Throughline - The original clickbait king

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

When we call something "clickbait," we don't mean it as a compliment. But let's be real: we also click. It's hard to resist a spicy story, and 19th-century newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst knew it. At a time when most papers merely reported events, his papers created them, sending reporters out to perform daring rescues, solve sensational murders, and even meddle in geopolitics. Today on the show: the man who brought spectacle and scandal to the news — and changed journalism forever.Guests:Karen Roggenkamp, professor of English at East Texas A&M University and author of Narrating the News and Sympathy, Madness, and CrimeW. Joseph Campbell, emeritus professor of communication at American University and author of The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms and Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential ElectionsTo access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

While all seemed so dark and helpless to me in my prison, events were shaping towards my delivery. For weeks, a brave, strong man had been watching the jail, seeking some weak spot, trying to find some way to rescue me. The year is 1897, and Evangelinea Cisneros, a teenage girl from a well-off family, has been in prison in Cuba for over a year. She doesn't know anything about the welfare of her family, and she doesn't know. She's horrified by the conditions. Initially, she lives in what she calls a large cage with other women. Hundreds of the most terrible women that could be dreamed of. Eventually, she's taken to a more private room,

which she shares with other women accused of a similar crime to her. Treason against Spanish colonial rule. Month after month, she sits and looks out the window, awaiting her fate. The only windows to be seen from the air. alley were about 35 feet from the ground and were protected by massive iron bars. Down below, a man from Washington, D.C., looks up at the very window from which Evangelina looks out. For weeks, he and a small group of men have been casing the jailhouse in hopes of breaking her free. They managed to smuggle in a note, asking her for ideas to break out.

She writes back, my plan is the following, to escape by the roof. Her escape plan included drugging the women in her cell. So as to set to sleep my companions. The men made a few tweaks to her plan. They run the house next to the jail. And a couple of days later, covered by the darkness of night, they crossed between the roofs of the buildings. The prison warden, hearing a sound, appears in the street.

Three 44 caliber revolvers covered him. And his discovery of our position on the roof would have called, for his immediate execution. The warden retreats, and the men walk across the roof just above the barred window of Evangelinea Cisneros's jail cell, where she's waiting.

I had many fantastic dreams in my prison, but I never dreamed of liberty coming to me from an American newspaper. More than a thousand miles away in New York City, the man orchestrating this whole jailbreak sits at his desk awaiting an update. His name is William Randolph Hearst. He doesn't have any connections to Cuba, nor is he part of the U.S. government.

He's the owner of the New York Journal, a newspaper man. And he's assigned his reporter, Carl Decker, to break Evangelinea Cisneros out of jail. And that's because Hearst has been paying attention to the news out of Cuba, rumblings of a revolution against Spanish rule. And he believes his newspapers and reporters should act. work to correct society's wrongs and make them right. His motto, We will be the journalism that acts. Journalism that acts.

There's a time of print media and daily newspapers were the dominant medium of the day. And competition was extremely intense, especially in urban American. New York City in particular. So into that scene, William Randolphurst burst as big as life and upset the apple card of American journalism. Before Hearst, American newspapers were mostly dull and dry, but he helped create a new style of journalism that leaned into the dramatic flare, stories with narratives and pictures, where his reporters were inserted into the action. And he then turned around and sold that drama to his audience. It was a moment that challenged and changed what journalism could look like. And the

legacy of that style is all around us today. The term clickbait isn't meant as a compliment, but Hearst likely would have approved. Take expressions we've all heard before on the nightly news, like shocking new development, or no one saw this coming, or headlines like how Hurricane Katrina paved the way for American fascism. They are big and in your face so that you notice. But the need to grab people's attention by any means necessary has come at a cost. Today, trust in the media is low, very low. Legacy news organizations are laying off staff, and what's truth or a fact is debated. Sometimes the role of journalists seems clear. Other times, not so much. And you can see it in the way people talk about journalism.

When you have mainstream news organizations going along with what appears to be propaganda, with no pushback at all, Like, where is journalism? When you're trying to support one narrative instead of trying to actually show the entire picture and what's going on, it's going to absolutely be biased. I have no agenda. I'll tell you what my bias is. Whenever this show is mistakenly called journalism, it is a slap in the face to the actual journalist

whose work we rely on. I get the liberal media loves to hate on the Trump administration and anything they do, but in the process, there's so many mistakes that are made along the way. There hasn't been a reckoning and how we deal with the media environment that allow Trump to be birthed into existence. So what is our job? Are we providing information, galvanizing action?

