Detail from Honor to McKinley! (1898), showing Pulitzer and Hearst, caricatured as a parrot and monkey respectively, battling it out amid a flurry of pages from the Yellow Press. The rest of the picture shows President McKinley below them ignoring their cries for war. Instead he reads a paper entitled 'The People of the United States have full confidence in your Patriotism, Integrity, & Bravery. They know you will act justly and wisely: decent press'. Such praise of McKinley's resistance to war would not last for long: a month later he asked Congress for authority to send American troops to Cuba

Featured on PDR in the collection Yellow Journalism: The “Fake News” of the 19th Century

It is perhaps not so surprising to hear that the problem of "fake news" — media outlets adopting sensationalism to the point of fantasy — is nothing new. Although, as Robert Darnton explained in the NYRB recently, the peddling of public lies for political gain (or simply financial profit) can be found in most periods of history dating back to antiquity, it is in the late 19th-century phenomenon of "Yellow Journalism" that it first seems to reach the widespread outcry and fever pitch of scandal familiar today. Why yellow? The reasons are not totally clear. Some sources point to the yellow ink the publications would sometimes use, though it more likely stems from the popular Yellow Kid cartoon that first ran in Joseph Pulitzer's New…