Lesson Idea: Yellow Journalism Activity

In the Progressive Era of the United States, as well as other advanced countries, journalists would often scrounge for stories in some of the most inane things. A boat sinking would become a systematized attack on the country (this actually led to the Spanish-American War), a small private occurrence became a national scandal, and almost everyone's lives were judged by the paper. This was called "yellow journalism", or sensationalism, and newspaper magnates like William Randolph Hearst would use it excessively to sell more papers; he once famously said to a news artist in Cuba during the S-A War, "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war." Today, you could successfully argue that news programs like Fox News and papers like the Daily Mail still force this yellow journalism into everyone's faces; take, for example, any story revolving around President Obama on Fox News as an example of this. In order for your students to see how yellow journalism shaped the way Americans looked at things in the early 1900s, this activity will help them make their very own sensational pieces out of small stories.

To begin, you'll need to either find or create outlines for news stories that simply aren't that newsworthy, or are newsworthy but can be incorrectly construed. This can range from fairly simple to fairly hard, so you may want to keep it to things like these:

• A man and his wife have separated after the former won the lottery.
• The state of Mississippi has placed the Ten Commandments on the wall of the Capitol.
• The President claims in a speech that gun rights "are too lenient".
• A boat has sunk off of the coast of North Korea.
• A dog has been elected mayor of a rural Oregon town.

In order for the students to correctly participate in this activity, they need to understand how yellow journalism worked. It wasn't based on fact at all; it was a tactic used by newspaper companies to sell more of their products to unwitting buyers. In the process, misinformation would often spread and actual problems could result, but due to the government not having say over what the press printed due to the 1st Amendment of the Constitution, they would continue to be spread. Even such things as a marriage or a birth were taken out of context and written to the effect that if you looked at only the sensational piece, it would be a scandal or worse. After giving them their news pieces, tell the students they must now create a headline which would not only completely take a story out of context, but could lead to some real-life issues if it ran in tomorrow's newspaper; they must be able to explain these issues to the class. Using the previous examples, we get:

• LOCAL PREACHER LEAVES WIFE FOR MONEY; MISTRESS TELLS ALL!
• MISSISSIPPI GOING AGAINST CONSTITUTION, ALLOWING RELIGION TO RULE!
• PRESIDENT PLANNING ON REPEALING 2ND AMENDMENT!
• NORTH KOREA HAS DECLARED WAR! HAS SUNK US BOAT; PRESIDENT FURIOUS!
• OREGON TOWN DECLINING INTO ANARCHY, ELECTS DOG AS MAYOR

As you can see, these headlines couldn't be more further from the truth. The first one could've been due to other causes, but the paper claims to have testimony from a "mistress", making nothing into a scandal. The second, third, and fourth examples are all taken completely out of context and paint the events in the light of the paper's opinion; this can and has led to many problems in foreign affairs/public affairs. The last one is an example of how the completely opposite side of a news story can be made from absolutely nothing. At the end of the day, the students should understand how this sensationalism is completely hurtful to society, and if they can connect these headlines to yellow publications like the National Enquirer and Globe magazines, then they fully understand how it all works.

Besides that, they got to learn about awful reporting in a way that's fun! As a funny little rule, don't censor whatever they write (as if you were the government), and see how many vulgar examples your students can come up with!

-Pharaoh Noh-Tyep