The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America's Emergence as a World Power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spencer, David R. The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America's Emergence as a World Power. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 272 pp. $24.95. That William Randolph Hearst, in his days in New York, was a rank imitator of the methods of Joseph Pulitzer is a notion that refuses to the, recent scholarship notwithstanding. David Nasaw, for one, sought to dismantle this stereotype in The Chief, his outstanding biography of Hearst published in 2000. At the New York Journal, which Hearst acquired in 1895, Nasaw wrote, Hearst and his staff constantly improved on their product with provocative headlines, outstanding writing, and excellent layout. Hearst hardly was waiting for Pulitzer's lead or guidance as the press period unfolded in the mid- and late- 1890s. And yet, the notion that Hearst was a shameless imitator is revived in David Spencer's The Yellow the most recent book-length treatment of a fascinating and much-misunderstood period in American journalism. Spencer, who teaches at the University of Western Ontario, writes engagingly and with characteristic wit. He seems truly fascinated by the American press and its larger-than-life personalities. But his characterization of Hearst as a poseur who copied Pulitzer's concepts shamelessly is as unfortunate and as it is misleading. To misunderstand Hearst is to run the risk of misunderstanding as it was practiced in the late nineteenth century. There was, to be sure, much to criticize in Hearst's especially in his Journal's overheated reporting in the runup to the Spanish-American War of 1898. But whatever his faults, Hearst in New York did not try to imitate Pulitzer, or Pulitzer's New York World. Hearst's Journal positioned itself as the vanguard of the new in fin-de-siecle America and routinely disparaged Pulitzer and the World as stodgy, stale, and boring. Hearst took inspiration not from Pulitzer but from Europe. He borrowed the model of the new from the British press, specifically William T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead's theory of government by journalism, advanced in the 1880s, found resonance in Hearst's vision of journalism of action, by which the Journal sought to inject itself as a high-profile participant in public life to render any public service within its power. Hearst set out his activist theory in 1897, the same year that yellow first appeared in print, in the now-defunct New York Press. Spencer refers to, but does not meaningfully explore, the journalism of action, which found greatest expression in October 1897 in the Journals rescue of a nineteen-year-old political prisoner in Havana, Evangelina Cisneros. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".