Scroll down to the cartoon of Pulitzer and Hearst as the two yellow kids at http://www.neponset.com/yellowkid/history.htm

And see (and buy!) Art Spiegelman's book, In the Shadow of No Towers http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/towersComics.html

. . . About a hundred years and two blocks away from Ground Zero, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the twin titans of modern journalism, gave birth to the newspaper comic strip as a by-product of their fierce circulation war (a competition that led to actual war when their papers inflamed public outrage over what may well have been the accidental sinking of an American ship in Cuba). Their distorted reporting of the Spanish-American War - America's first colonialist adventure - would have made Fox News proud. Their sensationalism was dubbed Yellow Journalism and its emblem was the Yellow Kid, America's first newspaper cartoon star. . . .
- - Art Spiegelman

Everybody's honorable. Everybody's dishonorable. All saints are sinners. The 50's surely weren't the halcyon days of the press, though they were the period of the most entertaining press critic, Liebling.

TVNewser does.

http://nytimes.com/2006/11/20/business/media/20newser.html

THE NEW YORK TIMES ** Monday, November 20, 2006
The Kid With All the News About the TV News
By JULIE BOSMAN
TOWSON, Md. — When people in the television news business want to find out what’s going on in their industry, they turn to a blog called TVNewser. But while the executives obsessively checking TVNewser are mostly high powered and highly paid, the person who creates it is not: he is Brian Stelter, a baby-faced 21-year-old at Towson University here, a few miles north of Baltimore. . .

. . . Mr. Stelter’s blog ( tvnewser.com ), a seven-day-a-week, almost 24-hour-a-day newsfeed of gossip, anonymous tips, newspaper article links and program ratings, has become a virtual bulletin board for the industry.

It is read religiously by network presidents, media executives, producers and publicists, not for any stinging commentary from Mr. Stelter, whose style is usually described as earnest, but because it provides a quick snapshot of the industry on any given day. Habitués include Mr. Williams and Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN’s domestic operations, who long ago offered up his cellphone number to Mr. Stelter.

“The whole industry pays attention to his blog,” said Jeffrey W. Schneider, a senior vice president of ABC News. “It would not surprise me if I refreshed my browser 30 to 40 times a day.”

[ Some bloggers reacted to this statement with snark about how you'd think somebody in the news biz would know how to get an RSS feed. ]

In April Mr. Stelter attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as a guest of MSNBC.

“He was quite a celebrity,” said Jeremy Gaines, a spokesman for MSNBC. “Literally two tables over was George Clooney, and at our table was TVNewser, and people were waiting in line to see him.” . . .

. . . “The biggest TV executives, the men and women who run the top networks, look at this kid’s Web site all the time,” said Joe Scarborough, the host of the talk show “Scarborough Country” on MSNBC. “And the genius of it is that everybody thinks they own him. Everybody says: ‘Oh, I’ve got a great relationship with Brian. Let me leak it to him.’ ” . . .

. . . In the industry Mr. Stelter is generally thought of as a reliable reporter, despite his youth and inexperience. “He seems to be a trustworthy guy, a trustworthy source of information,” said Jeff Greenfield, a CNN commentator. “And the fact that he can barely vote and drink shouldn’t really bother anybody.” . . .

- - The New York Times

Here's some reaction by Steve Gilliard and others : http://cjrdaily.org/behind_the_news/bloggers_doubt_tvnewsers_abili.php