Abstract
I learned about this book from a tweet and I could not wait to read it. While the topic is journalism history, the focus has clear contemporary relevance, given the challenges the U.S. news media face today covering the Black Lives Matter movement, the racism amplified during the Trump Administration and the ongoing efforts to suppress voting. This book does not disappoint. In fact, this tome paints a picture of the news media’s historic complicity in White supremacy—at least among newspapers in the southern United States—that is both shocking and yet unsurprising. Reading this book left me troubled because I fear the journalism industry has not learned the lessons it should have from its past.
The main thesis of this book is that journalism is not neutral as an institution or cultural product and that journalists themselves are “not neutral actors, even when they pursue the technocratic goals of objectivity and impartiality” (p. 1). The edited volume offers detailed example after example to support this thesis. Ten chapters explore specific episodes in journalism history. In additional two chapters, editors Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield introduce and synthesize the findings. Both Forde and Bedingfield have a long line of journalism history to their credit and their expertise on the topic is obvious. They note in the introduction that their goal was to create a coherent collection of essays, so they sought out specific scholars, rather than rely on the more open call approach that some edited volumes take. This approach serves them well, as the chapters fit together well. They offer a comprehensive account of the “illiberal white supremacist Democrats who overthrew Reconstruction in the South and joined with industrialists, railroad companies, and other New South allies to impose a one-party kleptocracy and brutal racist caste system that came to be known as Jim Crow” (p. 303).
The result is a biting invective of the role of newspapers in shaping White supremacy in America. This collection certainly documents that journalism was not a neutral actor, but it also shows journalism was far from being merely covertly complicit. Newspapers did not just help foster a biased worldview by covering issues related to race in hegemonic ways. Rather, this volume demonstrates the out-sized role individual powerful editors and their newspapers in the White press played in building a White supremacist system that continues to influence how we see the world today. Or as Forde and Bedingfield put it, “(These papers) served as base camps, ammunition depots, and command-and-control centers for white supremacist gangs that attacked African American communities, disrupted elections, and fomented chaos to undermine Reconstruction government” (p. 303).
For example, the chapter on “Architect of the New South” describes how Henry W. Grady, who became managing editor and part owner of the Atlanta Constitution in 1880, established practices, such as sensationalized coverage of lynchings that encourage mob violence to escalate. In a different but also troubling example, the “Mississippi Plan” chapter describes how Ethelbert Barksdale, the editor of the Clarion, used the newspaper as a “political weapon . . . to sow chaos at political rallies and at polling sites to disrupt” (p. 117) Blacks from voting.
Interspersed throughout the book are stories that offer more hope. These detail how leaders of the Black press, such as Ida B. Wells, T. Thomas Fortune, John Mitchell Jr. and others “provided the essential forum for Black dissent” (p. 95). Collectively, these accounts demonstrate the power and role of the Black press, which offers an important counterpoint to the harm that the White southern press was doing. I only wish these stories were more plentiful throughout the volume.
The editors end their book with a call to action. They urge newsroom leaders and journalists nationwide to learn from this history as they cover voter suppression, mis- and disinformation and anti-democratic behavior. I love this part of the book because it connects our past to our present, highlighting the real need to consider what has come before us to prevent it from happening again. Yet, I wonder whether those who most need to read this book, the practitioners of today, will find its very academic writing accessible. Given the need for journalists, and indeed all people, to read what is inside these pages, I wish it were written in a simpler, more journalistic manner. Some sections are quite dense and I suspect few non-academics would want to brook them.
However, the important message of this book still resounds: “. . . in the United States, journalism has always been a political activity and journalists have always been political actors. . . Journalists should finally vanquish the misguided view that objectivity demands rigid neutrality” (p. 314).