The assaults which Dana made upon yellow journalism were not actuated by the jealous envy of one who has himself overlooked an opportunity. Everything that the Sun attacked in yellow newspapers was something to which the Sun itself never would have stooped—the faked or distorted interview, the product of the thief or the eavesdropper, the collection of back-stairs gossip, the pilfered photograph, the revelation of personal affairs beyond the public’s business, the arrogation of official authority, the maudlin plea for sympathy in a factitious cause, the gross exaggeration for sensation’s sake of a trifling occurrence, the appeal to sensualism, and the demagogic attack upon the rich.
Right endures, and where is yellow journalism? Gone where the woodbine twineth. Its prototype, the wild ass, stamps o’er its head and cannot break its sleep. The “journalism that does things” doesn’t do anything any more except to try and teach its men to write articles the way the Sun has been printing them since 1868. In a chart of new journalism the largest, blackest X-mark would show where the body of new journalism, slain by public taste, lies buried forever.
The New York World, once the most ingenious exponent of yellow journalism, has become as conservative as the Sun was in the days when Joseph Pulitzer worked for Dana. Mr. Hearst’s papers, once the deepest of all yellows, now hold up their hands in horror when they see, beside them on the news-stands, the bold, black head-lines of the Evening Post!
Yellow journalism said to its readers:
“This way to the big show! We have a mutilated corpse, a scandal in high life, divorce details that weren’t brought out in court, a personal attack on the mayor, lifelike pictures of dead rats, the memoirs of a demented dressmaker, some neatly invented prison horrors, and a general denunciation of everybody who owns more than five hundred dollars. Don’t miss it!”
Dana said to his readers:
“Come, let me show you the clean stream of life; the newsboy with the trained dog, the new painting at the Metropolitan Museum, an Arabian restaurant on the East Side, the new Governor at Albany, the latest theory of planetary control, one book by Old Sleuth and another by Henry James, a ghost in a Berkshire tavern and an authentic recipe for strawberry shortcake, a clown who reads Molière and a king who plays pinochle, a digest of ten volumes of history and the shortest complete poem (“This bliz knocks biz”) ever written, a dark tragedy in the Jersey pines and a plan for a new subway, a talk with the Grand Lama and a home-run by Roger Connor, a panic in Wall Street and a poor little girl who finds a quarter.”
In the long run—and it did not have to be very long—the more attractive offering was permanently chosen by newspaper-readers.
The curious effect on American journalism of the conflict between Sun methods and the so-called new journalism was referred to, in an address delivered at Yale University on January 12, 1903, by Frank A. Munsey, then owner of the New York Daily News and now proprietor of the Sun:
The newspaperman of to-day is a composite type, the product of the Sun and the New York World of fifteen or eighteen years ago. These two newspapers represented two distinct and widely different styles of journalism. The World was alert, daring, aggressive, and sensational. It was about the liveliest thing that ever swung into New York from the West.... No man has ever stamped himself more thoroughly upon his generation than has Joseph Pulitzer on the journalism of America. He was the originator and the founder of our present type of overgrown newspaper, with its illustrations and its merits and its defects.