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.

Scene: So many of the great civil rights journalists were Southerners—Claude Sitton, Karl Fleming, you—and one thing that isn’t talked about a lot in your book, and wasn’t talked about in Karl Fleming’s book, is that people don’t seem to have felt a lot of personal conflict about the uproar they were creating in their own communities. They were pretty clear on what their principles were, and the fact that people were unhappy with them doesn’t seem to have mattered much. Do you think that was true?

Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. When you moved into a Southern town to cover racial problems, you knew you weren’t going to be received with open arms. Reporters expected that. In order to do their jobs, they became expert at blending in with crowds and looking like FBI agents.

Scene: There were plenty of those around.

Roberts: Right. You know, Claude and Karl invented this kind of cut-in-half notebook that would fit in their coat pockets. After a while reporters discovered that if you dressed in a suit and put two of the notebooks in your right-hand coat pocket, it would look like you were packing a shoulder holster. You’d be thought to be an FBI agent, and you could go about your business collecting the news. It could get very hairy in racial confrontations, and reporters learned to adapt.

Scene: There’s a wonderful story in your book about the time when you were with a group of reporters and you had to ask the Klan to protect you from the mob. It’s a pretty alarming situation when you have to ask the Klan to protect you.

Roberts: (laughing) That’s true.

Scene: That brings up the whole question of putting your life at risk to cover a story. When can an editor ask a reporter to do that?

Roberts: Claude Sitton would say “Prudence,” and take every precaution you could take, but having done that, nobody worried that much about danger. There was a sense that [you] were on an important story, and your job was to cover that story. While precautions were taken—both Claude and Karl had a list of things: they wanted the front rooms in motels because they were better lit, Claude wanted to sit in a restaurant with his back against the wall facing the door so he could see who was coming in, and all of that. But even with all of that caution, Claude was absolutely dedicated to the story, even loved the story, and just wouldn’t dream of being inhibited in the coverage of the story. He went everywhere he had to go, and some of the places he had to go were pretty hairy.

Scene: It seems to be a big issue these days. There’s a lot of talk in the world of journalism about how many people are getting killed out covering various conflicts. There have been an awful lot of journalists killed covering the Iraq war and other places.

Roberts: A large number.

Scene: Do you think it’s a sort of existential question for any journalist, “How far am I willing to go?”

Roberts: On certain stories that’s always been a question. During the Vietnam era—at least in the early part of that era, and covering war to this day—The New York Timesand most papers prefer to go with volunteers. If there aren’t enough volunteers, then they still have the problem of how to get the story covered, and they might offer inducements to get reporters to go. Most times there are reporters out there willing to take the risk because they think the story’s important. If you don’t mind, let me talk about the Nashville Tennessean at a critical time. Some of the best local coverage done any place was done during the sit-in movement by the Nashville Tennessean.

Scene: That was David Halberstam, right?

Roberts: Right. There were other people involved, but he was certainly the main player. He was the first reporter probably anywhere to probe the black students and their philosophy, and where they were coming from, and the frustrations they felt. And if you had to make a criticism of civil rights coverage up to 1960, when David—and I would also say Claude Sitton—turned a corner on it, it was the absence of black voices. It just wasn’t a question of the press not going after the black voices. Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t, but the risk for blacks to have their names in mainstream papers could be great. They could lose their jobs. In some parts of the South they might get into trouble with their banks over credit issues.

Scene: Do you think it’s hard for people now to understand the degree to which people were reluctant to be identified with the movement?

Roberts: Yeah, I had a real lesson in that. In 1960 I was a reporter in Raleigh for The News & Observer and was interested in the race story. I had contacts in the black community in Raleigh, and one of these people asked me if I would consider going to a rural county an hour or so away from Raleigh to cover the deplorable conditions in black schools. Whites in this county had very substantial school buildings, and blacks were still going to school in virtual shanties. But the ground rules were that no one locally wanted their name in the newspaper for fear of economic retaliation. So my instructions were to go to the local black funeral home, and they put me in the back of a hearse and drove me around the county. At each school there would be several black people to show me around, and they carefully didn’t give me their names. Which wasn’t really necessary: You could see for yourself the condition of the schools. This changed over time. After the Voting Rights Act came in, more and more people—even in the counties where there had been no blacks allowed to vote at all, in places like the Mississippi Delta—suddenly you had blacks voting in local sheriffs, and so forth. The big change [today] in the areas that were most segregated is the absence of fear, and white supremacy depended on the fear element.