Who are we talking to? And what are we asking of them? I'm Randabed Fattah. We're spending today's show with Evangalina Cisneros and William Randolph-Hurst, the man who changed American journalism from a mere record to a verb. And we'll think through what historical. tells us about the state of news today. Hi, this is Carolyn from Lopinger's Falls, New York,

and you're listening to Thrulyne from NPR. Your email inbox, like mine, is probably full of receipts and ads, but we've got something you'll actually want to open. Subscribe to NPR's book's newsletter for book recommendations, reviews, author interviews, and more delivered straight to you. No paywalls, no digging.

required. Sign up at npr.org slash newsletters. Part 1. Making the News. It's a cold, miserable January day in San Francisco in 1890. 26-year-old William Randolph-Hurst gets word of a horrible scene unfolding in the bay. There was a boat that capsized in the San Francisco Bay. A crew of five fishermen have been struck by a wave that's caused the boat. It's caused the boat. bow to shoot up into the air and bring the entire boat under. The men who can swim try to make their way to some nearby rocks. The rest aren't so lucky. And a number of the people on that boat were drowned.

One makes it to the rocks, the spray of the rising tide washing over him as he waits for help. There was a single man flailing in the water, clinging desperately to the rocks. Hearst springs into action. Hearst hires a tugboat, sends his reporters out there. His reporters, because Hurst owns the San Francisco Examiner, a newspaper that had almost tripled its circulation to about 45,000 since he took it over. And out in the bay, he sees an opportunity. A naked man was on Point Bonita rocks, crying for help.

At 11 o'clock, the high tide would cover the rocks, and he must die. unless help was sent. A Russian fisherman named Antonio Nicholas. And they rescue the man. He's the only survivor. The examiner writes the whole thing up for the next day's paper. In their telling, the lifeguards were refusing to go out. The conditions were rough.

The surf was too high. They, of course, get all sorts of fodder for their paper talking about how, look, these officials have. failed these people. According to the examiner, San Francisco's lifeguards had failed, and the only people who had taken action in the face of what the other newspapers had called an impossible rescue mission were the examiner's two reporters. Who's the hero? The journalist are the hero. The examiner has come to the rescue. Everywhere were heard praises for the enterprise and heroism. This is what you can count on. This is what we stand for. Action on your behalf.

Copies of the examiner containing the thrilling account of the rescue were sold almost as fast as they could be printed. It really sets the model for what he just explores with so much more vigor and detail in the following years. This is Karen Rogan Camp. I'm professor of English at East Texas A&M University. I'm author of two books, narrating the news, and sympathy, madness and crime. both of which look at 19th century periodicals. According to Karen, what Hearst did with the San Francisco Examiner was just the beginning of how he would infuse action into journalism.

Because remember, at the time of the shipwreck rescue, Hearst was only 26, and he'd only been at the helm of the paper for three years. This would be a good time to stop and explain how a guy in his 20s ended up with a newspaper, which for the record was a huge deal in the 19th, because newspapers were the main way people got news. There was no radio, no television, no social media. Print was king. So Hearst sees the power in newspapers and wants in.

And if you wanted to get into politics, there was no quicker way to do it than buying your own newspaper. Luckily for Hurst, his dad had one. But Hurst thought it needed a makeover, from boring to sensational. Hearst, for a long time, pitches to his dad, hey, let me take this paper over, let me turn this into something really exciting and fantastic. Hurst, by all accounts, always had a flair for the dramatic and kind of approached life itself in melodramatic terms. He wasn't a good student. He rather famously was expelled from Harvard, partly because of academic reasons, but also because he was, as a terrific prankster and just kept getting into trouble. But he wanted to be the West Coast Pulitzer.

Pulitzer, as in Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the New York World, which at the time was the leading national voice of the Democratic Party. Hearst idolized him. Pulitzer was a big deal, and he'd already spearheaded a movement called New Journalism. The premise of New Journalism is to revive what people, think the news should do. Make it something more exciting and more accessible for the common reader. Much of journalism at that time was dry. Newspaper articles were text-heavy, rows and rows of dense columns with no pictures, and many of them weren't accessible to everyone. The audience was not

welcoming of people perhaps whose first language was not English or who did not have the level of education that would make them want to pick up the current newspapers. So reinventing journalism also meant reinventing what newspapers looked like and how they read. Things like huge headlines, stacked headlines that are using very colorful language, the use of ample illustration. It would tell stories. rather than just provide information. You've got recognizable plot points. You've got characters.

