A Look Back:
Between Fake News and Yellow Journalism
Introduction
G. W. F. Hegel once said in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History that “Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.”, this quote and many other socio-historical evidence contribute to support the idea which this paper aims to examine and bring attention to, demanding us to contemplate how to solve the very contemporary issue of fake news, by treating it as part of a much larger problem with extensive historical evidence to learn from.
Fake News and Yellow Journalism
Brought to mass attention with the 2016 US Presidential Election, what is now dubbed as fake news is the pervasive massive digital misinformation which exists online, especially on social media.
Studies have shown that 62% of the US adult acquire their news from social media and that most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, have dramatically differing structures to previous media outlets, as content can now be relayed among users with no significant third-party filtering, fact-checking, or editorial judgment. Leaving masses vulnerable to the hands of individual users, with no track record or reputation, influencing their opinion.
Creators of fake news are able to gain profit through automated advertising, rewarding themselves from the high traffic they have on their sites. A man running a string of fake news websites from the Los Angeles suburbans told NPR he made between $10,000 to $30,000 a month, while a computer science student in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia told the New York Times that creating a new website filled with both real stories and fake news to influence the results of the 2016 US Presidential Election was a “gold mine.”
Many people who encounter fake news stories report how they believe them to be truthful, as fake news takes advantage of people’s nature to be attracted to gossip, rumour, scandal, innuendo, and the unlikely. In a Los Angeles Times opinion editorial piece, Matthew A. Baum and David Lazer also reflected upon how shocking claims stick to a person’s memory and that people are more likely to attend to and later recall a sensational or negative headline, even after a fact checker flags it as suspicious.
It is therefore with good reason that the World Economic Forum (WEF) lists fake news as being one of the main threats to our society. The way it utilises human nature warrants us to look into it as not just a problem of the internet, but as part of a larger problem recalling a rather peculiar period in the history of mass media called yellow journalism.
Yellow journalism is characterised by a dependence on the all too familiar aspects of sensationalism. It lavishly uses of pictures (many without significance) inviting copyright infringements, forged images and impostures and frauds of all kinds, such as ‘faked’ interviews and stories.
Yellow journalism was first witnessed, and was in its prime, at the end of the nineteenth century. A time which witnessed the birth of the linotype, causing the expansion of the press industry, and paving the way for media moguls who wielded the power of large corporations to sell newspapers and influence politics.
The two moguls accredited to this rise of yellow journalism were Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal, who were bitter rivals. Their biggest rivalry was over the cartoonist R.F. Outcault and his cartoon, the “Yellow Kid”, to which yellow journalism owes its name to mainly due to how the feud was widely publicised and embraced by both newspapers.
Outcault was a cartoonist working for Pulitzer, drawing his “Hogan’s Alley” comic series with “The Yellow Kid” as its main character. The series’ popularity and sensibility drew in Hearst’s attention, compelling him to wage a publication war with Pulitzer by launching his own mascot, “The Yeller Feller”, before eventually succeeding in persuading Outcault to defect and have his cartoon published by Hearst instead. Pulitzer further reacted to make matters worse by hiring another cartoonist to imitate Outcault’s work and continued to publish the cartoon. The public ate up the event, raising the revenue of both newspapers.
In 1922, Victor Yarros affirmed how yellow journalism, with its sensationalism and dishonesty, is a business strategy (emulating the monetary gains fake news creators receive) when he wrote that “some writers have not hesitated to indict the entire newspaper business-or profession-on such charges as deliberate suppression of certain kinds of news, distortion of news actually published, studied unfairness toward certain classes, political organisations and social movements, systematic catering to powerful groups of advertisers, brazen and vicious “faking,” and reckless disregard of decency, proportion and taste for the sake of increased profits.”
At one point, Yellow journalism was even cited to be the driving force behind the Spanish-American War, thanks to how the New York Journal covered the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in the port of Havana, an event comparable to how fake news influenced the 2016 US Presidential Election.
We now know that yellow journalism did eventually wane and gave way to honest fact-based journalism, owing itself to the collective labour of three main actors: the public, the courts, and the newspaper industry itself.
Lead by the efforts of the New York Times’ at the time fresh owner, Adolph Simon Ochs, the Times placed great in maintaining and emphasising accurate-objective coverage of international and local news of the day, differentiating itself from yellow press magnates, the New York Journal and the New York World. The Times gave the public an option of an honest press and was gradually favoured over the alternative, this change of consumer behaviour eventually lead to yellow journalism’s gradual decay.
The courts then displayed a negative attitude towards yellow journalism with regards to their intrusion into the lives of public figures. As a matter of fact, our modern notion of a constitutional right to privacy dates back to late nineteenth-century as a by-product of yellow journalism, in order to hold them responsible for their frequent privacy invasions, limiting their practices and holding them accountable (this paper recognises, but will not entertain, the motion of right to privacy v. freedom of speech as it is subject to ongoing debates).
Finally, an internal change of heart took place within the newspaper industry itself, when in 1910, the Kansas State Editorial Association adopted the industry’s first ever code of ethics as proposed by W.E. Miller, which successfully deterred the use of fake illustrations and fake interviews. Similar codes, a set of collectively recognised principles, were adopted across the US in such a widespread manner, that by 1955, Eustace Cullinan could reasonably claim that “[i]n recent decades the press of the nation has developed a code of ethics to which it adheres within reason, though sometimes stooping a little to get results.”
Conclusion
Which brings us back to present times and our current struggles. Could we in lieu of yellow journalism establish the very strategy to abate fake news? Could a joint venture between the public, the courts, and relevant internal stakeholders (technology companies, online press agencies, etc.) promote a possible solution?
Ongoing efforts are indeed being made by all involved parties. Little by little we are gaining awareness of the issue and are equipping ourselves with the necessary tools to identify fake news and report them, digital literacy is catching up, a list is being compiled of credible sources of information for the public to rely on, and most important of all, we saw the launch of the Digital Democracy Charter at the 2018 Paris Peace Forum to serve as the globally recognised action framework that will propel public response to utilise technological development in serving the wellbeing of democratic society.
We now stand at an inflection point. We must design a public policy response to steer technological development into serving the wellbeing of a democratic society. There are no single solutions that can meaningfully change outcomes. Only a combination of approaches — all of which are necessary and none of which are sufficient by themselves — will begin to show results over time. We may not be able to predict the course of the path that will restore the integrity of the democratic public sphere in a digital age, but we can, however, begin by reflecting back into what has been done to counter yellow journalism during its time.
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