Written By: Oluyomi O.
According to Jones, et al 2008, some newspaper publishers sensationalized the tense political scene between the United States and other world powers. This was a time when stories of international relations and policies were only read in newspapers with no other means of verification. The people were left to take all the stories that were published as the truth even though the whole story wasn’t published. These publishers often exploited exaggerated and twisted events for sales and personal gains. Of note were publishers such as William R. Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. An example of the sensationalism was the explosion of the battleship Maine (seen in the picture below). The Hearst paper had reported and implied that the Spanish were responsible for this explosion, but it was later discovered that “the heat from one of the coal bins had ignited an adjacent powder magazine (Jones, et al, pg 437).”
Another example of yellow journalism was when the Spanish ambassador Enrique Dupuy de Lôme wrote a personal letter to his friend José Canalejas who was in Cuba denouncing US diplomatic policies. After the letter got to Hearst, he published the letter with the headline “"The Worst Insult to the United States in Its History." “Once Hearst published the letter, the news of the insults filled newspapers across the country, and the story became a true international scandal--the U.S. public was outraged, the President demanded an apology, and the ambassador resigned (http://www.pbs.org/crucible/tl9.html).
References
Jones, J., Wood, P.H., Borstelmann, T., May, E. T., & Ruiz, V. L. (2008). Created Equal: A social and political history of the United States. New York, NY: Pearson Longman Press.
Cengage Learning: Wadsworth.com/history. http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=yellow+journalism&FORM=BIFD#focal=2ebae3a2bfe31ef501ebba8a6987142b&furl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wadsworth.com%2Fhistory_d%2Fspecial_features%2Fimage_bank_US%2Fimages%2F22_7.jpg
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