It's written in a style that uses dialogue and imagery. So it's constantly blending the techniques of fiction writing with the techniques of reporting. William Randolph Hearst was all in. He told his reporters that if stories on the front page of his paper didn't elicit a G-Wiz? Well, they'd failed. On the second page, readers should say,

Holy Moses, and on the third, a God Almighty. And his vision wasn't limited to San Francisco. He wanted his newspapers in the hottest market in the country. And William Randolph-Hurst realized that he had to succeed in New York City. This is W. Joseph Campbell. He's an emeritus professor of communication at American University. And he's written about Hearst and Journalism, in the 19th century.

And you know that saying, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere? That was definitely true for newspapers at the time. Hearst knew it and moved east. And right away... Just shook up the place,

just shook up the city. And right from the get-go, he sets out to challenge Pulitzer's world. His flagship paper, that is, the New York world. It's a crowded marketplace. There are lots of newspapers in New York,

but the world is the big boy. Hearst purchased a failing newspaper called the New York Journal. Gone were the days of hero-worshipping Pulitzer. Now Pulitzer was his competitor, and Hurst wanted to win. And he basically sweeps into New York with a bottomless pocketbook and does everything in his power to undermine Pulitzer. He sells his paper, the journal, for one cent a day, where Pulitzer is still charging two cents a day.

He is brash. He is outrageous. He goes in and he steals away all of Pulitzer's best reporters and editors. And commissioned work from big names like Mark Twain. And so Hurst just goes in with guns blazing. And as part of this competition, Hurst wanted more eyeballs. and he went to increasingly outrageous lengths to get them. Before long, the age of new journalism was over,

and in its place came yellow journalism. Yellow journalism is like new journalism, but with a massive dose of steroids. It takes that line between fact and fiction and blurs it even further, and in many cases, just throws it out the window. Now, you have to understand that audience, of the time didn't mind if not every little detail in a news story was based on fact.

There are advice manuals for journalists at the time that say, make sure the essential facts of your story are there, but your audience is going to forgive you if you are a little loosey with some of the less important details. Make it colorful. Make it engaging. The worst you can do is to write a dull story. Of course, there were some people who didn't like the style of journalism. Yellow Journalism was a term that was developed by a rival newspaper editor in Irvin Wardman, who ran the New York Press. He really resented Hearst's wealth, resented Hurst's flamboyance,

and resented the innovations that Hurst was bringing to newspapers, including color comics. One of the comics that Hearst was publishing at the time was colloquially known as the Yellow Kid. And the centerpiece of the comic was a young, bald street urchin in New York City who wore a flamboyant yellow nightshirt. Irvin Woodman found this just awful and resented that kind of intrusion of frivolous characters into American journalism. and this is early 1897. Wardman comes up with the term Yellow Kid Journalism,

sort of indirectly drawing on the comic strict character, the Yellow Kid, and then soon after that, just called it yellow journalism. And it just stuck, and it lives on to this day. Her style of journalism worked. The paper quickly became popular. Another feature of yellow journalism

in the 1890s was the, tendency to self-promotion. And Hearst was big into self-promotion, not for himself necessarily, but for his newspaper because he wanted to make sure that this was the newspaper that people were speaking about, the newspaper that people wanted to buy.

Hurst sent his reporters to look for the stories that would grab people's attention, crime, drama, heroism. But reporting news was just one part of his approach. He also started to explore the possibilities for what kind of news he could make. He'd already sent reporters to save the capsize boats in San Francisco, but he wanted to do something bigger and bolder. And he got his chance in the summer of 1897, when...

Great murder mystery that absorbed New York City in that summer. A human torso was found floating in the East River. And now it seemed like everyone in the city wanted to know who this person was and what had happened. The mystery of the headless, haggled, mutilated body, which was found Saturday afternoon by two Eastside boys floating along the flood tide in the East River at the foot of 11th Street is doubly a mystery now, more than ever, a horror. Hurst sees how captivated the city is by this mystery, and he decides it's not enough to report on the police investigation. Why leave the case to the police when he has a whole newsroom at his disposal? So he assembles, his special team of journalists that he called.

