Did the “yellow press” drive America into war with Spain in 1898?

The textbooks have long said so, but they are wrong. The "yellows" were apparently so named because the two leading practitioners of sensationalism in the news, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World (which Pulitzer had bought in 1883) and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal (which Hearst purchased in 1895) both ran a comic strip called "The Yellow Kid." Pulitzer and Hearst competed for the mass audience, and they were willing to be sensational to attract it. That included puffing up news of Spanish atrocities or alleged atrocities in Cuba. But the question remains: what influence did these newspapers have? Consider some relevant facts:

• 1. Both papers were ardent supporters of the Democratic Party. In the run-up to the Spanish-American War, the White House and the Congress were both controlled by Republicans.
• 2. Warmaking was a decision of the President and the Congress. The Senate was elected in those days not by popular vote but by the state legislatures. Senators therefore had to think about maintaining the support of their party, but they had little reason to worry about public opinion. They were well insulated from it. The President was more vulnerable—but, in 1896, he was still not very vulnerable. Republicans had controlled the White House from 1860 through 1896 with the exception of Grover Cleveland's two election victories in 1884 and 1892. In 1896 Ohio Republican William McKinley won the election for President. He carried New York—the only state where the New York World and the New York Journal had influence—by an overwhelming 58% to 39% against William Jennings Bryan.
• 3. President McKinley's staff prepared a regular news summary for him, but it rarely included anything from the World or the Journal. Neither paper was taken seriously in Washington; the yellow press, in fact, was the butt of White House jokes. Historians of the McKinley administration have simply not found letters, memos, or other commentary to suggest newspaper enthusiasm for war had any impact on McKinley's decision to go to war.

So why do we hear so often that the yellow press pushed the country into war? It appears that this became a consensus position among historians after World War I. World War I featured a massive outpouring of propaganda. Some popular historians, sharing a growing alarm, criticized propaganda for propelling America into a European war they believed we should have stayed out of, and they read their suspicion of propaganda back into the Spanish-American War. But in World War I both British and German propaganda efforts were centrally coordinated by the British and German govern- ments—and so was American propaganda after 1917 when the United States entered the war. In 1898, propagandists influences were uncoordinated and, so far as can be determined, unavailing. Pulitzer and Hearst loom large in the history of journalism, but they had no detectable influence on American foreign policy.