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Yellow Journalism
T in that school of journalism
which is supposed to have been largely instrumental in provoking
the murder of President McKinley indulged, not long before the assassination,
in a strain of prophecy:
“It may be near, it may be far,
but in a not remote Winter the American peasant will walk by
a window of the White House . . . . . . A white, fat hand
will toss its answer out the window:
“‘A Trust can do no wrong,’
“Then . . . . . . there will be
an awful, bloody quarrel between the Commander-in-Chief and
the peasant.”
Well, the quarrel over which this
yellow journalist so long watered his mouth at last took place.
The “peasant,” under pretense of grasping the “white, fat hand”
in friendship, shot down the Commander-in-Chief. It wasn’t, of course,
as much of a quarrel as the yellow journalist was plainly ambitious
to incite, but it was the nearest thing to it that could occur in
this country. Not ten thousand yellow journals of the capacity for
mischief which this one has displayed could precipitate anything
more. In a republic so admirably governed as this the revolution
which they ever boastingly anticipate is impossible. The most they
can do, try as they will, is to bring about, at long intervals,
the murder of a President.
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As to the effectual remedy for this
evil we shall in all probability discover it to be nothing more—nor
less—than improvement of the public taste. Anarchy can not be suppressed
any more than the school-boy’s belief that arithmetic is all a mistake;
nor can yellow journalism be legally repressed without violating
the rights of the other kind. Occasionally a school-boy will smash
his slate in the belief that he will thus be rid of his problem;
and occasionally the yellow newspaper becomes impossible; but in
both cases existing statutes will be found adequate. It is certain
that any abridgment of the right of free speech would do more harm
than good. Until the public taste in journalism is corrected additional
laws would be useless. When it is corrected they will be needless.
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While the reform can not come in
a day, this latest manifestation of the evils of yellow journalism
should do much to forward it. A too-tolerant public encouraged such
vilification of the late President as undoubtedly instigated his
murder. Nor should his death have been necessary to prove the wickedness
of that abuse which decent but unthinking citizens daily paid for.
The purveyors of yellow journalism do business to make money. They
found it profitable to rank the President of the United States a
little lower than any scoundrel heretofore discovered. The public
paid for it. The public was responsible when the chief offender
described him as “an abject, weak, futile, incompetent poltroon,”
and declared him to be “the most despised and hated creature in
the hemisphere. His name is hooted, his figure burned in effigy.”
The public was the real offender when it paid to read of a man with
McKinley’s war-record that “He plays the coward and shivers white-faced
at the foot-fall of approaching war,” and that “He makes an international
cur of his country.” It was by the public’s permission that their
President was daily accused of being in the pay of the Trusts, of
planning a mammoth issue of bonds to be negotiated in Wall Street
for the profit of himself and “his Wall Street Cabinet.” It was
this defective public taste that made it safe to describe him as
“a tyrant reddening his hands in the blood of the poor.” When the
public ceases to pay for the commission of these offences they will
no more be committed.
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And if the average man is not fastidious
enough to shun such papers on their merits, let him henceforth shun
them as a matter of duty,—so long as he does not consider the killing
of Presidents to be praiseworthy. And to make clearer the case against
them let him, above all, note how basely this school of journalism
panders to him. Let him contrast the tone of the chief yellow before
and after the crime. Had there been one shred of honest conviction
in its abuse of the President it would have had to attest its sincerity
after his death. Instead of this it has printed eulogies of the
man and President as offensively maudlin as its former abuse was
indecent. This pitiful exposure of a spirit so craven, whining out
the last vulgarities of cowardice, ought of itself to reconcile
the average reader to forswearing it henceforth.
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While we have chosen to cite examples
from one newspaper, it must not be inferred that there are not others
almost equally vicious. Some of these are pretentiously respectable
and would express horror at any classification that ranked them
with the yellows; and yet they have been as unjust and quite as
forgetful of the decencies in their criticism of a man whom history
will write down as notable for his integrity and his wisdom. These
journals as well as the frankly yellow ones have yet to learn, among
other amenities of criticism, that a President of the United States
has been chosen by the whole people, and that a certain degree of
respect must invariably be shown him in order to show a proper respect
for the people themselves. Until they do learn this they should
receive the treatment that ladies and gentlemen accord to creatures
who can not in their conversation refrain from oaths and obscenity.
They will not learn their lesson until their patrons have first
learned and applied it.
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