His murder squad in New York, whose role was to look at cases that were in the news and try to solve the mystery of what's going on here. And Hearst sends his reporters out, first to identify who is this person. The journal establishes the disappearance of Golden Sub. The dead man is named William Goldensub. The journal identifies him as a German immigrant who works at a Turkish bathhouse. Not only that, they, through their reporting, detect who the likely murderer is, and they go and confront this person and perform a citizen's arrest. The journal's reporters arrest Nack the husband, who had threatened Golden Sub's life.

He turns out to be innocent. But Hearst reporters parse through clues and find that there are two culprits behind the murder, Golden Sups lover and her other boyfriend. In a tale made for, and in this case reported out by the tabloids, the murder is a result of a love triangle. They were far ahead of the police in solving this pretty heinous crime. And of course, they get to tell the story over and over again. It's almost like a serialized novel that they're writing.

And they are actively participating in solving the mystery. It veered into kind of an activist or participatory journalism. Hearst called it the journalism of action or the journalism that acts. His newspapers would take an active role in solving the problems of contemporary life. It wouldn't just comment on it. They just wouldn't call attention to it. They would actually go out and try to resolve these problems. And in essence, the whole paper becomes the melodrama of the city in which common people are the innocence at the mercy of corrupt government officials or the police who bungle their cases.

and the hero is the journal and the newspaper of reporters who come in and rescue the damsel in distress the common people. Hearst had done what he set out to do, transformed journalism, first in San Francisco and now New York City, but he wasn't satisfied. Coming up, Hurst puts his thumb on Cuban politics and tips the scale. Hi, I'm Hazel Belvoir from Seattle, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. I love your guys with us so much. It's like watching a movie in my mind. Thank you.

Part 2. Jailbreak Journalism. What was happening in Cuba was of great interest to readers in the United States and especially to Hearst. Cuban revolutionaries had decided to challenge the authority. of the Spanish government. Since the mid-19th century, Cubans had been rebelling against Spanish colonial rule. But in 1895, a new and stronger rebellion broke out into full-on revolution. Three years later, the conflict was at a breaking point. At no time since the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution has the tension and anxiety been so great as it is at present.

We are now on the very verge of war with Spain. Spain still ruled Cuba in the late 1890s, and Spanish were trying to put down a rebellion against their colonial rule. It was not going well. For two years it had been going on, the Spanish had not been successful in shutting this down. And Spain was getting a lot of bad press in the U.S. Regional papers like the Macon Telegraph in Georgia

painted grisly scenes with headlines saying things like thousands perish there for lack of food, which is denied by Spain. And the bad press came with a point of view. A story in the sun read, quote, We do not pretend to be neutral between Spain and Cuba, and that the Cubans may suffer grievously from our withholding neutral rights.

The newspapers reflected the U.S.'s vested interests in Cuba. The U.S. did not want European influence so close to its shores, and it saw the island as an economic opportunity for U.S. business. On top of that, many people felt there was a moral imperative to care about Cuba as a humanitarian crisis unfolded there. In fact, they had attracted a lot of negative attention through one of their policies, which was called Reconcentration, a forerunner of concentration camps in which the Cuban non-combatants, old men, women, children were herded into garrison towns under Spanish controls. thousands and thousands of Cuban noncombatants died from starvation and disease, and this was the way in which Cuban women were treated by Spanish rulers.

And Hearst saw this unfolding and recognizing it this perfect paradigm of the narrative he loved most. Damsel in distress, people in distress being controlled by evil over, lords, who's going to rescue them? That journal is, of course. Leading the way in the U.S.'s coverage of Cuba was William Randolph-Hurst New York Journal, which had already established itself as one of the leading newspapers in the U.S. And in true Hearst fashion, the journal recounted the Cuban people's travails in lurid detail, a written telenovela for the American people. And so you have article after article after article,

positioning and framing the tale of what is happening in Cuba as this exciting, heroic, romantic narrative. And Evangeline and Cisneros, her case fit quite well into that paradigm. The Cuban Girl Martyr. Fortuitously, there's this woman that Hearst learns about. this young Cuban teenager. This true daughter of the revolution. Who was locked up for being an insurrectionist.

