Yellow Journalism Didn't End After The Spanish American War

Many of us learned the term "yellow journalism" in high school American History when we were told about the Spanish-American War (1898). Wikipedia's definition of yellow journalism sounds a lot like Fox News:

Yellow journalism or the yellow press is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. By extension "Yellow Journalism" is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.

TNT set up a website to promote a movie about the Rough Riders role in the Spanish American War and it includes a telling definition of yellow journalism as well:

In 1898, newspapers provided the major source of news in America. At this time, it was common practice for a newspaper to report the editor's interpretation of the news rather than objective journalism. If the information reported was inaccurate or biased, the American public had little means for verification. With this sort of influence, the newspapers wielded much political power. In order to increase circulation, the publishers of these papers often exploited their position by sponsoring a flamboyant and irresponsible approach to news reporting that became known as "yellow journalism." Though the term was originally coined to describe the journalistic practices of Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst proved himself worthy of the title. Today, it is his name that is synonymous with "yellow journalism."

...The press played a tremendous part in leading the charge toward America's involvement in Cuba. Two publishers, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, stood out among these opportunists. They perceived the conflict with Spain as their chance to increase circulation of their newspapers. Seizing upon the opportunity to capitalize on the growing spirit of American patriotism, Hearst and Pulitzer printed sensational anti-Spanish stories. Graphic illustrations commissioned from some of the country's most-talented artists and stories written by premiere authors and journalists of the day were fodder for fueling the flames of war. Together, Hearst and Pulitzer created a frenzy among the American people by reporting the alleged brutality of the Spanish toward the Cuban rebels. (However, acts of outrage committed by the Cubans were seldom mentioned.) By the time the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, the pro-war press had roused national sentiment to the point that President McKinley feared his political party would suffer if he did not engage in war with Spain.

The key sentence: "They perceived the conflict with Spain as their chance to increase circulation of their newspapers." This morning I woke up watching Candy Crowley on CNN mentioning that the disgrace around the forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod included something she demurely referred to as a "media frenzy." I guess "yellow journalism" is out as a descriptive phrase. These days however, the power of 24/7 electronic media is absolutely overwhelming. And "increasing circulation" isn't even the main motivation of the mass media owners. It's increasing power of their class. You can do that by persuading Americans their president is a Muslim or that there's a terrorist mosque being build on top of hallowed ground or that their are death panels inherent in a modest healthcare reform bill, or that the lavishly funded propaganda and organizing efforts of a washed up GOP hack politician are a legitimate grassroots movement instead of a grubby partisan effort to regain control of Congress.

In their new book, Over The Cliff-- How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane, John Amato and Dave Neiwert delved at great length into how Fox News became "the national propaganda organ of the Tea Party movement and, in the process, transform[ed] it from a low-level astroturf operation into a national phenomenon."

It costs advertisers thousands of dollars to air a single 30-second commercial on a few cable stations for a week, even in relatively cheap rural markets. To advertise nationally on Fox News-- the ratings leader in cable news-- costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions if the ads air often enough and during prime time programs.

So what Fox News offered the organizers of the Tea Parties-- and the conservative movement opposing Obama’s presidency-- was something you couldn’t measure monetarily. Not only did Fox air a steady onslaught of Tea Party promotional ads, it embraced the outright promotion of the events in its news broadcasts and on its “opinion shows.” The channel’s on-air personalities as well as its Web site took an active role, day after day and night after night, in promoting and urging the Fox audience to join in the Tea Party protests. Media Matters, a nonprofit organization that tracks the conservative media, documented 63 instances where Fox News anchors and guests openly promoted the Tea Parties and discussed them as a legitimate news event.

...At times, Fox tried to deny that this deluge of glowingly sympathetic “reports” and barrage of commercials on the Tea Parties constituted promotion of the event. On the morning of the protests, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy told his audience that “Fox is not sponsoring any of them, but we have been covering them.” This was a peculiar (not to mention disingenuous) remark, considering that Fox had repeatedly run on-screen graphics describing the events at which its anchors were to appear as “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties.”



