Terry Kirby (11:41)
I mean, what had happened in America was the first kind of newsletter. News sheets had come from basically from European immigrants. But there was a different model in America of newspapers. Whereas newspapers were sold on the streets in London and other cities in America, they were always connected to commerce and they were all tended to be available in the kind of 19th century by subscription. So the idea of kind of news vendors on the streets was just not known. But it became gradually more acceptable. And you've got the rise of these entrepreneurs. And particularly before you got Pulitzer and Hearst, you had a guy called John Gordon Bennett, who was a Scottish immigrant. And I use the quote from, from Bennett in my book, which, you know, to my mind espoused what journalism can be. And he said, I want to make the Herald, that was the newspaper that he set up, the great organ of social life, the prime element of civilization, the channel through which native talent, native genius and native power may bubble up daily. I shall mix together commerce and business, pure religion and morals, literature and poetry, the drama and dramatic purity, till the Herald shall outstrip everything in the conception of man. She's very high minded and very, very strong vision of what a great newspaper could be to encompass all of those things. But going back to politics, Pulitz again was another immigrant from Central Europe, from Hungary, Jewish immigrant, made his fortune in America in provincial newspapers. There was this sort of growth of the population in the Midwest and in the western newspapers serving those communities. And Pulitzer eventually bought a kind of framing paper called the New York Herald. And Pulitzer again had this vision of great journalism. But he also wanted to get to the heart of things. A bit like John Gordon Bennett, but he wanted to really investigate stuff. And he heralded what were known as the muckrakers. And at this point, New York was this teeming mass of immigrants and corruption and politics and politicians. It became this great metropolis of seething humanity. And Pulitzer was there to document it. And there was always this sort of dichotomy. There was always this sort of belief that his journalists would push things a bit. But he always had this, you know, he had a banner up on the wall of his newsroom which said, accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. Who, what, where, when, why and how, the facts, the color, the facts. So, you know, that was his mantra. And he had that up on newsroom. And you know, that's what I. The who, what, where, when, why now is what I teach to my journalism students now. You know, it's still as true now as it was then. Pulitzer, you know, became a bit eccentric at the end, but he had this great vision for newspapers. But then what happened was that in these early years, one of the people that he'd employed was a guy called William Randolph Hearst, who was a dropout from university. He came from a wealthy west coast family, completely different type of person, very establishment, very wealthy. His family owned, had owned newspapers in California purely for the purposes of political promotion from his father who wanted to be a local politician. Hearst inherited the family company, began to build it up, eventually rocked up in New York, bought his own newspaper in the Morning Journal. He set this up as a great rival to Pulitzer, who was the sort of established king of New York popular journalism. And this was when we got what was called the yellow journalism wars. And yellow journalism is still a popular term used to describe what we would call in the UK tabloid journalism. And the yellow journalism label came rather obscurely from a cartoon strip that Pulitzer had been running which featured sort of poverty stricken kids from the, the Bowery slums, one of whom wore a yellow shirt, a kind of overshirt. And this is very, very popular comic strip. Hearst nicked the cartoonist for his newspaper, the Morning Journal. Pulitzer then employed another cartoon is to produce a copycat strip. So that's where the phrase yellow journalism came from. And in the kind of 1890s, early 1890s, you had this period of intense competition between the two of them and there was generally accepted, there was, you know, boundaries got broken all the while. But what kind of brought this to an end was an aggressive campaign between both newspapers for a war between America and Spain. Now it's a fairly niche part of military history, but There was an eight month war between America and Spain in 1898 over Cuba, who owned bits of Cuba and so forth. And no one really wanted a war. But it was stoked up by Pulitzer and Hearst to create this kind of conflict. And America eventually felt, oh well, we'll better go and have a war. People seem to be demanding it. And it was all seen as a bit of a failure really. And they kind of shrank back from the sensationalism after that. Pulitzer founded the Columbia School of Journalism and the Pulitzer Prize. Hearst went on to become this massive magnate, newspapers throughout America, radio stations, and he became the model for Autumn Wells, Citizen Kane and Indeed, when Citizen Kane came out, Hearst used all his powers and all his newspapers to deny it publicity. He critiqued it. And that was why Citizen Kane never got a nod in the Oscar awards, because Hearst didn't like it for fairly obvious reasons. So Pulitzer then rediscovers his kind of moral compass, as it were, and is looking ahead. He sees that over in London, this boy genius, as it were, Alfred Harmsworth, has made a fortune out of newspapers, founded the Daily Mail, which does extraordinarily well, and then in 1900, in December, invites Harmsworth over to edit the New York Herald. And that's where we get the word tabloid from. So that's where we are. And then that heralds in the 20th century, which is the century of the tabloids.
