WHY A "YELLOW
PRESS" COVERED RIGHTS ABUSES
Today it seems almost "noble."
But the now respectable international reporting on human rights abuses
began with the journalism of sensation -- amidst accusations of
fabrication and exaggeration.
With a certain "macho" twist.
In the mass circulation newspaper age of the
1890's, the foreign correspondent had emerged as a celebrity,
especially in the "yellow
journalism."
A "dashing" foreign correspondent could seize the public imagination in
an age when it was still widely believed that heroric individuals could
shape history.
If willing to risk disease, accident, or ambush, the enterprising
correspondent might report back on military massacres, persecution of
minorities, and other atrocities thought to violate the norms of the
civilized world.
The fast cable, the modern printing press, and the growth of literate
city populations meant dramatic or sensational foreign reporting could
boost newspaper sales, stir popular opinion, and influence governments.
Newspapers made "stars" of their of their most colorful
foreign correspondents as publishers prominently displaying their
pictures and accounts.
Like the soldier or tropical explorer, a correspondent was credited
with the courage to sacrifice his life if necessary for the benefit of
his civilizing mission. Noted a profile of James Creelman, the "father"
of human rights reporting, in London's Review of Reviews,
October 1, 1898:
"(The
foreign correspondent) .. must ever be at the post of danger, for that
is also the point of observation...For the sake of the public at home
they must take every precaution to preserve that human camera from
hurt, yet in order to fix their lens on the objects to be seen they
must continually expose it to imminent peril of destruction."
James Creelman without qualms considered himself a "yellow
journalist." He saw the yellow press as a positive, civilizing force
helping to shape public events. In his memoirs he noted on the period
before the war with Spain:
"It may be that a
desire to sell their newspapers influenced some of the yellow editors,
just as a desire to gain votes inspired some of the political orators.
But that was not the chief motive; for if ever any agency was thrilled
by the consciousness of its moral responsibility, it was yellow
journalism in the never-to-be-forgotten months before the outbreak of
hostilities..." (See Creelman, James, On the Great Highway,
Lothrop Publishing Company, Boston, 1901, Chapter
9, p.176.)
SENSATION SETS
THE STAGE FOR "TRUTH?"
This sensationalized tone set the stage for foreign
correspondents to spotlight the violent. A correspondent who succeeded
could became a "star" with a personal and much coveted personal byline,
and even prominent line drawings of his face, with headlines
proclaiming his courage and accomplishments.
The reporters who practiced yellow journalism might vary in their
accuracy and and motivations. The desire for stardom and promotion
might tempt a sloppy reporter to go with exaggerated rumors - or even
fabricate news. It could also push a capable, motivated reporter to
really dig, interview, and travel for a headline catching story. Under
extreme competition writers often chose drama and sensation to get
notice, a byline, a front page spot, or simply to keep a job.
The massive headlines written in the home office also could
be far more sensational than the actual reports. Indeed dispatches
could be edited and shaped in the home office to magnify the
sensational.
Magnifying these tendencies was the large number of
newspapers competing for readership at a time when papers had come into
their own as instruments of mass information. Competition among papers,
including a desire to reach out to a growing number of readers who were
not wealthy, meant an emphasis on entertainment, drama, and emotion.
For example in 1895 New York had eight morning and seven
evening general circulation dailies and at least twice as many weeklies
( Charles H. Brown, The Correspondents' War, p.11). Newspapers
highly dependent on newsboy or newsstand sales needed massive catching
headlines and an often black and white viewpoint to really catch a
buyer's eye.
CREELMAN SCOOPS:
AN OVERVIEW
In August of 1897 the journal Our Day
described James Creelman as "the most famous newspaper correspondent in
America."
The 49 year old Canadian-born journalist was basking in the afterglow
of major "scoops" for the "yellow press," in Europe, Asia, and Central
America, first for the Pulitzer and later the Hearst chains. (For a
brief biography by a distant cousin, John E. Creelman, click here.)
Creelman had won fame and international controversy by reporting the massacre
of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers at Port Arthur, China in
1894. Critics accused him of exaggeration, of lacking balance, but his
moral and journalistic stance found no need for neutrality.
