Yellow journalism…
In a Slate article on print Journalism, Jack Shafer manages to takes some shots at cable news to buttress an argument that yellow journalism is sustainable…
Campbell cites as one reason behind Hearst’s downfall this 1931 observation from Walter Lippmann that yellow journalism is almost impossible to sustain:
When everything is dramatic, nothing is dramatic. When everything is highly spiced, nothing after a while has much flavor. When everything is new and startling, the human mind just ceases to be startled.
Is that really true? The Hearst tradition of making everything dramatic continues to live large on cable TV. It disgorges oceans of yellow journalism each week in both its news and opinion slots. At CNN, Lou Dobbs pushes the tabloid limits of xenophobia and on the network’s sister channel, Headline News, Nancy Grace specializes in unsolved and weird murders. At MSNBC, the recently demoted Rita Cosby mixes a dumber version of Nancy Grace with whatever trash she can fish off the wires. With the exception of Brit Hume’s program, Fox glows an incandescent yellow at most opportunities.
Although the cable news and opinion shows don’t draw very large numbers—The O’Reilly Factor, the most successful, attracts an average audience of 2 million—they inform the mainstream news agenda in a way that Adolph Ochs wouldn’t approve.
Just another hit piece. But the “yellow journalism” he assigns to cable news somehow applies only to conservative hosts. Isn’t that a shock?
Comment by Missy — August 31, 2006 @ 12:16 am
Dubious and outrageous are the two words I can think of to describe this book by Joseph Campbell. To invoke the newspaper wars of 1897 and somehow transpose them to the current channel TV wars does not make any sense at all. There is, indeed, still a lot of yellow journalism, but Campbell missed his marks. There is a lot of it in both print and broadcast media, which Campbell conveniently omits with his overemphasis on cable TV programs. Even the examples he cited, with some exceptions, do not fall into the category of what he calls yellow journalism.
In fact, I find it incredulous for Campbell to think that
the NY Times represents the model of what journalism ought to be. He mocks Randolph Hearst and deifies Adolph Ochs without ever mentioning that the NY Times, under its present publisher, has been on the decline for sometime. Its cirulation in NY City is the lowest of the three papers there, and it has been rocked by scandals none of which makes it in Campbell’s book.
His piece on the current cable TV programs represents, beyond doubt, yellow journalism at its worst. This book deserves to be burned and shunned.
Comment by RGL — August 31, 2006 @ 5:42 am
Yellow journalism has existed since way before the Yellow Kid, and we see it everywhere today, including many of our historically ‘honored’ publications. He starts out with a good premise, but then falls in and out of the very thing that is supposed to be the topic: yellow journalism. The best lies have always been hidden between two (or more) truths. That is the very nature and art of “spin.”
Comment by erljr — August 31, 2006 @ 5:47 pm
Jeez, RGL…nothing like deciding we need to burn a book just because we disagree with what it has to say…
Comment by tanne — August 31, 2006 @ 9:46 pm
That is a little harsh RGL. I think most Americans can see through bias. In some countries where indoctrination and censorship are commonplace, I can see people believing the spin. But here? You saw through it, I saw through it, Missy and tanne saw through it. The answer is not to burn the book and spin it the other way.
Comment by erljr — September 1, 2006 @ 10:27 am