What were the unstated policies of yellow journalism

do newspapers report the news or make the news?

fake New York Times printed and distributed on november 12, 2008 (dated july 4, 2009). the prank was designed and organized by artist Steven Lambert and the political activist prank group the Yes Men. they explained that the prank was timed to coincide with the election of Barack Obama to urge him to keep his campaign promises.

other Yes Men projects

Coal Cares, 2011

Survivaball, 2009

other Yes Men projects

Coal Cares, 2011

Survivaball, 2009

the Yes Men’s pranks rely on the idea that lies can expose truth.

first issue of the paper that would become the New York Times (1851)

Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Wells (1941) -considered by many critics to be the greatest American film. -the film is loosely based on the life and career of newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst.

William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951)

-descendent of a wealth mining family.

-got his first newspaper publishing job when his father handed over The San Francisco Examiner to him in 1887

(hired Mark Twain as one of his journalists).

-started his career advocating for progressive populist policies (it’s always easier to advocate for the working

man before the labor movement got in full swing in the 1930s).

-ran for NYC mayor twice and governor once. eventually became a U.S. congressman from 1903-1907.

-took over the New York Journal in 1895. eventually created a chain of newspapers across the country that

reached 20 million readers by the early 1930s.

-most remembered for his yellow journalism campaign advocating for U.S. military involvement in the

Cuban War of Independence (1895-1889).

-Hearst’s newspaper empire wasn’t effective in making money—he continued his family’s legacy of wealth with

other business interests.

-the newspapers and magazines are better understood as a vanity project that portrayed Hearst’s vision of the

world to his readers.

-the newspapers were a tool to smear his political and business enemies.

-the term “yellow journalism” is derived from the papers that were dyed yellow in order to grab the

attention of people at the newsstand.

-the term “yellow journalism” is derived from the papers that were dyed yellow in order to grab the

attention of people at the newsstand.

-media historian Frank Luther Mott outlined a set of defining characteristics of yellow journalism:

-prominent headlines that “screamed excitement, often about comparatively unimportant news.”

-the term “yellow journalism” is derived from the papers that were dyed yellow in order to grab the

attention of people at the newsstand.

-media historian Frank Luther Mott outlined a set of defining characteristics of yellow journalism:

-prominent headlines that “screamed excitement, often about comparatively unimportant news.”

-“lavish use of pictures, many of them without significance.”

-the term “yellow journalism” is derived from the papers that were dyed yellow in order to grab the

attention of people at the newsstand.

-media historian Frank Luther Mott outlined a set of defining characteristics of yellow journalism:

-prominent headlines that “screamed excitement, often about comparatively unimportant news.”

-“lavish use of pictures, many of them without significance.”

-“imposters and frauds of various kinds,” including “faked interviews and stories.”

clip from Citizen Kane. dir. Orson Wells. 1941: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15jCvBBn4Fo9YXtp6Op0YFsAU4lgGUJaS/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15jCvBBn4Fo9YXtp6Op0YFsAU4lgGUJaS/view?usp=sharing
-the term “yellow journalism” is derived from the papers that were dyed yellow in order to grab the

attention of people at the newsstand.

-media historian Frank Luther Mott outlined a set of defining characteristics of yellow journalism:

-prominent headlines that “screamed excitement, often about comparatively unimportant news.”

-“lavish use of pictures, many of them without significance.”

-“imposters and frauds of various kinds,” including “faked interviews and stories.”

-a Sunday supplement and color comics.

-“more or less ostentatious sympathy with the underdog’s with campaigns against abuses suffered by

the common people.”

Hearst: publisher of the New York Journal Joseph Pulitzer: publisher of the New York World

the main players in New York City’s Yellow Journalism Wars

Cuban War of Independence, 1895-1898

-Cuba fighting for its independence from Spanish colonial rule.

-José Martí: a poet, writer, and nationalist leader who went to Florida seeking American support for the revolution.

-was viewed as a type of exciting working-class struggle that Hearst was eager to support for the sake of selling papers.

“Richard Harding Davis and Fredric Remington in Cuba for the Journal.”

“Richard Harding Davis and Fredric Remington in Cuba for the Journal.”

unverified, yet iconic quote attributed to Hearst.

Evangelina Cisneros

-father was imprisoned as for conspiring against the Spanish government.

-when pleading for her father’s release the governor mistook her testimony for a romantic gesture.

-the governor sexually assaulted Cisneros at her home.

-as a result, she was charged with attempted murder and rebellion.

-she was sent to a women’s prison in Havana for over a year.

-Hearst was eager to use the young and pretty Cisneros sage into a relatable damsel-in-distress story.

New York Journal reporter Karl Decker. sent to Cuba to rescue Cisneros in 1887.

New York Journal reporter Karl Decker. sent to Cuba to rescue Cisneros in 1887.

