Another hallmark of both turn-of-the-century periods was radically new forms of mass media that led to a period of “fake news” at the century’s close. The phenomenon of media misinformation is not unique to these periods. “Fake news” has a long history; some trace it back to the mid-fourteenth century, others as far back as the ancient Romans.1 In fact, arguably the period in media history that is most distinct is the one in which objectivity became the norm—the mid-twentieth century. Nonetheless, the late nineteenth-century period of Yellow Journalism and the twenty-first-century era of “post-truth” signify something wholly different from the periods that preceded them. What was different was the scale of media reach and the immediacy of its impact. Therefore, the magnitude of the harm posed by misinformation in both time periods was critically different from anything hitherto experienced.
The 1890s saw the birth of the first era of modern journalism. The new technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution had made mass media possible for the first time in history. Improvements in print technology, such as fast cylinder presses, new typesetting machines, and cheap wood-pulp newsprint, revolutionized the production of newsprint. “Instead of 1,000 copies daily, the horizontal cylinder of the rotary Hoe press turned out 20,000 an hour.”2 Telegraphy also dramatically altered news coverage. The telegraph conducted information more rapidly giving rise to wire services that made syndication possible.3
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, overseas information traveled slowly. Correspondence between the United States and Britain could take up to two months. International news and even foreign intelligence were generally acquired through the foreign press, which printed government press releases verbatim. But once the telegraph linked cities across the world, people could get up to the moment reports from faraway places. Even news from Africa came within reach. In the early 1870s, people in the United States and Britain were transfixed by Henry Morton Stanley’s cabled dispatches of Dr. Livingston’s exploits across the continent.4 Immediate access to information from overseas meant that editors, no longer dependent upon government releases, could develop their own news corps stationed abroad. The foreign press service was consummated.
Across the Western world, domestic news industries were altered as well. Rail transportation in combination with innovations in printing technologies reduced distribution costs. In response, newspaper publishers slashed retail prices. Sales soared. In Canada, circulation of “the Toronto Telegram went from 5,000 in 1878 to almost 25,000 by 1889 and 94,000 by 1920.”5 A surge in publications also swept across Europe. In Britain, “it was calculated that the number of newspapers [in 1861] had virtually doubled from 562 to 1,102, although it was conceded that a substantial portion of these titles were very short-lived.”6 By 1896, Lloyd’s Weekly News of London reached a million readers. In France, national press circulation expanded more than eight times as the real cost of Parisian newspapers dropped over 50 percent.7
In the United States the media boom was also prodigious. News readership increased spectacularly, “from 3.5 million daily newspaper readers in l880 to 33 million in l920.”8 In fact, “So great was the demand by 1870 that no self-respecting city paper limited itself to one appearance a day.”9 Local news also proliferated. “Any place with more than five thousand people could support a daily, and many supported two or more: one for Democrats, the other for Republicans.”10 Lower distribution costs also unleashed “what one contemporary called ‘a mania of magazine-starting.’ ”11 Before 1850, “Few magazines circulated far from their places of publication; no general magazine reached a truly national audience.”12 By 1900, magazines were commonplace in homes throughout the United States. “The number of periodicals increased more than fourfold, from 700 in 1865 to 3,300 in 1885, in those two decades. By 1900 there were no fewer than fifty national magazines, some of them with circulations of more than 100,000.”13
The new mass media had two opposing effects. On the one hand, information was decentralized. Lower printing costs had made it feasible for papers to cultivate a consumer base focused on particular issues. The period saw a proliferation of media outlets. There were papers published by the Suffragettes promoting women’s voting rights, Labor Union Weeklies advocating for improved working conditions, and anarchist rags calling for the radical restructuring of society. In the United States, by 1870 there were over five thousand different newspapers and periodicals, one-tenth of which were published daily.14 A host of “ethnic presses” also grew in distribution, which combined social activism with social and cultural matters of concern to their specific populations. In New York, one could find multiple Jewish presses, in San Francisco Chinese-language newspapers took off, in Oklahoma it was the Native American newspapers, and African American papers circulated across several states.15 “By 1914, there would be 1,264 foreign-language newspapers, which garnered about a fifth of the total advertising dollars in the United States.”16
Ironically, however, the same technologies that paved the way for specialized media markets also allowed for the monopolization of news. Up until the early nineteenth century, newspapers were family-owned enterprises and readership was relatively small, restricted largely to the literate intelligentsia. But, by the end of the century, the efficiency of rail transportation had made it possible to dramatically increase circulation. The lower cost of large-scale printing and the capacity for larger circulation enabled publishers to lower the selling price. The “Penny Press” came into being. News was now accessible to the masses.
The new mass media changed the business of news publishing. “Newspapers had become big businesses by the l880s, with towering downtown buildings, [and] scores of reporters.”17 With all these changes to the publishing business, there also emerged a new historical persona: the media mogul. The new media moguls wielded “the power of large corporations, [using] the resources at their disposal to sell newspapers and influence politics.”18 This was in part because, even though the cost of large-scale news production had dropped, the initial costs of launching and running a national newspaper had jumped by leaps and bounds. The “Rising costs, particularly in relation to new printing technology, distribution and the larger staff needed to compile bigger newspapers, made it more difficult for newcomers to enter the industry.”19 “Consolidation and chain ownership exploded in the first decades of the 1900s, as market changes made taking over rival papers more lucrative and increased barriers of entries for new papers.”20 Over time, the “big newspapers had to take on the characteristics of corporations just to carry on their business.”21
One of the more consequential changes to the industry was that advertising came to surpass subscription fees as the primary source of revenue. In the United States, this fundamentally altered the very character of the news. It is not often remembered now, but American newspapers had traditionally been funded by political parties.22 Editors were closely associated with parties for which they largely functioned as mouthpieces. “Making good Democrats or Republicans mattered more than making a good profit.”23 Newspapers unabashedly and “publicly pledged their allegiance to either the Democrats or their nineteenth-century opponents, be it Whig or Republican,” which was seen to be “natural and proper,” for “newspapers were esteemed on the basis of their ‘influence’—their persuasiveness and political authority.’ ”24
This all changed when “higher profits from advertising allowed newspapers to break their affiliation with political parties and to declare themselves independent.”25 Moreover, papers which could afford national advertising were able to lower their prices even further without sacrificing the profitability of the business. Soon, the “straightforward control or patronage of the press by political parties was replaced by the modern machinery of media management.”26 New intermediary industries of advertising and Public Relations blossomed. Information syndicates, such as the Associated Press, United Press, and Reuters were developed to minimize the costs of news collection and make information more uniform.
In this new media world, monopolized by large news outlets and controlled by media moguls, newspapers began to compete for market share. It now became critical to reach new audiences. Before 1880, “the newspapers had not yet begun to break into the tenements.”27 This was in large part because readership was limited by low levels of literacy. But with the rising number of factory jobs created during the Second Industrial Revolution, national public education systems were created.28 For the large newspaper consortiums this spelled dollar signs. Improvements in literacy and reduced production costs meant newspapers could now reach a vast and previously untapped market: the working and middle classes.29
To capture this expansive audience, a new form of journalism materialized, Yellow Journalism. Whereas traditional journalism had been rooted in ideological frameworks, focused on propounding political positions, and targeted to a relatively small and elitist part of society,30 the “new” journalism catered to the needs of this much larger audience by appealing to “fundamental passions.”31 They “adopted varying proportions of sensationalism, populism, and socialism to address the interests of new, urban, working-class, and immigrant readers.”32
In fact, it was the bitter rivalry between two major American newspaper titans of the age, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, that set Yellow Journalism in motion. To outsell the other, each introduced sensational media content. Pulitzer’s the New York World and Hearst’s the New York Journal redesigned news to shock, entertain, and titillate urban working-class readers.33 A new formula for the news was pioneered: “love and romance for the women; sport and politics for the men,”34 all headed by sensational crime coverage. “The effect of the application of this formula was to enormously increase the circulation of the newspapers, not only in the great cities, but all over the country.”35
To make the news more alluring to their new customer base, the two publishing barons innovated several cutting-edge techniques. They introduced scare headlines printed with larger and bolder typeface to attract readers. Shocking or scandalous headers were accompanied by illustrations that bore little resemblance to reality, simply to add zest to the emotional impact.36 After photomechanical reproduction became possible, “up-to-the-minute sensationalistic pictorial storytelling” was added to enhance the lurid news copy.37 Another successful innovation was the comic strip. In fact, the term “Yellow Journalism” was derived from the Yellow Kid, the first comic strip that ever appeared in newsprint, created by Richard Outcault for Pulitzer’s World. Not to be outdone, in 1897 Hearst introduced Rudolph Dirks’s strip “Katzenjammer Kids” in his Journal.38
