A while back, I wrote about how oligarchs like William Randolph Hearst have dominated the media for ages. In the course of that discussion, I mentioned how yellow journalism played an important role in Hearst’s rise to power. In this post, we’ll explore parallels between the sensationalized journalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and today’s clickbait saturated media ecosystem.
Yellow journalism: the original clickbait
In the late 19th century, Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World were locked in a heated rivalry. To get eyes on their pages, they turned to increasingly sensationalized stories.
A 1925 MA thesis by George Lloyd Bird noted how the tone of the headlines in the New York World shifted after Pulitzer took charge in 1883. Sober headlines like “Chamber of Commerce,” “The Statue of Liberty,” and “Brooklyn News” were replaced by “Screaming for Mercy,” “$10,000 damages asked,” and “Suicide of a Millionaire.” But yellow journalism went beyond the headlines, and the actual content was often similarly amped up or even entirely made up (while it predates the yellow journalism discussed here, the New York Sun published a series of articles in 1835 that claimed the moon was populated by unicorns, two-legged beavers, and bat-like humanoids).
A race to the bottom
This triggered a race to the bottom where increasing numbers of journalists and editors chose to walk on the lurid side. As the editor of the Florida Daily Citizen lamented, “the evil grew until publishers all over the country began to think that perhaps at heart the public might really prefer vulgarity.” The Public Domain Review has compiled a collection of cartoons from Puck magazine highlighting how omnipresent yellow journalism had become by the early 20th century (the one entitled “Uncle Sam’s Dream of Conquest and Carnage–Caused by Reading the Jingo Newspapers” feels particularly…relevant).
From tabloids to mainstream: clickbait goes legit
Sadly, things aren’t all that different today. While the supermarket tabloids have long touted UFOs, bat boys, and celebrity sexcapades, more and more publications are succumbing to the siren song of sensationalism. Publications like BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and The Huffington Post were early pioneers of now-familiar clickbait tropes like “You won’t believe what happened next…,” “This one weird trick…,” and “Doctors hate her for this reason…” In time, even CNN was using these tricks in the headline for a story about sexual assault in Alaska: “What state has the highest rate of rape in the country? It may surprise you.”
When sensationalism shapes history
It may be tempting to dismiss clickbait as nothing more than a peril for the uninformed and the careless. The problem is that, even if you don’t consume this kind of content yourself, it’s still shaping the world around you.
While the oft-repeated claim that yellow journalism caused the Spanish-American War in 1898 is likely an oversimplification, media outlets run by Heart and Pulitzer nevertheless helped create an environment that was conducive to hostilities between the US and Spain. They amplified stories about Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain (regardless of whether they were true or not), and when the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, the yellow press breathlessly reported allegations of a Spanish conspiracy.
Algorithms: the new circulation wars
Something similar is happening with today’s clickbait. The technologies may be different but the logic is the same. The street-corner hawkers and circulation wars have given way to opaque algorithms, engagement metrics, and ad-driven revenue models that encourage creators to embrace outrage, fear, and emotional provocation. With more and more people getting their news from social media, platforms like Facebook, X, and YouTube are able to actively shape it by privileging content that keeps users scrolling, clicking, and reacting.
The resulting enshittification prioritizes emotional impact rather than informational value, steamrollers over nuance, and reduces complex social or political issues to shareable barbs. Just as yellow journalism helped create a climate ripe for conflict by distorting reality at scale, today’s clickbait ecosystem subtly sows the seeds of polarization, mistrust, and performative outrage.
Louder isn’t smarter
It can be hard to avoid falling into the clickbait trap when a lot of advice for new content creators steers you in that direction. When I started blogging in 2014, many tips and tricks pushed the BuzzFeed style of headlines, and YouTube is currently awash in MrBeastesque clickbait thumbnails. But while this approach can be eye-catching, it also gets on people’s nerves. It also makes it harder to stand out from the competition. The good news is that it’s not a binary choice between sensational or stodgy. There’s a happy medium where you can pique your readers’ interest without sounding like a tired meme.
Conclusion
The moral of the story is that yellow journalism didn’t disappear. It simply evolved. The same incentives that once rewarded lurid headlines and invented atrocities now fuel algorithmic outrage and rage bait, albeit much faster and at far greater scale. Clickbait isn’t just a trap for boomers. It’s steadily reshaping public discourse into something louder, angrier, and less grounded in objective reality. History shows where that road can lead. Will we recognize the pattern in time or keep clicking our way forward as if this time will be different?
About the author,
Jason Loch