They discover her in a Cuban women's prison. And what they say is that she is in this prison because she has fought off the advances of the Spanish official. And now she's being imprisoned for simply trying to defend her honor. And isn't it tragic? Isn't it horrible? Somebody's got to do something about this. She was jailed in Havana at the Casa de Recojides,

which was a notorious prison for women who were really down on their luck. The Spanish authorities had placed her in that jail in the center of Havana, held her without trial. Hearst's reporters in Havana sometimes would pass by the jail, and Hearst reporters noted this young woman. She was at the time 17 or 18 years old and was striking in her looks and was quite different from the other inmates of this prison. Young, beautiful, cultured, guilty of no crime save that of having in her veins the best blood in Cuba. They present her as having the best blood.

What they mean by that is that she's not of mixed race. If you look at her photos, she certainly looks white, and in their stories, in fact, they differentiate between Cisneros and the other women she is imprisoned with who are described in very racialized, quite ugly terms. So very clearly, there's colorism going on here. There's classism. she's presented as being more of an aristocratic nature. The Cisneros case was a great way for Hurst to call attention to and really kind of exploit this story for his newspaper and his newspaper's prominence.

So Hurst's newspaper, the journal, began to report who was his woman? And what is she doing there? Why? This true daughter of the revolution is now undergoing trial by a military tribunal at Havana on the charge of rebellion after a hideous imprisonment of nine months in a jail. She was a symbol of Cuban resistance. So Hearst encourages the women of America to get involved. The journal mounted a nationwide international, actually,

campaign petition drive to get the Spanish to release her. He appeals directly to the Queen of Spain. He convinces President McKinley's mother. And thousands and thousands of American women. To engage in letter-writing campaign. Many hundreds signed petitions to the Pope in behalf of the fair Cuban girl. That campaign went nowhere.

And when none of that works, Hearst comes up with this plot to break her out of jail himself via his own reporters. jailbreaking journalism, as one rival newspaper called it. Hurst sent a guy from the Washington Bureau named Carl Decker. He's ostensibly there as the journals man in Cuba. Carl Decker reported a few stories while in Cuba, but he really had one main job.

He was there under instructions to break out of jail and bring to New York City successfully of Angelina Sinseros. There is some debate about how the jail break really went down. But according to the book that Cisneros and Decker wrote afterwards, it happened like this. On the night of the escape in October of 1897, the men walk from the roof of the house they rented to the roof of the jail. They locate the window of the jail cell holding Cisneros. A man tells her, Don't be frightened. We'll soon have you out of here. They try to cut through the jail bars.

The man began to saw in the bars. The saw made a terrible noise. But they wake up Evangeline's cellmates and don't make it too far. So then the men leave and come back the following night. He asked me if I were ready, and I said I was. Then he began to work on the bars of the window. He twisted and turned the bar with something which he had in his hand.

Click. It broke. Carl Decker and two of his accomplices used steel wrenches to break the bars and smuggle her out of the prison. We climbed down from the roof into the patio of a little house and then went into the house itself. Oh, it was good to be free. One of the men took me by my hand and led me quickly into the street. There, a carriage was waiting. In a moment, we were in the carriage and being driven away, a way to freedom. I don't think any of us spoke. When we had written quite a little way, the carriage stopped, and the two men took me into a house. I don't know whose house it was,

even in what street it was, nor if I did know, should I tell. And into the home of a collaborator, and he hid Evangelinea for a couple of days in his home before they dressed her up as a, she was a petite, maybe not even five feet tall, dressed her as a boy, and then walked her to the passenger steamer to the docks in Nevada where she was smuggled aboard the boat and escaped Cuba that way. A few days later, on October. 13th, 1897. She arrived in New York City. Evangeline Sisneros reaches the land of liberty.

Now, what really happened is somewhat open to debate. What's of more interest to me is how the journal told the story. And in the journal's telling, the journal breathlessly relates that Evangeline Cisneros has been broken out of jail. And who has done that? The Night and Shining Arbor, of course. The journal itself. One week ago last night,

the journal correspondent broke the bars of her cell and led her to liberty over the flat roofs of the Cuban capital. It is the memory of those thrilling few minutes that meant for her a lifetime of captivity or a future of peace and liberty that most often recurs to her now. They framed this as a story that directly draws

upon some of the most popular literary genres of the time. The prison break narrative. The medievalist romance is an extremely popular kind of fiction in the 1890s. And they'll even have comics where they'll show Evangelinea coming away from the prison, and there's a knight standing by the boat. It's a night in shining arbor, and across the front it says, journal. So quite explicitly, they say this is a tale that belongs as a medieval romance rather than just the regular news. But this is reality, right?

