Customer Reviews

Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies

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The people who would most likely purchase this book should heed caution for a few reasons.

To the scholar/student/historian looking to write a paper about the yellow press, Spanish-American war, or effects of the media on the public during times of war:
First of all, the book is so topic-specific that it serves very little purpose other than to describe the circumstances of the yellow press during the Spanish-American war. Not only does it go into great depths to explain (in hundreds of pages) what happened over the course of 3 months, but it works to disproves conventional wisdom. Considering this is one of the only resources out there that disagrees with the notion that the media caused the public to rally for war against Spain, writing a paper agreeing with this book means that the scholar will have few other sources to back their claim.

To any reader:
The language of this book is so verbose that it loses the reader's attention. Maintaining focus on the message becomes difficult when in every sentence the reader must recall vocabulary words not studied since prepping for the SATs. Sometimes the author seems to be writing purely for the sake of deperately trying to prove his intelligence instead of wanting the reader to understand his points. Indeed, his points are so muddled in bombast that comprehending main themes is virtually impossible. The author would do best remembering that persuading the audience is done correctly by validity of ideas, not by how well they are packaged.

I can think of no reason this book would be of use to anyone-- too few sources exist that support the premise of this book for scholars to use it as research, and anyone else who would use this book to learn more about the conditions of the late 1800's should turn to other books that are more reader-friendly.

this book gave a really good perspective on yellow journalism. the book also gave very good and detailed information. i reccomend this book to anyone doing any sort of research on yellow journalism