ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a preliminary structural analysis of the relationship between objectivity and sensationalism that is both situated and potentially generative. It examines the ways in which critics used the term in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the relation between "sensationalism" and "objectivity"; and the ways in which the two terms intersect, both in broad cultural understandings and within the specific context of "muckraking". From among the criticisms implied by sensationalism, the chapter focuses on sensationalism as a mode of exposure with an emphasis on detail and without any reform imperative. Edwin Godkin's implicit definition of the term sensationalism suggests that the insouciance or irreverence he perceived in the press ran counter to the very foundations of American (if not Western) civilization. Muckraking as a journalistic form brings together the themes are discussed throughout the chapter—the centrality of "story journalism", the politics of visibility, the focus on detail, and the reform telos.
