Was American Justification for the War with Spain influenced by Yellow Journalism?

“That Hearst has received so large a measure of credit or blame for that ‘glorious war’ is a tribute to his genius as a self-promoter, explains David Nasaw in his book The Chief,” (Nasaw, 125). The popular belief is that yellow journalists like Hearst sensationalized Spanish injustices in Cuba; other papers picked up on and reiterated exaggerations especially after the sinking of the Maine and this pressure convinced the public and McKinley to go to war (Campbell, 97). Was American justification for the war with Spain influenced by Yellow Journalism? I believe that American justification for war with Spain was influenced by Journalism in general. Both conservative titles and yellow journals influenced the war. Whether the papers were telling the stories of Spanish atrocities from an objective point of view or sensationalizing them, Americans still wanted to get involved in the Cuban Rebellion. Yellow Journalism told stories of carnage and injustice committed on the Cuban people but they didn’t create the incidents. Many factors lead to a nation wanting to go to war and the stories in newspapers are only part of it. First we should ask: what is Yellow Journalism?
From Encyclopedia Britannica online: “the use of lurid features and sensationalized news in newspaper publishing to attract readers and increase circulation (Yellow). The phrase was coined in the 1890’s to describe the tactics employed in furious competition between two New York City newspapers, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World (Mugridge, 7). Some of the main arguments against yellow journalism pressing the country into war are pointed directly at the two newspapers that are credited with making yellow journalism famous. Screaming prominent headlines and lavish color pictures of the destruction of the Battleship Maine and Spanish war crimes encouraged sales of these yellow journals, (Campbell, 97). This paper will focus on the influence of the press in the 1890’s and especially Hearst’s Journal.
Those who believe that yellow journalism influenced the war believe that the “Steady Drum Roll” of anti-Spanish stories pushed the government and the people of the US towards war (Campbell, 104). But it is hard to see that this could be the case when the Yellow Press had such little power to do it. Hearst owned but two news papers in 1898; The Journal and the San Francisco Examiner (Mugridge, 8). In a time when most conservative papers deplored the sensationalism of the yellow press why would they follow their lead against Spain (Campbell 103)? While Hearst did control a syndicate that sent news stories to other papers, there is little evidence that yellow journalisms views permeated into small town and rural America, (Mugridge, 7; Campbell, 99). Some rural people received the journal and the World with their local papers (Campbell, 117). Most local papers didn’t support war and didn’t trust the Journal or other unsavory yellow journals (118).
In a debate about the effectiveness of journalism on people, two sides immerged. The “limited effects school” who believed “that readers had become to sophisticated – and their lives too hurried - for them to be much influenced by newspaper content,” (100). The other camp was the “powerful effects school” who believed that the press had a very big impact on people’s conclusions and therefore campaigned against Yellow Journalism. How could the American Public and the Government really be at the mercy of the Yellow Press when many believed that you couldn’t trust the yellow press and others believed what they said had no effect on them? While New York and other major cities had yellow journals in influence them the rural areas had even less contact with sensational journalism.
“Hearst played on American prejudices; he did not create them. Although he and other sensationalists supplied many false stories, they did not fabricate the major events that moved the United States (Nasaw, 132). An important question to ask is what was really going on in Cuba. The brutal Cuban rebellion was being met with Spanish savagery. Spanish General Weyler was popularly known as the “Butcher” in American Press (Campbell, 107). The Spanish’s first reconcentración put “as many as 400,000 Cuban noncombatants,” in walled cities with rotten food and no sanitation (106). Thousands of people died as many as 50,000 in province of Havana alone, (Hernandez). Even the conservative press couldn’t ignore the horrors of the Spanish.
The yellow journals weren’t the only press that were reporting Spanish abuses, and in a sensational manner (Campbell, 98). The Spanish imposed rigid censorship on the American press for what they were reporting in news papers back home and this made it very hard to get the truth out of Cuba (107, 98). Conflicting reports were being received by all the papers forcing even conservative journals to give erroneous information. Therefore all the papers had to speculate and print inaccurate reports (112; 113).
