Sensationalism has long been an undertheorized concept in the field of media history, especially when compared to journalistic objectivity, its presumed opposite. This special issue, Theorizing Sensationalism, asks how sensationalist media shape—and disrupt—popular understandings of truth. Largely focusing on Anglo-American contexts, this introduction explores how sensational media have persisted and adapted over more than two centuries, despite destabilizing technological innovations and significant sociocultural shifts. Further, it examines how theorists and critics have engaged with the evolving political and epistemic challenges posed by sensational media.Sensationalism is a combination of striking content and formal elements distinguished by hyperbole and excess and designed to attract an audience.1 Fusing arresting form and controversial content in an exciting package, sensationalism operates as a powerful communication strategy. Lurid details capture readers’ or viewers’ attention, stir up their emotions, and invest them in the underlying message of the story. Formal elements such as exaggerated headlines, inflamed rhetoric, startling imagery, compelling aural devices, stereotypical characters, and repetitive storylines drive home messages with speed and force that can be difficult to challenge or refute. This is not an accident; sensationalism constitutes visual and textual representation that seeks to elicit an effect—to provoke, to rouse, or to arouse. Its practitioners use media to stimulate and engage the senses, to transfer affect from texts to readers, billboards to passersby, social media platforms to user/creators. Sensationalism’s very efficacy makes it an enduring feature of the modern media environment, one that is dangerous to ignore.In the field of communication history, descriptive case studies of sensationalist media often take an “I know it when I see it” approach, which leaves unstated how sensationalist practices represent the body and knowledge—and for what purposes. Often dismissed as tawdry and trivial, sensationalism does significant cultural work in establishing conventions of morality, gendered power, and political authority. Its carnivalesque ethos deliberately pushes boundaries, yet it often operates as a stealth actor in the public sphere, one that thrives on not being taken seriously.2 This issue gives sensationalism’s formidable power the scrutiny it deserves and seeks out a better understanding of its many valences.While sensationalism’s many guises surface across geographical and cultural contexts, contributors to this issue largely consider US media cultures from the 1930s to the present, from legal disputes over women’s work to the impact of genetically modified organisms on food supplies, and from the promises of home supercomputers to the rallying cries of ACT-UP and other political protest groups. This introduction traces the history of aesthetic and literary influences on sensationalism and examines its juxtaposition to “objectivity” in media. The ever-presence of sexuality and race in sensationalist productions, and their undiminished social power, suggests the crucial importance of a critical approach to sensationalism for feminist theory. As Ann Cvetkovich argues, sensationalism’s appeal to women and the working class gave it disreputable connotations from the start: “melodrama, sentimentality, sensationalism and other forms of emotional excess are viewed with added suspicion because they are associated with femininity as well as popularity.”3Sensationalism’s durability over the past two centuries, despite efforts to dislodge it through suppression, regulation, and articulations of media standards, implies that it is an integral ingredient of the modern media environment, rather than a contaminant. It appears to be here to stay. Yet sensationalism has remained all too easy to dismiss, in part because sex, gender, race, and class are so often its enabling themes. It is not accidental that critics cite as its “founding” moment the reporting linked to the US entry to the Spanish-American war in 1898, an apocryphal beginning that elides earlier forms and conflates an array of practices with an egregious instance of manipulation of fact. The “sentimentalism” of antebellum crusades against slavery and poverty, the salacious headlines and images in illustrated police weeklies, the raucous output of tabloid newspapers, television news, and online content span the development of mass media. The long history and impact of sensationalist elements cry out for serious, cross-disciplinary analysis.In public discourse, sensationalism typically appears as a pejorative critique of media form and content, what Joseph Campbell calls “a convenient catch-all, an industrial-strength insult.”4 To call a text sensationalist is to discredit it as overwrought, trivial, fabricated, or otherwise undeserving of serious attention. Sensationalism connotes excess through content and form, from simple exaggeration of facts that garners attention or engenders emotion, to raw depictions of violence or sexuality. Such excess has made sensationalism one of the favorite negative descriptors of critics and commentators across disciplines. This pejorative presumption, which sensationalism wears like a costume on a typecast actor, not only drags down sensationalism’s reputation and underestimates its impacts but also precludes thoughtful analysis of its strengths and inner workings, its influence over human communication, and its social power in different contexts.Sensationalism operates on a logic of exposure and visibility; it is a mode of representing bodily knowledge and a rhetorical strategy for eliciting strong affective states in audiences. It can also be understood instrumentally as the use of representational devices (appeals to emotion, certain visual tropes) to draw attention to a cause, topic, or production in a crowded media field for some desired and achievable end.5 These ends include agitating for social change, capturing audiences for commercial gain, generating scandal for political purposes, creating public feeling for or against a social group, or simply getting attention (as in eye-arresting public or performance art and some social media content). But as a language, a way of representing, and a strategy of signification, sensationalism can be understood as a form of truth-telling in its own right.The terms “negative sensationalism” and “positive sensationalism,” which we use throughout this introduction, highlight the tension between the two poles typically used to demarcate sensationalism: its dismissal as a destructive force on the one hand, and its adoption as a productive storytelling or political strategy on the other.6 This tension has existed at least since the early nineteenth century in Anglo-American contexts (if not throughout sensationalism’s sordid history around the globe). It surfaces during moments of crisis, such as the journalistic debates around objectivity and sensationalism in the United States.Sensationalism is an equal opportunity practice that generates affects through a number of overlapping strategies, including provocative themes (sex, crime, violence, disasters); familiar characters (recognizable ‘villains’, such as racial others, recent immigrants, effete elites, brutal types etc., made familiar through repetition); and affect-generating practices (such as Gothic literary and visual conventions)—or, in other words, per Eugenia Brinkema, through form itself.7 But theorizing sensationalism as an excess-laden combination of form and content, one that both depends heavily on and generates affect, requires going beyond the analysis of themes, character, practices, and conventions as well as formal or aesthetic qualities present in sensational media products to identify and understand historical context, in order to perceive what is absent from the frame.Sensationalism’s meanings and origins engage long-standing debates about writing based on feeling and intellect, pressures created by mass publishing, trends in philosophy, and the limitations disempowered people have faced in generating positive representations. As early as the seventeenth century, the status and validity of sense-based knowledge came under scrutiny in early modern philosophy and in debates over the period’s expanding print marketplace. Brendan Dooley has shown that there were marked convergences between intellectual orientations toward truth (e.g., skepticism) and a burgeoning commercial print media in which a proliferation of newsletters, news books, and fledgling newspapers constituted “the soft underbelly of early modern truth.”8 Concerns over bodily knowledge and sensory perception mutually constituted the two social fields of philosophy and print media; the existence and social implications of print fueled debates in philosophy about embodied versus disembodied knowledge.Early modern philosophers debated whether objectivity and sensory perception could align. In 1641, René Descartes laid the foundation for a rationalist, disembodied approach to knowledge, based on the premise that for reason to prevail, the body and its sensory apparatuses had to be suppressed in order to discern truth in the world. A half century later, John Locke challenged the Cartesians, who had come to dominate Western philosophy. Far from finding the senses suspect, Locke proclaimed them the very portal to knowledge and truth. Locke’s understanding that knowledge grew from experience, which itself was the accumulation of interactions between the senses and the external world, would be adapted by Voltaire, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and others, and critiqued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, affect theory, which postulates that, as Deborah Gould puts it, “feelings are not pre-given natural substances with fixed properties that reside inside individuals…but instead are material effects of