Content area
Full Text
Spencer, David R. The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America's Emergence as a World Power. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 272 pp. $24.95.
That William Randolph Hearst, in his yellow journalism days in New York, was a rank imitator of the methods of Joseph Pulitzer is a notion that refuses to the, recent scholarship notwithstanding. David Nasaw, for one, sought to dismantle this stereotype in The Chief, his outstanding biography of Hearst published in 2000. At the New York Journal, which Hearst acquired in 1895, Nasaw wrote, Hearst and his staff constantly improved on their product with provocative headlines, outstanding writing, and excellent layout.
Hearst hardly was waiting for Pulitzer's lead or guidance as the yellow press period unfolded in the mid- and late- 1890s. And yet, the notion that Hearst was a shameless imitator is revived in David Spencer's The Yellow journalism, the most recent book-length treatment of a fascinating and much-misunderstood period in American journalism.
Spencer, who teaches at the University of Western Ontario, writes engagingly and with characteristic wit. He seems truly fascinated by the American yellow press and its larger-than-life personalities. But his characterization of Hearst as a poseur who "copied Pulitzer's concepts shamelessly" is...