“A Sad Reflection of Our Moral Disintegration”: The 1947 Campaign Against the Chilean “Yellow Press”

This article analyzes the 1947 campaign led by the University of Chile Student Federation against the “yellow press,” launched in the run-up to the country’s IV National Journalists’ Convention. Using primary contemporary sources, it places the episode within debates on press freedom, legal control, professional ethics, and the modernization of journalism in mid-twentieth-century Chile. I argue that the campaign was not a moral crusade alone. It was an attempt to define journalism’s place in a democratic order and to establish the boundaries of public discourse. The case shows how political and professional actors confronted the rise of sensationalist mass media and the challenges it posed to prevailing journalistic norms. It also demonstrates that journalists did not respond to the controversy strictly along political lines. Field-specific concerns—such as freedom of expression and the political economy of the press—played a more significant role in shaping positions on sensationalism.