What, then, is the aspect and character of these Yellow Journals?
As they are happily strange on our side the ocean, they need some
description. They are ill-printed, over-illustrated sheets, whose end
and aim are to inflame a jaded or insensitive palate. They seem to
address the blind eye and the sluggish mind of the halfwitted. The
wholly unimportant information which they desire to impart is not
conveyed in type of the ordinary shape and size. The "scare" headlines
are set forth in letters three inches in height. It is as though the
editors of these sheets are determined to exhaust your attention. They
are not content to tell you that this or that inapposite event has taken
place. They pant, they shriek, they yell. Their method represents the
beating of a thousand big drums, the blare of unnumbered trumpets, the
shouted blasphemies of a million raucous throats. And if, with all this
noise dinning in your ear, you are persuaded to read a Yellow sheet,
which is commonly pink in colour, you are grievously disappointed. The
thing is not even sensational. Its "scare" headlines do but arouse a
curiosity which the "brightest and brainiest" reporter in the United
States is not able to satisfy.
Of what happens in the great world you will find not a trace in the
Yellow Journals. They betray no interest in politics, in literature,
or in the fine arts. There is nothing of grave importance which can be
converted into a "good story." That a great man should perform a great
task is immaterial. Noble deeds make no scandal, and are therefore not
worth reporting. But if you can discover that the great man has a hidden
vice, or an eccentric taste in boots or hats, there is "copy" ready to
your hand. All things and all men must be reduced to a dead level of
imbecility. The Yellow Press is not obscene--it has not the courage for
that. Its proud boast is that it never prints a line that a father might
not read to his daughter. It is merely personal and impertinent. No
one's life is secure from its spies. No privacy is sacred. Mr Stead's
famous ideal of an ear at every keyhole is magnificently realised in
America. A hundred reporters are ready, at a moment's notice, to invade
houses, to uncover secrets, to molest honest citizens with indiscreet
questions. And if their victims are unwilling to respond, they pay for
it with public insult and malicious invention. Those who will not bow to
the common tyrant of the Press cannot complain if words are ascribed
to them which they never uttered, if they are held guilty of deeds from
which they would shrink in horror. Law and custom are alike powerless
to fight this tyranny, which is the most ingenious and irksome form of
blackmail yet invented.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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