Curley: They call it yellow journalism, but it’s always been about the greenbacks

Yellow journalism is not really yellow when you look, when you peel back, it’s actually green.

William Randolph Hearst loved Cuba more than he loved the facts. Mr. Hearst had all sorts of BS stories about how horrible Spain was, blaming them for a number of things they didn’t do, hoping to drive public opinion, to push the U.S. into war against Spain. Most people don’t even remember this particular war, but before any Americans lost their lives — 400 died in battle, and about 2,300 died from diseases — Mr. Hearst was selling about 100,000 to 200,000 papers a day.

War breaks out, amazing, April 25, 1898. And you know what happens? Well, Hearst’s yellow journalism turns into some big green because now he’s selling 400,000 papers a day. That’s good for him.

The hell with the 400 that died and the 2,300 that died of disease that didn’t matter to Hearst because the media loves war. They love taking sides.

Hearst allegedly told his illustrator, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

The power of photos to sway public opinion

Photos and pictures are so important to sway public opinion.

Stalin was often shown as walking alone, even though he had a number of people beside him. But often they had to Photoshop those guys out because they were executed by Stalin, so it’s best not to have them in there to remind the widow of what happened. Also, it made Stalin look extremely strong and independent on his own, just walking along with nobody anywhere near him. They often tried to keep all the bodyguard shots out of there as well, because they didn’t want anybody to think “Somebody wants to kill Stalin? No way. No How.”

The media did the exact same thing with Nixon. They needed to show Nixon as evil, mean, and tired. So any kind of photo they could get of him would be dark and distorted to make him look like he was really suffering under the weight of all of his bad decisions. They made sure that the angles of the photo were taken in such a way that Nixon looked evil, mean, and tired. Compare that to the photos they took of JFK, and you can see a striking difference.

So you provide the image, and I’ll provide the news. That’s basically the way it works.

Think about when Al Gore was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Al Gore appeared a little engorged. Later on, when Rolling Stone was asked about it, they said, “Yes, we did highlight some parts of the photo.”

That’s all they said, nothing else.

Altered photo of Alex Pretti

Photos sell papers; they sell clicks. It sells everything on social. This is the weirdest one that you could find recently. I think it just happened a couple of days ago; MSNBC, now called MS NOW, got caught. They changed the photo of the man who was shot and killed there in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti.

They changed his nose, his mouth, his teeth, and his skin color. They made him appear to be larger as well and a bit stronger. Why? To make him more attractive? To make him more sympathetic? Who knows? Who cares?

The important thing is that yellow journalism is all about the greenbacks, so the only way to demand that news give us the facts is to give the news the finger — not the middle finger — but the index finger. That would be the one that would click on something, that would ring the cash register for them, but distort the news for all the rest of us.

Listen to John Curley weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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