Missing News:
“Everyone was crowded in, trying to build up their courage because they knew that the next day they would face down state troopers while trying to register to vote. I listened and watched, thinking to myself that no one will see this scene. It won’t be reported in the newspaper, and it won’t be on television. It made me think about how many similar scenes were ignored because a president, or some other person deemed important, wasn’t there.”
—Howard Zinn, historian and activist, recalling a 1963 African American
church service before a civil right march, 2009
church service before a civil right march, 2009
Editorial Comment: Voice for the voiceless...
.
Professor Zinn was not present at a church service I covered in Alabama where the Rev. Martin Luther King jr. with his then small son at his side preached to a congregation of several hundred black citizens while the KKK marched outside.
ReplyDeleteI was a field producer for the CBS Morning News, and my colleagues and I covered—often at some considerable personal risk—many of the small and sometimes not so small church services and other meetings where civil rights leaders exhorted the faithful.
The civil rights movement was covered closely by all three TV networks as well as by many newspapers, as Jack Nelson and others can attest. Were there always "important" people there? It would depend on your definition of important, I suppose.
But for Zinn to presume there was something wrong with the news judgment of the networks and major newspapers because one gathering that he witnessed might not have been covered is an Olympic sized leap of logic.
As they did with coverage of the war in Viet Nam that followed closely, major news organizations made a major commitment to covering the civil rights story in the '60s, and for Zinn or others to cast doubt on that commitment indicates to me that he spent little time in the South - or watching TV news and reading the papers.
--Ed
Ed:
ReplyDeleteWell said. I heard Jeff Greenfield make the same kind of statement in the early 1990s--about how the U.S. press would have done a better job of covering race if they'd spent more time in the "basements of AME churches in the South." I take the point about trees falling in the forest, etc., but like all sweeping statements, this is inaccurate and simplistic.
As for Zinn: No one has ever accused him of modesty or moderation....
Of course you would have known Jack Anderson. He was a good friend both personally and of our J program here. We miss him.
Thanks for the comeback.
Ted
Don't get me started. The "press" in what I sometimes call the "unreconstructed" south failed generations of the voiceless. Black or white, those voiceless had in common poverty, poor schools and a society that gave not a damn for their plight.
ReplyDeleteWhen television, kudos to CBS, covered the civil right protests, the rest of the country was sufficiently shocked to force the regional newspapers to their duty. From the turn of the century until it was sold in 1939 the Atlanta Journal "cover(ed) Dixie like the dew," but the Civil Rights struggle came as something of a surprise to its successor, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.
The Charlotte Observer also let most of a century of post-war segregation and persecution escape observation.
Voice of the voiceless. Hah!
hodges