Sensational, exaggerated, sometimes simply made up. The phrase for the worst of the press was born from a comic strip, a circulation war, and a publisher who allegedly bragged that he would furnish a war himself.
Yellow journalism is sensationalist reporting that prizes drama, scandal, and emotion over facts, using screaming headlines, lurid pictures, and even fabricated stories to sell papers. It is the original name for what we might now call clickbait or fake news.
The name comes from a comic, not from reporting. In 1890s New York, Joseph Pulitzer's World ran a hugely popular strip featuring a character called the Yellow Kid. When rival William Randolph Hearst lured the cartoonist away, the two papers' bidding war over the Yellow Kid gave their sensational style its color: yellow journalism.
It helped start a war. In the run-up to the Spanish-American War of 1898, Hearst's and Pulitzer's papers ran inflammatory, often exaggerated stories about Cuba, and after the battleship Maine exploded in Havana, blamed Spain with no evidence, whipping up public demand for war.
One legend captures the spirit. When the illustrator Frederic Remington cabled from Cuba that there was no war to cover, Hearst reportedly replied: you furnish the pictures, I will furnish the war. Whether or not he said it, the line became the motto of journalism that manufactures the news it reports.