The “new journalism” with its bold headlines, exaggerated content, and new forms of imagery began in the United States but spread within a decade to France and then to England. In England, Alfred Harmsworth (better known under his later title Lord Northcliffe) was to become the archetypal press baron. He launched the Daily Mail in 1896, which became the market leader in London and paved the way for other mass-marketed newspapers. In fact, the Daily Mirror pioneered the model of popular journalism that still shapes English newspapers today. Northcliffe understood the new working-class readership. He rejected the long-winded Victorian style of news telling and adopted practices pioneered in the United States and France. His paper focused “on short, sharp and snappy stories and use of headings and subheadings.”39 To build circulation, Northcliffe used publicity stunts and public competitions. One such competition was to guess how much gold the Bank of England would have on December 4, 1889. The winner was promised £1 a week for life. The gambit was so successful that “250,000 copies of the edition which announced the result were sold.”40 The Mirror was also an important pioneer of photojournalism. “Mirror photographers went to great lengths, and at great personal risk, to produce eye-catching photographs, including photographing the interior of Vesuvius, climbing Mont Blanc and crossing the Alps in a balloon.”41,42
Mass media’s effects on society were both salutary and destabilizing. The most immediate transformation was in the very concept of “news” itself. “Journalism had to essentially redefine itself, to remain economically viable, find audiences, and establish a position in what could be labeled a ‘democratic market society.’ ”43 The new journalism renounced the political and social aims of the editors of old. No longer the champions of popular causes, these modern editors regarded themselves, first and foremost, as “news gatherers.”44 It was Pulitzer who recognized that the best way to fight popular causes “was not to advocate them on the editorial page but to . . . write them up—in the news columns.”45 His paper introduced the precursor to our contemporary investigative reporting, “muckraking.” The muckrakers were known for their detailed, accurate journalistic accounts. They focused on social issues and particularly on exposing political and economic corruption of the new industrialists and mega-banking institutions.
Beyond that, the new media was transforming the way the social world was represented and even the way in which power was exercised across society. The Yellow Press extended the habit of reading news to the masses, including women and immigrants. By disseminating information and ideas to a much wider population of readers, it became an agent of change46 and helped democratize both political and cultural authority.47 Thus, by the late 1880s, it was clear to many contemporary observers that a new information order had come into being.
However, the new media had a number of pernicious effects as well. The insatiable drive for readership and increased commercialization of the industry had carried journalism to extremes. Emphasis on sensationalism rather than facts introduced new social dangers. The critiques of William Randolph Hearst and his New York Journal were particularly heated. It was charged that by repeatedly featuring articles that claimed European immigrants spread diseases, his paper was heightening anti-immigrant sentiment. Hearst’s incessant attacks on President McKinley and the oft-printed cartoon depictions of the president as the puppet of great business trusts and wealthy financiers were believed by many to have fomented the anarchist assassination that felled the president.
Most infamous of all was Hearst’s stretching of the truth to propel America into the Cuban-Spanish conflict. In February 1898, Hearst’s New York Journal published a series of articles claiming to present evidence that the warship, the U.S.S. Maine, had been intentionally destroyed by a Spanish explosive device. The Journal characterized the sinking of the Maine as an act of war against the United States. Later, it was determined that there had been no conclusive evidence of Spanish sabotage. But the damage had been done. American sentiment had been inflamed. Soon after these spurious accusations had been published, McKinley, with the American public behind him, was able to launch the Spanish-American War; America’s first imperial war fought in Cuba and the Philippines.48 Undeterred by his critics, Hearst continued to support the war-effort, sending Journal reporters “small cameras on the battlefront to bring the war home to newspaper subscribers.”49
Nineteenth-century scholars tried to grapple with how to classify the enormous shift in the organization and representation of social knowledge and what it all meant for the future. However, characterizing the change and its potential effects proved to be as elusive as it was fascinating. In England, worries were expressed about the influence these new forms of print communication could exert on society. Elites had trepidation about the larger social and political effects of the rapid expansion of readership, which had been made possible by cheap newspapers. Commentators were troubled by the fact that “The technology of speed in composing, printing and distribution” was allowing print “to permeate all realms of society.”50 For some, “Newspapers appeared to be changing everything, from the appearance of city streets to the ways in which the English language was written and spoken.”51
In the United States, concerns were raised that Yellow Journalism’s blurring of fact and fiction, its penchant for hyperbole and sensationalism, and its emphasis on antisocial behavior would undermine essential institutions. Just as damning was the concern that journalism had become a commodity. As late as 1920, Arthur Baumann lamented that “The ownership of a newspaper [has become] a commercial organisation for the purpose of getting money, its one business is to sell news, not ideas.”52 Thus, whereas in the 1880s commentators held optimistic views of the liberating possibilities of the press, as the century drew to a close the news media came to be seen as a nefarious force in society.