In 1896 -- while still working for Pulitzer's The World
-- Creelman added coverage of domestic politics to his fame. He
trekked 20,000 miles through the United States to write more than 600
columns for The World -- analyzing and predicting the vote in
every state as it was to be cast in the presidential election. He spent
the last six weeks of the campaign with candidate William Jennings
Bryan, eating and sleeping in Bryan's private railroad car.
Creelman had gained national attention with vivid and
detailed articles reporting summary executions
of civilians by Spanish soldiers fighting Cuban
revolutionaries in the late 1890's. Creelman's writing on this subject,
first for Pulitzer and then for Hearst, helped stimulate the
anti-Spanish feeling which led to the Spanish-American war of 1898.
In Chapter
9 of his 1901 reminiscences On
The Great Highway Creelman reported Hearst's
memorable response to artist Frederic Remington, bored with his
assignment in Cuba:"You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."
While years later Hearst strongly denied he ever said such a thing, the
quote is still attributed to him and was paraphrased to great affect in
Orson Well's movie Citizen Kane.
CREELMAN:
NO PRETENSE TOWARD BALANCE
Creelman made no pretense toward objective, balanced reporting, to
avoid becoming "part of the story." The language was often
emotional, containing what today would be called "editorializing."
which included his own thoughts, emotions, or even actions. Willis
Abbott, once a journalist for Hearst and in the 1920's editor of The
Christian Science Monitor maintained that Creelman's egotism "often
impelled that very enterprising writer to put so much of himself into
an interview or a story that the real subject of the article was
utterly obscured. (Willis Abbott, Watching The World Go By, p.
208).
A good example of Creelman's editorializing, emotion stirring style is
this passage from his first brief dispatch in The World
reporting the massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers at Port Arthur, China in 1894.
"The defenseless and unarmed inhabitants were
butchered in their houses and their bodies unspeakably mutilated. There
was an unrestrained reign of murder which continued for three days. The
whole town was plundered with appalling atrocities. It was the first
stain upon Japanese civilization. The Japanese in this instance
relapsed into barbarism." (December 12, 1894, The World, p.1)
On several occasions Creelman abandoned the notion of the
journalist as observer to become an active part of the story.
When covering Cuba some three years after Port Arthur, he
personally appealed to the Spanish commander Valeriano Weyler y
Nicolau to investigate after filing a dispatch to The
World concluding Spanish troops were executing non-combatants
without trial.
Creelman,
like other journalists of the time, prided himself on activism,
becoming a "part of the story." In his memoirs he describes
how he personally helped lead an American charge against Spanish forces
at El
Caney
when he returned to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American war in 1898.
The Assault on El
Caney
But it was an earlier scoop which shook both Western and Asian
governments and catapulted Creelman into journalistic renown. Creelman
became a correspondent "hero" for reporting on three days of
massacre of more than 2000 Chinese civilians by Japanese
troops at the Manchurian city of Port Arthur in November 1894. His
reporting expressed Victorian era yellow journalism concepts of how
foreign correspondents might act as international "watchdogs" to
enforce standards of "civilized," Western-style, humane warfare.
(For Creelman's account of the massacre in his memoirs see On
the Great Highway, Lothrop Publishing Company, Boston,
1901, Chapter
5.)
Creelman's now forgotten "scoop" shook governments in Asia, America,
and Europe, helped establish American overseas journalism as a rival to
more established European media - and demonstrated the power of yellow
journalism as a force which could rally public opinion in such a way
that politicians and governments felt they had to respond.
Partly as a reaction to the massacre at Port Arthur, Japan
moved to improve its image overseas by carefully controlling its troops
during the 1900 intervention against China's Boxer rebellion and by
avoiding atrocities against Russian troops during the Russo-Japanese
War of 1904. The events Creelman reported foreshadowed Japanese
atrocities against Chinese and others during World War II.
A key player in New York "yellow journalism" was Joseph Pulitzer's The
World. In addition to reader-grabbing sensational features on
crime, accidents, fashion, executions, and lifestyles of both rich and
poor, it embarked on numerous campaigns against fraud and corruption,
picturing itself as a paper to both be read by "the people" and to
crusade for "the people." In October 1895, about the same time the
Cuban rebellion was picking up steam, William Randolph Hearst, bought
the New York Journal and set out to challenge Pulitzer's World.
Coverage of Cuba quickly became a competitive arena between the two.
For examinations of America on the eve of the empire it created after
the Spanish-American war, click here.
The two yellow papers went for large headlines and large
headlines on the front page, often on sensational accounts of crime,
but also on matters affecting civic welfare. They hoped to increase
their circulation by moving beyond a narrow, respectable, and abstract
focus on city and national politics. Prominently displayed articles
dealt murder of women in the streets, crimes of passion, domestic
violence, insanity, and suicides, as well as probes into corruption and
other matters affecting health and safety. Articles on misers dressing
up in women's clothes, detailed accounts of executions and graphic
drawings portraying the grisliest of crimes were designed to make the
papers anything but boring. Reporters such as Nelly Bly became media
stars by such daring stunts as climbing a flag ple or living in an
insane asylum by pretending to be mad. The acts of reporters themselves
became major news events, with line drawings of reporters and their
exploits prominently displayed in the papers.
CREELMAN: THE
RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME
James Creelman gained his short lived fame through
persistence, zeal, enterprise, and a tolerance for the most rugged
travel conditions. He was known for his strongly independent streak. He
could also be emotional, nervous and egotistical, sometimes smoking as
many as 30 cigars a day.
Creelman was sometimes accused of putting too much of
himself into a story (See Willis Abbott, Watching The World Go By,
p 208). According to one account, his later boss William Randolph
Hearst explained Creelman's appetite for any assignment this way "..He
thinks that the very fact of the job being given him means it's a task
of surprising importance, else it would not have been given to so great
a man as he...Creelman finds any assignment is dignified by being given
him. That's why he's so useful." (See Willis Abbott, Watching The
World Go By, p 208).
Creelman was the right person at the right time. By the
late 1890's, in the age of the mass circulation newspaper, the foreign
correspondent had emerged as a celebrity in his own right. Newspapers
boasted of their dashing foreign correspondents as they sought to boost
their circulations. Like the soldier a correspondent was credited with
the courage to sacrifice his life if necessary for the benefit of
others: in this case his newspaper and its readers.
The emphasis on being a sometimes heroic eyewitness seized
public imagination. It also reinforced the potential "watchdog"
function of the foreign correspondent who might be in a unique position
to report back accounts of military massacres, persecution of
minorities, and other atrocities thought to violate the norms of the
civilized world. The correspondent as "man on horseback" could flash
the spotlight of civilization on brutalities which seemed to violate
the spirit of the modern age.
The adventurous correspondent could startle foreign
offices, fuel public scandal or protest - and even change the course of
world events. The foreign correspondent took on a few of the traits of
the "man on horseback," in an age when history was still often believed
to be shaped by individuals. The heroic traits of boldness,
self-reliance, and perseverance were especially important at a time
when physical danger, disease and very little direct contact with the
home office were fact of life as an eyewitness to history charted
course by steamship, carriage, and horseback.
The August 1897 Our Day profile of James
Creelman (p.1) describes this mystique of the foreign correspondent in
a characteristically purple way, "The newspaper correspondent of today
is the modern counterpart of the mighty hunter of old...Strength of
brain, instead of body, has become the sine qua non of the
modern Nimrod...But the home of the correspondent is still where the
greatest and fiercest animals roam. His business it is to hover over
the snarling mobs, the prowling boodlers, the hissing, forked-fanged
trusts, the coyote bark of the jingoes, and the terrible battles of the
lions and bears whose ferocity is concealed by robes of purple."
CREELMAN: THIRTY
SEVEN YEARS OF JOURNALISM
James Creelman was born in Montreal, Canada Nov.
12, 1859, the the son of Matthew Creelman, a boiler inspector. Creelman
attended Montreal's Royal Arthur primary school prior to leaving home
for New York in 1872.