The conservative press would like to blame the “unnecessary war” on Yellow Journalism, (Campbell, 97). Hearst would like to claim credit for the war with headlines like “How Do You like the Journals war,” (Mugridge, 17). We saw that Yellow Journalism’s influence couldn’t reach very far, and that all of the papers in America were forced to report the truth of Spanish brutality. This shows us that Yellow Journalism influenced American opinion but not anymore then conservative titles.
Work Cited
Campbell, W. Joseph. Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies. Westport: Praeger, 2001.
Hernandez, José M. Cuba in 1898. Library of Congress. 21 Feb. 2002
Mugridge, Ian. The View from Xanadu: William Randolph Hearst and United States Foreign Policy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 1995.
Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
“Yellow Journalism.” Encyclopedia Britannica Online (2005):

Their Lives are Bigger than any Big Ideas

Today our nation is wrapped up in a titanic effort to democratize Iraq. We were told by our leaders that we must go there to stop Saddam Hussein from giving weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Many at home were struck by the fear of the September 11th attacks and distrusted the tyrannical dictator in Iraq. Others believed that the information about the weapons was always shady and still others never thought that violence could solve our problems. I was one who would have agreed with the former until recently. Now I know that our enemy is war. I believe that the war in Iraq is wrong. If you still believe in the mission I hope that I can at least get you to look at another perspective. I would like to start out by looking at a couple of the perspectives from people who are in favor of the war in Iraq.
One of the biggest reasons Americans believe that our mission in Iraq is right is because we have intentions of turning Iraq into a democracy. Everyone knows that democratic nations don’t go to war with one another. Why would two countries that were ruled by their own people want to fight one another? Well, unfortunately, those beliefs are fallacies. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder completed a statistical analysis of democratic nations and their tendencies to go to war. Mansfield is the Hum Rosen Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and Snyder is the Robert and Rénee Belfer Professor of Political Science in the Political Science Department and Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Their study tracked all the countries of the world from 1811 to 1980. Each country was classified as democratic, autocratic, or mixed regime – meaning a state that features parts of both democracies and autocracies (Mansfield 80). The study found that nations who were democracies did go to war with other democracies. For example, Serbia and Croatia in the Balkans, Armenia and Azerbaijan which are former Soviet Republics, and Peru and Ecuador in South America have all gone to war with one another (80 and 95). While all of these countries are of differing maturity levels of democracy the fact is clear that even if Iraq becomes a democracy it doesn’t guarantee it will be a country that will not fight other democracies. In fact, Iraq – which is being pushed through a rapid democratization process – fits into the category of countries that are most likely to fight a war (81).
The effect was greater still for those states making the largest leap, from full autocracy to high levels of democracy. Such states were on average about two-thirds more likely to become involved in any type of war (and about twice as likely to become involved in interstate war) than states that remained autocracies” (83).
Mansfield and Snyder didn’t tabulate nationalism in their statistical tests, but they agree that “historical and contemporary evidence strongly suggests that raising nationalism often goes hand in hand with rising democracy” (83). Nationalism in Iraq is evident from the elections where there was an unpredicted turnout in the voters’ booth. “Of Iraq's 14 million eligible voters, 8,456,266 cast ballots. That represents a turnout of about 60 percent, several points higher than the predicted 57 percent” (Shiite’s). The incurring insurgency against Coalition occupancy of Iraq is the biggest example of the Iraqis’ growing nationalism. With the many different peoples in Iraq and especially the majorities of Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims and Kurds, we may see a problem with nationalism for certain cultural groups and not the nation as a whole. I have to admit that the desire to change the political system in the Middle East seems to be a good idea. The region is trampled under the fist of autocracies. Unfortunately, I don’t think war is a good way to change Iraq’s government. But if you remember that that isn’t the reason we went to Iraq in the first place.
