What is Yellow Journalism?Yellow journalism can be portrayed in a few different ways. It can be a very biased story that only covers one side without pointing out pertinent and even detrimental facts. It can also be a story that has been published strictly for the “shock factor” and have no basis behind it. When the truth isn’t there and the facts are missing or twisted, this is when you have yellow journalism.

Today’s fast paced world revolves around technology. It’s everywhere; in our cars, phones, watches, even mirrors. Everywhere we go we expect to have access to the Internet. We want to check our emails, our friend’s Facebook status and we want to know today’s news yesterday.

It could be because of our need for instant gratification that journalists may justify “tweaking” their story a bit, making sure that they get it out first. Whatever their reasoning, the internet makes yellow journalism even easier. You can post anything you want without checking facts.

Yellow Journalism TodayThere are many examples of yellow journalism in the news today. A recent story that was circulating on all the top news channels and websites was about a court case between Samsung and Apple. The day after the judge ruled in favor of Apple, a story was published on a website in Mexico that claimed Samsung paid their $1.2 billion dollar fine in nickels. An American journalist picked up the story and ran with it.The story was complete with quotes and numbers. But, if you do the math, the numbers are completely wrong. They stated that 30 trucks showed up at Apple headquarters with all the money in nickels. It would actually take well over 2,500 trucks and all the nickels that have been struck by the U.S. Mint over the last several decades to pay the $1.2 billion dollars in full.

The website in Mexico where this story originated from was actually all about satire and comedy. They posted false stories, like this one, just as a source of comedic relief. If the person who picked this story up had actually been checking the website and not just focusing on the article, this whole mess wouldn’t have happened.

Yellow Journalism in TechnologyPicture this, you sit down at your laptop in the morning and you check the news. A large headline catches your attention, “Baby Snatched by Eagle”. You immediately click the link to the story and there’s a video. You watch the video that, sure enough, shows an eagle swooping down. It grabs a baby and tries to take off again. The baby proves too awkward for the eagle

and it drops him not a long distance, but enough to make it news worthy (the “baby” was fine). What a great story, right? The journalist did their job. They found a jaw dropping story that was sure to bring in readers and they even had a video to boot.Unfortunately, even videos aren’t safe from yellow journalism. Shortly after the news story had aired, proof came out that the video was a fake. With today’s technology one can create digital effects for just about anything. It turns out that the video had been created by three college students in Canada.

Yellow Journalism in the PastEven though the internet is considered to be fairly new technology and has become a breeding ground for yellow journalism, it actually started long before the World Wide Web came about. The perfect example of this is a picture that has been circulating around text books, newspapers and even ads since WWI.

The photograph shows a man standing in front of a brick wall blindfolded and facing a firing squad. The picture was first published in a newspaper during WWI. The caption stated that the man was a captured enemy spy. The real story behind the picture is that the photo was staged. There was a photographer who was overseas in Belgium photographing the war. He had taken many staged shots, this being one of them. Not only was this photo staged, but the photographer was actually posing as the “enemy spy”.The photo is now famous and is used frequently but has been mistakenly documented as being from WWII, or used in a way as to imply that the execution depicted actually took place. It rarely has the true story behind it.

At first glance, the vast majority of these issues seem overwhelmingly negative and many people believe the role of the journalist is fast becoming redundant with the takeover of technology and the Internet. After interviewing Paul Lobb for my major assignment and discussing the impacts of new technologies, I was quietly surprised to learn the positive affects it can have on the industry. Far from taking over the actual role of the journalist, new technologies assist journalists and the audience in finding news stories immediately. A recent example is the news coverage of the Chilean miners. Because of the Internet, the world was able to receive updates by the second during their rescue mission.

This magnitude of information now available to us also has people questioning whether the journalist and journalism in general is still necessary, particularly if the majority of information can now be sourced through the Internet. In a detailed commentary program called Lifelong Learning: Cultures of Journalism on ABC’s Radio National, these issues were discussed. Barbie Zelizer, from the Annenburg School of Communication at Pennsylvania University, summed up my exact feelings for the future of journalism:          “I would say that there's more information out there than we can possibly attend to, so that journalism acts as a primary filter, as an assist, as a ranking device, as a way for us to make sense of events that are far beyond our grasp. A colleague of mine, Michael Schudson, once said that if we were in a world without journalism, we would immediately invent journalists. And I think that that's precisely right. I think that it is not possible to imagine a world without journalists, so that's really the answer to the question of why journalism matters.”

Journalism is a dynamic and fluid industry that will continue to adapt to the digital age. It will never become redundant because ultimately people need and will always need it as an objective and impartial critic of society.