Scene: That puts me in mind of the Jena, La. incident. Jena seems like the sort of place where once upon a time none of that would ever have gotten any kind of attention, and yet it’s become this enormous national event—not primarily via the mainstream media, but via the Internet. What do you think about that? Do you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing that people bypass the mainstream media?

Roberts: At the risk of overstating, I think a lot of newspaper chains and groups are on a suicidal course. There is more competition. Newspapers have been losing circulation for quite some time, and yet they keep cutting back staff, which of course escalates the pattern of circulation losses. On the one hand, I think people on the Internet being able to chime in on a news story is a wonderful thing; but in another way, the press is making it more important than it otherwise might be, by not covering events as diligently as it ought to be covering them.

Scene: So you think, more than the Internet being this out-of-control phenomenon, it’s sort of filling a void.Roberts: Yes.

Scene: Would a story like Jena have been picked up more quickly, say, 30 years ago?

Roberts: Yes, certainly, 30 or 35 years ago. There’s a part in the book [about how] the black leaders in the Mississippi Delta were encouraged by the [1954] Supreme Court decision. They weren’t interested so much in school desegregation but simply in the right to vote, so they started a voter registration campaign, and two of the voter registration leaders were assassinated: one on the court house steps and another in a drive-by shooting. A third was wounded but not killed. At that moment in time, only the back press covered it with any accuracy and on-the-scene presence. But then, after that, things began to change. I would say definitely after Little Rock, from 1957 to the early 70s, papers were very vigilant about covering civil rights stories. After that you began to have some slippage, but then you really didn’t have an organized civil rights movement. Blacks were more venting their frustrations—now that they had lots of blacks on the voter rolls— through the voting process.

One of the things I bemoan today is that we don’t have the really strong regional newspapers that we had at one point. Papers like the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Des Moines Register and Tribune were national treasures of a sort, and today they are pale shadows of their former selves.

Scene: Is there any paper you can think of that shines with regional coverage?

Roberts: The St Petersburg Times. It’s set up under separate ownership. One of the discouraging events in the last decade, and it’s even escalated in the last year or so, is [the decline of foreign coverage in] most of the important second tier of American newspapers—not The New York Times or The Washington Post or the LA Times, which everyone sort of expects foreign coverage out of—but the second group of newspapers, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun, Newsday on Long Island. Some of the very best foreign journalism was done by these papers.

Scene: Why do you think that was?

Roberts: Because the main papers, the Times, the LA Times, The Washington Post—feel compelled to go with the big story of the day or the month. They feel compelled to run with important stories on a day-by-day basis. That sort of ties them down. Papers like the Globe, Newsday and the Inquirer didn’t feel the same obligation, and they in effect could zig when the big papers were zagging, and do stories that might otherwise not have been reported, or might not have been reported in as timely a fashion. A big example of that is that Newsday was the one that broke the ethnic cleansing story in the former Yugoslavia. I worry now that they are suddenly out of the foreign reporting business just how much real important news we may be missing.

Scene: Do you think the coverage of Iraq is lacking?

Roberts: It’s been good under the circumstances. Reporters virtually risk their lives every time they venture out of the Green Zone, but nevertheless they’re venturing out. The big papers have really made a huge commitment to Iraq. It’s costing the Times millions annually to cover that story. I don’t worry about Iraq, but I do worry about the rest of the Middle East. Everyone is so preoccupied with the Iraq story, and to a lesser degree, for the moment anyway, the story in Israel. But there are all these other currents going on in the Middle East, and there are not a lot of dedicated reporters covering them.

Scene: Not a lot of dedicated American reporters.

