Yellow journalism is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Yellow news is deceptive, biased, unprofessional, unethical, and often pot marked with outright lies. Techniques include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism in order to drive up profits.
A noted example of yellow journalism was William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Though the Journal’s sensationalist stories of Cuban virtue and Spanish brutality, Hearst’s paper was a major influence in starting the Spanish-American war in 1898. After the war Hearst turned to a hate campaign against President McKinley. On April 10, 1901, an editorial in the Journal declared, “If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.” On September 6, 1901, as a result of Journal attacks, Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, shot and killed President McKinley at Buffalo, New York’s Pan-American Exposition. The incident would haunt Hearst for the rest of his life and all but destroying his presidential ambitions.
Yellow journalism lived on, especially in big city tabloids adapting flashy techniques of yellow journalism, most notably the New York Daily News, founded in 1919.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Today Fox attracts an audience using the same methods employed by Hearst one hundred years ago. Using scare headlines for minor news items (such as ACORN) and exaggerated commentaries by so-called expert (such as in health care), Fox has managed to increase its market share and advertising revenues at the expense of a well informed public and legitimate news.
In separate actions, with the same results, Brooklyn District Attorney and California Attorney General blew the whistle on Fox for bringing down a minor nonprofit organization that served poor people, registered voters, and advocated higher minimum wages. In a relentless campaign against the Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Fox used deception and out rights lies to greatly increasing its viewer ship and advertising profits while putting ACORN out of business. Fox Conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe in September 2009 released on Fox selectively edited videos from a hidden camera that purported to show ACORN employees advising them, a couple posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend, how to set a up a brothel with underage girls. They had made visits in 2009 to ACORN offices in Brooklyn; Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; California and elsewhere. The videos created a political and media firestorm when they were released on Fox, adding to problems the organization was facing over allegations of voter-registration fraud and embezzlement. In September, Congress blocked previously approved funds from going to ACORN based primarily on O'Keefe’s investigative reporting. On March 1, 2010 Brooklyn District Attorney's Office released findings that ACORN employees caught on video did not commit a crime. Then on April 1, 2010 California Attorney General Jerry Brown issued a report stating that employees of ACORN did not break state laws. Attorney General Brown wrote: "Things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality....Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor." The investigations revealed that the tapes were doctored and that O'Keefe arrived at the office in khakis, shirt and tie, not pimp clothes. In an edited tape an ACORN employee looks like she is helping Giles to start a prostitution business. But the unedited tape shows O’Keefe and Giles inquiring about financing for subsidized housing, not pimping. The initial introductions were cut, and during the conversation O'Keefe drops the word “prostitution” to make it appear as though the conversation is about prostitution, not financing. Fox News went on to play this false story with wall to wall coverage on Hannity, Beck, and Fox and Friends. People thought they were getting straight up coverage about a corrupt organization, but in fact it turned out to be a dishonest political stunt that bears no resemblance to journalism and no resemblance to the facts. Fox News did not tell its viewers that the tapes were heavily edited or that O’Keefe wasn’t dressed as a pimp at ACORN offices. Fox deceived viewers by having O’Keefe wear the pimp outfit on air. As a consequence ACORN was shut down on April 1, 2010. The motive behind Fox’s skullduggery was to kill an organization that registering poor black people who have been voting Democratic 90% of the time. Fox was hands down successful in their campaign to throw ACORN under the bus. Ironically ACORN had multiple problems and had become an ineffective organization. Ultimately there was no need for Fox to trump up accusations. Fox could have instead hammered ACORN on their actual dishonest dealings, but then that would not have been as profitable for Fox.
While Fox spent a great deal of air time in vilifying ACORN, a small non-profit agency that has taken a grand total of $53 million in tax payers’ money since 1994 (about $3.3 million a year) it is giving giant BP a pass by suggesting the Deep Water Horizon disaster was an unfortunate accident and primarily Obama’s fault. BP’s short cuts, intimidation of its employees if they reported safety violations, out of date emergency readiness plans, reporting false oil leak quantities, poorly maintained equipment, and lack of redundant shutoff equipment were glossed over in a relentless effort to blame Obama in every way possible for the disaster. Viewers never heard about BP’s negligent pattern that went back several years. They never heard about BP’s 2006 Alaskan Prudhoe Bay corroded pipe oil spill that cost the company $20 million in fines and a criminal citation; and they never heard about the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery fire and explosion where the company was found guilty for killing 15 workers and injuring 170. Why? Because BP is big business. Fox listeners have been told that poor BP, with its extremely deep pockets, could go bankrupt. On June 17, 2010 Rep Joe Barton (R- Texas) apologized to BP for Obama’s Chicago-style “shakedown” of the oil giant by forcing them to cough up $20 billion. Fox’s Stuart Varney quickly followed up with the false assertion that that Obama had moved to “seize a private company’s assets” and complained that the action was “Hugo Chavez-like.” Realizing this was a GOP gaffe and a gift to the Democrats, House Minority Leader John Boehner ordered him to recant and apologize, and he quickly did; but FOX didn't play the apology. So much for fair and balanced!
