How Yellow Journalism Aided Imperialism in America

Yellow journalism is considered overly “exaggerated writings that are disguised as fact.”

Taking a factual story and distorting the meanings and the incidences of what really 

happened.  It is used in many stories to bring more excitement and sometimes fear or to 

gain sympathy from a reader.  William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were the two 

men first associated with yellow journalism.  They contributed to the use of yellow 

journalism through their newspapers , which were the two largest selling papers in New 

York City at the turn of the century.  The term yellow journalism stemmed  from a fight 

the two papers were having over a  cartoonist who created a  character named “Yellow 

Man,” made out of a no smudge yellow ink. Hearst took the cartoonist away from Pulitzer , 

so he hired another cartoonist and soon the battle of the yellow man was on... it was out 

of control to see who could sell the most papers.  Soon the papers started  altering the 

facts to make the headlines even more exciting and eye catching to sell more papers than 

their competition.

Hearst and Pulitzer both had a huge influence in how Americans saw the Spanish-

American War, how they viewed Cuba and what they thought was going on. Both papers 

called for the US intervention and swayed the American involvement in the war. Yellow 

journalism has been used in every war the US has been in since then and it has been 

used for political gain and altering public opinion.  Yellow journalism helped America strive 

to build itself into the country it is today.  It motivated the markets for profitable 

investments and helped intensify sales of newspapers and gain profits for many 

companies in the early part of the 1890's both in the country and abroad. 

Sources:

Michael Streich. American Imperialism in the 1890's. web.10 January2009.

http://www.suite101.com/content/american-imperialism-in-the-1890s-a89283

Richard D.Olson.R.F. Outcast, The Father of the American Sunday Comic, and the truth 

About the Creation of the Yellow Kid. http://www.neponset.com/yellowkid/history.htm