The Press, Japanese Americans, and the Concentration Camps

TpHE MALEVOLENT INFLUENCE and power of the press has often been exaggerated-as, for example, in the observation by Seldes that Hearst proved "that news is largely a matter of what one man wants the people to know and feel and think."1 It is generally acknowledged, however, that economic necessity compels publishers to print to please readers. Thus, a Hearst columnist observed that "nobody wants to know what you think. People want to know what they think."2 Further, it is said that journalists tend to emphasize crises, to fish in troubled waters, to stir up, rather than moderate, popular opinion. "Under the pressure of publishers and advertisers," wrote Innis, "the journalist has been compelled to seek the striking rather than the fitting phrase, to emphasize crises rather than developmental trends."-3 Thus, members of the press have been characterized as reactors to, not creators of, new issues and crises "like the modal members of their audience; and their communications fit audience predispositions, not through a process of tailoring, but through correspondence in outlook."4 The foregoing points provide a generalized framework for reviewing the historiography of the role of the press in the removal and detention of Japanese Americans during World War II. The standard interpretation depicts the press as a political pressure group and attempts to link it causally with Executive Order 9066 which formed the basis for the concentration camps. The historian Roger Daniels offers the clearest example of that interpretation. The press, wrote Daniels, particularly the Hearst papers, adopted and disseminated in the early twentieth century the image of the "yellow peril." A notable example was the 1907 two-part Sunday Supplement fantasy authored by Richmond Pearson Hobson entitled, "JAPAN MAY SEIZE THE PACIFIC COAST." Hobson predicted that Japan would soon conquer China and thus "command the military resources of the whole yellow race," and estimated that an army of 1,207,700 men could capture the Pacific Coast. "The Yellow Peril is here," Hobson concluded.5 That spectre of the "yellow peril" was revived in more strident form following Pearl Harbor. "Day after day," wrote Daniels, "throughout December, January, February