DISINTEREST OR DISSENT?
“The System Has Its Uses & Abuses”
“The system has its uses and abuses… It is a sad day to the lover of a good story when it is served to him cut up, interrupted, and mutilated by a succession of foolish, irrelevant little pictures of the roughest and rudest sort.”
“Art in the Dailies” from the Dec. 9, 1885 issue of The Daily Graphic
From the 1870s to the 1890s, “yellow journalism”—the unruly child of the 1830s penny press—rose to prominence. Sensationalism began to accrue its pejorative connotations of sex, crime, and exaggeration. The news was saturated with titillating images and texts. People were fed up.
To the right, an article complains about the low-quality pictures that accompany news stories. Below, a cartoon mocks sensational newsboys: “EXTRA SHOCKING DISASTER,” “THE PEOPLE PARALYSED WITH TERROR!!!,” “FIRE!!! FIRE!!! FIRE!!!”
“The Big Fireman and the Silly Little Newsboys” (Puck: Aug. 9, 1893)
In the 1890s, the news began to professionalize. Papers such as The New York Times updated their standards of journalistic objectivity. They provided neutrality, impartiality, and impersonality. Yet with these protocols, something was lost from mainstream reporting—the sense of the writer, and the reader, as embodied members of the communities about which they write and read.
Nellie Bly: Feigning Insanity
Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth Cochran, 1864–1922) was an early muckraker. She was a “stunt girl journalist”—a journalist whose job it was to write herself, sensationally, onto the page.
Bly became famous for her bravery, as well as her sense for detail and narrative structure. She raced around the world to beat a fictional record (Jules Verne’s hero makes it in eighty days; Bly makes it in seventy-two).
“They Called Her the Amazing Nellie Bly” (Good Housekeeping: Feb. 1955)
“So I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that my poor unfortunates will be better cared for because of my work.”
She also used her sensational appeal to fight for change. In “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” published in 1887, she feigns insanity, gets herself admitted to an asylum, and exposes the abuses happening inside. This pamphlet is neither impartial, nor impersonal. Bly aimed for her writing to change the story it represented. But with the turn to objectivity, journalists such as Bly were demeaned as unserious and oversensitive.
What do readers lose, when a journalist removes their own “I” from the writing? What does the world lose, when journalists’ objectivity prevents them from fighting for a cause?
Ida B. Wells and the Anti-Lynching Campaign
“Because our youth are entitled to the facts of race history which only the participants can give, I am thus led to set forth the facts contained in this volume which I dedicate to them.”
“Crusade For Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells” (1970)
Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) was a journalist and anti-lynching crusader. She owned a printing press in Memphis. When white supremacists burned it, she kept on writing. Her pamphlets used vivid sensory descriptions to document the realities of lynch mobs torturing and murdering Black women and men.
Wells fought against The New York Times. The Times’s standard of “impartiality” meant that, when writing about lynch mobs, the paper would “take both sides.” This often meant that Times articles would reproduce and legitimize the myths about Black criminality that the lynch mob perpetuated.
Wells and the NAACP redefine objectivity. Wells writes in the first-person voice. Objectivity, for her, is accessible only to the participants in the story. The “SHAME OF AMERICA” broadside below combines sensational tactics (boldface font, underlining, capitalized letters) with an insistence on carefully recorded numbers: 3,436 people lynched, from 1889–1921.
These anti-lynching documents invite us to reconsider our idealized standards of journalism. Do we really want our journalists to be impartial about injustice?
The “SHAME OF AMERICA” broadside combines sensational tactics (boldface font, underlining, capitalized letters) with an insistence on carefully recorded numbers.
Texts of Today
Still frame from a 2024 Skyrizi commercial showing a woman with a rash on her neck.
We get our news online now. Social media and screens replace newsboys and paper print. Everyone knows that the present is different from the past. But it is much harder to see how the past forms the present. Continuity, then, is the story that this exhibit chooses to tell. Medical ads are still omnipresent. To the right, in a 2024 Skyrizi commercial, this woman with a rash on her neck bears an eerie resemblance to the “HUMILIATING ERUPTIONS” silhouette from 1886 found at the bottom of the “Burning Tortures” section of DISEASE & DISTRACTION.
Across the political spectrum, people worry about the effects of screens on human eyesight, just as the stereoscope sparked concerns two hundred years earlier.
In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot publicized videos of men raping her. She took control of her own story, marshaling its sensational content for justice. In so doing, she gained attention for her own case, placed the burden of shame onto the men who attacked her, and helped other women to learn about drugging. If Jennie Cramer had survived her attack, would she have done the same?
Reading the news is an embodied, imaginative act. Our senses are hopelessly involved in our knowledge about the world. As long as there is reported media, then, sensationalism will continue to be challenged, defended, and redefined.
What will you do with your sensory, mediated embodiment?
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