#335 Pulitzer vs Hearst: The Rise of Yellow Journalism

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Places & Travel, History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 1890s, powerful New York publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst engaged in an all-out battle for readers of their respective newspapers, developing a flamboyant, sensational style of coverage today referred to as "yellow journalism". This battle between the New York World and the New York Journal would determine the direction of the American media landscape and today we still feel its aftermath -- from melodramatic headlines to the birth of eyewitness reporting and so-called "fake news". The two men come from very different backgrounds. Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant who started his publishing empire in St. Louis, used the World to highlight injustices upon the working class and to promote worthy civic projects (like the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty). Hearst, himself the wealthy publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, entered the New York publishing world, specifically aimed at competing with Pulitzer. In many ways, he "out-Pulitzered" Pulitzer, creating extraordinary daily publications which appealed to all types of New Yorkers. (Even children!) In Part One of this two-part series, we introduce you to the two publishers and meet them on a battlefield of newsprint and full-page headlines -- located on just a couple short blocks south of the Brooklyn Bridge. boweryboyshistory.com Support the Bowery Boys Podcast on Patreon, the patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators for just a small contribution. Visit patreon.com/boweryboys for more information. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Bowry Boys episode 334, Pulitzer vs. Hirst, and the rise of Yellow Journalism.
0:08.0	Hey, it's the Bowry Boys!
0:10.0	Hey!
0:11.0	Support for the Bowry Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:14.0	Join us for as little as $1 a month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowry Boys.
0:23.0	Hi there, welcome to the Bowry Boys. This is Greg Young.
0:26.0	And this is Tom Myers.
0:28.0	And today we are diving into a stack of old newsprint, old, yellowing, yellowed newsprint.
0:36.0	To tell a story that has some relevance to us today, a story of two of the most famous names in New York newspaper history.
0:46.0	Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.
0:50.0	Neither of these men got their starts in New York City, but they would both move here and run extremely successful.
0:57.0	And extremely colorful newspapers that would bring about a new era of sensational reporting.
1:05.0	They would wage war with each other in an all-out battle to be the most red paper in the city.
1:13.0	Now this new form of reporting, this sensational style of reporting, would be called yellow journalism.
1:21.0	And it often focused on scandal and on outrage.
1:26.0	But these men also claimed that it could be a tool to make the city and the nation better.
1:32.0	They believed that they could use their papers to expose corruption and hypocrisy.
1:38.0	So Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal made newspapers and the news in general more popular and more accessible.
1:50.0	They would gain masses of new readers by focusing on stories that really had more of an everyday appeal.
1:58.0	And to attract new readers, they would look to an audience that had largely been ignored by the mainstream press.
2:04.0	That steady stream of new arrivals to the city, immigrants from around the world.
2:10.0	Of course you know the names of these two men, right? They have names that live on today.
	...

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