MMMM # 486-- Selma...and Cops on Camera (NOT).

     Weekends are often "slow news days", when anything that happens gets a larger share of the news media attention than it would have on a weekday.

     No, I'm not saying that's what happened in Selma this weekend. The visit of America's first black president to the scene of a pivotal event in Civil Rights history 50 years after the fact would have gotten attention no matter what day of the week it happened. 

      


But when you add weeks of showings of the movie by the same name, and current news about sometimes deadly interaction between police and black citizens, I think a larger portion of the news "budget" in the network news was devoted to the story.
     PR (NOT): at one point during the president's speech, "black lives matter" protesters shouted and beat a drum. One of them was physically carried away.....by Alabama State Troopers. They did not, however, beat the protester. I would have thought that part of Alabama's newly named law enforcement apparatus (ALEPA) would have kept a very low profile. The rest of the protesters agreed to remain silent and the president never directly acknowledged them.
     The stations I work for were not producing newscasts in Selma in 1965, but it might be a great journalism grad student project to look back at Alabama local media coverage of the events. What did the Selma newspaper report? And radio stations? I know The Montgomery Advertiser deserves credit for confessing last week to being on the wrong side of history in covering the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965:

It was history in the making. But the Advertiser and the Alabama Journal, its afternoon sister paper, were, at best, indifferent to it. At worst, the Advertiser's editorial page poured juvenile scorn on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and those marching; refused to grapple seriously with their demands and suggested one victim of racial violence during the Selma crisis had brought it on himself.

                                                          Brian Lyman, writing in The Advertiser

     The White House released a page of notes from 1965 Lyndon Johnson aide Jack Valenti, who had been told to keep Johnson up to date on the hour-by hour events in Alabama.

     That last comment ("Across the bridge--sheriff and reg.???---") seem to say the Alabama authorities had agreed not to use either "horses" or "hoses". Either of which might have been expected, considering the state's history.

     Speaking of protests, as previously noted, today is the 50th Anniversary of the arrival of U.S. ground troops in Vietnam, and I came across a NY Times story about a  big anti-war protest at a draft induction Center on Whitehall Street in New York City in 1967. That was the same place I would report to for processing sixteen months later. The story is a good read.

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      Reporters are used to have roadblocks put in the way of their news gathering activity, despite The First Amendment. But those constitutional guarantees don't cover just the media We all share the

same freedoms. So when police in Philadelphia arrested a journalism student for trying to video a police officer's public interaction with a homeless man, city prosecutors explained their decision this way in opening arguments for the lawsuit the student and the ACLU filed:

“Like many other college students, he (the student) has some very high-minded ideas about government, the role of government in interactions with its citizenry and the role of the media in observing those interactions.”

     On Saturday, a jury agreed with the police and let the student's conviction stand.
       So much for high-minded ideas.

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of TimLennox.com]