It's like fiction, but it's more exciting than fiction because it's real. And who's the hero of the story? The Journal. Coming up, the legacy of Hearst Journalism of Action. Hi, I'm Hazel Belvoir from Seattle, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part 3. A Shared Reality. The rescue of Miss Evangela Sissneros from her prison in Havana brings forth hearty congratulations from every section of the United States.

When she arrived in New York City, Hurst had organized this rapturous celebration, this rapturous reception for this young woman, Evangeline Sissneros. The journal promotes the story of Sissneros arriving. They host a huge parade for her and this enormous celebratory rally. A crowd estimated at 75,000 persons thronged in in about Madison Square to formally welcome Evangelinea Kosio and Cisneros, the escaped Cuban prisoner. Within a few months, she publishes her version of the story. A man stood on the roof and was looking in at the window.

He asked me if I was ready and I said I was. Carl Decker writes a story of what happened. The fever of hurry was all in our vans. I quickly grasped Evangeline about the waist and lifted her through the bars. In a moment, she was out upon the roof and was bursting into a joyous carol of freedom when I clasped my hand over her mouth. She gets to go to the White House and meet President McKinley. She just becomes this important figure in selling not only the idea of the idea of

of Cuban independence, but in selling the newspaper as well, and selling the story of this journalism that acts. It's widely covered by other newspapers in New York and elsewhere, the celebration of a newspaper's triumph over Spanish colonial rule. I mean, it seems astonishing to this day. One of the really great achievements in American journalism, an event that will stand as a landmark in the history of, nations as well as newspapers.

Journalism publications, including one titled the Fourth Estate, really thought this was a great coup for American journalism and really praised what Hearst and his newspaper and his reporters had done in freeing Cisneros and bringing her to freedom. Now, not all newspapers were saying this was a great feat of American journalism. Some people thought it should never have been done. One in Chicago referred to this as a case of jailbreaking journalism, which I think is a great way to describe it. The Chicago Times Herald terms the feat jailbreaking journalism,

and concerning it, the Times Herald makes the following sensible remarks. Think of the brainless folly of the act. It might upset all negotiations and make the efforts of the president to win independence for Cuba by peaceful means absolutely useless. Audiences love the story. It's very popular. It's very exciting. But it's also so excessive that more and more people start to recognize things as being out of control. When you've got the two most important newspapers in America's largest city competing in such unfettered ways to be ever more exciting, ever more appalling, ever more exhilarating, that train has to see. stop somewhere. And what is going on as well during this time is you have a new owner of the

paper that ultimately comes out of this whole thing as Victor, and that's the New York Times. In 1896, Adolf Oaks purchased the New York Times. And he, of course, puts forward the famous masthead saying all the news that's fit to print. So he positions his paper as standing in direct opposition to the kind of excess that the world and journal are putting out there. New York Times thought it was just unlawful and illegal and just countervened international law and international authority. And they weren't necessarily calling for Hearst to return of

to Cuba and Spanish authorities there, but thought that this was a very reckless thing for a newspaper to do, to undertake. This was also an example of how Hearst's journalism could make a difference, the journalism of action. This is not just some sort of passing commentary on daily activities. This is journalism taking an active role in making a difference and writing wrongs of society. There has never been a case, at least in my view, of America. American journalism participating in a primary role in an international jailbreak. So this was an astonishing case, unprecedented case, and a case of really the zenith of the journalism that acts, the journalism of action that William Randolph-Hurst was an advocate of.

Of course, after the zenith comes the fall. And Hearst's big intervention in Cuba pushed other people in the industry to reassess their journalism's purposes and methods. More and more critics of the press start to say, this is too far, we do need new standards. And ironically enough, one of the things that happens as we move into the 20th century is the rise of journalism schools

and the credentialing of newspaper reporters as people who've gone through some sort of training that upholds a, a certain level of standard. I think that detached role that the New York Times pursued for many, many years, detached an authoritative reporting, but without taking a role in the reporting, without showing your partisan colors, it was meant to be a little more neutral, even-handed, detached, dare I say, objective.