In the twentieth century, all around the globe, in every nation, national communications systems were developed. However, by the twenty-first century, these national media markets had fragmented, and mass production of information had fallen by the wayside. As in the turn of the nineteenth century, this brought into being a period paradoxically characterized by both the centralization and decentralization of media. And as in that earlier period, the new media’s effects on society were both constructive and destructive.
Twentieth-century “Mass production was not confined to automobiles; there was mass production in news and ideas as well.”53 The communications innovations of the belle époque had produced the possibility of a national media market. Changes, however, began to take shape in the 1980s, when satellite television and broadband cables exponentially increased the number of available channels. In no time, individuals were even able to record televised content. These innovations bequeathed much more power to end-users than had been conceivable in the mid-twentieth century. No longer dependent upon a handful of television channels, customers could choose what to watch and when. Soon after, Internet platforms completely altered the transmission of information. At the turn of the century, the democratizing potential of the Internet seemed indisputable. Internet pages, which were originally only produced by people with technical knowledge, could now be made by anyone. Especially after Facebook emerged in 2004, people were able to create and pass on information at will. By the 2010s, Web content could be generated by anyone.
Another dramatic change developed in the financing of media. If the late nineteenth century was marked by the birth of the advertising industry, the turn-of-the twentieth century was characterized by its slow demise. An early 1990 prophecy that “the last vestiges of traditional mass advertising will disappear”54 has largely come to pass. Instead of mass marketing, companies have developed “adaptive marketing,” where product offerings are made at the micro level and continually adjusted to satisfy individual customer demands.55 In the 1990s, it was assumed that this process would increase the power of consumers: “The information superhighway will become the global electronic supermarket of the 90s, uniting producers and consumers directly, instantly, and interactively.”56 What was not understood at the end of the twentieth century was the degree to which “control over data [would become] a key resource for political and economic power.”57 Given the voluminous amounts of data generated every millisecond on the Web, only large-scale institutions were able to manage its storage and collection. This helped strengthen the power of the state and private industry. By the 2010s, “Big Data collection and storage [was] managed in a highly centralized fashion, resulting in privacy-intrusion, surveillance actions, discriminatory and segregation social phenomena.”58 Consequently, in this data-driven world, “the internet, despite its countless founding techno-utopias about its subversive and democratic potential,”59 has, to the contrary, provided both governments and corporations unforeseen powers.
Even worse, to improve individualized user experiences, media platforms created automated systems that could recognize what people’s interests were. This led to the development of proprietary technologies capable of tracking people’s desires, and even coding people’s relationships to one another. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter and most especially Facebook continued to champion the liberating and democratizing potential of their platforms. But, all the while, they were quickly centralizing control over data to commodify it.60 In this brave new world, privacy was to become something of a quaint notion of a bygone world. By the 2010s, “data protection had become increasingly linked to Internet firms” and the Internet itself transformed into a “web of corporations.”61 Thus, whereas user-generated content dominated the Web in the first decade of the twentieth first century, by the second decade, internet platforms were progressively shaping politics; economics; and, indeed, all social interaction.
