Joseph Pulitzer Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Janet E. Steele

Critical Essay by Janet E. Steele

SOURCE: "The 19th-century World Versus the Sun: Promoting Consumption (Rather than the Working Man)," in Journalism Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 3, Autumn, 1990, pp. 592-600.

In the following essay, Steele argues that the victory of Pulitzer's World over its competitor the New York Sun in the late nineteenth century "signified the erosion of traditional American values such as hard work, thrift, and self-sacrifice, and the emergence of a value system that increasingly celebrated consumption, leisure, and self-indulgence."

One of the most familiar dramas of late nineteenth-century journalism is that of the epic battle for circulation between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The role of the yellow press in aggravating what Theodore Roosevelt called the "splendid little war" with Spain has been taught to generations of journalism students as an object lesson on the dangers of sensationalism and the need for editorial responsibility.

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