Over time, the standards created and enforced by the New York Times became the default for serious journalism. Journalists weren't there to make the news. They were there to document what was happening with discernment and impartiality. The goal was not to have skin in the game. Doing that quickly became dismissed as advocacy journalism,

but rather to be objective so audiences could make up their own minds. Objectivity and the pursuit of it has been a big debate in the industry ever since. And lately, it's front and center as newsrooms are once again re-evaluating their role and purpose in the face of new information outlets like Instagram and TikTok. When the internet became a thing, became a reality,

became a real challenge for mainstream media, for conventional news media, they responded pretty poorly, pretty ineptly, and pretty sluggishly to the digital challenge beginning in the mid-1990s. And that challenge continues to this day. Some, a few media outlets have been able to surmount the challenge. Most of them have not.

One that has surmounted the challenge and has done is very profitable is the New York Times. All the news that's fit to print is part of the picture. Its other interests, including games, including puzzles, including recipes, including ancillary elements that it owns and have proven to be very popular are, successful and help keep the New York Times a profitable entity. That's right. The New York Times' biggest source of revenue is its digital subscriptions, which can include the news along with games and recipes. You could call those distractions or smart business. A 2026 Pew poll found that over 50% of Americans are worn out from the news,

and trust in news has been on the decline for years. Americans don't have a whole lot of trust in the news media to tell the story accurately, to tell it fairly. Those levels of trust have really cratered in recent years. Gallup began doing these trust in media surveys back in the 1970s. At that time, the news media was kind of buoyed by the Watergate scandal that the news media had a conspicuous, if not decisive, role in uncovering reporting on. And so the trust level of the news media was very high back in the mid-1970s,

at least according to Gallup's polling on this topic. It has subsequently dropped off pretty consistently since then, driven largely by Republicans and independents who far less trust in the news media than their Democratic counterparts. But nonetheless, it's headed downwards, pretty strikingly, and continues to have cratered in recent years. A big reason for this crater is because, we in the U.S. are in a moment of extreme division, and many people blame the media and newsrooms

for this. American journalism might be reaching back to its deeper roots of very partisan, very politically oriented news organizations. It was that way, way back in the early days of the American Republic. Whatever his other motivations, it's clear that Hearst felt there was some unmet need, and he had ideas about how journalism, could meet that need. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 took place.

It was a devastating natural disaster. And Hearst organized food aid to be sent by train to Galveston to help support the victims of the hurricane. And that's the kind of journalism of action that he had in mind, that he would take an active role to sort of perform the safety net role that was otherwise missing in American life at the time. So what's missing today that journalism could help solve, in a world where it feels like we have endless information or news or AI content accessible immediately,

so much feels like it's out of our control. What role can facts and truth and stories play in a world where it feels like anything and everything is possible? I worry that the American public no longer cares as much if something is made up, or if there's a level of fabrication or stretching of the facts, provided the narrative fits their social and political biases. And with the rise of the world of citizen journalism, where anybody can start a YouTube channel, you can make up whatever you want,

and provided you have people who are helping to support you, you can just keep going. but people who are interested in that kind of sensational news, they want more, and then they need more, and they need even more than that. And so sort of like what we saw with a yellow press, it just becomes this snowball rolling down the hill. I worry, I worry greatly about the state of news. We no longer seem to have a shared reality in some way across the nation. And, you know, a literary historian, I've always been open to the fact that the news is constructed in the same way that history is constructed. Yes, you have a set of fact, but the way that is conveyed is a narrative,

it is a construction. And that means that things are subject to storytelling. I'm fine with that. But if there is no set of fact from which to work, then where are we? Where do we go with that? That's it for this week's show. I'm Randaabed Fattah, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. Next week on the show. I think for a long time, tech considered itself sort of searching for new frontiers. And in recent years, they're starting to look for literal frontiers.

The fantasy cities of the ultra-rich and their very real effects, on the rest of us. Rather than kind of reform or change existing institutions, a lot of tech elites want to either replace them entirely or create their own alternatives. This episode was produced by me and Ramtin and... Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg.

Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Irene Noguchi. Kiana Muratem. Thomas Coltrane. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Thank you to Johannes Durgy, Dylan Kurtz,

Rebecca Ferrar, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Navid Marvi, show Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. And make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app.

That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.