Posted
10:26 AM
by Gene
Another history lesson that must inflict itself on our loudmouths:A century ago, yellow journalism ultimately burned itself out. But the tail end of that era is an object lesson that politicians and the media alike ought to be paying attention to now.
Both Hearst and Pulitzer made a sport of lambasting their political enemies, with Hearst’s New York Journal especially tormenting Republican President William McKinley. The paper ultimately even suggested—twice—that the president should be assassinated. As the paper put it in an unsigned April 1901 editorial: "If bad institutions and bad men must be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.” The president was murdered five months later.
Neither Hearst nor Pulitzer ever fully recovered.(Via
the usual Romy; and we haven't yet directly turned to TINA's site because it too has outbreaks of the yips)