“Yellow journalism” is an evocative sneer that has morphed over the decades.
Hearst's New York Evening Journal, April 1898
The term these days is sometimes invoked as an off-hand description for sensational treatment of the news. Or, more broadly, it's used to describe egregious journalistic misconduct of almost any kind.
Or, as AlterNet blog noted in a post yesterday, “sometimes, yellow journalism is seen as synonymous with [William Randolph] Hearst, himself.”
But that's really an imprecise characterization of a robust genre practiced by Hearst and others in the late 19th century.
As I wrote in my 2001 book, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies, yellow journalism was defined by these features and characteristics:
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