NYTimes | Now at the remove of 50 years, we can ask how it happened so fast — but not only that. We can also usefully ask how such an idealistic and altruistic movement might fare in today’s media environment. As Jack Bass, a Southern newspaperman turned historian, observed when we talked the other day, it was a time when everybody watched the three network news programs. It was also a time when hysterical jeremiads about the perils of change were not part of the mainstream news flow.Sure, conservative columnists like Rowland Evans and Robert Novak clucked about Communist influence on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Paul Harvey seemed vaguely disturbed by dark-skinned youngsters who talked back to Southern sheriffs. But straight, eyewitness reporting dominated television news, and Northern print reporters flooding the region quickly shamed Southern newspapers into covering civil rights in a way that began to look, let us say, balanced — or even, in a few cities, fair.
What seems remarkable in retrospect is the factual authority of network news in those days. Dixie’s politicians, of course, accused the national anchors of bias. But the pictures trumped the home-cooked propaganda, as when you put a spittle-spraying Southern governor up against a Greensboro Four leader like Franklin McCain, in his earnest Sunday clothes, offering a cogent critique of Woolworth’s Southern business strategy as it related to black shoppers nationwide. It took only one national telecast of Nashville students being assaulted at the lunch counters to demonstrate that segregation everywhere depended on the unconstitutional application of police brutality.
With such an agenda of real news, how one dreaded seeing some ponderous network commentator interrupt the reporters to claim his 90 seconds of air time. There was simply no need to put a scrim of opinion between the viewer and fresh news film.
Today, however, there’s no denying that traditional reportage of political and social trends seems almost as out of date as segregation. Surely the civil rights movement would have been hampered by the politicized, oppositional journalism that flows from Fox News and the cable talk shows. Luckily for the South, that kind of butchered news was left mostly to a few extremist newspapers in Virginia and Mississippi and to local AM radio talk shows that specialized in segregationist rants.