When Colin Powel Addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 he said, “There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction” (Iraq Denial). Those dangerous weapons were the reason Americans supported this war. What ever happened to those Weapons of Mass Destruction? According to a 12 January article on CNN.com the US has given up on the search for WMDs. “The United States is taking steps to determine how it received erroneous intelligence that deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was developing and stockpiling nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,” said The Bush Administration’s Press Secretary Scott McClellan (Official). Some believe that the WMDs are in Syria and Iran, quickly shuffled over the borders before the Coalition invasion. Others contend that the weapons were never there to begin with. The question that I have is: Would Saddam even have used them anyway? Saddam used chemical weapons on Iran during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980’s (Shlaim, 87). Saddam also used the Chemical Weapons on the rebelling Kurds in 1988 killing 5,000 and leaving 7,000 injured some with long term illnesses in the town of Halabja (Osman). But during Gulf War I, no chemical weapons were used by Iraq, despite the massive military that was moving against Saddam’s forces. When would you use chemical or biological weapons if you had them? Saddam used them on Kurds who are his own citizens and on Iranians in a protracted war. Saddam didn’t use them on the Coalition, but he had used them before and that seems to create the fear of Saddam giving Terrorists WMDs. Our intelligence on Saddam having more WMDs has officially been declared false. Whether the WMDs were there to begin with or not I don’t think it is up to the United States to be WMD police. We have Chemical Weapons and there are 28 nations who are known to have chemical weapons or have suspected programs (Chemical). I believe that using WMDs as a case for war is bogus. But Saddam Hussein is a supporter of terrorism – Right?
Well, yes he was a supporter of terrorism. Many Americans feel that Saddam was in cahoots with our greatest enemy Al Qa’eda. Saddam like all Muslim nation leaders has had a sore spot for Israel. Saddam would pay the families of Hamas Suicide Bombers to help them after their family member blew themself and others up (Proud). Hezbollah bombers were also paid by Saddam (Hezbollah). Hezbollah, a terrorist group based in Lebanon, opposes Israel. Hamas, too, is a terrorist group working to end the Israeli control of the land also known as Palestine. Both Hamas and Hezbollah have killed Americans, but both organizations are more interested in defeating Israel then the US (American). The problem is that there is no definitive evidence that proves that Saddam did anything more then allow Al Qa’eda to operate inside his boarders (Selling). Know lets look at my main points against this war.
We have sent American soldiers all over the earth and now they are in battle across the Middle East. They are not protecting our borders but the borders of other nations. While they protect others they are dying. As of 8 March 2005, 1,511 American GI’s have died, 364 of these soldiers died as non-combat fatalities. Those men and women will never be with their families again but 11,220 Americans have been wounded in the war. Out of these 5,387 were ‘lucky’ enough to return to service within 72 hours (icasualties). I do not believe that Americans dying in Iraq are keeping our borders safe. In fact I believe they are making more terrorism. Now I will tell you how we are creating terrorism.
We are creating terrorism by killing civilian Iraqis. As of today a website called Iraqi Body Count reports that between 16,231 and 18,509 Iraqi civilians have died in the liberation and democratization of Iraq (IBC). But other sources have claimed upwards of 100,000 civilian casualties (Chelala). The Project on Defense Alternatives did a study of Iraqi Casualties, both military and civilian, in the beginning of the war. Based on hospital records and burial surveys between 19 March and 20 April 2003 there were 4,376 to 5,726 casualties in Baghdad and the surrounding areas. Nearly half of these figures are civilian casualties (Conetta). “Only in Baghdad was the data from hospital and burial societies sufficiently complete to support an estimation of total war dead, both combatant and noncombatant”, says the report (Conetta). While this was at the beginning of the war, I can’t imagine that it has gotten much better. Dr. César Chelala, an international public health consultant, explains in his article that The Lancet, a British medical journal, completed a study in Iraq that shows that “there has been substantially more deaths in Iraq since the war began than in the period immediately before the conflict” (Chelala). A lot of these civilian deaths happened because of faulty intelligence or misguided weapons. Many buildings are being hit in civilian areas due to unknown reasons.
