In 1879, American newspaper editor Whitelaw Reid wrote “There is an old question as to whether a newspaper controls public opinion or public opinion controls the newspaper.”^[1] At the turn of the century, America was beginning to grapple with this question in a new way due to a wide variety of issues ranging from the effects of Reconstruction, industrial expansion, territorial growth, and foreign policy conflicts. All of these changes influenced public opinion, a volatile range of sentiment that was modulated by the nation’s media.

Media in the Early 1900s

In 1900, print was the primary form of media in the U.S., as radio and television had not yet made their debut. Newspapers were originally developed as part of political party organizations and there was no concept of “non-partisan” journalism. Papers existed almost solely to push a political agenda, not to report the news as it happened or give unbiased opinions. Paid advertising was also almost non-existent, as loyal party members supported the papers through their subscriptions. Around 1900, however, several big-time newspaper publishers realized that they could make more money by creating a facade of “non-partisan” reporting, which would expand their reader base, and then running paid advertisements.

Muckraking

The effect of this change was that papers shifted from being branches of political parties to being consumer-based, which required them to be far more inoffensive so that they could appeal to wider audiences, particularly in large cities. Papers turned to new techniques to sell copies and one of the most popular was called muckraking. The first “investigative journalists” would take aim at large institutions, political bodies, or powerful individuals whom they felt were corrupt and would try to expose them to the public. They focused on bringing injustices to light, particularly those suffered by the urban working class and poor at the hands of corporations or politicians. The purpose of muckraking was to sell newspapers by giving the general population a common enemy. The working class far outnumbered the middle or upper classes, and since the latter held all of the power in the U.S., the media hoped to appeal to the masses by exposing the secrets of those in power.

In the decade or so before World War I, the media again shifted to more sensationalized reporting that used exaggerations, half-truths, scandal-mongering, and other shady tactics to sell papers. This type of reporting became known as yellow journalism, so named because the two most popular New York papers, known for their sensationalist reporting, both published a comic strip called “The Yellow Kid”, and were sometimes referred to as “the Yellow Kid papers.” The cartoon shown here is of William Randolph Hearst, one of the most notorious yellow journalism publishers, dressed as a jester while he tosses yellow-colored papers to the crowd.

Figure 1. The papers contain headlines like Appeals to Passion, Venom, Sensationalism, Attacks on Honest Officials, Strife, Distorted News, Personal Grievance, and Misrepresentation, which were all common Yellow Journalism tactics. The men seen pouring money into the printer are labeled: Man who buys the comic supplement for the kids, Businessman, Gullible Reformer, Advertiser, and Decent Citizen.

The note at the bottom left in the political cartoon is an excerpt from a letter published by New York Mayor William Gaynor and reads: “The time is at hand when these journalistic scoundrels have got to stop or get out, and I am ready now to do my share to that end. They are absolutely without souls. If decent people would refuse to look at such newspapers the whole thing would right itself at once.” Do you think that Mayor Gaynor was correct in his statement? Think about the relationship between the three pieces of this cartoon (Mr. Hearst, the public, and the men feeding the machine), and then answer the question below.

Freedom of the Press

The American media has had to grapple with the complexities of the First Amendment for more than two centuries. The “Freedom of the Press” is guaranteed to all Americans, no matter their political affiliation. However, the effect of this is that American media outlets are free to publish almost anything without repercussion.^[2]

In the 1920s, while the nation tried to come to terms with the social and economic changes brought on by the First World War, newspaper and magazine journalism was an important source of information for Americans on all parts of the political and socio-economic spectrum. However, as the nation became more divided over issues like organized labor, race, and Prohibition, more and more media outlets began to spring up in order to serve specific subsets of the population. Black Americans, women, immigrants, Native Americans, and labor organizers created their own newspapers to keep members of their community informed. Instead of newspapers controlled by political parties, the U.S. now had papers controlled by cultural, religious, racial, and other minority demographics.

The divisions between these groups sometimes resulted in reporting that was sensationalized in order to appeal to the paper’s specific audience or to elicit an emotional response directed at another group. In this Historical Hack, you will read excerpts from post-war newspapers and learn how to recognize bias and sensationalist reporting, which is still a hot-button issue in the media today.

Understanding Point of View

When we read primary sources, we want to interpret them carefully, and within the context of their times. One method for doing this is by using the H.A.P.P.Y Analysis:

When we think about yellow journalism, the audience, purpose, and the point of view of the authors all play an important role in influencing how the media was created. When looking at a newspaper article, think about the publisher and their target audience. Even modern newspapers can report about the same event with a slant, depending on if they are left-leaning or right-leaning. Understanding this and the author’s point of view will also make you aware of any potential bias found within the article.