...Beck’s event had been announced back in February, well before the Tea Parties had coalesced or become a Fox News cause célèbre. But in the intervening months, the “9/12 Project” had seamlessly become so identified with the Tea Parties that they were now basically indistinct. Tea Party organizers started marshaling their forces to make the march another big national media event, along the lines of the tax day protests.

In late August, ads started showing up on Fox News promoting the Tea Party Express: a 7,000-mile cross-country bus tour featuring Tea Party events in 34 cities, beginning in Sacramento on August 28 and culminating in Washington, DC, on September 12.

Early on, CNN gave the tour some free promotion too. An August 27 report from Tony Harris featured both a fluff report on the cool bus being used in the tour and an interview with Mark Williams, the chief spokesperson for Our Country Deserves Better. It was a largely congenial segment in which Williams was permitted to flatly deceive the CNN audience about the bus tour’s purpose and intent.

Harris asked Williams whether the entire thrust of the Tea Parties was to attack President Obama’s policies-- a reasonable query, since these “partiers” were nowhere to be found when George W. Bush was busting budgets and running up massive deficits in the name of tax cuts for the wealthy. Williams, though, pretended throughout the segment that they were purely a nonpartisan outfit angry only about overtaxation.

The tour was sponsored by the Our Country Deserves Better political action committee (PAC), an offshoot of Move America Forward, the right-wing response to MoveOn. It’s chaired by Howard Kaloogian, a former Republican congressional candidate from California. The PAC was founded in August 2008-- before the election-- specifically to oppose Barack Obama and his policies. In October 2008, spokesperson Williams campaigned against Obama by characterizing him as a “socialist” on a bus tour called the Stop Obama Express and publicly endorsed the Birther conspiracy theory. In July 2009, the same organization ran a series of ads comparing Obama to Adolf Hitler.

CNN was susceptible early on to the deceptive charms of the Tea Party Express, but its coverage paled in comparison to the reportage that subsequently emanated from Fox News-- and particularly from “reporter” Griff Jenkins, who followed the tour from start to finish and filed nightly reports from the events. These reports aired in segments hosted by all the various Fox anchors (Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Neil Cavuto, Bill O’Reilly, the Fox & Friends crew).

Jenkins made clear that he was sympathetic to the Tea Party cause, but he did include in most of the segments feature interviews with attendees so as to create some semblance of journalistic reportage. However, Jenkins’s role as a cheerleader was unmistakable, and a YouTube video that popped up a month later showed a female producer for Jenkins’s show waving her arms to encourage the crowd to cheer at the appropriate moments.

Two days before the march, at a big rally in New York, Jenkins dropped all pretense in a report for Sean Hannity’s show. Rather than include any interviews, Jenkins simply gathered the Tea Partiers behind him as props and launched into a rant about how these events were all about average Americans taking back America from an out-of-control federal government:

This is the 30th stop, Sean. This group, like the 29 before, is what I describe as the America Washing-ton forgot. I say that because that is the way they feel. They are white, black [but crowd shots featured only white faces], young, old, male, female, and they are upset with the size of government, they are upset about the bailouts. They are upset about taxes, and they are upset about czars, Sean. They see themselves, in my observation of more than 50,000 people, they see themselves as a part of an America that is rising up to reclaim itself from a government that has run amok-- a government that has overreached itself.

Jenkins wasn’t reporting; he was essentially being a Fox-paid propagandist for the Our Country Deserves Better PAC.

When September 12 finally arrived, the media were in full frenzy mode, with camera crews from Fox as well as CNN and MSNBC covering the event. District of Columbia authorities calculated that some 70,000 people showed up.

Afterward, Beck and his supporters-- notably right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin-- tried to claim that there had actually been as many as two million people at the event.

They even circulated photos showing over a million people on the National Mall-- but from a march that took place before the National Museum of the American Indian was built... in 2004. Yellow journalism? Much worse... much, much worse. And society is so bifurcated by it that there is no remedy, no way for the Democrats to protect themselves, let alone to protect society at large. This is cute, but it doesn't quite stand up to the full force of Big Business and it's media conglomerates: