ABSTRACT
There is a consistent recurrence in any historical study of critical texts on the ethical performance of the media in either the USA or UK. This is a discourse on ‘journalism crisis’. There never was a time when lawyers, politicians, academics, and journalists themselves were not condemning the evils of the ‘Fleet Street of Shame’ or the ‘yellow press.’ Even the first historian of the UK and Irish National Union of Journalists, F.J. Mansfield, was writing in 1943:
Within the last few years the methods of sensational journalism have become invested with a sinister significance. This kind of journalism is far from new; in fact it is as old as the Press itself. Some of those who have studied our earliest papers will agree with Mr R.D. Blumenfeld when he says that sixteenth century journalists were adept in the arts of yellow journalism, and that ‘no modern newspaper could rival the news records of that time for sensationalism.’