encounter, meaning they materialize through contact with the world,” evokes Locke’s sense-based framework.9In the eighteenth century, an Anglo-American “cult of sensibility” emerged that sought to arouse empathy and understanding for the less fortunate through the cultivation of proper moral feeling.10 Sensibility promoted emotional literary conventions on the understanding that, confronted with scenes of pain and suffering, humans would instinctively work to ameliorate them. As Karen Halttunen notes, eighteenth-century humanitarians felt it necessary to describe grisly scenes of violence and pain in order to change public sentiment and advance reform, but they could also come under attack for these gratuitous representations: “Anglo-American humanitarianism first appeared in a culture of sensation, which assigned great importance to the role of the senses, and developed within a culture of sensationalism, which tended to treat pain as alluring, exciting, and ultimately obscene.”11 Humanitarians were caught between the desire to expose moral wrongs and charges that a reader might become immune to or even come to enjoy the harrowing scenes they described.Sentimental literature, and particularly the novel, rising to prominence in the early nineteenth century, took the optimistic view that a reader could enter another’s experience through imaginative and emotional connection—“a form of sympathetic identification.”12 Sensibility and, later, sentiment in literature sought to develop readers’ moral refinement, even as some critics disparaged the overindulgence in or improper display of emotion. Sensationalized and sexualized representations of virtue and vice in novels, and later in the poetry and prose of the Romantics, retained earlier formal and thematic elements of the “cult of sensibility” but also embraced its more dramatic relation, Gothic literature.13Reformers learned quickly that sentimental conventions and themes infused emotional urgency into their critiques of moral wrongs such as slavery, vice, and injustice. Antislavery fiction writers like Lydia Maria Child and Fanny Fern, and abolitionist slave narratives including Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs, and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, brought revelations of the horrors of slavery into the realm of domestic politics. Influential sentimental novels, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, merged the serious and sentimental to engage readers’ political and moral feelings. Familiar character types and plots rendered such stories easily digestible and offered a template for revealing other abusive systems, such as prisons or lunatic asylums.14If sentimental literary productions merged reason and feeling, seeing their convergence as a necessary condition for social change, reformers found in the highly adaptable Gothic language of “excess,” a more dramatic means to attract and affect readers. Gothic-inspired characters, venues, and themes proved particularly useful in critiquing oppressive systems, investing readers emotionally in the plight of the vulnerable.15 Nineteenth-century British critics, however, warned of the “addictive” qualities of sensational as Gothic narratives, as “intellectual opium” that led readers to lose themselves in a world of fear and fantasy, as dangerous as substance abuse to the domestic ideal.16 This was arguably part of their appeal – and power.Print media capitalized on the popularity of both sentimental and Gothic literature, and their familiar content and form. While crime news in early modern newspapers and tracts typically included moralizing advice to readers, emerging sensationalist daily newspapers in the 1830s (known in the United States as the “penny press” for their low cost) quickly learned that the “horrors” of murder and scandal sold papers.17 Soon, advocacy publications used exposure of real-life “monsters” and “fear-producing literary devices” to attract an audience and influence outcomes.18 Gothic-inspired morality tales served no single political agenda: some sought to preserve or restore an imagined order and bolster traditional authority, others to defy convention and transgress oppressive boundaries. Crime news had both a shock value and a cultural impact, however; as Frank Luther Mott put it, the “exploitation of crime and scandal were…aligned with the crusading spirit, and thus crusaders were often sensational.”19 Tropes of isolated city cellars, sinister forces of evil, subterranean criminal activities, among others, allowed publications across the political spectrum to showcase human cruelty and corruption for causes as disparate as anti-immigrant and pro-slavery campaigns, abolition, women’s rights, temperance, and anti-vice activism.20 Penny dailies further amplified sensational content by publishing letters to the editor that appeared to bring hidden stories to public view, and by hiring newsboys (and a few girls) to shout ear-catching headlines from street corners in all walks of city life.21Visual innovations only heightened the impact of sensational news production. Crime weeklies were the first to use sensational images on a large scale, illustrating crime scenes and sexual scandals with an exuberance that combined both “manipulative rhetoric and transgressive content” to promote what they called a service to the public good.22 Such stories “primed the readers’ moral sensibilities” and catered to a “mid-Victorian predilection for spectacular thrills.”23 By the mid-nineteenth century, as Joshua Brown demonstrates, pictorial reporting conferred a competitive and persuasive edge to family weeklies, such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.24 Like the period’s story papers and dime novels, weekly newspapers in England, France, and the United States combined dramatic events and striking images that echoed the emotional and fear-inducing content of sentimental and Gothic literature to inspire and advocate for a broad spectrum of political positions.25 Vivid, illustrated, emotion-based news reporting gained influence, during the US Civil War, as public demand for news from the front led to an explosion of visual, sentimental, and horrifying content in weekly newspapers.26With increased urbanization and other rapid changes associated with modernization, sensational print media appeared to encapsulate the disorientation of modern life. In the 1860s, the British Belgravia magazine, for example, embodied the fragmentation and hyperstimulus of urban modernity. As Alberto Gabriele argues, the magazine’s serialized stories, and the novels they inspired, with their cliff-hangers, “riveting scenes,” and “heart-wrenching” story lines, established “a common language of late Victorian sensationalism in popular literature.” Belgravia’s “fragmented stimuli,” along with other precinematic approaches to popular amusements, including “magic lantern shows, peep-boxes, and phantasmagorias,” juxtaposed many disparate elements to startle and arouse.27By the 1880s, daily newspapers jumped on the bandwagon, seizing on the power of visual, serialized journalism to elicit feeling and attract attention. Daily newspapers (such as Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World) visualized familiar villains and victims to capture readers’ interest, sell papers, and advocate for causes. Social activists, such as antilynching and women’s rights activists, likewise found ways to harness the emotional power of news illustrations to raise consciousness and mobilize support. In the process, weekly and daily news illustrations established parameters for news photographs—a new technology available for daily newspaper publication by 1897—further accelerating the trend toward visual, sensational news production.28Critics, dismayed by the excess and exaggeration of emerging sensational journalism, generally ignored how salacious content and attention-grabbing formal strategies also empowered marginal actors to advocate for social change, sometimes by disrupting and countering negative stereotypes.29 Instead, they increasingly used “sensationalism” negatively, as a pejorative descriptor for the variety of commercial print genres thought to pander to lowbrow, common-denominator taste. They blamed sensational media and literary forms for degrading modern society and culture and proposed new standards for reporting. Sensational reporting, such as white slavery exposés, came under attack for their emotional, dramatic appeal and spawned efforts to purge journalism of excess and exaggeration.30Practitioners, by contrast, defended sensationalism as a necessary strategy and set of narrative devices that could produce a mass effect, or that existed in dialogue with a mass effect. In 1886, William T. Stead openly defended sensationalism from critics, arguing that their derisioncovers a wonderful lack of thinking. For, after all, is it not a simple fact that it is solely by sensations experienced by the optic nerve that we see, and that without a continual stream of ever-renewed sensations we should neither hear, nor see, nor feel, nor think. Our lives, our thought, our existence, are built up by a never-ending series of sensations, and when people object to sensations, they object to the very material of life.31Stead spoke for other contemporary news workers and social reformers in theorizing sensationalism as a positive force. Sensationalism, he believed, was a legitimate (if controversial) method of knowledge production, and a socially revelatory journalistic mode.Critics who downplayed sensationalism’s truth-telling potential contrasted mass print culture to higher order, rational knowledge, typically coded as masculine. By the 1890s, the term “sensationalism” was a convenient pejorative that referred to anything from excess emotionality to exaggeration, fabrication, and pandering and was used to deride both the “new journalism” in Britain and “yellow journalism” in the United States. Sensational daily