An AP story a half-dozen years ago pointed out that the civic-minded white leadership of the paper wasn't exactly anxious to cover the despicable things happening on city streets:
News photographers from the period said the paper did not want to draw attention to the demonstrations and discord in the 1950s and 1960s. "It was difficult for people to see," Horace Huntley, director of oral history at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told The News. "People were embarrassed by it. The city fathers were embarrassed by it."
The newspaper said that in its centennial edition in 1988, it noted that a New York Times story in 1960 forced the paper and the city's white community to confront the racial conflict. "The story of The Birmingham News' coverage of race relations in the 1960s is one marked at times by mistakes and embarrassment but, in its larger outlines, by growing sensitivity and acceptance of change," the centennial edition said. "The editors thought if you didn't publish it, much of this would go away," said Ed Jones, 81, a photographer at The News from 1942 to 1987. "Associated Press kept on wanting pictures, and The News would be slow on letting them have them, so they flooded the town with photographers. The AP started sending pictures all over, and it mushroomed."
Out-of-town papers-- like the NY Times-- focused the nation's attention on the blood being shed in Birmingham and Montgomery.
CBS began it's half-hour nightly news format fifty years ago next Fall. Some Southern TV stations refused to carry the network stories. One in Mississippi actually has its license pulled by the FCC.
(The Monday (and sometimes Sunday) Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of www.timlennox.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment