Book Review: <i>Sensationalism: Murder, Mayhem, Mudslinging, Scandals, and Disasters in 19th-Century Reporting</i> , edited by David B. Sachsman and David W. Bulla Sensationalism: Murder, Mayhem, Mudslinging, Scandals, and Disasters in 19th-Century Reporting. SachsmanDavid B.BullaDavid B., eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013. 425 pp. $49.95 hbk.

Sensationalism: Mayhem, Scandals, and Disasters in 19th-Century Reporting. David B. Sachsman and David W. Bulla, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013. 425 pp. $49.95 hbk.The edited collection of essays by David B. Sachsman and David W. Bulla is a treasure chest for media historians, whether or not the nineteenth century is their primary area of interest. Beginning with four cover photographs that depict bludgeoning, stabbing, whipping, and war, the book delivers on a theme that remains pervasive in contemporary media: The one thing that journalists seem to have learned from this long history of what would come to be called journalism is that sensationalism sells, write the editors in their introduction.Sensationalism: Mayhem, Scandals, and Disaster in 19th- Century Reporting is a veritable explosion of topics dear to the hearts of those invested in media analysis and history. Written by administrators, directors of publication, marketing specialists, professors, professors emeritus, and others-many with media experience-the essays highlight not only a particular period in newspaper history, but also provocative contemporary media practices.For example, the collection deals with portrayals of politicians, including John Adams, Jefferson Davis, Grover Cleveland, Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Richard M. Nixon, Barack Obama, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Mitt Romney. Its sweep includes writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Charles Dickens, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lord Byron, Jacob Riis, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Edgar Allan Poe. News personalities also are in abundance: James Gordon Bennett, Nellie Bly, Benjamin Day, Horace Greeley, William Randolph Hearst, S. S. McClure, Joseph Pulitzer, and Henry Raymond head the list. In addition, there are important analyses of newspaper coverage of Tammany Hall and the Tweed Ring, among other scandals of corruption.The fifth book to be published from papers presented at the Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression-a conference that began in 1993 and continues annually in Chattanooga, Tennessee-Sensationalism follows previous collections of essays about the Civil War and the press, fiction and film, race and gender, and other topics. In their detailed introduction, Sachsman and Bulla write,Sensationalism is a key to the story of how newspapers changed throughout the century to appeal to an increasingly literate workforce that included wave after wave of new immigrants. Political scandalmongering continued throughout the century and continues to the current day, and the crime coverage that was the bread and butter of the penny press rose to new heights in the era of yellow journalism and is now the essential feature of if it bleeds, it leads culture of news reporting.The George R. West Jr. Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Sachsman reveals in the preface to Sensationalism that his first job in newspapers was as a copy boy at the New York Daily News, which he identifies as a tabloid newspaper designed to be a picture window of the world. He observes,To capture and keep the attention of the largest audience possible, both the newspapers (and the press in general) and local news broadcasts are designed to entertain, titillate, mesmerize, and shock, at least within the limits of their own definitions of propriety.Author of Lincoln's Censor, Bulla is an associate professor of journalism at Zayed University's College of Communication and Media Sciences. Together, the editors organized twenty-one essays in four sections: The Many Faces of Sensationalism; Mudslinging, Muckraking, Scandals, and Yellow Journalism; Murder, Mayhem, Stunts, Hoaxes, and Disasters; and Hatred. …

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