Yellow Journalism to Fake News: A Timeline of Media Manipulation

"If it bleeds, it leads"

Scandalous. Gut Wrecking. Spiced up. This is how we like our news in the 21st century. Indians love their masalas, and that holds true even for our daily dose of news. Remember Peepli Live? The Aamir Khan Production was an intelligent satire on the yellow journalism of modern times and how it influences and rules our lives. Another great example is the 1976 gold standard, "All the President’s Men."

Yellow journalism was a style of newspaper reporting that emphasized sensationalism over facts. During its heyday in the late 19th century, it was one of many factors that helped push the United States and Spain into war in Cuba and the Philippines.

You're probably wondering, "Why Yellow Journalism?"

The answer to this can be found if one delves into the history of journalism dating back to the 1890s, when two giants of the print media world were waging a cutthroat war for circulation. Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Hearst's New York Journal American were sold like hot cakes, all due to their titillating and scandalous approach to articles and headlines. Pulitzer, however, had the initial edge due to a popular comic strip by the name of Hogan’s Alley in his daily that featured a character called the Yellow Kid. Hearst hired the maker of this comic, and hence, both newspapers now had their own Hogan’s Alley comic. Both eventually came to be known as yellow kid papers. The name evolved to yellow journalism over the years due to the outrageous practices of both newspapers, which placed atrocious over accurate and profits over principle.

Yellow journalism is a broader term that can include, but is not limited to, sensationalism. The latter is more of a tactic used under yellow journalism." Today, news is all about grabbing the attention of your audience. And as we all know, the audience of today has the attention span of a squirrel's nut (pun intended). Hence, the media resorts to the most powerful weapon in its arsenal, sensationalism. It's not about the most important news, but rather the most interesting one.

Fake news is the bolder, modern, and uglier cousin of yellow journalism. The feathers of malevolence have only been ruffled with the advent of social media. Despite our government's constant efforts to exterminate the roots of fake news and nullify its effects, not much has been achieved.

Pulitzer and Hearst are towering examples of the power of the media. If the print media of the 19th century was a powerful enough medium to wreck havoc by waging war between two countries, the extent of damage that fake news in the current world can do with today's omnipresent media is beyond comprehension.

It is time to learn from our past and not let yellow journalism turn into fake news, because the latter is truly the source of a different colour.

After all, lies do travel faster than the truth.

This piece was written for a local college magazine in India in 2019 to raise awareness about Yellow Journalism