I oppose the destruction we are causing in Iraq. Not just its people but its buildings, roads, homes and infrastructure. One group called the Iraq Peace Team – who is affiliated with the group Voices in the Wilderness – lives in Baghdad. The IPT website has their report of the damage to the city and civilian casualties. The site records the first thirteen days of the war between 20 March and 1 April. The IPT report is drawn from first hand observations and interviews of Iraqis. Al Naser Market was visited after it was blown up, homes were blown up, commercial districts bombed, a farmhouse was hit by a bomb, and the list goes on (Baghdad). If you choose to visit this website, be cautious. Some of the report is accompanied with pictures, and they can be very graphic. Here are two excerpts from the report. The first excerpt details damage to a home and a neighboring school. Take note that not all of the IPT members can speak Arabic, so a lot of their information was gathered without having the whole story related to them.
On March 27, IPT visited the home of the Abdullah Haamad Hassawi family, House #74, Street #3, District 317, located in Al Tujjaar, a residential neighborhood in Al Shaab in North Baghdad. Next door to their home, IPT saw damage to windows of the Balquis Secondary School for Girls. In the Hassawi family home, we saw rubble from walls on the second floor roof patio in the courtyard below, as well as hundreds of marks in the outer walls made from small, uniform, cubed, metal pellets with sharp edges three to five millimeters thick. In an upstairs room, there was a large blood-stained mattress on the floor.” (Baghdad)
This next quote from the report is well described by the casualty.
Most of the homes were empty, and only two persons were injured, including Hashim Abdul Dayen. "I was outside at the time, going to a neighbor’s house, when the bomb hit. I turned around and was thrown back by a huge fireball. I just heard the deafening noise and saw bricks flying and clouds of dust rising. I tried to get up four times but kept falling down. I crawled towards my home, shouting for my mother and sister. The neighbors rushed out to help. It was nightmarish, but was also a miracle. My mother was only slightly injured and my sister was unhurt," said Ahmad Abel-Daayem, 28, from his bed at the Al Yarmouk hospital, surrounded by friends, his right leg heavily bandaged. It's only after I saw my mother and my sister that I felt the pain in my right leg. It was deeply cut from the ankle to the knee," he added. (Baghdad)
Another huge problem from Coalition bombing is the terrible state of Iraqi plumbing. Damaged water and sanitation systems from Gulf War I coupled with new bombings caused the systems to nearly collapse. Some homes have no water while others have contaminated water. A UNICEF assessment of nutrition in Baghdad “found that acute malnutrition has nearly doubled to what it was before the war” (Chelala). The assessment found that 70 percent of Baghdad children suffer from “various degrees of diarrhea, which [leads] to a loss of nutrients and often to death if not properly treated” (Chelala). So what happens to these Iraqis when their homes get flattened by a five-hundred pound bomb? Well, they become refugees.
The effect we have on the every day life of Iraqis is why I oppose this war. Can you imagine having to leave your home because bombs were indiscriminately falling on your family’s and your neighbors’ houses? What if a foreign military invaded your town and demanded to see inside your house at two in the morning? I believe that when most people in America think about these types of questions they might rationalize, “oh, well that could never happen to me; it’s just some other poor idiot on the other side of the globe.” Stop and think of how terrible that would be. I have a really hard time trying to imagine what it would feel like, but people who live in Iraq know what it is to be a refugee. The Coalition attack on Fallujah has displaced an estimated 200,000 of the cities 390,000 inhabitants. Karbala, Kufa, Najaf , and Samarrah, too, have lost many of their inhabitants who have been forced to move out because of the violence between the Coalition and insurgents. All over Iraq small numbers of people have been uprooted by the Coalition for reasons of ‘national security.’ According to international law, Coalition forces and combatants are responsible for protecting civilians to "prevent and avoid conditions that might lead to displacement of persons" (FMO). The UNHCR or United Nations High Commission for Refugees is dedicated to protecting the human rights and health of refugees over the entire world (UNHCR). In the Northern Sector of Iraq there are a presumed 800,000 refugees who will be returning to their homes. Due to Saddam’s "Arabisation" of Kurdish areas in the North of Iraq these Kurds were pushed out. Now these people are coming home and reports of 1,000 families have been registered with authorities to have their homes and belongings returned (Fact Sheet). Before the war Arab Iraqis lived in those homes. Now as a wave of Kurds return, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Arabs are running, fearing violence (Iraq). Who will pay for all of these refugees? Who will pay for their care while their homes can be returned to them without violence?
