A Brief History of Fake News

In the 1890s, two newspapers, the New York World and the New York Journal, were competing for readers.

In order to get people to buy their newspapers, both papers tried to one-up each other by using a technique called sensationalism, or reporting on a topic in a way that attracts public interest and excitement but doesn’t always seek out the facts.

This kind of reporting was called "yellow journalism" by Erwin Wardman, the editor of another New York newspaper, the New York Press, who saw the World and Journal’s lack of ethics as a problem for his profession.

The “yellow” referred to the color of a quick-drying ink that the papers used when printing comic strips.

Below are examples of sensationalized headlines and yellow journalism from the World and Journal. You can click on them to see the full pages and read some of the articles.