Roberts: Not a lot of American reporters. The whole context in which I’m talking is American journalism.

Scene: Do you think the European press does a better job?

Roberts: It depends on the story. But I think more is expected of us and more should be expected of us. I think very few Americans would argue with the notion that we are at least for the moment the most powerful and strategically important country, and I think for us not to lead the world in the coverage of the world in which we presume to be the leader is a very bad thing. Unless the world is fully reported to Americans, we don’t have the real facts we need in order to hold our leaders accountable.

Scene: You teach journalism at Maryland. How do your students feel about the professional world they confront? Do they feel hopeful about it? Do they feel discouraged about the possibilities of what they can do, given the current corporate atmosphere?

Roberts: It breaks into two groups. The undergraduates have these concerns and they’re under no illusions about pay. I mean, they don’t come into journalism schools expecting to get rich. They know lawyers are going to start out making four or five times what they’re going to make. But they do worry about finding good newspapers that they would be proud to work on. The graduate students tend to be career switchers—28, 29, 30. They’ve been in other occupations and are bored out of their minds. To them, journalism seems an interesting alternative to what they were previously doing. I have had several students during the years I’ve been teaching who are economists, usually working for the federal government in places like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and reached the point that several of them have said if they had to do one more econometric model they thought they’d go out of their skulls. I had one student who was a CPA, who described herself as neither happy nor unhappy in her job. She was just going along without question. She took some time off and went backpacking in Thailand and decided she could never go back to CPA’ing again, and switched into newspapers.

Scene: That seems like a hopeful sign, that interesting and curious people are still attracted to journalism.

Roberts: The tragedy, I think, is that individual journalists have never been better. There’s better writing, there’s more capability or talent among journalists to do the most complex types of reporting. But once you get outside of four or five of the largest newspapers, in an era of staff cutbacks, it becomes harder and harder for editors to assign reporters to complex stories. The staffs are too tight even in some instances to cover the basics.

Scene: Do you see any glimmer of change in the industry that might correct that?

Roberts: I keep hoping. For 25 years I’ve told myself that newspapers must see how shortsighted this is, and surely they’ll wake up. But I think the way that most newspaper companies are structured, that newspaper business executives feel they have to meet Wall Street’s expectations. Where you have two classes of stock, where families control the voting stock—and of course, that’s changing on the Wall Street Journal now [with] Murdoch—but previously these papers with two classes of stock were the only ones that really felt comfortable not doing everything that Wall Street demanded in the way of profit production. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and McClatchy newspapers also have two classes of stock. They have been, at least up to this point—and we certainly hope it will continue—less inclined to have temporary layoffs, permanent layoffs, and that kind of thing.

Scene: It seems like a pretty dire situation. I hate to end this interview on a sad note, but is there anyplace happier to go?

Roberts: Well, the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by a foundation, they have to worry about being a solvent organization, but they don’t have to worry about making a profit level that’s unreasonable.

Scene: We’re coming pretty close to saying that capitalism is killing the news. I’m not sure you want to say that

Roberts: There’s capitalism and there’s capitalism. What’s really crazy is that newspapers, even with all of their problems, still make considerably more than the average American corporation. Newspapers until recently, by which I mean in the last year or so—a lot of the big companies were making operating profits of 18 to 25 percent, and that’s down some, but not a whole lot. The irony is, if I’m remembering correctly, is that two years ago Exxon made its record profit, the biggest annual profit it had ever made, and it was about 15 percent. That same year, McClatchy bought Knight Ridder newspapers, and decided not to keep The Philadelphia Inquirer, to sell it, because in the previous year it had only made 15 percent operating profit. You kind of wonder if newspaper companies—in an era when they have more and more competition and more people are going on the Web—if investors insist on above average profits as opposed to average profits, they may ultimately have nothing, because I think newspapers have to serve their readers well in order to survive and be viable in all this competition. Yet, with those few exceptions I named— and there are a few strong local, small newspapers—but the general trend line in the industry has been to cut back on staff. It’s very unfortunate, because society isn’t getting simpler to cover. It’s getting more complex to cover.