newspapers, such as the “chambermaid’s delight” (the New York Evening Journal prior to William Randolph Hearst’s takeover in 1895), which deployed content and conventions that deliberately appealed to emotion (and so-called women’s issues), at first garnered little acclaim and less respect. Yet it was media coverage disparaged as sensationalist that did the most to push the boundaries of allowable discourses around gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, and to promote progressive reform. As just one example, Jean Lutes shows that female stunt reporter Nelly Bly sensationalized her own bodily vulnerability to uncover abuses of the asylum system, anticipating revelations produced by the ‘muckrakers” in the years that followed.32The antilynching journalism of Ida B. Wells is perhaps the best exemplar of the fusion of evidence-based and sensationalist media practices. In Southern Horrors (1892) and The Red Record (1895), at great personal risk, she masterfully critiqued sensationalism in the white Southern press by calling out stories that deliberately inflamed white fears to summon lynch mobs. She simultaneously shocked and galvanized readers by publishing those same papers’ laudatory accounts of the lynch-mobs’ atrocities—horrors committed by vigilante mobs of white men, women and children in festival-like settings, against accused Black men (and some Black women). Ironically, the vivid language embedded in these sensational accounts helped Wells convince many white activists, particularly in the United Kingdom, that lynching was the opposite of law and order.Wells not only turned the words of the Southern white press against itself, she also backed up her own arguments with data gleaned from mainstream, conservative white newspapers (notably the Chicago Tribune). In today’s parlance, she meticulously “saved the receipts.” Her purpose was to debunk and undercut “the old threadbare lie” that justified many of the lynchings: that Black men raped white women. By reversing the myth of the Black rapist, as Mia Bay argues, Wells achieved a “radical revision of conventional wisdom.” Her skill in marshalling fact to generate affect helped her mobilize an international antilynching alliance and set the stage for boycotts and other economic pressure tactics, demonstrating that feeling, reason, moral clarity and analysis can combine to make commanding arguments for political action. As Paula Giddings notes, Wells’s publications were powerful precisely because they “looked at lynching from the perspective of logic and documented evidence.”33 Wells justified her methodology in The Red Record, noting that “if stating the facts of these lynchings, as they appeared from time to time in the white newspapers of America—the news gathered by white correspondents, compiled by white press bureaus and disseminated among white people—shows any vindictiveness, then the mind which so charges is not amenable to argument.”34 Wells pioneered techniques that would become widespread and recognized as best practices in investigative reporting in the twentieth century.By the century’s end, some of the most profitable newspaper enterprises began to claim the mantle of sensationalism as a positive good; they championed their own advocacy, positioning themselves as protagonists that intervened in local, national, and international affairs. Pulitzer, for example, whose New York World had spearheaded many successful newspaper crusades in the city, felt that the role of papers was to “always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, [and] always remain devoted to the public welfare.”35 Similarly, Hearst echoed Stead’s earlier call for a “journalism of action.” Perhaps the most frequently cited example of Heart’s action-oriented journalism occurred when the New York Journal sparked an international crisis by sending foreign correspondent Karl Decker to Havana to help the eighteen-year-old political prisoner, Evangelina Cisneros, break out of jail. The Hearst-sponsored celebrations in New York City after the rescue, along with the apocryphal stories about Hearst inciting the Spanish-American War, remain commonly cited examples of the perils of sensationalism run amok.36 Ironically, the pejorative lost potency as a growing number of twentieth-century news publishers followed Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s lead, incorporating characteristics once deemed sensational in their own pages to report news and pursue commercial success.37It is worth noting that even so-called yellow newspapers bolstered their sensationalism with rigorous, evidence-based (and well-financed) reporting. Accuracy was the mantra at Pulitzer’s World, for instance, and its editors diligently vetted and fact-checked stories before committing them to print. If anything, these behemoths of American journalism highlighted the problem of trying to “do it all.” They endeavored to inform and entertain through coverage of a wide range of timely events, from