You scroll through Instagram aimlessly, letting the constant barrage of information take you away. Headline after headline pops up on your feed about politics and music and business and pop culture. You get sucked in and click on every post you see. Eventually, you fall into an endless rabbit hole and decide to start googling things, but, to your surprise, nothing shows up. There isn’t a single article backing up this account’s claim. You realize that you’ve been tricked by yellow journalism once again. 

Yellow journalism, also known as sensationalist journalism, has historically described newspapers that prioritized lurid, sensationalized stories that were presented as fact to attract readers and increase circulation. It started out with the circulation wars between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, according to Middle Tennessee State University. While the specific technologies and business models have changed, the underlying logic of monetizing attention through appeals to emotion and curiosity remains, according to the International Symposium of Online Journalism (ISOJ).

In the era of social media platforms and algorithmic feeds, sensational content “has become increasingly relevant and is widely employed in journalistic practice…held responsible for misleading readers, propagating fake news and violating journalist code of ethics,” according to a study done by Salman Khawar and Mark Boukes the University of California (UC), Davis.

“From a historical perspective, we’ve had sensationalism forever,” said Christopher Wilbur, Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. government and politics teacher. “It’s not new, but with the advent of social media and the internet, sensationalism can thrive in a lot of different ways.” 

The rise of social media has led to a steady uptick in interaction bait and misleading headlines in order to gain more views. The UC Davis study found that posts that featured clickbait, a term that describes intentionally misleading or hooking titles, made up the majority of the posts both published and viewed by social media users. The increased interactions result in the algorithm placing it on more users’ home feeds, creating a cycle of misinformation, according to ISOJ. 

Social media sensationalism and its rise has led to much more problems than in the past. It has become increasingly difficult to find trustworthy resources, which some classes have tried to help combat. 

AP Seminar, a class that focuses on evaluating evidence, analyzing real world problems and coming up with solutions, relies heavily on articles and studies that form the basis of their work. However, with the spread of sensationalist journalism solely for views, finding reliable sources can become difficult. 

“Part of writing our papers is finding peer reviewed journals,” said Fiona Freiss, a sophomore AP seminar student. 

When the sources aren’t part of a larger study, however, it becomes more complicated. “For articles we find on the internet, we have ways to figure out whether or not it’s trustworthy,” Freiss said.

One way to do this is by looking at the writers and authors of the work.

“I check to see if they have a degree and what it’s in because sometimes it could be totally unrelated to the topic,” Freiss said, regarding clickbait. “There are times that I have clicked on an article and been like, ‘Wow, this does not at all say what I’m looking for.’”

Nisma Qureshi, a journalism student at New York University, said that this yellow journalism online can decrease the trustworthiness of news outlets too. 

“Audiences have been trained for years that the news prides itself on being impartial and yellow journalism completely destroys that by allowing for more subjectivity,” Qureshi said. 

Sensationalist journalism can look like misrepresenting facts or events to look more enticing to click on, eye catching words like “incredible” or unbelievable”, or edited pictures. Qureshi said that there is not much journalists themselves can do to combat this modern day yellow journalism aside from making their work honest and clear. 

“Almost everything is in the consumers’ hands,” Qureshi said. “Show publishing houses what you want, especially when it comes to something with real world impact like journalism. Engagement leads to sales, sales leads to money.” 

Sales, and subsequently money, are a main factor in this uptick in sensationalism. More clicks or views on an article lead to more money and engagement. The more sensationalist features used in an article or post from a news source, the higher the favorite count is, which confirms the effectiveness of clickbaits, according to the UC Davis study. 

“My journalism professors often mention integrity and the objectivity norm,” Qureshi said. “The objectivity norm simply refers to an expectation of neutrality among reported pieces, which social media has destroyed.” 

Many of the more traditional and reputable news outlets require subscriptions. These paywalls may prevent many from getting credible and reliable information, according to Wilbur. 

“Publications that operate with a paywall or subscription model tend to be less prone [sensationalism] and not everybody has disposable income,” Wilbur said. “If you’re reading something you’re afraid is sensationalized, put it into Google and see how different the headlines are from publication to publication and that gives you an indication.” 

While modern tabloids and dramatized sources like The Daily Mail have much in common with yellow journalism, many people are able to recognize that those sources are attempting to get attention through shock. According to Elizabeth R. Purdy, PhD, in an article on EBSCO, a platform for research collection, a more significant challenge to modern journalism lies within fake news and its popularity, which has shown much similarity to yellow journalism. 

Through the increase of clickbait, misinformation, disinformation and fake news are becoming more prevalent, which not only harms the consumers of news, but journalists too. Clickbait, content specifically made to get views, is a type of sensationalist journalism that is reliant on using certain features, such as emotion-provoking headlines, to garner attention. The point of this type of journalism is to attract attention, rather than state the facts, according to the UC Davis study which, furthermore, states “…the attractiveness of news has consequently become more important than the credibility of the source.” 

According to Qureshi, there are many negative effects of this sensationalization of news on the journalism industry. 

“Anyone can report news,” Qureshi said. “This means that the barriers for entry are completely gone, which leads to an increased quantity of news but the cost is a decline in quality.” 

In addition to the influx of reporters, there has also been an influx of consumers who need to be captivated by the story.

“Maintaining consumer attention is more emphasized than ever,” Qureshi said. “Now we have to turn to unreliable freelancing and journalists who sell their integrity for clicks and sales. The job I fell in love with is dying.” 

While the world of honest journalism has become harder to navigate in the past few decades, it is up to the journalist to follow their moral compass, according to Wilbur. 

“If you want to publish honestly, it can be pretty bleak at times,” Wilbur said. “But for your own soul and conscience, you gotta be true to yourself.”