Yellow journalism was named after a comic strip kid in a newspaper war
In 1890s New York, two press barons fought for the pennies of men buying one paper a day from shouting street vendors. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst filled pages with crime, scandal and screaming headlines, and the style took its name from a comic character both papers ran: the Yellow Kid.
Pulitzer bought the New York World in 1883, having already made the St. Louis Post-Dispatch his city's leading daily. He told editors to pile on sensation, anti-corruption crusades and illustrations, and added games and contests. Within two years the World had New York's biggest circulation. Yet Pulitzer also saw newspapers as public institutions with a duty to improve society, and much of his paper was serious reporting, something envious older publishers conveniently ignored.
Hearst, a mining heir, studied the World closely after taking over the San Francisco Examiner from his father in 1887. He gave 24 percent of its space to crime, told as morality plays, while also sending reporters to expose municipal corruption. One of them, Winifred Black, got herself admitted to a city hospital and exposed how poor women were mistreated; the entire staff was fired the morning her story ran. In 1895 Hearst bought the New York Journal, kept it at one cent against the World's two, and drove its circulation to 150,000.
The rivalry peaked between 1895 and roughly 1898. Ervin Wardman, editor of the New York Press, was first to print the term yellow journalism, though newsmen may already have been using it. The historian Frank Luther Mott listed its trademarks: enormous scare headlines over minor news, lavish or invented pictures, faked interviews and bogus experts, splashy colour Sunday supplements and loud sympathy for the underdog. W. Joseph Campbell added heavy use of unnamed sources and shameless self-promotion.
Popular memory says this press pushed America into the Spanish-American War of 1898. Most historians disagree: the two papers mainly reached working-class Democratic readers, while Republican decision-makers such as President William McKinley rarely read them. An English magazine of 1898 put it neatly, observing that not all American journalism was yellow, but all the truly up-to-date yellow journalism was American.
Source: Yellow journalism
