Television news began broadcasting
political conventions, inaugurations, and other large political events
in the early 1950s. The Kefauver organized crime hearings, the 1952 Republican
Convention, Richard M. Nixon's "Checkers" speech, and the Army-McCarthy
hearings in 1954 featured dramatic coverage of political events, and millions
of Americans tuned in. By the mid-1950s television news organizations
at the local and national levels were experienced with the medium and
on the lookout for news that made good television. When the networks covered
the Democratic National Convention in 1956 however, the proceedings were
so tedious that critics panned the coverage. One reporter pointed out
that the picture of Sam Rayburn "pushing through not only the civil
rights plank but the whole platform by the simple device of exhausting
the delegates" made for good politics but bad television. "There
have been great attempts by television to reconcile its medium to political
reporting," he noted, "and by politicians to reconcile themselves
to television." The convention was not one of them.
28
Jack Gould, the television critic for the
New
York Times, considered the 1956 Democratic Convention coverage a
"routine show." He conceded that television offered the viewers
an "excellent seat at the proceedings" but argued that the coverage
"highlighted the inherent weaknesses that TV does have as a reportorial
medium." The convention, he wrote, "just wasn't the type of
story that lent itself to vivid visual treatment." Television, Gould
thought, had done a great deal to stimulate the nation's "political
consciousness," but he voiced concern about what he called television's
"journalistic narcissism." As the medium grew in popularity
and power, Gould noted, the television producers were trying too much
to come between the viewer and the event. TV, Gould wrote, should worry
less about "making history" and more about reporting it.
29
The connections between the civil rights struggle
and television as a medium were too numerous and significant to ignore
for either opponents or supporters of desegregation. The first televised
debate for statewide office in New York took place on October 20, 1956
between New York City Mayor Robert Wagner and New York Attorney General
Jacob Javits. The televised debate focused entirely on civil rights issues.
Powerful images, from political debates and other events, might come across
the screen, reveal different perspectives, and open discussion. In 1957
southern congressmen began taking measures to insure the "southern
point of view" might make its way onto the nation's airwaves. The
passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Bill led some southern congressmen to
put pressure on the big radio and television networks. One powerful congressman
sent a letter to the broadcast companies urging that the "southern
view" be given consideration. He wanted white conservative opinion
defending state's rights and segregation fully broadcast. The letter,
printed on the letterhead of the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee,
the committee that oversees the FCC, included the veiled threat that the
networks might eventually be transformed into a public utility if they
did not present the "southern" point of view.
30
White conservatives took aim at television programming
and news coverage that they claimed instigated African American protests
and poisoned race relations in the South. Often, local white conservatives
in small towns and cities in the South saw the national programming as
especially offensive. In 1960, for example, Petersburg, Virginia, businessman
Remmie Arnold, president of the Remmie Arnold Pen Co., Inc., objected
to an NBC program aired on April 10th and hosted by Chet Huntley. Arnold
called the program "terrifying" because "it was put over
in such a way that" it gave "instructions to the dissenters
of the colored race." Arnold wrote directly to Robert Sarnoff, president
of NBC, and invited Huntley and NBC newsmen to "come into the South
and see what is happening." He warned Sarnoff that "a campaign"
was underway "through proper channels . . . to prohibit such broadcasts
as these in the future." Arnold forwarded a copy of his letter to
NBC to Virginia Governor J. Lindsay Almond and asked the governor to "protest
and prohibit the National Broadcasting Company, or any other television
company, from sending in to the State of Virginia such distorted programs."
31
If some southern politicians were taking aim at television indirectly
and some citizens were expressing privately their disdain for certain
broadcasts, some southern sheriffs were more direct. When the FBI came
to Dawson, Georgia, in 1958 to investigate allegations of police brutality
and civil rights violations, the local county sheriff, Z. T. "Zeke"
Matthews, blamed the situation on television news broadcasts originating
in the North that stirred up local African Americans to protest. Television
and the "communists," he suggested, were the point of origin
for all disorder and difficulty in the county. "There isn't a nigger
in Georgia who wouldn't take over if he could," Matthews stated plainly.
"I've noticed things have gotten worse since television," Matthews
pointed out,
This small town Georgia sheriff was not
far wrong about the increasing role of television in the lives of young
southerners black and white. One of the most detailed descriptions of
the widespread penetration of television into African American households
was recorded in the criminal court records in Danville, Virginia, in 1963
when hundreds of young African American people were arrested for violating
a local court injunction against street protests. The police took down
information about their favorite shows and asked whether they owned a
television. The large majority of the young African American students
lived in a household with a television. Nearly 70 percent owned televisions
in their homes, and only 5 percent lived in homes without access to either
a television or a radio. These young people watched major league baseball,
"Bandstand," "The Beverly Hillbillies," "western
shows," and "The Eleventh Hour."
33
In Virginia the first television stations went on
the air in 1949 and by 1960 there were still only a handful of local stations
broadcasting local news. Early in the fifties, some television news editors
and station managers began to take avowedly neutral stands on the issues
of segregation and discrimination. After 1961, the FCC's 1949 Fairness
Doctrine became a standard for licensing when Commission head Newton Minnow
reinforced it. The doctrine required that television stations give equal
time and access to diverse opinions on the air and barred them from editorializing
in their news broadcasts. WAVY-TV (Portsmouth, Virginia), for example,
declared that its news staff "will not editorialize, give an opinion,
or predict any future development relative to the integration issue."
The station urged its reporters that all interviews with local school
officials and state elected officials "will be handled so that no
side or definite stand will appear to result from the questions by our
newsmen."
34
In both its original application for a broadcast license
in 1952 and its renewal application in 1960, WDBJ in Roanoke, Virginia,
offered justifications for its programming in the public interest. The
station noted the track record of its radio operation as an "important
medium of cultural expression and as a source of unbiased and factual
news dissemination." WDBJ pointed out its work with religious organizations
for the broadcast of local services and fundraising for the completion
of "a new Negro hospital" in the city. In 1960 the station planned
to continue "to provide an outlet for the Roanoke area for local
self-expression, thus contributing to the vitalizing of our Democracy."
As examples of public-interest, unbiased news reporting, the station pointed
to several controversial issues it covered, most prominently the "segregation-integration
issue."
35
The doctrine originally was intended to secure balanced coverage in the
public interest concerning controversial topics because the spectrum of
channels was limited and the stations were in effect "trustees"
of the public space. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing
sides of a controversy. Instead, it required broadcasters to meet two
criteria for license renewal. First, the broadcasting company had a responsibility
to air controversial subjects in the public interest. No television station
in the American South, therefore, in theory would be allowed to blackout
the desegregation or civil rights news. Second, the station had to provide
reasonable balance in the coverage of these issues. The FCC required stations
"to provide coverage of vitally important controversial issues of
interest in the community served by the licensees" and "to provide
a reasonable opportunity for the presentation of contrasting viewpoints
on such issues." The FCC gave stations wide latitude to interpret
how best to achieve balance.
Local television stations, such as WDBJ, did report on controversial issues, and because they gave time and voice to multiple perspectives, these shows offered audiences something new—a desegregated news account. At the local level, some news organizations began putting together hour-long news specials on the civil rights struggle and on racial issues. One of the first to produce them in Virginia, WDBJ developed a special on school desegregation in 1955 titled "Virginia's Dilemma" and another on the school closing crisis in 1958 titled "September Showdown." These programs featured interviews with black and white participants in litigation and school desegregation, representatives of organizations, city government, and everyday passers-by on the street. Not all were willing to talk on television. The white school board officials in Norfolk, Virginia, were "unwilling to face television cameras" when WDBJ did its "September Showdown" piece at the height of the school closing crisis. Yet, they were willing to talk with "pencil and paper" reporters. African American civil rights leader Vivian Carter Mason in Norfolk did grant WDBJ reporters an interview after she escorted the first African American student on her first day at formerly all-white Granby High School in 1959. Carter, however, made clear that the students who desegregated Norfolk's schools would not be interviewed extensively on television. She considered the "barrage of questioning and picture-taking detrimental" to the students and feared that television interviews might be misinterpreted as attention-getting.