All of this dramatically altered the way in which people accessed news and information. The new communications technologies both empowered individuals, allowing them to directly connect with one another across vast distances, and disempowered them by facilitating the strategic spread of misinformation. Just as the mass communications technologies of the nineteenth century led to the production of Yellow Journalism, the Digital Age has given birth to what has been coined the “post-truth” era. The label gained so much traction that in 2016 that it was added to the Oxford Dictionary, where it was defined as: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”62 Resembling the bold scare headlines developed during the period of Yellow Journalism, in the “post-truth” era, online platforms use techniques designed to elicit emotional responses, like boldly printed, clickbait headlines that entice people to click on a site and read more. It didn’t take long for bad actors to figure out that such techniques were a perfect way to disseminate false information. Fake, emotive news stories began to proliferate across the Internet. False information was used to rile up people’s emotions, encourage support for extremist ideologies, and change the outcomes of elections in advanced democracies like Britain and the United States, as well as less-developed ones like Guyana and Kenya.
As mass-market newspapers had a century before, the Internet changed the media industry. Print newspapers began a precipitous decline. In the United States, between 1990 and 2008, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs disappeared.63 Even before the pandemic of 2019, newspapers were closing their doors at an alarming average rate of two per week. It was reported in 2022 that “Over one-fifth of Americans now live in [a place with limited access to local news], or in a place that is at risk of becoming one.”64 Similar problems have begun to plague the news industry in Europe. In a policy paper for the European Union put out in December 2020, it was found that the European news sector had made a significant shift to digital media. Although paid subscriptions remained the major source of income in the European media market, digital advertising was “quickly becoming the main source of revenues for both news broadcasters and publishers.” The report found further that “Between 2014 and 2017, the turnover of the European written press subsector declined at a [compound annual growth rate] of 0.33% leading to a turnover of EUR 73,275 million in 2017.”65
To make matters worse, by the early 2000s, trust in print media had plummeted in the United States. In its stead, an increasing number of people, particularly young people, turned to Internet bloggers, amateur YouTube videographers, and TikTok aficionados for critical information about the world. Indeed, according to the article, “ ‘Abandoning the News,’ published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper.”66 Confidence in news media also eroded across Europe, particularly after the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic. In one survey conducted by the Edelman Trust,67 which collected data about how opinions were shaped by the epidemic in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States, it was found that “Only 43% [of respondents] consider[ed] the media trustworthy on Covid-19, making journalists less trusted than coworkers, NGO representatives, politicians, and ‘a person like yourself.’ ” This trend has been particularly apparent in Italy, Spain, and especially France, where “2019 Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute ranked France last among European countries in terms of public confidence in the media.”68
Furthermore, just as the cost of entry into mass media markets increased in the nineteenth century, so too in the twenty-first century newcomers have been squeezed out. The early entrants into the Internet, like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have not only amassed breathtaking fortunes, they have also been able to solidify their dominant position on the Web. Laissez-faire policies adopted in the United States aided the monopolizing power of these companies, where most of the large tech companies have been located. Regulations on media mergers put in place in the 1960s and 1970s, to ensure that a diversity of voices and opinions could be heard on the air or in print, began to be repealed in the 1980s. With these changes the 1990s witnessed Sony’s union with Columbia Pictures and AT&T’s acquisition of NCR. Mergers and acquisitions of large media conglomerates have continued through the twenty-first century.
Nor has there been the political will to control the monopolistic practices of large Web companies. This has allowed the twenty-first century media moguls, like their earlier counterparts, to assume fearsome powers. Where men like Pulitzer, Hearst, and Norcliffe could manipulate mass public perceptions, in the early twenty-first century Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook, and Jack Dorsey the CEO of Twitter, had the potential to change the outcome of national elections, promote or militate against ethnic cleansing, and even possibly determine the fate of liberal democracy.
Ironically, just as in the previous century, the more the new digital media decentralized information, the more monopolized it became. Internet companies have been able to consolidate power over how information is distributed and used. As media platforms increased their ability to filter, rank, and recommend information, the algorithms they had created began to mediate social, economic, and, perhaps most ominously, political interactions.69 These twin processes have led to a paradoxical outcome: information has been increasingly directed by individuals, at the same time that it has been increasingly manipulated, constrained, and influenced by governments and monopolist corporations.
The consequences of these changes have been quite weighty. Digital media and cable television produced an upside-down, “through-the-looking-glass” world, in which a significant portion of the world’s population held more faith in information provided by disgruntled individuals blogging in their basements, than in established media organizations with procedures in place to vet and triangulate information. The new forms of mass media, moreover, undermined people’s trust in established institutions, taking a great toll on the very mechanisms that keep liberal democracies functioning. Together, the new world of mass communications helped propel anti-liberal populism and neo-fascist movements of the 2010s.