Everything uttered and done by President Obama is cast in an extremely negative way by Fox. So when Obama came out with his recent nuclear policy review statement that would limit the role of nuclear weapons and get rid of unprotected nuclear stockpiles, Fox annalists didn’t waste any time in demonizing Obama, accusing him of "undermining our national defense" with a "dangerous policy.” Fox’s Glenn Beck characterized his nuclear reduction policy statement by saying it was, "The most dangerous thing I think I've ever heard a president say." Fox’s Pamela Geller said, “Obama is removing nuclear defense at a time when Iran's devout mullah crazy is building their nuclear arsenal,” and Fox’s Sarah Palin said, “Only a leftist liberal would want to reduce nukes. It’s like a child in a playground who says 'punch me in the face, I'm not going to retaliate.'” But outside of the Fox bubble other Americans heard world wide praise for Obama’s position as leading to a safer planet. Legitimate news analysts compared Obama’s efforts closely with President Ronald Reagan who said, “we must go at the matter of realistically reducing… if not totally eliminating, nuclear weapons - the threat to the world. We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth." (Ronald Reagan in his Second Inaugural Address on January 21, 1985). Reagan’s efforts were during a time of cold war tension with the threat of Soviet thermo-nuclear annihilation which greatly overshadowed today’s Iran and North Korea concerns. There are some issues that both liberals and conservatives agree with and nuclear disarmament happens to be one of them. Even if the US cut its nuclear arsenal drastically there would still be enough left to blow up any hostile nation. By hitting Obama in the area of nuclear weapons reduction, a subject that Ronald Reagan championed, and then getting Fox listeners to go forth armed with that as a “talking point” demonstrates Fox’s strong influence over its listeners.
Today a naïve public using Fox as their sole source of information have taken on a similar attitude people did back in the 1890’s under Hearst’s relentless drum beating for an unnecessary war and attacks on the President. Similarly Fox’s manipulative techniques have created an angry audience that could spill over into violent action. Listeners absorb the hatred and intolerance of the commentators, fueling desires for vicious responses that could led to another Presidential assassination. Fox has more than a little to do with the fact that President Obama receives more than 30 death threats a day, an unprecedented number.
Fair and balanced? Hardly! Fox is nothing more than a 24/7 Republican mouth piece using its network to try and bring Obama and fellow Democrats down using the same type of vicious attacks Hearst used against President McKinley 100 years ago. Fox is quick to justify its actions under the pretense of correcting a Democratic bias in news reporting. But this is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head. Ironically Fox champions Christian conscious people.
Fox addicted listeners are convinced by Fox that it is the only true legitimate source of news. However, Fox has gone off the deep end so frequently that some prominent conservatives are now speaking up. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, a staunch conservative from Oklahoma urged his audience to "know what other people's thoughts are -- not just what I hear through a pipe channel."
Fox has a host of analysts who agitate their listeners. Take Glen Beck. On Mar 23, 2010 he suggested that the Obama administration was "coming after him" and may actually kill him. He has called Obama a Nazi, a Communist, a Socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim, and a non-US Citizen. Then there is Fox’s Sean Hannity who is actively fanning the flames of hostility by repeatedly proclaiming that a new revolutionary war is needed. On Dec 17, 2008 Media Matters awarded Hannity the “2008 Misinformer of the Year,” followed the next year by Beck who was awarded the “2009 Misinformer of the Year.”
More recently, Fox has gone against one particular religion. Some days after the 9/11 attack, President Bush visited an Islamic Center in Washington and stressed in a speech that Islam and terror could not be mentioned together because Islam is a religion of peace. But somehow Fox is again stoking racial fears about Islam. Fox calls the planned mosque near ground zero "a monument to the terrorists," a theme that is sure to sell lots of add space as it resonates with white Christian zealots.
What brings a democracy down is not the anarchists, not the socialists or the neo-Nazis; it’s the misinformed. The truth is out there, it’s up to people to get unfiltered facts so they can make up their own minds. Fox needs to start practicing what it preaches – “we report, you decide.”
See
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20001827-503544.html
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