Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 32
to repair the economic, educational and political
harms inflicted on the city’s Black community. The
recommendations included a call for “judicial redress to
compensate heirs of victims.” The commission also called
for newspapers to acknowledge their role in the deadly
coup and to “study the effects of 1898 and impact of Jim
Crow on the state’s black press and to endow scholarships
at the state’s public universities.”32
Following the report’s release, the News & Observer
apologized for its role in the coup and acknowledged that
“this newspaper was a leader in that propaganda effort
under editor and publisher Josephus Daniels.”33
But the racial terrorism that Daniels ushered in by
publishing hate and disinformation was common among
Southern newspapers. In her critically acclaimed and
bestselling book The Warmth of Other Suns, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Isabel Wilkerson addressed the deadly
role that newspapers played in promoting violence against
Black people. She wrote:
Newspapers were giving black violence top
billing, the most breathless outrage reserved
for any rumor of black male indiscretion
toward a white woman, all but guaranteeing
a lynching. Sheriff's deputies mysteriously
found themselves unable to prevent
the abduction of a black suspect from a
jailhouse cell. Newspapers alerted readers
to the time and place of an upcoming
lynching.34
In Waco, Texas, the Tribune-Herald apologized in 2006
for its coverage of the 1916 lynching of 17-year-old Jesse
Washington. It stated: “We regret the role that journalists
of that era may have played in either inciting passions or
failing to deplore the mob violence. We are descendants of
a journalism community that failed to urge calm or call on
citizens to respect the legitimate justice system.”35
The Tallahassee Democrat apologized that same year for
taking “the side of the segregationists” in columns and
editorials that opposed the 1956 bus boycott by the city’s
Black community. “We not only did not lend a hand,
we openly opposed integration, siding firmly with the
segregationists. It is inconceivable that a newspaper, an
institution that exists freely only because of the Bill of
Rights, could be so wrong on civil rights. But we were.”36
published a front-page “clarification” that stated: “It has
come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader
neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret
the omission.”
The paper published a report and previously unpublished
photographs as part of its “clarification.” And it admitted
that the paper had refused to cover the local civil-rights
struggle because it wanted to “play down the movement”
— noting that the outlet’s “stance was not unusual among
newspapers across the South.”37
The Montgomery Advertiser apologized in 2018 for its
“proliferation of a false narrative regarding the treatment
of African-Americans,” which it noted “propagated a
worldview rooted in racism and the sickening myth of
racial superiority.” The paper stated that “the Advertiser
was careless in how it covered mob violence and the terror
foisted upon African-Americans from Reconstruction
through the 1950s. We dehumanized human beings. Too
often we characterized lynching victims as guilty before
proven so and often assumed they committed the crime.”38
In 2018, Susan Goldberg, editor-in-chief of National
Geographic, addressed the magazine’s racist history in a
special issue on race. The publication asked John Edwin
Mason, a University of Virginia professor who specializes
in photography and African history, to examine the
magazine’s coverage.
“Until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored
people of color who lived in the United States, rarely
acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic
workers,” Goldberg wrote. “Meanwhile it pictured ‘natives’
elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed,
happy hunters, noble savages — every type of cliché.”39
Mason told NPR that “[National Geographic’s]
photography, like the articles, didn’t simply emphasize
difference, but made difference ... very exotic, very
strange, and put the difference into a hierarchy.” He
added: “And that hierarchy was very clear: that the West,
and especially the English-speaking world, was at the
top of the hierarchy. And black and brown people were
somewhere underneath.”
The Orlando Sentinel apologized in January 2019 for the
role its racist coverage played in wrongfully accusing
one Black teenager and three Black men — known as the
Groveland Four — of raping a white woman in 1949.
Earlier, in 2004, Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader
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