In New York, Creelman attracted the attention and patronage
of the prominent theologian DeWitt Talmage with whom he studied at the
Lay Theological College. Republican Party boss Roscoe Conking tutored
him in the law. Creelman's move into journalism began when the Reverend
William Muhlenburg counseled the young man and found him his first
employment in the print shop of the Episcopalian Church newspaper Church
and State.
During a later stint in the print shop of the Brooklyn
Eagle, editor Thomas Kinsella discouraged Creelman from becoming a
poet. Undaunted in his determination to become a writer, Creelman
joined James Gordon Bennett Jr.'s New York Herald as a reporter
in 1876.
Creelman's career took a step up in winter 1878 when
Captain Paul Boynton arrived in New York with his pneumatic life-saving
suit. The young reporter was assigned to test the device and, with
Captain Boynton, put on a suit to jump into the ice-filled bay and the
Battery and float down through the Narrows. After being rescued from
the waters, Creelman wrote an account of the adventure which created a
sensation. Among other assignments The Herald sent him to
investigate the death of General Custer. Creelman interviewed Sitting
Bull and the other Indian chiefs who took part in the massacre. He then
was sent to Kentucky to investigate the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
By 1887, Creelman was editing the Sunday Herald
while writing editorials for the daily Herald. In 1889, James
Gordon Bennett Jr. ordered Creelman to take charge of the floundering
London edition of the Herald. Failing to salvage the paper, he
took up duties with the Paris Herald during the following year.
While writing for the Paris Herald, Creelman
developed as an interview journalist with a preference for difficult
and allusive subjects. He secured interviews with, among others, Louis
Kossuth and Leo Tolstoy. He was the first English speaking non-Catholic
reporter to interview the Pope, Leo VIII. During this period, Creelman
also investigated the Mafia for his paper and the United States
Department of State.
In 1893, Creelman left the Herald and worked
briefly for Illustrated American and Cosmopolitan magazines,
attempting unsuccessfully to establish a London edition for the latter
publication.
Joseph Pulitzer's New York World hired
Creelman in 1894 by to cover hostilities between Japan and China.
Accompanying the Japanese Army, he reported on the aftermath of
hostilities at Pyongyang, the Yalu River naval engagement and
interviewed the King of Korea. At one point, Creelman disappeared and
was reported beheaded by the Chinese. However, it was Creelman's
coverage of the battle of Port Arthur and his claim of atrocities
committed by Japanese soldiers, with whom he initially sympathized,
that gained him substantial attention. Though his story was supported
by Pulitzer and subsequently verified by fellow journalist Julian Ralph
and others, Creelman's graphic account of widespread slaughter was
initially disbelieved and roundly denounced by many American
newspapers, includingThe Herald.
In 1896 Spanish authorities expelled him from Cuba after a
stay of less than a month when his dispatches to The World
spotlighted abuses in the system of concentration camps instituted by
General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau. In 1898 Creelman was back in Cuba
to cover the Spanish-American War, this time for William Randolph
Hearst's New York Journal. In the accepted patriotic
style of that day's journalism, he helped lead an American charge
against Spanish forces at El Caney - and while recovering from his
wounds was interviewed by his boss Hearst for a front page story in the
New York Journal.
After publishing his book of reminiscences On
The Great Highway in 1901 and a novel Eagle Blood
in 1902, Creelman returned to the employment of Joseph
Pulitzer where he remained until 1906 when he joined Pearson's
Magazine as Associate Editor. There he specialized in feature
interview/profiles on individuals as diverse as Edison, Roosevelt, Taft
and President Diaz of Mexico. The Diaz interview (which Creelman
subsequently turned into the 1912 book Diaz, Master of Mexico)
has been credited with contributing to events leading to the Mexican
Revolution.
PROCLAIMING AN
INDEPENDENT SPIRIT
In 1911 a close friend, New York Mayor William J.
Gaynor, appointed Creelman to the Presidency of the City's Civil
Service Commission. His eighteen month tenure in that position was
followed by brief stint on the City's School Board. True to character,
he resigned both positions, disillusioned by his lack of independence
and his inability to introduce needed reforms. When resigning on
December 30, 1912 from the Presidency of the Civil Service Commission,
Creelman left this poem by Sir Henry Wooton on his desk:
