Television News and the Civil Rights Struggle:
The Views in Virginia and Mississippi
The Views in Virginia and Mississippi
William G. Thomas III, University of Virginia
Essay Sections:
Abstract | Introduction
| Print Media and Segregation | Birmingham
and Danville, 1963 | Local Television News and the
Breakdown of Segregation | The March on Washington
and Television News | WLBT and Pro-Segregation TV
| Conclusion | Notes | Bibliography
WLBT and Pro-Segregation TV:
While local broadcasters in Virginia
strove for disinterested presentation of the news, a few stations used
this new medium to continue the practice of the older media and in some
places station managements tried to use television to perpetuate segregation.
One station, WLBT in Jackson, Mississippi, proved exceptionally biased
in its news coverage and commentary, so much so that the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) in 1969 revoked its license. This drastic action came
after years of litigation and marked the only time in FCC history that
it took a license because of racial bias in programming. Eleven years
later, in 1980, the FCC awarded a new license to a group of African American
owners who hired the first African American general manager for an NBC
affiliate. 52
The WLBT case deserves scrutiny since it has recently received the attention of historians and media scholars. Both have suggested that the South's television stations perpetuated segregation and that WLBT was less than exceptional. "Most southern television stations," one historian of the WLBT case summarized, "failed to provide balanced coverage of the civil rights movement." Another recent study found that a "repressive media" throttled any information about the African American freedom struggle in Mississippi.
WLBT was owned by Lamar Life Broadcasting, a subsidiary of the large insurance company. The owners and managers, furthermore, were active participants in the White Citizens Council. In the same year that the company received its license and went on the air, 1955, the Citizen's Council began producing its Citizen's Council Forum syndicated TV program. WLBT featured these programs and clearly aimed its news and educational programming at maintaining the color line. Fred Beard, the station's manager, was an outspoken and militant Citizen's Council member.
In 1955 the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, led by Medgar Evers, filed a complaint with the FCC that WLBT presented the local news in a racially biased manner that did not serve the public interest. In its reply the station declared that it "has a policy not to sell or afford time locally for programming dealing with the issue of racial integration." The NAACP complaint alleged that the station cut off a national news program on the NAACP and the Brown case to squelch any discussion on the air about desegregation and to prevent showing Thurgood Marshall. Station manager Fred Beard complained publicly that the national networks were "overloading the circuits with Negro propaganda." The station fumbled about for an alternative program and after finding none available simply put a sign on the air "Sorry, Cable Trouble." A few years later in 1958 the station reiterated its position "not to present local programs dealing with the issue." In 1961, FCC chairman and Kennedy appointee Newton Minnow made clear to broadcasters that their license renewals every three years were about to become more rigorous and that the FCC would hold public hearings at the local level to determine whether the station was serving the public interest or not. As late as 1963 WLBT continued to maintain that it would not air any "inflammatory" programs and that any program dealing with civil rights, racial issues, or integration would not be aired. 53
In September 1962, however, the station weighed in with segregationist appeals and editorials as James Meredith became the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. WLBT and another station in Jackson, WJLT, were accused of helping to foster an atmosphere of violent resistance and encouraging the mob action that tormented the University campus and left two dead and dozens injured. WLBT broadcast an editorial at the key moment in the crisis over Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi that claimed "The word of the hour, the word of the day, the word of the year is: Never!" When the FCC investigated these allegations, it held that only segregationist editorials on the air were under scrutiny, not the news operations and newscasts. 54
In 1964 the United Church of Christ's Office of Communications began a study of WLBT's programming and within a year initiated a lawsuit against the station, its owner, and the FCC to revoke the license. Local African American viewers in Jackson particularly objected to the news anchor, Bob Neblett, whose slippery pronunciation of "Negro" often was heard clearly as "nigra" or "nigger." "By insinuation, innuendoes and even by his countenance this man expresses contempt for Negroes in his newscasts," one African American pastor testified. The station's general manager, Fred Beard, was a prominent participant in the local chapter of the White Citizen's Council. African Americans made up 45 percent of the population in the station's broadcast area, the Church of Christ investigation found, yet the station broadcast four hours of religious programming on Sundays without any from an African American church. For many African American witnesses in the suit, the television station was broadcasting in the same pattern of segregation and discrimination that characterized the newspapers owned by the same media companies. These African American men and women considered television an especially influential medium, "because of the type of appeal it makes, its visual impact," and concluded that WLBT presents news items in the form of "editorial comments which are mostly biased and unfair to Negroes." 55
When the FCC voted to give WLBT a year probationary period to develop public interest programming, comply with the Fairness Doctrine, and end racially discriminatory news broadcasting, two of the six commissioners dissented, arguing for an immediate hearing on whether to revoke the license. They considered the case of "unusual importance" because it was one of the earliest legal tests of the Commission's Fairness Doctrine. According to the two commissioners, the case was important because it was the first "consideration of a possible long continuing pattern of public deception as a means of censoring programs the licensee did not wish to present." 56
Witnesses in the case described a pattern of omission and segregation of information in WLBT's programming and news coverage. Reporters failed to use courtesy titles, covered African American crime not African American schools and colleges, and generally presented the voices of the status quo. One witness, Reverend Edwin King, reported that the station would precede every broadcast of the NBC national news program "Today" with a lead-in that said: "What you are about to see is an example of biased, managed Northern news. Be sure to stay tuned at 7:25 to hear your local newscast." 57
The WLBT six o'clock evening news broadcast on June 19, 1963, featured a story that African American witnesses probably found familiar and disheartening. The report covered the arrest of two African American men for "the assault and robbery of a white man." The news anchor boasted on the air that the credit for the arrest belonged to a WLBT television reporter, who "recognized the car [they] were riding in . . . followed the car and called a Jackson policeman to make the arrest." When the station's reporters put together stories on major events, such as the Freedom Riders' coming into Jackson, James Meredith enrolling at the University of Mississippi, or the assassination of Medgar Evers, they presented slanted coverage according to all of the witnesses for the United Church of Christ. "I saw many persons interviewed who were clearly race haters," one recalled, "but I did not see any Negroes or whites interviewed who favored civil rights or equal treatment for all races." One witness, Marian E. Musgrave, noting that all of the testimony referred to examples over many years, asked rhetorically, "If these channels had used Negro news as it came along, who would have such an accurate memory?" For African American Jackson residents the segregation they saw daily on the television screens was the same segregation they saw in their newspapers and in their parks, schools, and hospitals. 58
The United Church of Christ's statements and testimony pointed to a pattern of censorship, especially of canceling or failing to show national news programs that covered civil rights. What WLBT considered "inflammatory," the United Church of Christ and African American residents considered educational and news programs in the public interest. A whole series of national programs in the late 1950s and early 1960s investigated the problem of segregation and discrimination in American society. The special programming in August and September 1963 offered the most intensive examination of any nationally significant issue in television's history. NBC devoted three hours of prime time to its "American Revolution" program and ran it without commercial interruption. Despite these impressively documented and balanced news reports, some local affiliates did not air them, preferring to air more commercially successful programming. When they were shown on local stations, they were often up against other networks' prime time entertainment and suffered from low ratings. The commercial difficulty of airing in-depth news coverage was widely noted--TV Guide, for example, reported that in the 1960-62 seasons, network television aired over fifteen-hundred hours of news programming but only thirty hours concerned racial issues or civil rights. With pressure from FCC Director Newton Minnow who called television a "vast wasteland" in 1961 and threatened to hold stations accountable for "public interest" programming at license renewal, national networks and local affiliates began to take their news organizations more seriously. 59
By 1965 the Jackson television stations had begun to change under the pressure of the FCC's warnings and probationary renewal of the license. WJLT, for example, broadcast live the complete hearings of the Civil Rights Commission for five days. In the gripping testimony before it, the Commission's findings about the extent of terror, violence, discrimination, and evil practiced by whites against blacks in Mississippi shocked viewers and opened up a world of news. The New York Times 's Roy Reed saw the broadcast as a "crack in the racial wall" that business interests in Jackson had opened up. Businessmen wanted law and order, stability, and an end to the racial strife. The "wedge," Reed argued, "was WJTV's 90-mile signal." Reed concluded that the hearings, which WLBT also broadcast as taped segments, opened white local citizens' eyes. During the commission hearings, Reed reported, people remarked again and again, "the white people of Mississippi don't know these things." One African American man, Albert Whitly, told the Commission of his kidnapping and near execution at the hands of white men. Whitly, Reed pointed out, had "no face" to thousands of whites who might never have heard of the incident, but the television broadcast his personal story and in course of the hearings many more like it. 60
WLBT moved to make a clear reversal from earlier programming and practices to meet FCC guidelines in 1965. Fred Beard, the station's segregationist general manager, resigned. African Americans were addressed on screen as "Mr." and "Mrs." According to the New York Times, the news was "presented without the flagrant anti-Negro bias that once characterized it." The Reverend Allen Jackson, a local African American civil rights leader, was added to the noontime devotional messages and made his first on-air appearance in this venue in November 1965. These steps could not erase the damage of the past. The Reverend Edwin King, chaplain at Tougaloo College, said "that Mississippi would have seen much less racial violence in the last three years if its leading television stations had fully and objectively informed the residents on racial news." 61
The WLBT case deserves scrutiny since it has recently received the attention of historians and media scholars. Both have suggested that the South's television stations perpetuated segregation and that WLBT was less than exceptional. "Most southern television stations," one historian of the WLBT case summarized, "failed to provide balanced coverage of the civil rights movement." Another recent study found that a "repressive media" throttled any information about the African American freedom struggle in Mississippi.
WLBT was owned by Lamar Life Broadcasting, a subsidiary of the large insurance company. The owners and managers, furthermore, were active participants in the White Citizens Council. In the same year that the company received its license and went on the air, 1955, the Citizen's Council began producing its Citizen's Council Forum syndicated TV program. WLBT featured these programs and clearly aimed its news and educational programming at maintaining the color line. Fred Beard, the station's manager, was an outspoken and militant Citizen's Council member.
In 1955 the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, led by Medgar Evers, filed a complaint with the FCC that WLBT presented the local news in a racially biased manner that did not serve the public interest. In its reply the station declared that it "has a policy not to sell or afford time locally for programming dealing with the issue of racial integration." The NAACP complaint alleged that the station cut off a national news program on the NAACP and the Brown case to squelch any discussion on the air about desegregation and to prevent showing Thurgood Marshall. Station manager Fred Beard complained publicly that the national networks were "overloading the circuits with Negro propaganda." The station fumbled about for an alternative program and after finding none available simply put a sign on the air "Sorry, Cable Trouble." A few years later in 1958 the station reiterated its position "not to present local programs dealing with the issue." In 1961, FCC chairman and Kennedy appointee Newton Minnow made clear to broadcasters that their license renewals every three years were about to become more rigorous and that the FCC would hold public hearings at the local level to determine whether the station was serving the public interest or not. As late as 1963 WLBT continued to maintain that it would not air any "inflammatory" programs and that any program dealing with civil rights, racial issues, or integration would not be aired. 53
In September 1962, however, the station weighed in with segregationist appeals and editorials as James Meredith became the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. WLBT and another station in Jackson, WJLT, were accused of helping to foster an atmosphere of violent resistance and encouraging the mob action that tormented the University campus and left two dead and dozens injured. WLBT broadcast an editorial at the key moment in the crisis over Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi that claimed "The word of the hour, the word of the day, the word of the year is: Never!" When the FCC investigated these allegations, it held that only segregationist editorials on the air were under scrutiny, not the news operations and newscasts. 54
In 1964 the United Church of Christ's Office of Communications began a study of WLBT's programming and within a year initiated a lawsuit against the station, its owner, and the FCC to revoke the license. Local African American viewers in Jackson particularly objected to the news anchor, Bob Neblett, whose slippery pronunciation of "Negro" often was heard clearly as "nigra" or "nigger." "By insinuation, innuendoes and even by his countenance this man expresses contempt for Negroes in his newscasts," one African American pastor testified. The station's general manager, Fred Beard, was a prominent participant in the local chapter of the White Citizen's Council. African Americans made up 45 percent of the population in the station's broadcast area, the Church of Christ investigation found, yet the station broadcast four hours of religious programming on Sundays without any from an African American church. For many African American witnesses in the suit, the television station was broadcasting in the same pattern of segregation and discrimination that characterized the newspapers owned by the same media companies. These African American men and women considered television an especially influential medium, "because of the type of appeal it makes, its visual impact," and concluded that WLBT presents news items in the form of "editorial comments which are mostly biased and unfair to Negroes." 55
When the FCC voted to give WLBT a year probationary period to develop public interest programming, comply with the Fairness Doctrine, and end racially discriminatory news broadcasting, two of the six commissioners dissented, arguing for an immediate hearing on whether to revoke the license. They considered the case of "unusual importance" because it was one of the earliest legal tests of the Commission's Fairness Doctrine. According to the two commissioners, the case was important because it was the first "consideration of a possible long continuing pattern of public deception as a means of censoring programs the licensee did not wish to present." 56
Witnesses in the case described a pattern of omission and segregation of information in WLBT's programming and news coverage. Reporters failed to use courtesy titles, covered African American crime not African American schools and colleges, and generally presented the voices of the status quo. One witness, Reverend Edwin King, reported that the station would precede every broadcast of the NBC national news program "Today" with a lead-in that said: "What you are about to see is an example of biased, managed Northern news. Be sure to stay tuned at 7:25 to hear your local newscast." 57
The WLBT six o'clock evening news broadcast on June 19, 1963, featured a story that African American witnesses probably found familiar and disheartening. The report covered the arrest of two African American men for "the assault and robbery of a white man." The news anchor boasted on the air that the credit for the arrest belonged to a WLBT television reporter, who "recognized the car [they] were riding in . . . followed the car and called a Jackson policeman to make the arrest." When the station's reporters put together stories on major events, such as the Freedom Riders' coming into Jackson, James Meredith enrolling at the University of Mississippi, or the assassination of Medgar Evers, they presented slanted coverage according to all of the witnesses for the United Church of Christ. "I saw many persons interviewed who were clearly race haters," one recalled, "but I did not see any Negroes or whites interviewed who favored civil rights or equal treatment for all races." One witness, Marian E. Musgrave, noting that all of the testimony referred to examples over many years, asked rhetorically, "If these channels had used Negro news as it came along, who would have such an accurate memory?" For African American Jackson residents the segregation they saw daily on the television screens was the same segregation they saw in their newspapers and in their parks, schools, and hospitals. 58
The United Church of Christ's statements and testimony pointed to a pattern of censorship, especially of canceling or failing to show national news programs that covered civil rights. What WLBT considered "inflammatory," the United Church of Christ and African American residents considered educational and news programs in the public interest. A whole series of national programs in the late 1950s and early 1960s investigated the problem of segregation and discrimination in American society. The special programming in August and September 1963 offered the most intensive examination of any nationally significant issue in television's history. NBC devoted three hours of prime time to its "American Revolution" program and ran it without commercial interruption. Despite these impressively documented and balanced news reports, some local affiliates did not air them, preferring to air more commercially successful programming. When they were shown on local stations, they were often up against other networks' prime time entertainment and suffered from low ratings. The commercial difficulty of airing in-depth news coverage was widely noted--TV Guide, for example, reported that in the 1960-62 seasons, network television aired over fifteen-hundred hours of news programming but only thirty hours concerned racial issues or civil rights. With pressure from FCC Director Newton Minnow who called television a "vast wasteland" in 1961 and threatened to hold stations accountable for "public interest" programming at license renewal, national networks and local affiliates began to take their news organizations more seriously. 59
By 1965 the Jackson television stations had begun to change under the pressure of the FCC's warnings and probationary renewal of the license. WJLT, for example, broadcast live the complete hearings of the Civil Rights Commission for five days. In the gripping testimony before it, the Commission's findings about the extent of terror, violence, discrimination, and evil practiced by whites against blacks in Mississippi shocked viewers and opened up a world of news. The New York Times 's Roy Reed saw the broadcast as a "crack in the racial wall" that business interests in Jackson had opened up. Businessmen wanted law and order, stability, and an end to the racial strife. The "wedge," Reed argued, "was WJTV's 90-mile signal." Reed concluded that the hearings, which WLBT also broadcast as taped segments, opened white local citizens' eyes. During the commission hearings, Reed reported, people remarked again and again, "the white people of Mississippi don't know these things." One African American man, Albert Whitly, told the Commission of his kidnapping and near execution at the hands of white men. Whitly, Reed pointed out, had "no face" to thousands of whites who might never have heard of the incident, but the television broadcast his personal story and in course of the hearings many more like it. 60
WLBT moved to make a clear reversal from earlier programming and practices to meet FCC guidelines in 1965. Fred Beard, the station's segregationist general manager, resigned. African Americans were addressed on screen as "Mr." and "Mrs." According to the New York Times, the news was "presented without the flagrant anti-Negro bias that once characterized it." The Reverend Allen Jackson, a local African American civil rights leader, was added to the noontime devotional messages and made his first on-air appearance in this venue in November 1965. These steps could not erase the damage of the past. The Reverend Edwin King, chaplain at Tougaloo College, said "that Mississippi would have seen much less racial violence in the last three years if its leading television stations had fully and objectively informed the residents on racial news." 61
Essay Sections:
Abstract | Introduction
| Print Media and Segregation | Birmingham
and Danville, 1963 | Local Television News and the Breakdown of
Segregation | The March on Washington and Television News |
WLBT and Pro-Segregation TV | Conclusion |
Notes | Bibliography