These long-format news shows revealed powerful arguments for desegregation from articulate and compelling African American voices. NAACP lead attorney, Oliver Hill, appeared in numerous news films describing the plaintiff's position in school desegregation litigation. Oliver Hill's clear statement of the moral reasons segregation should end were delivered with drama and force in a WDBJ interview. To provide fairness Hill's comments were paired with an interview of Robert Crawford, the founder of the segregationist Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, an all-white organization intended to preserve segregation in all aspects of southern life.
While WDBJ and other stations created
their own news specials and aired them, these stations also carried the
national news and the national networks' specials. Some southern stations
refused to broadcast national news reports on the civil rights movement,
either because they did not want to cancel popular entertainment programming
or because they did not want to air controversial shows. Others refused
to air any national programming that dealt with racial matters. National
and local news programs often strove, nevertheless, for fairness but southern
politicians worried about the visual power of the medium to shape interpretations.
CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, for example, wrote to Governor J. Lindsay
Almond in November 1958 to explain the special one-hour report he was
preparing on the Norfolk school closings. Murrow claimed that all sides
would be presented in a "full and fair hearing." He viewed the
situation in Virginia as "a dilemma which had decent people in all
walks of life seeking a solution." Calling himself "an old admirer
of the Jefferson country," Murrow indicated he would deal fairly
with the "traditions of Virginia."
36
Murrow's fairness, however, would not go unchallenged. The program was
screened to a limited audience in January 1959 and one participant wrote
Murrow to offer her objections. Para Lee Brock, an independent television
producer and writer in Atlanta, considered the program on the whole a
"reasonable attempt to present both sides of the controversy."
But one sequence in the program drew her criticism. It depicted a African
American teacher calling roll in class asking those African American students
who had applied to attend white schools to stand, and it featured Murrow's
voiceover, which, according to Brock, "with a hint of laughter in
it, would say, 'One pupil out of six thousand.'" Brock claimed it
ridiculed Virginia, as if to say why should Virginia be so concerned about
token integration. Brock went on in her letter to explain that the cause
of massive resistance was not about a few black students in a few white
schools but instead about total desegregation of southern life, something
she considered serious, far-reaching, and not a matter to be taken lightly.
Brock called on Murrow to correct the sequence: "No Virginian was
given the opportunity to say that token integration would be merely the
opening wedge."
Brock's letter to Murrow did not end there; she went
on to ask Murrow to consider the visual power of the medium of television.
She argued that "intelligent viewers" in the South and elsewhere
would "refute the unbalanced sequence on their own and the network,
rather than the South, would be the object of ridicule." The combination
of Murrow's voice and the visual example of the roll call might influence
"the masses." Brock called this "propaganda" and was
clearly worried that the American public would be led inexorably toward
the conclusion, "how ridiculous can the South be?" Brock sent
a copy of her letter to Governor Almond, who replied that he "read
[it] with considerable interest."
37
There can be little doubt that the CBS national program aired in Virginia.
Many of the stations in Virginia including those in Roanoke and in Bristol,
carried all such national news programs. WCYB in Bristol stated clearly
in its FCC license renewal application that "every documentary and
public affairs program made available by NBC, whether sponsored or sustaining,
has been carried by WCYB-TV." The station carried all of the Kennedy-Nixon
debates and all of Kennedy's news conferences. In addition, it gave time
for local editorial opinion and invited multiple perspectives on current
issues.
Editorials were run outside of the local news broadcasts
but not all stations broadcast them. When they did, editorials on television
appeared little different from those in the print media. One WCYB editorial
ran on June 12, 1963, just two days after the Danville violence. The editorial
commented on Governor Albertis Harrison's reactions to the events in Danville,
repeating Harrison's views. Harrison held that Danville's violence was
encouraged and perpetrated by "outsiders," that Prince Edward
County's closed schools were deplorable, and that the only way to move
forward for both races was through communication and education to attain
equal treatment and opportunity for African Americans. The editorial applauded
Harrison's sensibility on the subject, stating that segregation laws should
and would be stricken down, that the Prince Edward "tragic"
situation needed quick resolution, and that "this country is not
alone with the race problem." At the same time, the editorial warned
that zealous civil rights proponents were beginning to trample "upon
constitutional guarantees" in calling for the proposed Civil Rights
Bill.
38
While editorial comments, then, often carried clear
messages for viewers and did not often include corresponding opposing
views, news programs and documentaries featured African American voices
speaking eloquently and directly to the audience. It is impossible to
tell whether any of the young people of Danville or anywhere in the South
in the late 1950s ever saw the local news or some of the national special
broadcasts aired by NBC or CBS news. They might have seen, for example,
James Baldwin interviewed by Dr. Kenneth Clark in May 1963. If they had,
they would have witnessed his opening statement. Baldwin looked directly
into the camera and said, "I am not a nigger." Baldwin stated
plainly his humanity and his equality. The effect took hold of
New
York Times television critic Jack Gould, who called it "a television
experience that seared the conscience of the white set owner." All
of the usual legalistic and moral equivocations on television about civil
rights were, according to Gould, "shattered" in Baldwin's remarkable
performance. "Ever since the introduction of television," Gould
wrote, "it has been self-evident that the searching camera eye and
the intimacy of the screen at home can reach into the mind's inner recesses
in a manner different from any other medium." The television combined
access to mass audiences with the kind of personal challenge that Baldwin
issued, a statement whose clarity and power stretched across region and
time. Gould thought that Baldwin's connection to the audience would last
well beyond the end of the show.
39
As the major networks developed and ran specials on
the civil rights struggle, some southern politicians saw these as invasive
and misguided. They singled out television and sometimes the media generally
as a prime cause of racial conflict in the region. In NBC's special "American
Revolution of '63" Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett lashed out at
television as one of the chief catalysts of African American protest in
the South. Barnett had tried to use television speeches in the crisis
over James Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi at Oxford.
He spoke of abusive federal power and the need to maintain southern segregation,
but the events of September 1962 showed unrestrained violence at the campus
and federal marshals struggling to bring order. A year later Barnett attacked
television because it presented what he thought were inflammatory pictures,
stirred African American protesters, and made local stories into national
media events, all but inviting federal power into localities to resolve
them.
40
Barnett was wrong about many things, but he correctly
understood that television as a medium operated in new and different ways.
Television was not only an extraordinarily lucrative new venture, it was
also radically different as an information medium. Unlike newspaper, television
operated exclusively in a time-dependent fashion. Time governed the pacing
of all programming on television and created a different set of structures
and imperatives for the reporters and news directors. At first, as the
new medium was taking shape, early television directors saw the advantages
of presenting long live events to fill the hours and hours of open programming
slots. Presidential campaigns and political conventions, as well as boxing
matches and other sporting events, both filled time and offered viewers
a built-in dramatic narrative. After the Army-McCarthy hearings were televised,
news directors could see that the best use of the medium was to craft
sequenced narratives. One television news historian, Paul Weaver, has
argued against the conventional wisdom that television news was superficial
while newspapers more analytical. Instead, he argues that television achieved
integration and coherence where newspapers offered fragmentation and multiple
layers. The newspaper story, he points out, was not meant to be read in
its entirety yet still had to achieve intelligibility. The television
news story, on the other hand, "is a whole that is designed to be
fully intelligible only when viewed in its entirety." To accomplish
this, television news directors began to focus not so much on an event
per se as on what Weaver calls "a process, mood, trend,
condition, irony, relationship, or whatever else seems suitable to them."
While newspapers piled unrelated stories into an edition with little regard
for how the whole newspaper for that day looked and read, television news
directors developed the reverse strategy—the broadcast in its entirety
was an arranged selection meant to appeal to the most viewers and over
time not to lose viewers.
41
In Roanoke, Virginia, WSLS (NBC) and WDBJ (CBS) covered key events in
the late 1950s and early 1960s in ways that set them apart from the state's
leading white-owned newspapers. WDBJ was owned by the same corporation
that published the
Roanoke World News, and so the station was
influenced by the moderate stance of the ownership. WSLS was owned by
principals at Shenandoah Life Insurance, a company with strong ties to
federal employee organizations in the District of Columbia and few links
to conservative Virginia Democratic Party operatives. Of the surviving
film footage from these two stations that covered civil rights issues,
approximately forty-four percent of the films prominently featured or
presented African American spokespeople.
WSLS' coverage of the school closing crisis in 1958-1959
included both opposition voices to Virginia's massive resistance program
and those in favor of it. After federal and state courts ordered integration
to proceed in Virginia and put an end to massive resistance laws, Virginia's
Governor Lindsay Almond considered taking a more drastic step to prevent
integration in schools—repealing the provision in Virginia's constitution
that required the state to maintain free and public schools. After a few
days, however, Almond relented and decided to scrap massive resistance
and search for "other methods as effective as or better than those
which have served until the hammer of federal intervention fell with devastating
force."
42
Almond's retreat from continuing massive resistance
was big news, and the WSLS news script called it what it was: "a
turning point in the fight against school integration." The white-owned
newspapers covered Almond's speech not as a turning point but as a capitulation
or at least as an admission of failure. The moderate papers, such as the
Roanoke World News, considered Almond's speech a positive sign
telling the "people what they already knew but were loath to admit."
Defiance, these papers suggested, was "futile" and the state
should "have learned a lesson" from the dismal failure of massive
resistance both as a policy and a strategy. The more conservative white
papers, such as the
Richmond News Leader, emphasized that white
leaders were "powerless" in the face of federal authority and
yet still called for massive resistance to shift gears toward minimizing
desegregation. The
Richmond News Leader ran an angry editorial
a few days after the speech. James J. Kilpatrick chastised the broadcasting
stations for giving "equal time" to the NAACP spokesmen to respond
to the Governor and rebuked NAACP attorney Oliver Hill for suggesting
that the lack of communication between white and black Virginians could
be corrected "once white people decided to work constructively."
Fulminating over the comment, the
News Leader editor lashed out
in an oddly accurate assessment: the white South, he wrote, has "been
working constructively upon segregation problems for the past several
generations and they have had mighty little help from the Negro people."
Only the African American-owned newspaper, the
Richmond Afro American,
used the same language as WSLS and called the speech a "turning point."
Its editorial reviewed it as "a masterpiece of agonized rhetoric."
43
WSLS gave considerable voice, time, and attention to the white leadership, but it also presented news stories covering the affairs of African American Virginians. The September 28, 1959, news broadcast featured a story on a meeting of the African American Roanoke Development Association. The anchor on the broadcast described a speech calling for desegregation by a retired African American judge from New York, H. T. Delaney, who "says if his race moved any slower towards this goal, they'd be going backwards." The news director not only quoted from Delaney in the coverage but also showed film footage of the event and described the group's plans to "quit doing business" with several downtown merchants who would not hire African Americans. WSLS went further, however, and also covered the speech of a little-known independent candidate challenging U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Virginia's most powerful politician. The script read that the candidate was "claiming he [Byrd] was trying to keep Virginia small in every way." Concluding the story, the script summarized, "Delaney told his audience that white people in the South had never learned the precept of love thy neighbor." Neither Delaney's speech nor the independent candidate's were covered in the newspapers. WSLS's news broadcast linked these stories and created a sequential narrative of black and white opposition to the Byrd-led conservative politics.
On the day of court-ordered integration in several localities in Virginia, WSLS' news coverage explicitly linked the school desegregation issue with a wider one—the economic development and the future of Virginia. The script and film created a seamless narrative of consequences in the desegregation story, one that connected white and black students to the state's future economic well-being. The station's news script for February 20, 1959, led off with how integration proceeded at one of the closed schools, Warren County High School. As it turned out, the African American students arrived for classes only to find that no white students returned to the school. "In theory, classes began at Warren County high school today on an integrated basis," the script read, "actually, however, the once all-white school is now an all-Negro school." The story explained that the white students were staying put in the segregated private schools set up during the closing crisis and then went directly into a second story about a business leader's speech to a gathering in Roanoke. The speaker, a vice president of the Norfolk and Western Railroad, argued that "a prompt and sound solution of the school segregation problem" was necessary to accelerate Virginia business growth. He called not only for lower taxes on businesses but also "a change in attitude by some Virginians, who apparently don't want progress." While the Roanoke newspaper covered the business meeting and mentioned the speaker's points, the newspaper did not connect the event to the larger desegregation story.
