Page:Columbia Journalism Review volume 2 issue 2 (summer 1963).djvu/34

AROUND THE MAP eye. The News, in this period, used much more outside comment than the Post-Herald.

2. The failure of the papers to report in detail on the demonstrators’ objectives is apparently part of a general lack of contact with the Negro community, which comprises 34 per cent of the Birmingham area population. On Sundays, the News runs a small section of Negro news and photos—less than one page. Aside from this section, only one Negro identified by name appeared in a photograph anywhere in the two papers in the first half of May. He was Willie Mays.

In this respect, the Richmond Times-Dispatch for the same period offers an enlightening contrast. Its issues are dotted with serious Richmond and Virginia stories on desegregation proceedings in the courts and on plans for future suits by Negroes. In addition, it has desegregated news of Negroes to the point where it ran a long profile of a Negro detective on the Richmond police force. All this, when its editorial attitude toward the Birmingham demonstrations was hardly more friendly than that of the Birmingham papers.

In other words, news policies of the Birmingham papers appear to be almost as segregated as has been the city itself. (It must be observed that many northern newspapers are hardly better in this respect.) In times past, these policies could perhaps be endured as a type of social custom. Now, they get in the way of full, in-depth reporting of important news. Like the Senior Citizens, the newspapers of Birmingham may have to learn how to sit down and talk with Negroes.

JAMES BOYLAN

Meanwhile, up north...

Many papers throughout the country printed the picture at left of a fracas in Nashville on May 13, in which, according to the accompanying stories, both Negroes and whites wielded knives. In the New York Post for May 14, the picture appeared cropped as shown at right 32 Columbia Journalism Review