Evangelina Cisneros

“melodrama is the fundamental mode of popular American moving pictures. it is not a specific genre like the western or horror film' it is not a ‘deviation’ of the

classical realist narrative; it cannot be located primarily in woman's films, ‘weepies,’ or family melodramas-

though it includes them. rather, melodrama is a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks

dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action. it is the foundation of the classical Hollywood movie.”

—Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised”

USS Maine: sent to Cuba in 1889 to protect US interests and was destroyed upon its arrival.

-261 men died.

-Spanish were blamed in the press for bombing the ship.

-multiple subsequent investigations have concluded that the explosion was most likely caused by a fire originating from the ship.

-Thomas Edison joined the yellow journalism campaign as well.

-he commissioned the film Shooting Captured Insurgents in 1898 to show the world the horrors of the Spanish colonialists.

Shooting Captured Insurgents. dir. Thomas Edison Company. 1898: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11Y_TB4URx1oehS__3Ucszccnd6xUgbep/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11Y_TB4URx1oehS__3Ucszccnd6xUgbep/view?usp=sharing
Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders

-first US volunteer cavalry.

-President William McKinley was able to gather 125,000 men for the effort.

-got its name from “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World” (1893).

-Edison’s company filmed them in Tampa Florida before their mission to Cuba.

F.M. Prescott, exhibitor agent for Edison’s “War Films”: “in these superior films can be seen the dead and wounded and the dismantled cannon lying on the field of battle. the men are seen struggling for their lives, and the American flag proudly waves over them and can be plainly seen through the dense smoke. the brave American and Cuban soldiers show their valor and superiority in fighting the hated Spaniards. you think you can hear the huge cannon belch forth their death-dealing missels, and can really imagine yourself on the field witnessing the actual battle.”

Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. American Mutoscope Company. 1903: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zts5yUML00ubn9QSjXH2YWstmMpt8f-W/view?usp=sharing

U.S. Infantry Supported by Rough Riders at El Caney. Thomas Edison Company. 1899: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rlWp4hdbldleMWHSV1froILBG2sNafEK/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zts5yUML00ubn9QSjXH2YWstmMpt8f-W/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rlWp4hdbldleMWHSV1froILBG2sNafEK/view?usp=sharing
“News Values and News Production” by Peter Golding and Philip Elliot

-news values derive from unstated or implicit assumptions or judgements about three things:

“News Values and News Production” by Peter Golding and Philip Elliot

-news values derive from unstated or implicit assumptions or judgements about three things:

1) the audience. is important to the audience or will it be understood, enjoyed, registered, perceived as relevant?

“News Values and News Production” by Peter Golding and Philip Elliot

-news values derive from unstated or implicit assumptions or judgements about three things:

1) the audience. is important to the audience or will it be understood, enjoyed, registered, perceived as relevant?

2) accessibility—in two senses, prominence and ease of capture. prominence: to what extant is the event known to the news organization how obvious is it, has it made itself apparent? ease of capture: how available to journalists is

the event, is it physically accessible, manageable technically, in a form amenable to journalism, is it ready-

prepared for easy coverage, will it require great resources to obtain?

“News Values and News Production” by Peter Golding and Philip Elliot

-news values derive from unstated or implicit assumptions or judgements about three things:

1) the audience. is important to the audience or will it be understood, enjoyed, registered, perceived as relevant?

2) accessibility—in two senses, prominence and ease of capture. prominence: to what extant is the event known to the news organization how obvious is it, has it made itself apparent? ease of capture: how available to journalists is

the event, is it physically accessible, manageable technically, in a form amenable to journalism, is it ready-

prepared for easy coverage, will it require great resources to obtain?

3) fit. is the item consonant with the pragmatics of production routines, is it commensurate with technical and

organizational possibilities, is it homologous with the exigencies and constraints in programme making and the

limitations of the medium? does it make sense in terms of what is already known about the subject?

DRAMA: “dramatic structure is often achieved by the presentation of conflict, most commonly by the

matching of opposed viewpoints drawn from spokesmen of ‘both sides of the question.’ the

audience is here felt to be served by being given the full picture as well as an interesting

confrontation.”

VISUAL ATTRACTIVNESS: “the temptation to screen visually arresting material and to reject

stories unadorned with good film is ever present and sometimes irresistible. in turn, judgements

about newsworthiness will be shaped by aesthetic judgements about film.”

ENTERTAINMENT: “news programs seek, and usually find, large audiences. to do so they must

take account of entertainment values in the literal sense of providing captivating, humorous,

titillating, amusing or generally diverting material. the ‘human interest story’ was invented for this

this purpose.”

BREVITY: “partly this related to the journalistic role of informing rather than explaining, partly to

concerns for what are seen as audience requirements and limitations.”

