Head-lines and pictures, so far as their sensational attraction was concerned, meant nothing to Dana. He was not yellow, but white and alive. The distinction was clearly explained by Mr. Mitchell:
Remember the difference between white and yellow. The essential difference is not of method or quality of product, but of purpose and of moral responsibility or moral debasement. Yellow will tell you that it means force, originality, and independence in the presentation of ideas. This is consolatory to yellow, but not accurate. Yellow will print an interesting exaggeration or misstatement, knowing it to be such. If in doubt about the truth of alleged news, but in no doubt whatever as to its immediate value as a sensation, yellow will give the benefit of the doubt to the sensation every time, and print it with head-lines tall enough to reach to Saturn. White won’t; that is the only real color test. I hope you are all going to be white, and not only white, but red, white, and blue.
No yellow journalist he, Dana! To paraphrase Webster, he smote the rock of humanity, and abundant streams of literature rushed forth. If he startled, he startled the intellect, not the eye. His appeals were to the intelligence, the soul, the risibilities of man, and not to his primitive passions. He believed that all the information, the philosophy, and the humour of the world could be conveyed through the type of a daily newspaper as surely as and much more broadly than they had been conveyed through the various mediums of the old newspapers, the encyclopedias, the novels, the pulpit, and the lecture platform.
When Dana attacked yellow journalism—the expressive phrase was fastened in the language by Ervin Wardman, in the Press—it was in the firm belief that this new journalism, the “journalism that did things,” was doing the wrong thing; that it was breaking down the magnificent structure that had been reared by himself and Greeley and Raymond and Bennett and Hurlbut. This group had been possessed of all the newspaper faculties and facilities. If yellow journalism had been right, they would have raised it to its highest peak. Dana, who knew better than any editor of his time what the public wanted, could have produced a perfect yellow Sun; but he chose to print a golden one. He wrought more genuine journalistic advance than any other man in history. As Mr. Mitchell wrote of him in McClure’s Magazine in October, 1894, three years before Mr. Dana’s death:
The revolution which his genius and invention have wrought in the methods of practical journalism in America during the past twenty-five years can be estimated only by newspaper-makers. His mind, always original, and unblunted and unwearied at seventy-five, has been a prolific source of new ideas in the art of gathering, presenting, and discussing attractively the news of the world.
He is a radical and unterrified innovator, caring not a copper for tradition or precedent when a change of method promises a real improvement. Restlessness like his, without his genius, discrimination, and honesty of purpose, scatters and loses itself in mere whimsicalities or pettinesses; or else it deliberately degrades the newspaper upon which it is exercised.
To Mr. Dana’s personal invention are due many, if not most, of the broad changes which within a quarter of a century have transformed journalism in this country. From his individual perception of the true philosophy of human interest, more than from any other single source, have come the now general repudiation of the old conventional standards of news importance; the modern newspaper’s appreciation of the news value of the sentiment and humor of the daily life around us; the recognition of the principle that a small incident, interesting in itself and well told, may be worth a column’s space, when a large, dull fact is hardly worth a stickful’s; the surprising extension of the daily newspaper’s province so as to cover every department of general literature, and to take in the world’s fancies and imaginings as well as its actual events.
The word “news” has an entirely different significance from what it possessed twenty-five or thirty years ago under the ancient common law of journalism as derived from England; and in the production of this immense change, greatly in the interest of mankind and of the cheerfulness of daily life, it would be difficult to exaggerate the direct and indirect influence of Mr. Dana’s alert, scholarly, and widely sympathetic perceptions.
WILLIAM C. REICK