In the media jungle, the little feed on the big. Periodicals of small circulation appoint themselves critics of larger journals. For half a century The New Yorker has kept a careful eye on news syndicates. Newspapers today sit in judgment on the electronic media, and movies, in their turn, criticize television. TV, like an amorphous mass of plankton, lies at the bottom of the food chain, too huge, diffuse, and busy to be critical of anything.

The urban newspaper, which began to develop into a mass medium in the latter part of the nineteenth century, was not without its critics at the time. Among these were the illustrated comic weeklies: Puck, Judge, Life, Truth, Texas Siftings, and The Arkansaw Traveler. As the characteristics of yellow journalism emerged—sensationalism, muck-raking, promotional stunts, scandal mongering—the comic weeklies chortled through cartoons, jokes, sketches, and editorials. The record of their laughter provides a perspective on this development of journalism.

One of the characteristics of the "new" journalism that the comic weeklies opposed was the focus of news stories around personalities. This practice probably began with rural newspapers, where local names were used lavishly. A local citizen did not have to exert himself to get his name in print: the normal events of life would assure him publicity. Let a relative visit, a new buggy be purchased, a solo sung, a leg broken, or someone’s cow have a calf, and the item would appear in print, documented down to the name of the calf. When Miss Cora Brown returned to Avondale, Ohio, after visiting friends in New York City, a fact well covered by the Avondale press but missed entirely by the so-called great dailies of the city, Puck mentioned that New York might as well yield the palm for enterprise in journalism to the West.¹

The weekly census was necessary to hold the circulation of the paper. Sherwood Anderson, who owned two weekly papers in Virginia, said that the country newspaper is not really a newspaper in the modern sense. It is actually a big weekly country letter. There are hundreds of names in every issue, and the size of the circulation is directly dependent upon the editor’s enterprise in working local names into his news columns.²

Opie Read, of The Arkansaw Traveler, created the character of George Sabberly, editor of a paper in Dry Fork, Arkansas. Sabberly

continually tried to get national recognition and sent his work to several magazines, including the Traveler. "I reckon you have hearn of me, for a man who takes your paper by the year staid all night at my house a short time ago, an’ mor’n likely he has told you something about me."³ Sabberly then sent off his "Dry Fork Notes" to Scribner’s advising them to print five or six extra copies as their magazines would sell like hotcakes in his neighborhood.

Dry Fork Notes

By the Hon. George Sabberly

Good time for picking cotton.
Mad dogs are reported in the neighborhood.
Aunt Nancy Wilkes had our thanks for a dish of choice honey.⁴

William Allen White pointed out the parallel between rural and urban newspapers. The rural weekly dealt with leading citizens in the village, and if the community was small enough, everyone was prominent. The big city daily wrote of prominent citizens in the social and criminal and financial worlds.⁵ The only difference was the approach. The small town paper could scarcely afford to print anything derogatory about a member of the community, yet that type of news was exactly what the city press looked for.

Alex Sweet, of Texas Siftings, created a character, Colonel Bill Snort, who was to become the Jack Downing of his age. Col. Snort, the fictional confidant of Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland, had his beginnings as the editor of a small Texas paper: The Crosby County Clarion and Farmer’s Vindicator. In one sketch he decides to imitate the New York press. He gives instructions to his cub, Johnny Fizzletop, how to write up the local Sniverly trial. When Johnny says that Mrs. Sniverly was about forty, ugly as sin, and had a wart on her nose, Snort dictates:

    "Write—Mrs. Sniverly, the girl wife of the accused, then took the stand. She was a vision of loveliness, a bewitching blonde with large languishing eyes, a faultless, willowy figure, and fine chiseled features."
    "But Col. Snort, she ain’t that sort of a woman. I saw her myself."
   "Johnny, we must keep pace with the New York press no matter if we perjure ourselves in every issue of the paper."⁶

It was Joseph Pulitzer, in his New York World, who first applied the rural practice of using names to the urban press. Pulitzer made the news more spicy by playing up vice, crime, and scandal, stories of which were written in a style more detailed and elaborate than theretofore used. Puck claimed that the reason so many university

graduates failed in journalism was that they did not realize the profound change that the profession had undergone. The magazine prepared a guide for aspiring reporters, showing the difference between the old and the new style.

Ye Old Style (A.D. 1875)

    Mary Smith, an intemperate woman, was arraigned before Police Justice Morton yesterday morning on a charge of vagrancy preferred by Officer O’Toole. She was found guilty, and sentenced to ninety days on Blackwell’s Island.