NEGATIVTY: “bad news is good news.”

PERSONALITES: “news is about people, and mostly about individuals. this news value

emphasizes the need to make stories comprehensible by reducing complex processes

and institutions to the actions of individuals…brief, and especially visual, journalism cannot deal with

abstractions and has to narrate in the concrete. thus it becomes a news value to ‘seek the personal

angle’ or to ‘personalize’ the news. the effect of this is to treat institutional and international

relations either as the interactions of individuals, or as being analogous to inter-personal relations.”

David Brinkley: “news is what i say it is. it’s something worth knowing by my standards” (1964).

news media “bombshell” montage!: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y27YkKSaePfDPQ-doI18CqdHmZQhrhaQ/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y27YkKSaePfDPQ-doI18CqdHmZQhrhaQ/view?usp=sharing
POWER: “is absent from news by virtue of this severance of politics from economics; power is

located in authority not in control, in the office-holder not the property owner. news thus provides a

particular and truncated view of power, and in this sense power is a dimension that is effectively missing

from news. with these two missing dimensions—social process or

history, and power—news indeed provides a world view. the question remains to what extant this is a

coherent ideology.”

“the key elements of any ruling ideology are the undesirability of change, and its impossibility;

all is for the best and change would do more harm than good even if it were possible. broadcast

news substantiates this philosophy…”

Stuart Hall: “what debate there is tends to take place almost exclusively within the terms of reference of the controllers. and this tends to repress any play between dominant and alternative definitions; by ‘rendering all potential alternatives invisible,’ it pushes the treatment of the crime in question sharply on the terrain of the pragmatic—given that there is a problem with about crime, what can we do about it? in the absence of an alternative definition, powerfully and articulately proposed, the scope for any reinterpretation of crime by the public is an issue of public concern is extremely limited.”

Trump after dropping 59 Tomahawk missiles in Syria after a reported gas attack by the president: “my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much…you’re now talking about a whole different level… [this] crossed a lot of lines for me…when you kill innocent children, innocent babies, babies, little babies, with a chemical gas that is so lethal—people were shocked to hear what gas it was. that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line, many, many lines.”

Brian Williams in awe of America’s killing machines: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lKOqrghcV_KTaF4Wo3DTcQJGCEKoEumz/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lKOqrghcV_KTaF4Wo3DTcQJGCEKoEumz/view?usp=sharing

whiteness is defined by the “other”

“[whiteness] is defined by what is it not: the racially coded “other.” sociologists who have studied the historical evolution of contemporary racial categories…demonstrate that what ‘white’ means has always been understood through a process of exclusion or negation. when European colonists described Africans or indigenous Americans as wild, savage, backward, and stupid, they cast themselves in contrast as civilized, rational, advanced, and intelligent. when American slaveholders described their Black captives as sexually uninhibited and aggressive, they in contrast built an image of whiteness as pure and chaste. when white people today stereotype Black and Latino boys as bad, dangerous kids, they counterpose white kids as well-behaved and respectable. when we describe Latinas as ‘spicy’ and ‘fiery,’ we in turn construct white women as tame and even-tempered.

as a racial category devoid of any racially or ethnically coded meaning, ‘white’ is all that it is not. as such, whiteness is something loaded with social, cultural, political, and economic significance.”

—Nicki Lisa Cole

“the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves— result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

Marshal McLuhan “The Medium is the Message.”

“if the arrow is an extension of the hand and the arm, the rifle is an extension of the eye and the teeth. and it may be to point to remark that it was the literate American colonists who were first to insist on a rifled barrel and improved gunsights…it was the highly literate Bostonians who outshot the British regulars. marksmanship is not the gift of the native or woodsman, but of the literate colonist. so runs this argument that links gunfire itself with the rise of perspective, and with the extension of the visual power in literacy. in the Marine Corps it has been found that there is a definite correlation between education and marksmanship.”

McLuhan, “Weapons: War of the Icons”

“weapons proper are extensions of hands, nails, and teeth, and come into existence as tools needed or accelerating the processing of matter.”

“since our new electric technology is not an extension of our bodies but of our central nervous systems, we now see all technology, including language as a means of processing experience, a means of storing and speeding information. and in such a situation all technology can plausibly be regarded as weapons.”

“our highly literate societies are at a loss as they encounter the new structures of opinion and feeling that result from instant and global information. they are still in the grip of ‘points of view’ and habits of dealing with things one at a time. such habits are quite crippling in any electronic structure of information movement, yet they could be controlled if we recognized whence they had been acquired. but literate society think of its artificial visual bias as a thing natural and innate.”

Django Unchained. dir. Quentin Tarantino. 2012: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aP5LXYVQXLi3Mfy7H_nt5hTcYdprdkL_/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aP5LXYVQXLi3Mfy7H_nt5hTcYdprdkL_/view?usp=sharing
principals of phrenology

-the brain is the organ of the mind.

