Sensationalist Reporting

I occasionally hear or read of someone complaining about sensationalism in the news media nowadays as if to suggest that this phenomenon is relatively recent. I agree that some news outlets and some journalists sensationalize the news just to try to attract more readers or listeners, but I strongly disagree with the implication that there was a time when such sensationalism didn't pervade the American media. If so, I don't know when it was. If anything, newspapers used to be much more sensationalist than they are today. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, almost nothing was off limits, including people's private lives. Suicide, for instance, was a subject that often made headlines. Nowadays, when a person commits suicide, newspaper accounts many times do not even give the cause of death, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not only was the cause of death almost always given, but the incident was also usually recounted in detail, insofar as the reporter could learn the details. It was not until around the 1920s or so, when the medical community began reprimanding journalists for reporting suicides, suggesting that such coverage only caused more people to kill themselves, that sensationalist reporting of suicides began to subside.
People's romantic lives were also considered fair game, although there was often a sexist element in deciding which stories to pursue. If a wife cheated on her husband, that was considered fodder for a good newspaper story, but if a man cheated on his wife, that activity was often allowed to continue with just a knowing wink.
When the Rev. J. B. Tharp, a 60-year-old Baptist minister from Weir City, Kansas, arrived in neighboring Fort Scott in early February 1902 saying that his wife had left him and run away with a younger man and that he was looking for the fleeing lovebirds, the Fort Scott Daily Tribune deemed the story not just newsworthy but worthy of a major headline and a full account of the wife's treachery. In addition to preaching the gospel, Tharp sold eggs and butter out of his home, and people would call at his house at all hours to make purchases. His wife was about twenty years younger than he was and looked even younger, as she was said to be beautiful. She often conducted the butter and egg transactions; so Tharp took little notice when one young man in particular started paying frequent visits to the home. Tharp was often away from home on the preaching circuit, and the relationship between his wife and her mysterious paramour blossomed in his absence. Tharp had a friend who tried to warn him that there was a growing intimacy between his wife and the young man, but the old preacher paid little attention until it was too late.

Tharp was holding revivals in Missouri when he received a letter from the friend that his wife and the young man had run off together, taking the couple's 9-year-old boy. Tharp hurried home and found that not only had his wife and her lover fled with his son but they had also taken about $200 in cash that Tharp had saved up and also converted a horse and buggy and other property belonging to Tharp into ready cash and taken it, too.
Tharp scoured Weir City at first, but no one had seen his wife or her lover during the past few days, and no once seemed to know the identify of the young stranger she had absconded with. Tharp then went to Lamar, Missouri, where his wife's folks lived, but they had seen no sign of their daughter, they said. Returning to Kansas, Tharp stopped in Fort Scott to institute a search in that town. When reporters got wind of his story, they rushed to interview him and to broadcast the story of his forlorn search.
Not finding his runaway wife in Fort Scott, Tharp left, saying he was headed to Kansas City to look for her there. The preacher did, indeed, overtake his wife in Kansas City a week or so later, but the paramour was not with her. Tharp retrieved some of the money his wife had taken from him, but he decided not to press charges against her. He refused to take her back, because he said he wanted to go his own way, and he allowed her to go her own way, too, and to keep their young son. "He returned to his home in Weir City," concluded the Daily Tribune, "and she will probably take up life with the man whom she loves better than she does her own husband."
And that's the kind of story that made sensational headlines in the "good old days."