The Modern Racket (A.D. 1885)

    A handsome and voluptuous brunette toyed with her lace handkerchief yesterday morning in the Sessions, and shot glances from her dark and lustrous eyes into those of Judge Mike Morton. The old, old story. A happy home, loving parents, the growler, the fall and ruin. Only a broken head.

    "Here again, Mary?" queried the sympathetic magistrate.

    "Yes, your Honor," sobbed the victim of man’s inhumanity. "But please let me go, only this time!"

    "Yes, Mary, I’ll let you go—to the Island for ninety days. And when you have come back, after three months of industrious study and reform, turn over a new leaf, Mary. A leaf? Make it a large quarto volume."

    And the handsome Judge wiped away a tear with a rich blue silk handkerchief, while Mary rode off in the Black Maria.⁷

But it was not just the style that had become sensational; the subject matter had grown so too. Truth defined the "new journalism" as having no "sense of decency and respect for the rights of citizens, either public or private; it exploits every thing that is sensational and vile, blows its own trumpet continually and claims to be the greatest force for good in the community."⁸ The urban press was criticized for emphasizing the sordid part of the news: corruption, murder, crime, rape, divorce, and general immorality. Judge thought that the sensational newspapers were replacing the old yellow-backed dime novel,⁹ and Puck warned that the features that glamorized crime and criminals had caused an increase in juvenile delinquency.¹⁰ Life advised those who wished to be successful editors to hire degenerates who would search the country for horrors.¹¹

One practice of the new journalism most complained about was the invasion of privacy. In their self-appointed role as servants of the people, the journalists regarded private lives as public property, and prominent individuals became pestered by reporters. Moreover, the sensational style quickly transformed rumor and suggestion into

lurid scandal. No man of the time was more maligned or irritated by the press than Grover Cleveland. His character had been defiled in the election of 1884 because of his personal life, and after he became President, reporters still annoyed him with their sniping and surveillance. Not only were his betrothal and marriage offensively reported, but a large contingent of newsmen followed the couple on their honeymoon and stayed close at hand to write about state affairs or anything else that might occur. A cartoon in Life shows Cleveland and his bride fishing; behind them, stretched out on a long log, are half a hundred reporters, pencils poised above notebooks.¹² Cleveland at last expressed his indignation in a letter to Joseph Keppler, publisher of Puck.

    I don’t think there ever was a time when newspaper lying was so general and so mean as at present, and there never was a country under the sun where it flourished as it does in this. The falsehoods daily spread before the people in our newspapers, while they are proofs of the mental ingenuity of those engaged in newspaper work, are insults to the American love for decency and fair play of which we boast.¹³

Another feature of the new journalism that brought criticism was the charities and funds which were operated under the guise of helping the poor but which were really promotional stunts. That these drives were more for the benefit of the paper’s circulation than anything else was indicated by. the lists published in every issue, which gave donors a chance to see their names in print. It was alleged that these donations did little good; they merely allowed the public to placate its conscience. Newspapers were not thought to be sincerely interested in social reform, despite all the publicity accorded the slums and poverty. Sentimental slum stories made good copy and that was as far as the interest went. It was charged that some publishers profited financially from the various bread, milk, and free ice funds that they periodically conducted.

William Randolph Hearst, who was as successful mining sentiment as his father had been mining silver, instituted the "sob sister" who specialized in stories of disaster, pathos, and sentimentality. James L. Ford, who worked for the Journal in its heyday, once found out from one of these reporters how an errand of mercy for tenement children was actually performed. Her assignment was to take some children to the beach for a picnic. An ice cream dealer was supposed to supply an unlimited amount of ice cream in trade for a "puff’ about his daughter’s engagement. But the girl’s picture did not come out right, and the dealer gave the reporter only a single

can of ice cream. Fortunately, only about twenty children showed up because they had been to these picnics before and had grown skeptical. Even with only twenty mouths to feed, the individual portion of ice cream was very small, and one street Arab got up and declared that the Journal was a fake, and he was going to tell everyone. The "sob sister" displayed the quick-thinking natural to her sorority.