sports and society to politics and crime, all while bankrolling expensive undercover investigations and daredevil stunts. Like network television in the decades before cable, they tried to offer a smattering of something to everyone. As a result, these papers were money-making machines but also carried tremendous overhead and shouldered great financial (and reputational) risk. Their entertainment pages sometimes undercut the legitimacy of their more serious reporting.It was smaller publications, however, such as McClure’s Magazine, that would claim the mantle for investigative reporting as advocacy for economic and social reform in the public interest. The magazine form, it turned out, was better suited to the task because it had longer turnaround times; its long-form stories did not compete for space with episodic news items. Early twentieth-century “muckraking” magazines strived for accuracy and eschewed stunt journalism in favor of documentary evidence. As practitioners of “positive sensationalism,” reform publications and muckraking investigative journalists published exposures that explicitly advocated for change. Like Wells, so-called muckrakers sought to balance the sensational nature of their revelations with a strict, fact-based approach to evidence. As S. S. McClure wrote of Ida Tarbell’s History of Standard Oil, “Miss Tarbell…tells this history…without partisan passion and entirely from documents.” Tarbell defended her work from accusations of advocacy; as she put it in responding to Teddy Roosevelt’s scathing critique of “muckrakers” in 1906, “we on McClure’s were concerned only with facts, not with stirring up revolt.”38 Despite such disclaimers, and the adherence to evidence-based reporting, sentimentalism was woven into muckraking, which inherited the mantle of earlier sensational fiction.39In 1914, Walter Lippmann, one of the twentieth century’s most vocal critics of sensationalism, muckraking, and progressivism more generally, conceded that investigative journalism had exposed genuine economic and political corruption, but argued that it had also generated a conspiratorial mindset and “a distinct prejudice in favor of those who make the accusations.” Muckraking made it possible to “work yourself into a state where the world seems a conspiracy and your daily going is beset with an alert and tingling sense of labyrinthine evil. Everything askew—all the frictions of life are readily ascribed to a deliberate evil intelligence.”40 In a 1931 lecture at Yale, Lippmann suggested that the daily dose of sensations offered up by the yellow papers overwhelmed and blunted the senses, ultimately leaving readers drained of affect: “When everything is dramatic, nothing is dramatic. When everything is highly spiced, nothing after a while has much flavor. When everything is new and startling, the human mind just ceases to be startled.” He lauded the “less temperamental” objective papers of the 1920s, arguing that “the objective, orderly, and comprehensive presentation of news is a far more successful hope of journalism today than the dramatic, disorderly, episodic type.”41In these examples and elsewhere, Lippmann engages in a specific form of negative sensationalism: sensationalism as retrospective critique. He assesses a past historical moment as emotionally uncontained and hysterical and cautions against a return to these excesses. Ironically, Lippmann’s valorization of detachment, emotional restraint, rationality, and orderliness is itself an (unacknowledged) affective stance that, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, turns a “self-interested vision of the social world into the appearance of a scientific sociology.” Lippmann is positing an authority-based journalism that privileges official and elite sources while undermining the validity and utility of sensation, and delegitimizing what Gretchen Soderlund has called “street-based knowledge.”42The ascendance of comparatively tame objective papers in the twentieth century was only partly a backlash against the unbridled excitability of yellow journalism and the reformist zeal of muckraking. But objectivity remains a much-debated concept among journalism historians and, increasingly, among journalists and editors. Since Michael Schudson argued that objectivity achieved the status of an ideology and professional norm in the 1920s, when journalism professionalized and journalism programs proliferated, scholars have countered with alternative accounts of how objectivity took root in the United States.43 David Mindich, for example, claims that objectivity “became codified as the great law of journalism” as early as the 1890s, three decades before Schudson had postulated.44 Other scholars have advanced economic, technological, and sociological/occupational explanations for the emergence of objectivity, focusing on different aspects of its commonly invoked hallmarks—truthfulness, factuality, rationality, fairness, balance, neutrality, quality, trustworth