Yellow Journalism
We live in a world today of “intimate” mass communication. In the “old days”, communication was by reading; newspapers, tracts or books. We had a “choice to know”, short of the street corner cry of the newsboys: “Extra, Extra, Read All About It, Spanish sink US Battleship!!!” Want to know more – buy the paper. And from the beginning, newspapers had their biases. Some of the great newspapers of the mid-1800’s fought for abolition of slavery, like William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and Frederick Douglass’s North Star.
But the bias of the newspapers of the late 1800’s was more about selling papers and making money. The great newspaper “war” between William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World wasn’t about ideology. It became a national battle of sensationalism to sell papers. Which paper could tell the “biggest” story, true or not? We categorize that as the era of “Yellow Journalism”. It was when the United States actually fought a war driven not by necessity, but by public opinion stoked with outrage by the lurid stories of Spanish atrocities.
Fredric Remington, the famous artist of the American west, was sent to Cuba by Hearst, to draw images of the war atrocities for the Journal. The story goes that when Remington cabled Hearst that nothing was happening, Hearst replied: “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war”.
Intimate Communication
Today we are far beyond newsboys crying out in the city streets. In fact we have surpassed the time of the television “evening news” (though it’s still available). Today our news is delivered individually, to our handheld devices. We get our news in bed or the bathroom, as we drive or as we idle away time at work. The newsboy is no longer crying out from the street – he is “pinging” on the bedstand or vibrating in our pocket. But he still demands the same attention – “Extra, Extra, read all about it”.
Just as the yellow journalists one hundred and twenty years ago used stories and pictures to drive our emotions, today’s “commentators” (such a neutral word, as if they were ancient Greek scholars) find key words to impress our views. And that’s what today’s essay is about, the new “yellow journalism” of the Twenty-First Century. I call it “critical word theory”.
Legacy Americans
Let’s start with the “newest”, coined by Fox commentator Tucker Carlson: Legacy Americans. This term is part of an entire “school” of thought, based around the changing demographics of the United States. The facts are that sometime in the next twenty years, white people will no longer be the majority of Americans. For the first time since the colonization of North America, the country will be a “majority-minority” nation. That means that no one group; not whites or blacks, Latinos or Asians or Native Americans or “others”, will be a majority of America. We will be a nation of varying minorities.
That’s a fact. But what Carlson means is what happens to the “legacy” Americans when they stop being the majority? “Legacy Americans” are the white people who were here – before. Before what? Before the migrations of the twentieth century, before “brown people” became more populous throughout our nation, rather than just the Southwest. Carlson uses the term like a crowbar to divide the interest of the soon to be minority whites from what will be the majority of the nation, non-whites.
Fix the Vote
And so the machinations of many states to reduce the voting power of non-white peoples and enhance those of whites is to protect “legacy Americans”. It sounds so “proper”, like the inheritance left by some old aunt to keep the family fortune going. But of course, the definition of “legacy American” is anti-democratic, as anti-American as it comes. It calls for the preservation of power regardless of electoral strength.
Which brings us to Carlson’s greater thesis of “White Replacement Theory”. This is the over-arching theme of his philosophy. The theory states that, like the villainous organization in a James Bond movie, the Democratic Party is in favor of allowing “open borders”, because they want more brown people to come to the United States and vote for them. They will “replace” the white voter, (and employee), to reshape the nation into something else – in Carlson’s mind maybe Venezuela.
Which fits into the real propaganda, the “Big Lie” of “Stop the Steal”. Because when Democrats respond that they don’t want open borders but legal immigration, and besides immigrants aren’t citizens and can’t vote – the Carlson thesis is that they already do vote. His claim is that voting is already so corrupted in this nation that millions of illegal votes have reshaped our election results, particularly one. The fact that this isn’t true, doesn’t seem to matter to Carlson: He’s “furnishing the pictures and the war”.
White-washed History
“Legacy Americans”, Carlson would say, should embrace their “Heritage”. Heritage is another misappropriated term in our modern Yellow Journalism. It stands for the literally white-washed history taught in the public schools of the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s. “Heritage” means that the Southern “Lost Cause” of the Civil War was righteous, and that the villainous North (just like the Democratic Party) is trying to erase history by removing Confederate relics from town squares and flag poles.
But the real erasing of history took place at the end of Reconstruction in 1876, when the white votes of the South were more important than securing the victory of civil rights in the war. Robert E. Lee didn’t even want monuments. He wanted the nation to move on from the disaster that he prolonged (though he certainly didn’t put it that way). But it was in the “interest” of the white South to re-write the history of America.
That’s what we (I’m sixty-five) were taught in school, the “Lost Cause” history that somehow put the “romantic” Confederates on an equal footing with the “industrialized” Union. Sure we learned about the heroic Irish Brigades who fought in the War on both sides. But we were taught about the brilliant “strategery” of the Confederate Generals, and the life wasting butchery of the Union Generals. And we learned very little about the 179,000 African Americans of the Union Army who battled to free their brothers from slavery. Where are their statues?
Leave it to Beaver
“Heritage” is used to define what I would call the “Leave it to Beaver” time, of the 1950’s. It all seemed so peaceful, before the upheavals of Americans of color demanding equal rights. The good old days when everyone “knew their place”: women stayed at home, gays stayed in the closet, and people with disabilities stayed in the upstairs bedroom with the shades down.
Which leads us to the final “bugaboo” term: “Critical Race Theory”. No matter that critical race theory was a specific term used to define a study of legal processes at the post-graduate level, today it is now misused as the over-arching term for the “evil” of teaching that discrimination is wrong; that it benefitted and still benefits one race over another. Because, as Mr. Carlson would have it, we are to roll back the changes to “Leave it to Beaver” times. That way, we would make sure that “Legacy Americans” are protected, that their “Heritage” is saved, and that they aren’t “replaced”.
The end of the Reconstruction marked the end of the dream of an America where color didn’t matter. Yellow Journalism brought us an “imperialistic war”. And the Critical Word Theory of today is trying to divide our nation, and make it one of minority rule.
If that’s not Un-American, I don’t know what is.