    I took away the ice cream from a deaf and dumb kid who couldn’t holler and gave it to the malcontent. Then I had to write my story beginning, "Thousands of children, pale-faced but happy, danced merrily down Coney Island’s beach yesterday and were soon sporting in the sunlit waves shouting, ‘God bless Mr. Hearst.’"¹⁴

When interesting news was scarce, newspapers with enterprise created some. This was done through promotional stunts. The first great idea occurred in 1871 when James Gordon Bennett, Jr., of the Herald, sent Henry Stanley into unexplored Africa to find David Livingstone. After this dramatic discovery, the adventurer Stanley stayed in Africa as the Herald’s correspondent and made several newsworthy explorations. On one of these he became lost himself, and was lost for so long that Pulitzer of the World sent a man into Africa to find Stanley; and, as Texas Siftings put it, to learn all he could about the Dark Continent:

    . . . its products and manufacturers, its system of common schools, whether bribery is resorted to in elections, the extent to which the Bell telephone is introduced, whether the people are prepared for the introduction of Trusts, how the Fourth of July is celebrated, what proportion of women wear bustles, is marriage a failure, and many other interesting things regarding Africa that are likely to interest World readers.¹⁵

When the World’s reporter also became lost, Siftings volunteered to send a man in search of him.

The greatest stunt of all was thought to be the Spanish-American War. It is alleged that Hearst sent Frederick Remington to Havana before the actual declaration, and Remington wanted to leave when he found no war to draw. Hearst is reported to have cabled him: "You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war."¹⁶ Whether they furnished the war or not, the newspaper did outfit a regiment of correspondents. One sketch showed a company of reporters elbowing Admiral Dewey off his own bridge. The papers were satirized also for trying to run the war and for claiming the victory.

Ho! For the war with its fierce cannonade,
Ho! For the riflemen’s rattle,

There’s newspaper men at the front and we’ll wade
Through column accounts of the battle;
Journalists, artists, are there on the field,
All in the pink of condition,
Cable the Spaniard he may as well yield—
Ho! for the hundredth edition.¹⁷

The criticism of journalism during the eighties and nineties had been brought about by a transition: journalism was becoming less a profession and more of a business, or so claimed the humorists. Newspapers had become interested not so much in reliable coverage of news but in large circulations and more advertising. They bragged about their circulations in daily headlines and often made extravagant claims.

   "Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur."
   They all do it!
    The Sun started it, the Herald and others followed, and is Puck going to be outdone in honesty, modesty and truthfulness by his esteemed contemporaries?
    Not if he knows it!
He also will state his circulation at the end of each week, and if his contemporaries stagger at his figures, they will see that Puck can and will go them one, or ten, or a hundred, or a hundred thousand, or even a million better every time, and don’t you forget it.
    But to business:
    During the last quarter the average circulation of Puck was 1,190,377. The sales of last week’s Puck were 1,197,433¹/₈.*

Yours for truth and modesty.
Puck

* Last Saturday nothing was left of the entire edition but two pages containing advertisements. These, of course, were anxiously procured by an admiring reader.¹⁸

The character of the reporter, as he appeared in the humor magazines, was that of an unmitigated liar. He was even able to beat the drummer when the two met in a sketch. One editor told a reporter to fake a drowning; then to write a story showing up the inefficiency of the river police and the brutality of the morgue employees. The reporter was pictured as willing to experience anything: drunkenness, dope, carnality. The character of the hard-bitten city reporter began to take form during this period.

    A beautiful young lady, elegantly dressed, and worth $100,000, appeared in the Tombs Police Court, New York, last week as a witness. She was much interested in the famous old court and gazed earnestly at six young men sitting in a box.

    Even as she gazed she shuddered, and a little moan broke from her lips.   

    "Are those hardened looking young men prisoners?" she asked.

    "Oh, no ma’am," replied the justice, greatly shocked; "those are reporters for the morning newspapers.

    The young lady said she would like to go and look at the dungeons immediately.¹⁹

But as unscrupulous as the male reporter was pictured by the magazines, his infamy was scarcely equal to that of the girl reporter, a phenomenon new to journalism. Here was a class of women who would stoop to any guise or indulge in any venture to create a story. A pretty young girl volunteered to serve as a model for Charles Dana Gibson. While posing, she volunteered other things too, offerings that the gallant Gibson preferred not to notice. Finally, the girl broke down and confessed. She was a reporter from the World and had an assignment to uncover sensational stories about sex life in Bohemia.²⁰

The girl reporter was a frequent subject for paragraphers and cartoonists. Truth, in an editorial, suggested that since some women were so eager to reform things, they might well begin with those of their sex who worked for newspapers.

