An undesirable class of readers

From The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins.  Page 56.

An enlightening history as to how sordid and messy information creation and conveyance can be.  Yellow journalism is almost universally reviled by the establishment but it serves a market.  Just not a class of readers respected by the establishment.  And despite the illegal and immoral tactics on display though-out this book, journalists were not infrequently ahead of the police in chasing down leads and validating claims or overturning alibis.  

Reading this history in the midst of the Administration's efforts to police truth with a Disinformation Governance Board was striking.  

Other newspapers were looking endangered as well. The Times had briefly gone bust the previous year, and over at the stately Sun—the paper whose respectability the Times still only aspired to—an even more dire drama was now unfolding. It was being whispered that editor Charles A. Dana, after having helmed the Sun for more than fifty years, had stopped coming to his office in the previous week. Only imminent death could be keeping the old man from his desk in the middle of the year’s biggest crime story. New York newspapers without Dana were nearly unthinkable—indeed, Pulitzer himself had trained under the Sun’s publisher before turning on him.

The irony was not lost on the denizens of Newspaper Row. Pulitzer had made his fortune by attacking his old colleagues at the Sun as dinosaurs, and he then went after James Gordon Bennett’s equally celebrated New York Herald by undercutting its newsstand price. Now Hearst, trained in his college years at the World, was doing the exact same thing.

“When I came to New York,” one editor heard Pulitzer say with a sigh, “Mr. Bennett reduced the price of his paper and raised his advertising rates—all to my advantage. When Mr. Hearst came to New York I did the same. I wonder why, in view of my experience?”

The World’s unmatched circulation of more than 350,000—an audited figure it proudly advertised atop its front pages by proclaiming CIRCULATION BOOKS OPEN TO ALL—was now in danger of being overtaken by the Journal. And as the two pulled perilously close in record-setting circulations, the city’s other papers were getting shoved further aside. A future owned by yellow journalism was not one most reporters wished to contemplate. Some libraries had already barred the World and the Journal from their precincts, with one Brooklyn librarian sniffing that they attracted “an undesirable class of readers.” Rival papers were quick to agree, and laid into the salivating coverage of what the World had dubbed the Missing Head Mystery.

“The sensational journals of the city have now become scientific and publish anatomical charts and figures, solely in the interests of science, and to supply a want which the closing of the “dime museums in the Bowery creates,” mocked the New York Commercial Advertiser. A Times reporter bemoaned the sight of the yellow journals co-opting the case from a bumbling police force: “The freak journals, those startling and irrepressible caterers to the gross and savage side of human nature, are having a particularly fine time with their new murder mystery … and putting all the celebrated detectives of fact and fiction to shame.” Worse still, he admitted, they were good at it: “Yet it seems that in an enlightened age criminals might be brought to justice in a manner less demoralizing to the whole community.”

But it was another observation by the Times, one being quietly made all down Newspaper Row that day, that contained the real sting for Pulitzer’s men.

“The Journal, by the way,” they wrote, “is generally doing better nowadays. The pupil is taking the master’s place now.”

It was all too true. Ned and Gus and the rest of Pulitzer’s newsmen were barred from the very crime scene that they’d been the first to uncover. Locked out of Nack’s building while a joyous Hearst scampered about inside, infuriated World reporters marched off to the neighborhood pay phones to call the newsroom and complain. But when they picked up the earpieces, nothing happened.

Hearst’s men had cut the cords.