entirely—formed and shaped by organizational considerations.” That is to say, the organizational requirements of national networks place such restrictions on the work of their news divisions that the correspondents themselves exercise only a minor influence on their own broadcasts. He describes four such restrictions, and in one way or another each is a blow to the legend of the Intrepid Reporter.
First is budgetary restriction. News divisions are often described as “autonomous,” but in fact the revenues from advertising on news programs are collected by the parent network, which then allots a budget to the news operation. The policy of all three networks, according to Epstein, is that national news should be given little more than enough funds to fill the necessary airtime. The rationale behind this policy—much less flattering to reporters than mere corporate tightfistedness—is the conviction that the public simply is not interested in news. Analyses of the composition and behavior of TV audiences have convinced the networks that, as Epstein puts it, “network news programs, unlike entertainment or local news programs, inherit most of their audience from the preceding programs. In other words, national news does not attract its own audience to any significant extent.”
The implications of this are far-reaching. If network news programs do not draw their own audience, then no changes in the quality of those programs—in coverage, reporting, or investigative journalism—are likely to increase the audience or the revenues based upon it. Networks therefore have little incentive to provide more than the minimum coverage demanded by their affiliate stations (which in turn are responding primarily to the FCC’s demand for a certain percentage of “public-service” programming). This leads to a variety of cost-cutting techniques designed to produce the impression of national news coverage at minimum expense. One is the practice of taking many out-of-town (i.e., out-of-New York) stories from certain cities like Chicago and Washington which are connected to network headquarters by permanently-leased cables, for the transmission of material from these points is free to the news division. Another is the use of many “timeless” stories from areas like Europe or the West Coast which are not permanently connected, since these can be filmed at leisure and flown to New York at much lower cost than leasing cables or satellites Yet another is the restriction of filmed coverage of timely events to those predictable ones which are almost certain to produce “usable” stories.
The concept of usable stories is based on the second organizational requirement: maintaining the inherited audience. Network analysts believe that “unsatisfactory” presentation of the news can actually lose viewers, thus reducing the inherited audience for prime-time entertainment programs. Satisfactory presentation involves 1) clear-cut, highly “visual” images; 2) motion; and 3) conflict, preferably with two easily-described sides. Epstein quotes a memorandum from the president of NBC News: “Every news story should, without any sacrifice of probity or responsibility, display the attributes of fiction, of drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising action and falling action, a beginning, a middle, and an end. These are not only the essentials of drama; they are the essentials of narrative.” The implementation of such policies is the responsibility of producers, whose role in TV journalism is roughly that of editors in print media. Epstein maintains that correspondents who do not fit their reports to the formulas of drama may find themselves on a producer’s blacklist, receiving few assignments.
Other restrictions are imposed by the networks’ relations with their affiliates and with the FCC. Affiliate stations, which can refuse network programs if they wish, see no point in replacing local programs with less profitable network material unless the network is providing something the affiliate needs and cannot provide itself. The FCC ruling that news programs count toward its requirement for public-service programming creates a need, but the only material affiliates cannot provide themselves is national news, which they therefore demand from the network. “To meet this expectation,” Epstein says, “producers must solve the problem of converting local happenings—since all news happens in some locality—into national stories. The ‘nationalization of news,’ which is commonly regarded by network producers as the crux of their operation, is accomplished by using reports about particular events as illustrations of national themes.” The choice of these themes is obviously based on individual judgment, but even here their presentation, like that of all stories, is subject to the fourth restriction: the Fairness Doctrine of the FCC.
The FCC has traditionally been reluctant even to appear to be censoring broadcasters’ views. One result is that its celebrated Doctrine is utterly unconcerned with content; it merely demands equal coverage of each side of controversial topics. As interpreted by the networks, this means programs in which equally articulate representatives receive equal amounts of time—regardless of whether such a presentation is actually “representative” in any statistical or ideological sense—and policies which discourage correspondents from taking partisan positions and from investigations which might conclude that one partisan position is clearly right.
In summary, News from Nowhere portrays television journalism as virtually compelled to present a distorted picture of America, to manufacture out of the raw material of daily events a view of society which is biased toward certain geographic areas, certain types of people and behavior, and certain types of (usually superficial) commentary—all in all, no setting for the Intrepid Reporter.
Epstein’s arguments in support of his conclusions are almost completely persuasive, despite an occasional error of fact or judgment. (For one thing, he dismisses Edith Efron’s criticism of 1968 election coverage in one-and-a-half pages which mainly suggest that he has only casually read her argument, and he repeatedly misspells her name; for another, the American Political Science Association does not, as Epstein says at one point, conduct public-opinion polls.) Yet his tightly woven pattern of evidence and interpretation and his ability to draw persuasive conclusions, the two greatest strengths of his book, may ironically leave some readers dissatisfied, for the author seems capable of more than he delivers. More than once Epstein’s statements about network news seem to have important implications for society as a whole which he simply ignores. The “national themes” used to generalize local events are an example; Epstein never discusses the consequences of choosing one theme over another. Similarly, he disagrees with Vice President Agnew’s explanation of the narrow geographic focus of network stories, arguing that such narrowness arises “because news is less expensive and more conveniently available from these cities, not because of the political preferences of any small fraternity of newsmen. . . .,” but he does not consider whether the effect is not the same. In short, News from Nowhere restricts itself to an exploration of the subject indicated by its subtitle, “Television and the News,” when it might have said important things about television and America.
Nevertheless, within its scope, this is an excellent book—one whose thoroughgoing analysis and unglamorous conclusions are sure to offend network correspondents and executives alike. In its dogged pursuit of accuracy and truth, News from Nowhere offers a particularly fine example of the virtues of Intrepid Scholarship.” • David Ernest Haight, Commentary Magazine, 1973
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