    The bravest man in America today feels the chills running up and down his spine when a female reporter is announced. She is a menace and a terror, and she owes it to herself. Apparently there is no assignment too degrading, underhand or disreputable for women reporters to undertake.²¹

One reporter, masquerading as a street tramp, begged alms from well-known men and reported everything they said to her. Another went to an insane asylum as a patient and dragged family skeletons out of the closets of people who had already suffered enough.

    Others pretend to be ushers at theaters, feminine detectives, amateur shoplifters, and still others play the spy in the offices of physicians and in Turkish baths, where respectable women are lampooned and derided with brutal indifference to their feelings.²²

The most famous girl reporter of them all was Elizabeth Cochran, better known as "Nelly Bly," of the World. Nelly did her stint in an insane asylum and performed other heroics in the service of the new journalism, but she is best remembered today for her attempt to prove Jules Verne’s story that the earth could be circumvented in eighty days. Nelly did it in seventy-two days and some odd hours, even detouring from her course to visit Verne in France. Life

magazine was not to be outdone by the World and hired the intrepid reporter "Sadie McGinty," who was to attempt to go around New York City in eighty years. Life reported her journey in a parody of the World’s account of Nelly’s adventures.

    At precisely the time indicated in her telegram Miss McGinty arrived at the office of Life fully equipped for her tremendous undertaking. Our lady readers will be interested to know that she was tastefully clad in a brocaded Mother Hubbard, with galoshes and overgaiters of pink China silk. Her only baggage consisted of a dress-suit case containing three tooth brushes, one pint of Moet and Chandon (white label), Life’s Christmas number, one quart V.S.O.P., one eight day clock, one shotgun, one set Encyclopedia Britannica, and three bottles of bandoline. Her pulse was normal and her temperature 106 in the shade. . . . No one has ever yet been daring enough to attempt the feat of completely encircling New York in a given time.

    She will have to encounter all the dangers of subway explosions, police clubbings, overhead wires, and the influenza. . . . Miss McGinty is a courageous girl and Life is a great journal. . . . This trip is made purely in the interest of science, but our circulation last week was 2,146,942 copies. . . . Miss McGinty carries with her a special passport from the Police Department and letters of introduction from Mr. Russell Harrison [the President’s son] to all the crowned heads she is likely to meet. . . . Remember, our circulation last week was 4,942,387 copies.²³

It was bad enough that the "new" or "yellow" journalism was marred by sensationalism, melodramatic style, prevarication, invasion of privacy, and promotional stunts; but when the papers did these things as servants of the people, it was too much. Yellow journalism was thought a more pernicious influence than the dime novel, because the latter did not attempt to justify its sensationalism with moral pretensions. Anyway, the papers were not so much interested in the welfare of the people as in their own circulations, and the humor magazines kept hammering on this point.

One sketch that appeared in Life at the time of the outbreak of the Spanish-American War shows how broad and sarcastic the attacks against the press became by the end of the century. The editor of the Yellow Rot, known also as the "Protector of the Poor" and "Intellect of the Universe," is assigning stories to his reporters. He charges one man as derelict for destroying only three reputations in a week. He orders another to take the burglar tools and break into a house where there is a society wedding and get a list of the presents and who sent them. He makes other assignments of a similar nature; then turns to the Yellow Rot War College and accuses the members of lack of patriotism. He orders one to make up a story about a

cruiser being sunk off the Philippines; another to discover a plot to kidnap Teddy Roosevelt; a third to circulate the story that the new Spanish Minister is a nephew of the editor of the Sun. Then he thunders to the trembling remnant:

    "Go forth and raven! Sweep the gutters; scrape the garbage scows; filter the sewers; listen at doors; peer at keyholes; haunt kitchens and back alleys; fake, lie, misrepresent, and be up to date."

    Then the Moulder of Public Opinion walked into the streets, conscious of duty well done; certain that a great Circulating Cesspool was doing the work of morality and civilization.