Figure 2. This news media bias chart shows modern media sources and how these fall on the political spectrum, with right-leaning media organizations holding more conservative views about societal topics, and left-leaning media organizations holding more liberal views about societal topics. You can view their latest version of the bias chart on the Ad Fontes media website.

The point of view, or perspective, describes the vantage point from which someone sees an event. Everyone has their own unique perspective. For example, if the same people witnessed a speech given by W.E.B. DuBois, they will each have a different recollection of the speech based on their own point of view. How they describe and report on that speech could be influenced by their many factors—including their nationality, race, profession, political beliefs, cultural background, gender, sex, religious beliefs, educational background, or more.

Identifying Bias

Once you know that an author has a certain perspective, it is safe to assume that they show some sort of bias. Generally speaking, bias is an inclination, leaning, tendency, predisposition, or prejudice towards something. Every author is biased in some way, whether they know it or not, even if they are trying to remain non-partisan.

Sometimes the bias is obvious and intentional, other times, bias is subtle or less significant (in which case, we would say that the document is “balanced” or “unbiased”). Information presented with a bias does not mean that the information in and of itself is incorrect, but we should be aware of how the information may be presented in a way that aligns with certain values or how it could be interpreted to mean something else. In historical evaluation, we typically consider a document or source to be biased if it “intentionally uses language that presents a one-sided and often unfair description of an event or person.”^[3]

The most important thing to understand when talking about author bias is this: bias is not necessarily malicious or bad, because sometimes it simply stems from ignorance or inexperience of the author. If an author is writing from a biased perspective, you must ask yourself where that bias comes from: is it because the author did not know any better? Or is it because they wrote intentionally biased material in order to accomplish a certain goal?

This is especially true when you are reading primary historical sources. People from the past held opinions that we now know to be based in ignorance, factually incorrect, or simply ill-intentioned. In the internet age, it is much easier for a journalist or author to do thorough research on their sources and material before writing, and there is more awareness of the responsibility that the media has to do their due diligence. In the past, this was not the case. Keep in mind the time period and historical context in which authors were writing, as it can help you identify certain biases very quickly.

Hack Activity #1

To see how media bias is not just relevant in today’s world, consider a news article published in 1919:

The text is as follows:

“The Lusk committee operatives have what they say is conclusive evidence that the radical Socialists and Bolsheviks have been engaged for some time past in the dissemination of radical propaganda among the negroes. The committee has the name of a prominent white woman who has given large contributions to carry on this work. Her name will be made public at a hearing of the committee next week when this phase of the Red propaganda will be taken up.

The reports of the investigators of the committee say the propaganda amount the negroes was launched on a large scale last February when “Th Messenger” (a radical negro publication) announced a meeting for the formation of the National Association for Promotion of Labor Unionism Among Negroes. The committee that directed this project included [list of names]…”

 

Decide which newspaper it was likely published in based on the descriptions of the papers in the chart below.

The New-York Tribune	The Chicago Defender
Founded by Horace Greeley, progressive reformer In 1919, the Tribune was run by Whitelaw Reid, who emphasized the importance of partisan newspapers in influencing public opinion In 1919, the Tribune served a mostly white, progressive, urban audience and stayed away from Yellow Journalism & muckraking tactics	Founded by Robert S. Abbott, a prominent Black lawyer & publisher In 1919, Abbott mostly published articles about civil rights and Jim Crow, and encouraged Black families to move north to escape oppression in southern states In 1919, almost ⅔ of The Defender’s readers lived outside Chicago

To put this into some historical context, imagine that you are an American reporter in 1917 and are assigned to write an article about the experiences of working-class Black women living in the Jim Crow South. How would you proceed with your research (assuming that you yourself were not Black, nor a woman, nor living in the South)?

All of these might help get you some information to write your article, but options B and C are less than ideal because they do not contain the perspective of the actual people you are writing about. Now, there could be a number of reasons that a reporter would not be able to interview a working-class Black woman from the South. Maybe there were none who were willing to be interviewed or maybe the reporter felt that a Black woman’s actual experience would not sell as many papers as a White woman’s story about the Black women that work for her. If the reporter went ahead and wrote the article based on the interview with the White woman, but called the article “Working-Class Black Women in the Jim Crow South,” a reader might get the wrong kind of idea about what Black women’s experiences working and living under Jim Crow laws was. This idea would depend heavily on what type of bias or perspective the White woman being interviewed had toward her Black employees