May 17, 2003 - 1n 1895 Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World had created a circulation boosting sensation with its publication of the first color comic strip, The Yellow Kid. William Randolph Hearst had come to town from California that year, bought the New York Journal, and immediately started a circulation war with Pulitzer. In January 1896 he induced Richard Felton Outcault, the artist who created the comic strip to leave Pulitzer and come to work for the Journal. Pulitzer hired George B. Luks to continue the strip and both papers were publishing their own version of The Yellow Kid. At the height of the circulation war between Hearst and Pulitzer the New York Press published an editorial deriding both of the contending papers as engaging in “Yellow Journalism”. The derisive term stuck and entered the language. One of the ironic aspects of the contest was that Hearst modeled his paper after the World’s style and was trying to go Pulitzer one better. Soon the competing papers were not just reporting news – they were creating in from a fabric woven of fact, fiction and plagiarism. At one point Hearst planted a story about the death of a fictional Spanish Colonel, Reflipe W. Thenuz. Pulitzer took the bait and The World published its own story, dressing it up with imagined detail and datelines. Hearst revealed that the name was a scrambled anagram of the phrase, “We pilfer the news”

Now we have our own century’s edition of “Yellow Journalism”, faster paced and with the immediacy of cable television, more insidious than the contest between the titans of the New York newspaper world of the 1890s. Ted Turner gave us the twenty four hour news cycle with his innovating creation of CNN. Rupert Murdock came to town and decided to go Turner one better with Fox News. Like Hearst, who used his mother’s considerable fortune to hire away the competition’s star talent, Murdock followed the same path in creating his “fair and balanced” news source that is anything but. Reporting at the dawn of the 21st Century has been replaced by thinly veiled advocacy draped in the mantle of broadcast journalism. CNN responded in kind in the war for ratings.

In that atmosphere the infection was bound to spread to the print media and its step-children the newspapers Websites designed to compete with Cable TV in the 24-hour news cycle. Jayson Blair is just one more practitioner of 21st Century yellow journalism in a long string of writers who have been exposed as substituting style for substance and rhetoric for reporting. His race has nothing to do with it, despite the cable clamor twisting the story to discredit affirmative redress of past inequities. That the Times, a paper that had weathered the Yellow Journalism wars with a deserved reputation for objective journalistic integrity would become infected is both ironic and inevitable.

More ominously the infection, as it did in the 1890s, has reached government itself. Driven by the 24-hour news cycle this administration has learned from its predecessor and substitutes posturing for policy and stagecraft for statecraft. Yellow journalism has become Yellow Broadcasting and the politicians have become its most accomplished practitioners.