    That night the Devil said to Moloch: "Molly, old boy, I am going out of business; I feel like an amateur every time I pick up the Yellow Rot."²⁴

The humor magazines were not the only ones to criticize yellow journalism. Since most foreign observers tried to find something bad to say about America, they usually found opportunity to discuss the press. Oscar Wilde’s "Bad manners make a journalist" is remembered today. Kipling encountered the reporter type at San Francisco and thought that his ignorance was exceeded only by his brashness. Matthew Arnold shook his head in disbelief; he felt that he could not adequately describe American journalism. "You must have lived amongst their newspapers to know what they are. . . . The absence of truth and soberness in them, the poverty in serious interest, the personality and sensation mongering, are beyond belief."²⁵

There was fear, too, that the disease was spreading to Europe. One imaginative humorist tried to see how the French language might adapt itself to the new style.

Murdre Horrible

Les Laches Loups Laissent Loose Leurs Couteaux

Mère Marguérite, Maman de Mignonne Marie, Murdrée Marie Morte Maintenant.

Le Temps Reporteur Naturellement Sur La Spotte.

Tout était quiète.

Mère Marguérite avait travaillé le growler.

Elle était trois drapeaux dans le vent.

Marie, sa seule fille, nursait son kid.

Toutes les deux avaient un beau jag.

    Soudainement les autres tenants de la maison ténément dévenient vexés par le bruit, car Marguerite et sa fille chantaient en divers clefs "Après le bal est fini" et "Deux petites filles en bleu."

"Je terminerai leur damnée bruit," disait Jean Baptiste, et il

31

monta l’escalier avec Pierre, Louis, Edouard et Claudius.

Avec des cris horribles ils se jettèrent sur la vielle, la jabbant dans l’estomac avec leurs couteaux.

"Fils d’un fusil," elle exclama en expirant.

"Quittez votre slaughtère," shriekait la fille, comme elle hurla le growler à la tête de Jean Baptiste qui avança.

"Prenez cela chanteuse de vieux marrons," et Marie sankait sur la terre couverte de sang.

"Maintenant pour le kid," cria Edouard.

    A ce moment le petit pursa ses lèvres et commençait à hummer "La maison de Maggie Murphy."

Tous les hommes éc1atèrent en larmes.

"J’ai entendu cette tune, là quand un garçon," sobbait Claudius.

    "Moi aussi," pleurait Louis, qui avait quatrevingt ans puis chacun tomba sur le cou de le’autre pleurant horriblement.

Le Temps reporteur accompagna le police à l’abode.

Il y aura un joli exéution, n’est-ce pas?

Chacun yieldait sans combattant.

Le tune de leur enfance, venant de la bouche d’un enfant, avait touché leurs coeurs.

Le Temps est toujours en evidence.

Nous sommes le peuple.

Et n’oubliez pas.²⁶

ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY, NORMAL, ILL.

    ¹Puck, 16, 7 Jan. 1885, 291.
   ²Sherwood Anderson, ‘The Country Weekly," Forum, 85 (April 1931), 210.
   ³The Arkansaw Traveler, 8,1 May 1886, 1.
   ⁴The Arkansaw Traveler, 9, 9 Oct. 1886, 1.
   ⁵William Allen White, "The Country Newspaper," Harper’s, 132 (May 1916), 890.
   ⁶Texas Siftings, 6, 31 July 1886, 12.
   ⁷Puck, 17, 13 May 1885, 171.
   ⁸Truth. 16, 11 March 1897, 7.
   ⁹Judge, 25, 7 Oct. 1893, 210.
   ¹⁰Puck 41.24 Feb. 1897, no p.
   ¹¹Life, 28. 20 Aug. 1896, 131.
   ¹²Life, 8, 26 Aug. 1886, 120-21.
   ¹³Puck, 18, 3 Dec. 1885, 275.
   ¹⁴James L. Ford, Forty Odd Years in the Literary Shop (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921), p. 261.
   ¹⁵Texas Siftings, 10, 2 Feb. 1889, 8.
   ¹⁶Frank Luther Mott, History of American Journalism (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 529.
   ¹⁷Puck, 43, 8 June 1898, no p.

¹⁸Puck, 15, 23 April 1884, 114. Puck’s actual circulation at this time was about 75,000.
   ¹⁹The Wasp, 12, 3 May 1884, 10.
   ²⁰Fairfax Downey, Portrait of an Era (New York: Scribner’s, 1936), p. 134.
    ²¹Truth, 13, 28 April 1894, 2.
   ²²Ibid.
   ²³Life, 14, 26 Dec. 1889, 360.
   ²⁴Life, 31, 14 April 1898, 325.
   ²⁵Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States (Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1888), p. 177.
   ²⁶Truth, 13, 20 Jan. 1894, 11.

ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY