Reckoning with whiteness: the limits of desegregation in America’s newsrooms from the 1960s to the present

ABSTRACT

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a host of Black and minority journalists are spearheading a national conversation about how racism within the news media has resulted in its failure to adequately and accurately cover the Black community and to report on racial injustice. This article puts that conversation into historical context by considering its antecedents in calls to address the news media’s whiteness problem in the mid-1960s and beyond. Focusing predominately on the television news industry and the print press, it reveals how American newsrooms appeared to lower their colour barriers but did not commit to substantive change. The article shows how the journalists of colour speaking out today inherit a struggle waged by generations before them. The biggest obstacle they faced in turning desegregation into full-blown integration, however, has not been overt white supremacist racism in American news media, but the enduring commitment of white media owners, managers, and editors to white-defined ‘objectivity’.

KEYWORDS:

• Desegregation
• American news media
• television
• race relations
• Kerner commission
• objectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I wrote this article while I was the beneficiary of a scholarship from the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford, and a doctoral studentship from the Global History of Capitalism Project, Oxford. I would like to thank Dr. Mara Keire, Dr. Nonie Kubie, Dr. Emma Day, Grace Mallon, and Lynne Foote for workshopping an early draft of this article with me and helping to shape its direction; the anonymous reviewers of Comparative American Studies An International Journal, Matthew Stone, Peter Herford, and Prof. Stephen Tuck for their valuable comments; and Dr. Mara Keire, Charlie Harris, and Sylvia Alvares-Correa for their invaluable fine-tuning.

2. The history of broadcast news does however differ from the print press in that from their inception radio and television required use of publicly owned airwaves. Broadcast news industries therefore came under government regulation and did not enjoy the same First Amendment guarantees as other media. (Cole 1970, 285) Where there was unlimited legal freedom to start a newspaper, Congress determined that due to the limited number of available frequencies, it had the right to impose certain requirements on those companies it granted a broadcasting licence. Under first the Radio Act of 1927, and then the 1934 Federal Communications Act, U.S. regulatory agencies granted access to the scarce public resource of the airwaves under the obligation that licensees serve the ‘public interest, convenience, and necessity’ (Hendershot 2011, 16; Mayer 1966, 290-291; Perlman 2016, 4). The Fairness Doctrine from 1949 to 1987 required broadcasters to devote fair and balanced coverageto controversial issues of public importance. Where newspapers had total freedom in what they published, and adhered to objectivity as a professional code, the state played a role in shaping how broadcasters reported the news. As political historian Julian Zelizer has shown, such federal rules ‘helped support the kind of journalistic norms … which made objectivity a goal of everyone in the news business.’ (Zelizer, 2017) See also Allison Perlman, Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over U.S. Television (Rutgers University Press, 2016)

3. A study of 30 U.S. cities from 1940 through 1970 found that Black-white segregation averaged 85% on an index of residential dissimilarity – a standard measure of residential segregation whereby 0 represents full integration and 100 represents total segregation. (Massey and Denton 1993, 20, 47; Flournoy 2003, 50) Acceleration of the twentieth century trend of suburbanisation in the post-war period combined with federally sponsored discrimination to lock minority families in the cities and promote ghettoisation. (Kruse and Sugrue 2006, 2; McGrew 1997, 27) The Kerner commission warned that American society was moving in the direction of separate Black and white Americas but many already lived in them.

4. According to opinion polls, in 1963 television overtook the print press as Americans’ primary source of news. (Cited in Mayer 1993, 595–596)

5. Internal examinations today by newspapers reckoning with their racist pasts are providing more evidence to support this conclusion. The Kansas City Star for example, in December 2020 published a 6-part package exploring how for much of its early history the white paper produced by white reporters and editors ‘disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians.’ (Fannin 2020)

6. To help improve its coverage of the Black community the Kerner report advised large news organisation to ‘establish better lines of communication with their counterparts in the Negro Press’, an institution which ‘manned largely by people who live and work in the ghetto’ would be ‘a useful source of information and guidance about the black community.

7. The article explored the effects of the Federal Communication Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, the regulation intended to ensure impartiality versus slanting of the news in broadcasting. Broadcasters were impelled to present ‘all sides of controversial issues’ in a presentation that was ‘fair,’ ‘non-distorted,’ ‘non-one-sided,’. (Efron 1964, 304)

8. Salant, however, was more concerned that the newsroom was an all-male establishment than an all-white one and his efforts towards diversity steered towards gender rather than race, former CBS news producer Peter Herford who ran the minority training program recalled in an interview with this author.

9. Originally the American Society of Newspaper Editors

10. For Ben Holman, however, the silent discrimination of his new white colleagues at CBS was an improvement on the treatment he had received on his first day as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News in the early 1950s. Upon his arrival at work Holman later recalled, his new white co-workers ‘all got up and literally walked out of the room.’ (Quoted in Flournoy 2003, 72)

11. I have borrowed this useful phrasing from Mary Alice Basconi. (Basconi 2008, 72)

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Sage Goodwin

Sage Goodwin is a DPhil candidate in History at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. She holds a Global History of Capitalism 2020-2021 Doctoral Studentship and the Rothermere American Institute’s Esmond Harmsworth Graduate Scholarship in American Culture. Her research explores television news and the African American freedom struggle in the fifties and sixties. She is a former Director of The Oxford Research Center in Humanities’ (TORCH) Race and Resistance Network and a co-founder and co-convenor of Oxford’s Cultural Histories, Cultural Studies seminar.