Is Capitalism Killing the News?

Scene:It seems as if part of the point of writing The Race Beat was that the history of the courage of people who covered that movement is in danger of getting lost, because the public just doesn’t have the same attitude toward the news business that they used to. Do you think that’s true?

Roberts:Certainly, papers at the time, and editors of the papers, carried a stature then that they don’t carry now. They were more a combination of local news anchor and chief commentator on events in their towns and regions. Very few editors now are that visible.

Scene:Do you think that makes them less courageous or more courageous when it come to having something to say about what’s wrong in a given place?

Roberts:I don’t know if it’s so much a matter of creativity [sic], but it’s certainly a matter of impact. I think they have less impact today even when they comment. Comparisons are difficult. Were the civil rights movement or something similar to happen today, I don’t think you would get the same degree of leadership and commitment from newspapers that you had during the civil rights era. On the other hand, because so many papers are now owned by chains and groups, you wouldn’t have the rabidly segregationist newspapers like you had in, say, Jackson, Mississippi. I guess I’m saying there’s more of a corporate blandness today, and a worry at times about the corporate image, which places limitations on editors taking too strong a stand about anything.

Scene:It seems there’s an obligation to present at least an image of neutrality on any important public issue, at least in terms of coverage. It’s pretty clear that at that time people were fairly willing to endure the accusation that their coverage was biased in one direction or the other. It didn’t seem to be as serious an accusation as it is now.

Roberts:No, but there was plenty of controversy around it. Newspapers were much freer then to go their own way. The kind of chain empires you see today were just sort of in their infancy. Newspapers didn’t seem to have a problem with so-called balance, in which you had to give each side their perfect due. But television had a lot of problems with this. It came mainly from pressure from their Southern affiliates. They were afraid they would get cancelled.

Scene: There’s that very striking business in your book about Howard K. Smith, and all the editing that was done by local affiliates on all the reporting.

Roberts: Right, and you remember his comment that “truth is not equidistant between good and evil.” So that kind of debate was going on in television.

Scene:It seems pretty clear to me that the basic thrust of the book is that the civil rights movement wouldn’t have happened, or wouldn’t have happened in the same explosive way, without the kind of news coverage that it got in the mainstream white media.

Roberts:Oh, absolutely.

Scene:That’s a pretty sad comment on the current possibilities for social change, isn’t it? Or do you think there’s just a very different configuration now in how information moves around?

Roberts: I don’t think we have quite as many issues today that are that stark. You have to remember that basically up until 1955 the press really didn’t cover the race issue. It was the black press, not the mainstream press, that you had to look to find out what was happening before 1955. It started with the Emmett Till case, which as you know from the book was actually given momentum by the black press, and [then] picked up by the mainstream press in Chicago and mushroomed from there. But the civil rights decision by the Supreme Court in 1954—there wasn’t a lot of reaction to [that] immediately, until what is called “Brown #2,” the implementation decision a year later touched off a lot of debate—mainly opposition from Southern senators, which triggered a national reaction on the other side. Then you had a full-blown national discussion on race. And the street elements of the civil rights movement made it unique. I think we might face something similar—but it’s going to be more focused in Washington—in the health care debate.

Scene:You see some parallels between those two stories?

Roberts:It’s a different kind of thing. You’re not rushing around from conflict to conflict, as in the civil rights movement. But I think you’re going to have a real debate, and I think if it’s covered properly it won’t be covered just in Washington. When we last had a national medical debate during the early years of the Clinton administration, when it was being run by Hillary Clinton, a lot of papers really gave detailed attention to what was happening in Washington, but less attention to the impact that the health insurance industry ads were having on the debate, and how people rightly or wrongly became convinced that their own health insurance could be in jeopardy. The coverage was flawed. But God knows that there were many errors made in coverage of civil rights. It was just such an ongoing story that journalists learned from their mistakes and moved on.