Yellow Journalism, What is it? Is it Still Here? And Who Do We Trust?

In an earlier post I pointed out that I am an “80's girl” so that tells you around what era I grew up in. I am sure that many readers may be older than I am and remember this era but I am just as sure that there will be younger readers who were not alive in that era. I point this era out because, at least in my opinion, it seemed or felt like the only real “sensational” journalism we saw were the tabloids that you saw at the registers at the grocery stores. They were considered to be the “trash” magazines. The National Enquirer was the big one. Most of their stories revolved around celebrities and their lives. Then there was The Sun, which at the time I did not realize was the name of a major newspaper in the UK, that showed the sensational stories like “half man/half woman found” (yes, I just made that title up). Magazines like People and Time were also located in that area but they were much more respectable than either of them are today. And while I obviously cannot tell you that the general newspapers wrote all of their stories based in facts, I will say they were more respectable in their reporting.

I wonder if this era of newspaper writing came about because of journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post. They are considered to be the ones that brought light to the Watergate Scandal of 1972. They dug deep and investigated what was going on and broke the story. It was important that their information was based on fact and was not released until the timing was right. This was not a local story that had to get printed immediately, so they had the opportunity to make sure they got it right. In my opinion this set a new standard, one that had not really been huge, although was getting a bit better, and is one that is often lost today.

But, lets go back..... way back. Lets go back to the 1890s, some eighty years before the Watergate Scandal. This is the era we have all seen on television where there is some young boy standing on a street corner waving a paper encouraging people to read the latest news and if it was new and “breaking” they let you know. The thing is, on the corner across the street may have been another young boy saying or doing the exact same thing, for a different newspaper company. On the surface the stories the young boy would be trying to sell was the same story but contents could be vastly different.

In the 1890s there were two major New York newspapers; The New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer and The New York Journal, owned by William Randolph Hearst. Unsurprisingly their number one goals were to make money. It seems their second goal was to beat the competitor. Whether their stories were local, national or world did not matter, their goal was to get the story published and published first. Read that sentence again. It was all about being published and published first. And, it was about sensationalism. The more interesting the story, the more newspapers that would be sold and the more newspapers sold meant more money and to an extension, job security. What these newspapers were short on were facts. They knew it and they did not care because again, the bottom line was sales and money. This is when the term “Yellow Journalism” was coined. If you look up the definition of yellow journalism you will find “sensationalized or biased stories that newspapers present as objective truth.”

In the same respect, reporters were more like what we call paparazzi today, only really a bit worse. Sure they chased down leads and witnesses but they were also trampling all over crime scenes and authorities let them, before, during and after they had arrived. Authorities would often allow the reporters to walk through the crime scene with them before they themselves had seen anything. It was not unusual for a reporter to find something that could have been very important to solving a crime that they may eventually give to the authorities but not before they photographed it and published a story about it. Today we would know that that evidence would not likely make it into a courtroom. Today we have rules about the chain of custody. In respectable and well run investigations of a crime scene today a reporter would not be allowed on the scene to trample through and a respectable reporter would call the authorities before touching something they knew could be important or at the very least call the authorities as soon as they realized what they had. In the days of yellow journalism tips were not given to the authorities. Tips would be related to reporters and they published them, oftentimes with not only not informing authorities, but also without even double checking the fact itself. This brand of reporting and “investigating” went on for decades. Newspapers were full of stories that were untrue and full of innuendos and maybe half truths if you were lucky.

These stories were then taken as fact and “ran with” to the general public. Now, people may not find that unusual considering the impact of social media in particular today. I guess I could argue that at least with social media you can cut and paste something to make sure that exactly what was said was actually said, true or not, and is better than the old game called telephone. Now, for those of you who may not remember that game or know what I am talking about let me explain. For those who do know... well then you know. Telephone was a game where someone whispered something into the ear of someone else. That person then whispered it to the next person and then the next person and so on until everyone had heard the saying. The last person would then say out loud what it was that was said to them and would see how close it was to the original saying. The idea was that the original saying would change along the way and be completely different at the end. Of course you do not have to whisper into someones ear to have this effect. So these stories from an era before more modern times where things are recorded and preserved were really just told to people and trickled down to really become even less ingrained in facts. For me as a blogger those are the most difficult crimes to research because it is hard to tell what was fact and what was fiction and what was twisted to get the sensationalism out for a reader, or even a conviction for a prosecutor.

Now, as I started this I talked about the 1980s and that is because I feel that that era until maybe at least the mid-2000s it was easy to know and distinguish what stories were true and what were not. You knew what was a responsible outlet and what was not. Now, I am not speaking of just written media, I am speaking of film media also. You trusted the local newscasters but you knew shows like Entertainment Tonight was probably not as respectable.

Then came the world of social media and “leaks” and hacking and a multitude of other things that began to gray the area of knowing what you could trust and what you could not. A great example of this would be the TMZ network. When they first came out they were nothing more than a video version of the National Enquirer. I do believe they had a show for a while that aired on actual television but I believe most of their information came from what we now consider podcasts or their own outlet of written release. You took everything they said with a grain of salt and you believed less than half of it. If TMZ said it, you ignored it until NBC or someone else with a good reputation said it was so. In the past decade or more that has changed and almost flipped. TMZ is now one of the more reputable news outlets and if they have yet to say it then it probably did not happen.