-human mental powers can be analyzed into a definite number of independent faculties.

-these faculties are innate, and each has its seat in a definite region of the surface of the brain.

-the size of each such region is the measure of the degree to which the faculty seated in it forms a constituent element in the character of the individual.

-the correspondence between the outer surface of the skull and the contour of the brain-surface beneath is sufficiently close to enable the observer to recognize the relative sizes of these several organs by the examination of the outer surface of the head.

Harper’s magazine in 1851 described the “Celtic physiognomy” as “simian-like with protruding teeth and short up-turned noses.” Similarly, the 1871 book New Physiognomy written by the American phrenologist Samuel Roberts Wells, described the Irish woman as being governed “by lower or animal passions,” seeking her chief pleasure from things physical and animal,” and unable to see “beauty in that which can not be eaten or used for the gratification of the bodily appetites or passions.” she “is rude, rough, unpolished, ignorant, and brutish.”

“a gulf certainly, does appear to yawn between the gorilla and the negro. the woods and wilds of Africa do not exhibit an example from any intermediate animal. but in this, as in many other cases, philosophers go vainly searching abroad for that which they could readily find if they sought for it at home. a creature manifestly between the gorilla and the negro is to be meat with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers. it comes from Ireland whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish yahoo. when conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. it is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder laden with a hod of bricks.”

Punch magazine (England, 1862)

-diarist George Templeton Strong, for example, wrote that “the gorilla is superior to the Celtic in muscle and hardly their inferior in a moral sense.”

-one American philanthropist claimed that Irish immigrants “are content to live together in filth and disorder, and enjoy their balls and wakes and frolics without molestation.”

Civil War, 1861-1865

Mexican War, 1846-1848

wars where Irish soldiers make a name for themselves and come back to U.S. cities as heroes.

Tammany Hall Democratic political machine in N.Y. that had a grand corrupting influence on politics from the 1850s to the election of mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1933.

William “Boss” Tweed politician and “boss” of the Tammany Hall political machine from 1858-1871

The Five Points neighborhood

Dead Rabbits Riot (1857) Dead Rabbits vs. Bowery Boys

what is a knife saying?

what are the memories of a locket?

what is gaslight revealing?

what history is a cross carrying?

The Five Points neighborhood

“the city, itself, is traditionally a military weapon, and is a collective shield of plate armor, an extension of the castle of our very skins. before the huddle of the city there was the food-gathering phase of man the hunter. even as men have now in the electric age returned physically and socially to the nomad state. now, however, it is called information and it ignored and replaces the form of the city which has, therefore, tended to become obsolete. with instant electronic technology, the globe itself can never be more than a village, and the very nature of the city as a form of major dimensions must inevitable dissolve like a fading shot in a movie.”

-McLuhan

what is a knife saying?

what are the memories of a locket?

what is gaslight revealing?

what history is a cross carrying?

Gangs of New York. dir. Martin Scorsese. 2002: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zn-t3prbaxvvB3yPU0s0TgipkZ2UzGj1/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zn-t3prbaxvvB3yPU0s0TgipkZ2UzGj1/view?usp=sharing
what is a knife saying?

what are the memories of a locket?

what is gaslight revealing?

what history is a cross carrying?

Boddy Seale: “take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people the time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.”

Malcolm X: “[the government was] either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.”

“the gun is the only thing that will free us— gain us our liberation.”

-Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed.

-his application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home.

-one adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.”

-republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control.

-governor Ronald Reagan: “[r see] no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

-he called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.”

-Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.”

-The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

saturday night special cheap, inexpensive, easy to attain handgun

more controversially, the laws restricted importation of “saturday night specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

“to be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. the whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. the destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising.” 1850

“Why Some Black Americans Need Guns to Feel Safe in Their Country.” New York Times | Opinion. 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSqTKE5apxE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSqTKE5apxE
“a senior Pink Pistols member said that if patrons had been armed at the Orlando nightclub, they might have prevented the shooting for minimized loss of life

‘i think there is a possibility that it could have prevented it…or helped to make the death toll less. if we could have sent one more person home to their family alive instead of in a body bag that would have been something,’ said Gwen Patton, a spokeswoman for the Pink Pistols.

Patton said that membership of the group’s facebook page had tripled from 1,500 before the Orlando massacre to 4,500 by thursday. but with no formal registration system or fees for joining the Pink Pistols, there were no reliable membership numbers available for the group itself, she said.”

Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. dir. Stanley Nelson. 2015: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ShTEDXUlTu_um_4VS-e744uL92KiTIpe/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ShTEDXUlTu_um_4VS-e744uL92KiTIpe/view?usp=sharing