I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about social media as a source of news, and how we are currently experiencing parallels with yellow journalism. I think that if we can identify similarities with our current media environment, and the rise and management of yellow journalism during the Hearst/Pulitzer years, we may be in a better position to brainstorm meaningful solutions to the fake news challenges that we are seeing today. And there are indeed many parallels to be drawn, so I’ll begin with a few important ones, as I see them:

1. The business model of news: During the key years where we identify the rise of yellow journalism in the US, newspaper barons such as Hearst and Pulitzer were really driven by a desire to attract the attention of as many people as possible and grow their audiences, beating out the competition. We see the same thing in news coverage generally right now, and social media content in particular where each outlet is trying to outdo each other in a competition for the attention economy.
2. War and a time of crisis communication: Yellow journalism really took off during the Spanish American war. A thirst for dramatic news coverage drove audiences to major newspapers and fueled dramatic coverage. Similarly, we live in a hyperconnected world now in which crisis seems ever imminent. This is driving much of the exaggerated and dramatic content that we see shared on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
3. An opportunity for information domination: In the US at the time of the rise of yellow journalism, there were two major information players: WIlliam Randolf Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. These two had much to gain from judicious exaggeration and drama in their news coverage. That is to say, each was trying to a certain extent to outdo the other in order to attract the largest market share. We can look at major social media content providers the same way: Facebook, Twitter, Google, and to a lesser extent other sites, are all vying for their share of advertising dollars – thus they all aim to have the content that spreads the farthest, whether that content is accurate or not.

Of course, all of this, is antithetical to a both a functioning Habermasian public sphere, and also a functioning networked public sphere. The main thing required for public reason is access to accurate information, and right now, we are stymied by what Habermas would refer to as spectacle. So what can we learn from  journalism after the Spanish American war? One

of the factors that is widely acknowledged to have helped mitigate yellow journalism was the professionalization of the journalism field, and the resulting development of journalistic standards and practices. This, in tandem with a growing consumer search for news that was accurate and true, helped to manage yellow journalism, relegating it, for a time, to the fringes of newspaper check out counters. What does this look like in a digital context?

I wonder if there is a new important role for journalists, not as the original producers of online information, but as content curators and moderators to ensure veracity of information? Of course, this would have to be supported in some ways by a new business model – and this is where consumers need to play a role. Yellow journalism will always exist in whatever medium is most popular as long as there’s a way to make money from it. If people were to vote with their eyeballs, they could potentially begin to help change the situation. That said, there seems to be a tendency for people to form tribes of shared belief systems, in which they feel much more comfortable only consuming information that they already agree with. Digital communication technologies exacerbate this trend by facilitating a long tail of networked individualism. So there’s clearly still a digital literacy piece that needs to be part of this puzzle. I’ll address digital and information literacy in my next post – as there are some clear needs that currently remain unaddressed in how we teach people about technology. Society needs more than simply teaching children how to code.