ABSTRACT
The European and American mass journalism that evolved in the nineteenth century was the opposite of everything “objective” and “factual.” Its paramount aim was to tell an interesting and entertaining story—not to describe reality as it was but to harvest materials from this reality in order to construct a colorful and noisy spectacle that would give the reader sensory and emotional pleasure. In the late nineteenth century against the background of competition with the European Hebrew press, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had to abandon the European target readership and focus on readers in the Yishuv. Ben-Yehuda’s primary aim was to disseminate Hebrew and transform it from a language read by synagogue-goers and followers of the Jewish Enlightenment into a secular national vernacular for daily communication. The melodramatic, sensationalistic coverage of crimes and disasters was also meant to encourage the “man in the street” to converse in Hebrew about the content presented.