But today we have so much more than we ever did in the 1920s or even the 1980s. There is CNN, HLN, Fox News, independent filmmakers making documentaries on stories. Print newspaper is becoming obsolete but things like The New York Times, The Washington Post, still report news, and do print papers but live in the digital era. And in many ways we are back to the yellow journalism era. News companies want to be the first with “breaking news.” If they are doing a written story there is no “deadline to print” now, it is get the story, get it written and get it out as soon as possible. While again, there are some reputable companies out there the push to be the first out often causes less accuracy. And, then there is a lot of copy/paste going on.

Let me be clear in saying I am not talking about “Fake News” as we often hear the phrase, one in which you will not hear me say. For me that phrase was invented to convince, or gaslight if you will, people into not believing something that is true simply because you do not like the answer or the outcome. What I am talking about is stories that are not researched properly and released without fact checking or even having all the facts. I am going to give you a very current example of this that is probably the reason I decided to re-launch my blog. Before I go into it know that I was first angered when I read the story because I knew that what was being said was not likely accurate. Then I was mad that it was published by The New York Post. Today I woke up to not only check my own facts and knowledge about the story but I found that NBC has now recently picked up the story... much of it copy/paste and has also released it.

The story was about former CEO Elizabeth Holmes who is serving federal prison time. I am not going into her story because a) I do not really know it and to research it would take time and b) her conviction and charges were not relevant to the article. So the title of the article indicates and says that she has had “more than” two years taken off her sentence. First off, even though I am not proficient in math I can read and when it says she was given a sentence of eleven years and three months and with this “unexplained” time off she will serve nine years and six months I know that is not “more than two years” time. Secondly the article got the time of her “release” from the Bureau or Prisons (the BOP) website. They went on to say that the BOP had not responded to their calls and their questions as to why Elizabeth Holmes would have gotten time off her sentence.

Now, I am not a journalist and while as a blogger I take my “job” seriously and I try to be as accurate as possible but I also know that mistakes can be made. I make every effort to find the answer to something. I know that you cannot always find the answer to every question but I also know and knew when I read this, that the answer to this question was very, very simple. When someone is sentenced to serve federal time with the BOP they are required to serve 85% of their time. That 85% includes “good time” which amounts to 54 days a year. Yes, release times can change based on an inmates behavior or even programming they do, but when they got inside the website for the BOP calculates their time with the good time already figured in. The BOP deals in months. So in Holmes' case her sentence of eleven years and 3 months amounts to 132 months. The time the article stated she was “really” going to serve amounted to about 115 months. If you were to calculate 85% of 132 months that comes to 112.2 months, which is actually as you can see, a few months less than even the article is stating. Anyone who has ever dealt with someone in BOP system knows this is how it is. Obviously you do not have to know someone in the system, you could find someone who works for the system to get the answer. Again, the answer was and is very, very simple and easy to get! And yet this article was published to create the idea that this woman was being given special treatment and that for absolutely no reasonable reason was she given “more than” two years off her sentence to sensationalize the story. Now, had the journalist done their job they would have known the answer and hence it would not be a story because every single inmate who is give a term sentence (this does not include life sentences) are done this way. And, as I said, when I got up today that story had been shared by at least one other outlet. The story was released to cause outrage and indicate privileged. Of course it is a “young, pretty, white girl” in the story too because while I will not argue that white privilege is not a thing in this country I will argue that we have enough examples of it that we do not need to conjure up any more examples, especially untrue ones.

So what is the answer to all of this? I do not know that I can tell you that. What can tell you is that as a writer of this blog I try my very best to give the facts of the case. I will dig for an answer but I also cannot guarantee that is the absolute correct answer. If I find conflicting information, I will tell you; if I am confused on an issue, I will tell you; if I am ultimately found to be wrong, I will admit it and edit the blog to indicate that. All I can do is promise to do my best to give you the correct information. What one has to keep in mind however is that every story, whether it is written or recorded, is going to have some facts omitted and at least a bit of bias included. In some cases it is impossible to express every single thing from at least two sides of story. So when I sit down to write out my cases I have to decide what I think are the most important parts and that is where some of the bias comes in. The parts that I believe are most important may not be the same as someone else who knows the story. I will say that obviously the majority of cases, if not all, that I will tell I have absolutely no personal connection beyond possibly living in the same town. This means I do not have a “dog” in the fight so I feel as if I am able to tell the stories better from all sides. This does not mean that I do not get angered about some cases and or that I will not express that from time to time but I still try to stay with the story.

I do not do a lot of “unsolved” crimes. I like a story with a beginning, middle and an end. But, that is not to say that some “unsolved” crimes from a legal standpoint are really unsolved or that a case should not be heard. Currently there are several cases in the news that once they are done and settled I will willingly write about. One is the “infamous” Delphi case. You will learn that I once lived for several years in that county. You will hear how I know the terrain and the people from that area, even if they are different today. I had only been away from the area three years when the crime was committed but I had lived there thirteen. Currently there is someone awaiting trial in that case but I have reserved complete judgment (to the dismay of many) until the trial and more facts are presented. Another is the case of Lori Vallow-Daybell and her husband Chad Daybell. We have seen one trial with at least two more to come. Maybe one day I will get up and decide I want to talk about one of those cases before they have ended but you never know.