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