In 1960 WSLS presented a radically different picture of the Democratic Party when it featured what it called a "Negro Democratic Rally" on its October 7th evening news. At the time both Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and his Republican rival Richard Nixon were stumping in Virginia. National Democratic Party leaders considered Virginia in play despite Harry F. Byrd's opposition to Kennedy. Several key Democrats in Virginia, including state party chair Sidney Kellam and Governor Lindsay Almond, backed Kennedy in the race. Desegregation had begun in some Virginia schools, but resistance to desegregation was by no means dead. When WSLS broadcast a African American Democratic Party rally, the political stakes were high for a changing party.
Meanwhile, television news reporters at WDBJ, the CBS affiliate, covered the events of desegregation in careful detail. The station's reporters interviewed state legislators, political leaders, school board officials, and citizens. These interviews included extensive comments from African American lawyers and NAACP officials, as well as local ministers, organizers, and parents. The balance and engaging presence of these multiple voices represented a distinct difference between the television and the print medium. WDBJ's interview with NAACP attorney Oliver Hill presented as direct and clear of a statement that Virginians were ever to hear about why segregation was wrong.
Later, in 1963, the WDBJ reporters interviewed a young African American student getting on the school bus in Prince Edward County after four long years out of school because white authorities closed schools rather than integrate them. The story's captivating appeal came from both the long wait for the bus as it trundled down the lane and the enthusiasm of the youngster who seemed one moment closer to his lifelong goal—to be a physician. "You need a lot of education for that," remarked the newsman. "I know that," replied the youngster as he boarded the bus.
Television news not only gave African American leaders a channel
of communication to white and black viewers, it also invited viewers into
the movement behind the scenes. Television cameras went where many whites
had never been: into African American churches, into African American
homes, into non-violent training workshops, into African American meetings,
and into the legal offices of African American lawyers and organizers.
When WDBJ, for example, filmed a SNCC workshop on non-violent demonstration,
it offered white viewers an opportunity to learn and see what was happening
in their wider community. These images and the commentary that African
American leaders provided often were the only sources for whites to hear
from and see the African American community unfiltered through the white
newspaper media. Only those who had read African American newspapers,
such as the
Richmond Afro-American, might have absorbed this
perspective.
Local television news, it turned out, could reach
far beyond a station's broadcast territory. Stations across the networks
picked up important stories and the effects of this coverage were sometimes
surprising. CBS's story on the June 1963 violence in Danville, for example,
was broadcast nationally. A letter to the editor of the
Richmond Afro
American came from New Mexico, where the writer was "looking
at the 8 p.m. news on television" when the Danville mayor appeared
on screen to defend his refusal to free the jailed protestors. The writer
argued that "our very nation was born and established in a revolt
against injustice and tyranny" and that the mayor should start by
negotiating with the African American leaders of Danville.
44
Another television viewer saw the Danville coverage
and reacted with direct, personal action—she went to Danville. Anne
Karro, a 53 year-old wife of a Labor Department lawyer and mother of three,
drove to Danville "after seeing a television show on the police brutality
there." Karro said she "wanted to see what it was all about"
and she ended up marching, protesting, and spending eleven days in jail
for violating court injunctions. Later, after the March on Washington,
Karro organized a community road trip from her suburban Maryland neighborhood
to Danville where they joined meetings and attended church.
45
Television news made up a small proportion of the broadcast day and of
the station's operations, but the news it aired was markedly different
from what made it into the newspapers. The Roanoke stations estimated
in 1952 that 10 percent of the broadcast time would be devoted to news.
By 1960 the station reported that the number was optimistic, as just six
percent of programming time went to news. Yet both local and national
news broadcasts remained powerfully resonant. Local segregationists wanted
a news blackout on the issues of civil rights, and in many places controlled
or influenced the newspapers enough to achieve that goal for a time. In
Roanoke, Portsmouth, and other Virginia areas, television, on the other
hand, opened up new spaces, bringing whites into black places, broadcasting
black voices, and showing dramatic scenes of confrontation, debate, prayer,
and action.
