They will return in July for the Newport
season.
XV.
YELLOW JOURNALISM.
While several of the New York dailies were circulating from two to three
hundred thousand copies, the _News-Record_--the best-written, the most
complete, and, where the interests of the owners did not interfere, the
most accurate--circulated less than one hundred thousand. The Sunday
edition had a circulation of one hundred and fifty thousand where two other
newspapers had almost half a million.
The theory of the _News-Record_ staff was that their journal was too
"respectable," too intelligent, to be widely read; that the "yellow
journals" grovelled, "appealed to the mob," drew their vast crowds by the
methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the
_News-Record's_ smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from
vulgarity and debasement. They looked down upon the journalists of the
popular newspapers and posed as the aristocracy of the profession.
Howard did not assent to these self-complacent excuses. He was democratic
and modern, and the aristocratic pose appealed only to his sense of humour
and his suspicions. He believed that the success of the "yellow journals"
with the most intelligent, alert and progressive public in the world must
be based upon solid reasons of desert, must be in spite of, not because of,
their follies and exhibitions of bad taste.
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