According to the interview, what does yellow journalism mean?

W: Now that the 20th century has slipped into history, we take this opportunity to look back at 100 years of journalism. Joining us now Clarence Page, columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Welcome.
M: Thank you.
W: You know, in the early 1900s, the Citizen Kane area, you had a lot of papers—The World, Sun, Herald Tribune, Telegram, Mirror, News, Times, Post, and so on. But many of these were openly partisan papers swinging away on behalf of Democrats or Republicans. Today’s newspapers are big, supposedly objective, but more homogenous and some would say boring. Have we lost something?
M: Oh, I don’t think they’re boring. I think that today’s newspapers are infinitely better than any one of those newspapers that you mentioned there. You go back and look at those things, I mean the word yellow journalism, although it came out of a comic strip, came to speak about a whole generation of papers that were untrustworthy, in which you couldn’t tell the difference between an advertisement and news and a good part of the news was made up or created to serve the interests of the publisher.
W: But aren’t newspapers today a little more cautious, Clarence?
M: Well, that’s always the question. The worst thing we can do is to be boring. We also don’t want to be offensive. At the beginning of the century we were an immigration country, mostly immigrants coming from Europe. We are once again an immigration country but they’re coming from all over the world. We’re also a country that recognizes diversity in different kinds of ways. When I came to Chicago, we had four daily newspapers and that was fun to be a reporter. We’ve got two dailies in town and the real competition is not between the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times but between us and the suburban papers.
W: Exactly.
M: And that’s true all over the country. Now the suburban papers are competing with the old urban papers because America is changing once again. Now we’re a more suburban country.
W: I would hate to return to the days of partisan papers or the days when the staffs were all white, mostly male, a far cry from today. But I do think that newspapers have gotten very cautious in their new monopoly status in most cities. Let’s flash forward now to World War II and the coverage there. It was an era of great story-tellers. But it was also a very patriotic kind of coverage.
M: Well, look back home, a classic story of how American journalists and photographers didn’t put pictures of Roosevelt in his wheelchair, of how the one young photographer started to take a picture and the older one knocked the camera out of his hands.
W: Inconceivable today.
M: Exactly, and the whole culture has changed and our role now is more adversarial and the public expects us to be so.
W: I have a question for you because in the same decade of the 1960s that we had the civil rights upheaval we also had Vietnam War and because of the focus of the press on how badly the war was going, I’m wondering if some might say that that, too, was advocacy journalism that helped turn the country against the Vietnam War.
M: I don’t think it was advocacy because that suggests a predetermined point of view. I think in the case of Vietnam the reporters were reporting the facts and the facts were stacked against the reality that was being presented by the Pentagon. Advocacy presupposes that you go to the typewriter or the computer with a fixed point of view. That was not the case in Vietnam. I remind you that in the early years of the war in Vietnam, the resounding message in the press corps was pro-war, that is to say pro the U.S. position in the war.
W: Certainly. Right.
M: And, in fact, it’s interesting, our evening news was only 15 minutes long. But it was 15 minutes long until the fall of 1963 when Huntley Brinkley and the others went to a half hour just in time for JFK to be assassinated and become the first 24-hour TV news story. And then the Vietnam War heated up after that, along with civil rights, etc., and TV became the real conveyor of the narrative here.
W: OK, we’ll talk about where the media are heading in the 21st century. Television clearly changed the world but the Internet seems to be remaking it once again and even more significant. Is that a good thing?
M: It’s good and it’s bad. I mean there is now much more competition. On the other hand, of course, you get very, very bad and dangerous web sites. It’ll need to be policed.
W: Clarence Page, thanks very much for helping us cover the last hundred years.
M: Likewise. Thank you.