CHAPTER XIX
“THE SUN” AND YELLOW JOURNALISM
The Coming and Going of a Newspaper Disease.—Dana’s Attitude Toward President Cleveland.—Dana’s Death.—Ownerships of Paul Dana, Laffan, Reich, and Munsey.
Of such things as we have mentioned here, putting into the necessary news, attractively written, a proper seasoning of regional colour and atmosphere, humour and pathos, the Sun has been made since Dana came to it. He created a new journalism, but it was a decent and distinct kind, appealing to the intellect rather than to the passions. It gave room for the honest expression of everybody’s opinion, from Herbert Spencer to Chimmie Fadden. Because of this, because he had lifted American newspaper work out of the dust of tradition, Dana had a holy anger when a newer journalism tried to throw it into the mud.
When Henry Watterson was called as an expert witness in proceedings to appraise the estate of Joseph Pulitzer, in 1914, the veteran editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal made an interesting statement on this subject:
There is much confusion in the public mind about what is known as “yellow journalism.” There have been several periods of it in New York. James Gordon Bennett was the first yellow journalist, and Charles A. Dana was the second. Mr. Pulitzer was the third. Finally, when Mr. Hearst came along, he was the fourth, and I think he quite filled the field of yellow journalism.
As Mr. Bennett became more respectable and Mr. Dana more fixed in his efforts, they were raised in the public estimation. So was Mr. Pulitzer. I think the field of yellow journalism is so filled by the Hearst newspapers that they no more compete with the World than with the Herald or the Sun.
Mr. Watterson did not define yellow journalism. Perhaps he considered it broadly as sensational journalism. The elder Bennett was sensational to the extent that he printed things which the sixpenny papers of his time did not print. He made the interview popular, and he was the first editor to see the value of paying attention to financial news.
So far as printing human news is concerned, Benjamin H. Day worked that field before Bennett started the Herald. If Mr. Watterson considered Dana a yellow journalist, what else was Day, with his stories about the sodden things of the police-courts, or his description of Miss Susan Allen smoking a cigar and dancing in Broadway?
Printing a diagram of the scene of a murder, with a big black X to mark the spot where the victim was found, did not make the World a yellow newspaper, for Amos Cummings began to print murder charts as soon as he became managing editor of the Sun. Putting black-faced type over a story on the front page did not make the World or the Journal yellow, for Cummings, when he was on the Tribune, was the first to use big type in head-lines, and the Tribune was never accused of yellowness.
If pictures made a paper yellow, Dana was not yellow, for he used few illustrations in the news pages of the paper. Again, if head-lines indicate yellowness, Dana must be acquitted of being a yellow journalist; for the head-lines of the Sun, from the first year of Dana’s control until after his death, remained practically unchanged, and were conservative to the last degree.