[If you are a reader, please forgive the lack of pictures. I just want to get this up and will edit and enrich some other time. Or not. I am pretty much just doing this for me at this point. If you want pictures then you can damn well comment for them! And if you know me, you might want to email too, because I always forget to moderate my comments. I am really a terrible blogger! Here is a dreamy picture of Joseph Pulitzer to try to make it up to you.]
The spread is “Newspaper Row” during the Spanish American War in 1898. There is a W. C. Loftus store in the picture. I wonder if they are any relation to the DeSmet Loftuses.
“Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.” Joseph Pulitzer
And we’re off! The press is inaccurate and men’s virtue is unquestionable. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…
So much text in the newspapers. The style was called a tombstone. Yikes! Headlines, those bastard precursors to the screaming chryons, were about to smash the tombstone to bits!
Pulitzer was quite pithy, “Gentlemen, heretofore you have all been living in the parlor and taking baths every day. Now I wish you to understand that, in future, you are all walking down the Bowery.” Meaning that his paper the New York World was going to be the paper that represented the little guy. He declared his papers to be “dedicated to the cause of the people rather than to that of the purse potentates.” He was a good cusser too. He would “split a word to insert an oath, his favorite being ‘indegoddamnpendant’.”
He used lurid stories to draw big circulation numbers, but through editorializing, he tried to change things for the better. And he would set them up and chop them down. He basically got Grover Cleveland elected, but when Cleveland married a girl half his age, Pulitzer printed salacious details of their relationship to get readers.
He used his paper to raise money to do upkeep on the Statue of Liberty and he sent out Nellie Bly [Nellie Bly, a woman!] to see the world in 72 days. Perhaps he was one of the first to make the media feel like a way of identifying one’s self, like people who think “I read the Globe and I am smart. You read the Herald and are a dummy.” (Or conversely, “I read the Herald and I am a regular guy. You read the Globe and are a snob.”)
He also launched the first newspaper comics page. He seems to have had misophonia, “the noise of crumpling paper, even the sound of someone eating toast, drove him into agonies.” And in 1889 he went blind!
Just as I am beginning to think Joseph Pulitzer hung the moon, I saw his story about the Missing Link. Oh, so he did that kind of “journalism” too.
TL gives his origin story that is easily Wikipedia-ed if you’re interested. He was a hell of a businessman, but an awful manager, who pitted employees against each other in a textbook toxic work environment. But he single handedly staved off war with England in 1895 which irked Teddy Roosevelt to no end.
The writer of this section clearly has no love for Teddy. He makes him look like a jerk more than once. The first time for opining that capping horse car drivers’ work day at 12 hours is “communistic” and secondly for trying to have Pulitzer jailed for not going along with his war plan. Oh, and bonus - Teddy is also quoted as saying “he looked forward enthusiastically to the ‘conquest of Canada’.”
[According to the front page reprint from February 11, 1898 there was a story about murdered babies in Harlem. Could this be abortion related? Eva Godorsi and Mrs. Agusta Nack are mentioned. Look this up!]
Eventually, Pulitzer and Hearst started the Spanish American War. Yep, journalism has been tearing down and shoring up American democracy for at least 120 years. But Pulitzer did regret his manipulation in the end apparently. And now there is this prize.
This chapter ends with no representation of people of color and no women except possible abortionists and Grover Cleveland’s child bride - but the negative slant on the women is nearly mitigated by Nellie Bly...
All quotes are from TL. Pulitzer photo courtesy of LOC.gov.
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