Of Wars and Newspapers

At least two of my previous posts have linked concepts which have been taught in Term 1 and Term 2. Two links have been made between three concepts, all that is left is one more. I have made a link between war and prejudice, as well as of how newspapers display prejudice in their way of advertising. Now I am going to make an even more harder link, two concepts which seem so distant there could possibly be no link between them: war and newspapers. Of course, one can argue that newspapers report on wars and during wartime, people read newspapers to find out about the war. However, these are not links, these are merely examples of the uses of newspapers, which is to find out about current events. Initially, I was hoping to find out about newspapers which caused wars, but it appeared that humans were more intelligent than to start a war over trivial matters. Instead, I shall discuss something much more light-hearted: a newspaper war.

The birth of tabloids started in a rather intense journalism war between two parties: Joseph Pulitzer, the person who created the Pulitzer Prize, and William Randolph Hearst. The war begins in 1895, when newspapers throughout the world were all respectable, unless they were corrupted by the government. In 1895, William Randolph Hearst bought the Journal, which ironically, was founded by Joseph's brother Alfred in 1882 before he sold it for a profit. Meanwhile, Joseph Pulitzer owned the World, which along with the Journal, used to report respectable news. In a bid to increase circulation of the Journal, Hearst lowered its price to one cent, and increased its pages, meanwhile using his family's finances in order to support these moves. Copying Pulitzer, Hearst also made headlines bolder and more dramatic, and other than that, focused entirely on sensational news which may have no relation at all to whatever important was happening at that time. Then, in 1986, Hearst managed to persuade Richard Felton Outcault to draw a popular colour comic strip in the Journal, which only the World, happened to have at that time, and also persuaded the whole of Pulitzer's Sunday staff to work for the Journal.

Not a man to admit defeat so easily, Pulitzer hired George B. Luks to draw a colour comic strip about the same character and under the same name, "The Yellow Kid", which ultimately was what caused tabloid to be called yellow journalism. Since the public at that time were hungering for a scandal, no matter the consequences, the Journal delivered one by being not being objective in its journalism. Instead of reporting information from both sides of the party in the Cuba rebellion then, the Journal only reported information coming from Cuban rebels, claiming that Spanish sources could not be trusted. This resulted in increased circulation of the Journal, with people wanting to read more about the rebellion from a simplistic and one-sided point of view. In order to compete with Hearst, Pulitzer also lowered the standard of the World, resulting in such irresponsible journalism where both publications even ripped off stories from each other without any research. Hearst managed to catch Pulitzer at this by including a false article in the Journal. This all continued for quite some time, an era of irresponsible journalism and tainted articles, all in the name of trying to get publicity for their newspaper.

Thus, tabloids have been born, even though tabloids now do not go to such extreme means to create sensational news by providing tainted articles and questioning the words of important people such as the president. It would appear that tabloids are not really a source of reliable news, but rather a source for entertainment.