TIME magazine has republished an article that was part of its coverage of the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965, including this amazing photo:
The article includes criticism of ministers who took part in the march. The writers falls back on that old journalistic trick of getting someone else to speak the invectives, and then quoting them, but sometimes they eliminated the middleman:
Just as the men and women who took part in the march are dying off, so are the reporters who quite literally walked the walk to the capitol that year.
[ALSO: National Geographic has produced an interesting report on old predictions about the future of newspapers. A great read, whether on your tablet, in the actual printed NG magazine, or in the imagined 1938 device to the right, which printed your newspaper via radio at home.]
[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of TimLennox.com]
The article includes criticism of ministers who took part in the march. The writers falls back on that old journalistic trick of getting someone else to speak the invectives, and then quoting them, but sometimes they eliminated the middleman:
In their overzealousness, some of the ministers seemed to have left their good common sense back home with their toothbrushes.There has been an effort to rehabilitate George Wallace's reputation in recent years. His son has written a book to emphasize his Dad's late-in-life conversion. But the TIME reporting brings back the rhetoric of those days:
"....the proposed march, he (Wallace) declared, was Communist-inspired, abetted by a “collectivist press,” by “propagandists masquerading as newsmen.” He delivered himself of a withering blast against his old Alabama University friend, Judge Johnson, calling him a man who is “hypocritically wearing the robes” of a judge while “presiding over a mock court,” one who “prostitutes our law in favor of mob rule.”
Just as the men and women who took part in the march are dying off, so are the reporters who quite literally walked the walk to the capitol that year.
[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of TimLennox.com]
VEry interesting to read how the march was covered in the news at the time, and that is quite a dramatic photo with the marchers on their way, the flag waving and the clouds gathering above them.
ReplyDeleteThere's not much difference between Wallace's ridiculous statement and the invective hurled around by today's legislators.
ReplyDelete