Yellow journalism refers to a news media that uses exaggerated headlines, fear and sensationalism to attract eyeballs to advertisers. Another term used outside the U.S. is tabloid journalism. Scandals, celebrity gossip, and sensational claims often regarding race or sex or today, transgenderism serve to attract attention – but most of all they are used to generate FEAR. Today, the media is especially fond of expert pronouncements about the future – always scary, doom-centric forecasts of a dark and catastrophic future – yet almost all expert pronouncements of the past proved wrong.

Yellow journalism got its name from the mega publishers in the 1890s; the term “yellow” may have originated from a comic strip.

Today, the term “yellow journalism” is no longer in common use – yet the techniques are used every day. Indeed, almost all media today is yellow journalism – how the media manipulates your perspective using this one weird trick!

One simple way that goes unnoticed is for the media to declare that every topic is a “crisis”.

A quick review of Google News stories finds the following “crisis” topics – a majority of which are in the past 1-3 days:

1. Argentina’s economic crisis
2. Sudan crisis
3. Climate crisis (multiple times)
4. Bolivia’s crisis
5. Migrant crisis
6. Environmental crisis
7. Health crisis
8. Humanitarian crisis
9. Teen girls in crisis
10. San Francisco’s Fentanyl Crisis
11. Banking crisis
12. Veterans in crisis
13. Israel’s High Tech crisis
14. Housing crisis
15. Dianne Feinstein crisis
16. Russia’s demographic crisis
17. The crisis of work
18. America’s literacy crisis
19. Mental health crisis
20. Global debt crisis
21. Fiscal crisis
22. Cost of living crisis
23. Traffic deaths crisis
24. Kansas City diaper insecurity crisis
25. Chicago’s crime crisis
26. The border crisis
27. Military recruiting crisis
28. Insulin cost crisis
29. Nickel crisis
30. Natural gas crisis
31. Flint MI water crisis
32. The crisis of trust
33. Cancer crisis after pandemic
34. Kremlin threatens global crisis
35. Men’s health crisis
36. Sport’s celebrity experiencing “injury crisis”
37. Anheuser-Busch Dylvan Mulvaney crisis response

Fear is among the most powerful methods of propaganda messaging and the word “crisis” immediately connects to fear.

The media’s doomerism leads to the public’s mental health deteriorating – indeed, a crisis! From the above you can see that the media loves “prophets of doom”.

When everything is declared a crisis, everyone becomes numb – and no one listens to any of the noise anymore. The media itself descends into a parody and caricature of itself. Fewer and fewer people take the news seriously, and regard reporters as low class used car sales staff – indeed, to compare reporters to used car sales staff is to insult used car sale people.

During the recent pandemic nonsense, the media’s two favorite words were: surge and superspreader.

There was, in fact, a surge in doomerism, and reports telling us that every upcoming activity would become a superspreader. History showed that close to zero superspreader scary predictions proved true – but the media has no memory and never goes back and reviews their own abysmal track record. And why should they? They were too busy having moved onto the next prophet of doom!

The crisis in yellow journalism has led to the opposite of the media’s activist arm’s goals: Study finds that media’s climate crisis coverage sparks fear and favors avoidance.

The effect is “Never Cry Wolf”: The media has cried wolf for so long, about everything that eventually those who are paying attention, and anyone old enough to have seen this pattern play out for decades, no longer listens to the noise. We all begin to see that the media is bull shit and reporters are mostly fools and idiots.

All stories today further descend into stories of an oppressor and an oppressed victim. Their intent, presumably, is to create an emotional link to the victim – and to get the reader or viewer hooked emotionally. Those who are hooked emotionally are, coincidentally, more susceptible to responding to advertising messages.