Abstract
Scooping the national news media 20 years after the 1963 March on Washington was, for me, an achievement. At least until Aniko Bodroghkozy, a media studies scholar at the University of Virginia, surpassed my effort.
Let me explain.
In 1983, Coretta Scott King decided to stage a march to commemorate the 1963 demonstration where her husband, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Then a reporter at the Dallas Morning News, I interviewed many of Dr King’s closest aides, hoping to find a new angle. I did. They said the heart of Dr King’s speech was a call to the nation to address economic injustice. ‘He really wasn’t preaching about dreaming’, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told me. ‘That was his melodic ending to a great sermon. It was basically an economic speech, it was about jobs and justice.’
My story was good. However, Bodroghkozy’s analysis of broadcast coverage of the 1963 March on Washington – detailed in her book, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement – is better. The author understands the power of televised images, and her account of what ABC, CBS and NBC showed the nation on 28 August 1963 is perceptive and new. Unfortunately, it also represents the high point of her deeply ambitious work. Equal Time seeks to trace television’s impact on race relations across two tumultuous decades. It ultimately falters by trying to cover too much ground, failing to adequately examine civil rights reporting and relying on reductive reasoning.
Some historians and journalists have suggested the networks served as allies of civil rights activists, particularly when broadcasting scenes of nonviolent demonstrators attacked by police dogs and fire hoses (Birmingham in 1963) and mounted troopers wielding billy clubs and tear gas (Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ in 1965). Bodroghkozy argues such incidents were exceptions to television’s dominant approach: positively framing black Americans’ push for social change only when blessed by white moderates.
The author makes an admirable effort but falls well short of proving her thesis. She did herself no favors by taking on the news and entertainment divisions at three networks. The book’s ambitious scope – assessing nine years of civil rights reporting and 17 years of entertainment programming – stands in stark contrast to its modest research materials – scattered episodes from three entertainment programs, nine documentaries, live broadcast of the March on Washington and a handful of reports on the Selma voting rights campaign. The author pays little attention to the evening newscasts of CBS and NBC though their audiences dwarfed those of the documentaries.
Bodroghkozy’s analysis of television coverage of the March on Washington is compelling. She finds the networks focused not on the speeches but the crowd. Camera shots repeatedly showed blacks and whites together, though no more than one-quarter of the participants were white. In the author’s words, ‘The March on Washington may have been the Negroes’ TV show on August 28, but the networks insisted on white co-stars’ (p. 96). This is first-rate historical detective work. So is her discovery that a subsequent CBS report on Dr King’s speech ignored his soaring ‘dream’ conclusion. Bodroghkozy’s explanation is a different matter, attributing the oversight to a systemic weakness among journalists. As she wrote, ‘The prophetic, Biblical discourse did not fit any news frames that reporters in 1963 would have known what to do with’ (p. 110).
James Reston did. His page-one analysis in the 29 August New York Times was headlined, ‘I Have a Dream.’ The subhead read, ‘Peroration by Dr King Sums Up a Day the Capital Will Remember.’
Bodroghkozy’s gaffe illustrates a larger issue in Equal Time: the author’s tendency to engage in speculation rather than using primary records to reconstruct historical events, then drawing on multiple journalistic accounts to compare coverage.
Consider the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march. Citing a single secondary source, the author’s account of the five-day march focuses on one CBS story, particularly footage showing a one-legged white man on crutches flanked by two black men, one carrying an American flag, the other playing a flute. Bodroghkozy makes the obvious point that ‘somebody must have grouped these marchers together’ but never explains who or how ABC and NBC covered the march (p. 137).
Equal Time’s final chapter examines television coverage of Barack Obama winning the presidency. Professor Bodroghkozy, sans footnotes and specific examples, asserts election night reporting portrayed ‘a dignified blackness yoked to an accommodating and welcoming whiteness’ (p. 229). She concludes, ‘Television news personnel probably had no idea they were borrowing from an old script’ (p. 230).
Perhaps the reverse is true. Cultural historian James Carey has said ‘journalism history remains something of an embarrassment’ because most scholars fail to examine its heart – reporting. Carey wrote these words in 1974. They still apply.