Yellow Journalism: The Architecture of Modern Manipulation

About this episode

The episode explores the origins and impact of yellow journalism, particularly focusing on the rivalry between Hearst and Pulitzer leading up to the Spanish-American War.

They'll tell you Hearst was a newspaperman — a rich boy who sold headlines. That's the myth. And the myth is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is keep you from looking any closer. Because the truth is faster than that. And darker. And a lot more precise. In 1898, two men in New York — William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer — were fighting a circulation war that had crossed the line from exaggeration into fabrication. They invented atrocities. They bribed sources. They ran illustrations of events that never happened. They funded their own publicity stunts and then covered them as news. And when the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 266 American sailors, they had the story they had been waiting for. Within weeks, they had pushed a reluctant president and a divided Congress into a war that turned the United States into an imperial power for the first time in its history. This isn't conspiracy. It isn't ideology. It's architecture — and the architecture they built in 1898 is still operating right now. In this video: → Joseph Pulitzer arrives in America at 17 with no money, no English, and no connections — and ends up owning the tallest…

People in this episode

Host: Jeremy Ryan Slate

Topics covered

• yellow journalism
• media manipulation
• historical events
• American journalism
• war propaganda

Keywords

• yellow journalism
• William Randolph Hearst
• Joseph Pulitzer
• USS Maine
• media manipulation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: New York

Places: Havana harbor

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