I also oppose the amount of money it will cost to fight this useless war. How much does this war cost us anyway? According to the San Francisco Chronicle, George W. Bush has asked for another $81.9 Billion for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. This will be on top of the $87 Billion that Congress gave him in September 2003, the $25 Billion in 2004, and the $419 Billion Bush proposed for the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2006. The largest chunks in Bush’s supplemental spending plan for this year are “$42.5 billion for combat and intelligence operations in Iraq and Afghanistan along with an increased death benefit to families of military personnel killed in the war zones” (Epstine). Another $5.7 billion will be used to train and equip Iraqi forces and $5.4 billion will replace old or damaged military gear (Epstine). Who pays for this? Where does the money come from? Tax Payers? No, it comes from an imaginary credit card called the national deficit.
In the end of this war will we be happy with the outcome? Will we feel that democracy for Iraq was the solution to our problems in the Middle East? Will we find that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden or other Islamic Fundamentalists conspiring to use WMDs on the U.S.? I don’t know the answer to these questions but I do know for sure that all sides will have lost a lot of fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, friends, and role models. Those who come back from Iraq with physical wounds or not will always live with the fact that they destroyed a country and spread fear upon an entire civilization. Those of us at home will pay for it with more taxes and more fear of what will happen next from “the forces of evil” that we set out to destroy in the first place.

Works Cited
American Victims of Mideast Terrorist Attacks. Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. 10 Mar. 2005 <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/usvictims.html>.
Baghdad Journal. Iraq Peace Team, Voices in the Wilderness. 7 Mar. 2005 <http://inlet.org/wade/iptreports/2003apr04/>.
Chelala, César. The Most Tragic Victims of the Iraq War. Common Dreams News Center. 8 Mar. 2005 <http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1030-23.htm>.
Chemical & Biological Weapons Resource Page. Monterey Institute of International Studies. 10 Mar. 2005 <http://cns.miis.edu/research/cbw/possess.htm>.
Epstine, Edward. Critics say war-fund request circumvents budget process. SFGate.com, San Francisco Chronicle. 7 Mar. 2005 <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/17/MNG1IBCL4L1.DTL>.
Fact Sheet: the IRAQ situation. UNHCR, The UN Refugee Agency. 7 Mar. 2005 <http://www.unhcr.ch/cgibin/texis/vtx/home/opendoc.pdf?tbl=NEWS&id=3ecde3 a04>.
Hezbollah Enlists Palestinians. LFP.com, Lebanon Foundation for Peace. 6 Mar. 2005 <http://www.free-lebanon.com/LFPNews/2004/April/April13/april13.html>.
IBC. The Iraq Body Count Project. 4 Mar. 2005 <http://iraqbodycount.net/>.
icasualties. Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. 7 Mar. 2005 <http://icasualties.org/oif/>.
Iraq after Saddam: Needs and Responses. FMO, Forced Migration Online. 7 Mar. 2005 <http://www.forcedmigration.org/guides/fmo015/>.
Iraq Denial and Deception. The White House. 10 Mar. 2005
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030205-1.html#23>.
Mansfield, Edward, and Jack Snyder. “Democratization and War.” Foreign Affairs May/June 1995: 79-97.
Official: U.S. calls off search for Iraqi WMDs. CNN.com, CNN. 5 Mar. 2005 <http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/01/12/wmd.search/index.html>.
Osman, Hiwa. Iraqi Kurds recall chemical attack. BBC News On-line, BBC. 5 Mar. 2005 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1877161.stm>.
Proud of My Son: Mahmoud Hamdan Kwasma, the Haifa bomber. Free Republic.com, Free Republic LLC. 6 Mar. 2005 <http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f- news/861590/posts>.
Selling an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. CNN.com, CNN. 10 Mar. 2005 .
Shiites Dominate Iraq Election; Kurds 2nd. ABC News International, ABC News. 5 Mar. 2005 <http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=495492>.
Shlaim, Avi. War and Peace in the Middle East. New York: Penguin, 1995.
UNHCR – Basic Facts. UNHCR, The UN Refugee Agency. 7 Mar. 2005 <http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/basics>.