‘Satanic Journalism and its Fate’: The Scripps Chain Strikes Out in Buffalo

Abstract

This article explores the nineteenth century editorial feud as a distinct and critical journalistic genre by examining the malevolent competition hi Buffalo between the fledgling Scripps chain's Evening Telegraph and Edward Butler's Evening News between 1880–1885. The feud reached its climax during Grover Cleveland's scandal-plagued presidential campaign of 1884, when salacious (and exaggerated) details of Cleveland's adulterous affair with a shop girl were first published by the Telegraph. This article adds significant new material about the scandal itself (in the form of previously unpublished correspondence between Cleveland and his ally, Butler) and the Scrippses' methods in Buffalo. The Halpin affair was a signal event in the press' growing boldness in exposing the private foibles of public figures. The Evening Telegraph was shuttered in 1885 — a rare failure in the development of the Scripps chain. Contemporaries attributed its demise to its practice of “Satanic Journalism.”.