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Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow
300 pages, Paperback
Published December 26, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 5, 2025
The writing was a bit dry and academic, but the content was really good. The efforts by the press to be “objective” in the 20th century by giving equal space to the voices of white supremacists on racial issues reminds me of the press thinking they were being objective in recent years by giving equal space to lies about covid, immigrants, and January 6, as though those views had equal validity to the truth. I guess the latter would be "politicizing objectivity."
I had always wondered why reporters felt the need to announce the race of people in news articles, rather than just representing them as people. The book included the time when a man in Michigan brought his newborn triplets into the hospital in a basket, after his wife unexpectedly gave birth at home. This heart-warming human-interest story was rapidly picked up and published across the country. But then a picture was published that showed he was Black. The southern papers were furious. They had been deceived! “…the attached wire photo came along which for our readers completely ruined the story.” “White” was the default race. People in the news were considered white unless stated otherwise, highlighting POCs as being “others.”
Southern editors “needed to know” race so they could determine whether a story was worth printing. When AP stories came through depicting Blacks as intelligent, law-abiding citizens, they weren’t interested. They only wanted stories about Blacks being violent and anti-social. They objected to stories in the Northern press that highlighted segregation in the South (which represented southerners as ignorant bigots) while ignoring stories about discrimination in the North. (A 1956 house I bought in 1986 in Indianapolis came with a deeply buried paragraph in a covenant that I could never sell it to a family of color. While that bit was illegal and not enforced, it had never been taken off the community books. This is the only place where I would agree with the Southern editors. The North was throwing stones without looking at itself as well.)
It was also interesting and highly telling that white editors didn’t want to include Black reporters on their staff, because they didn’t think Blacks could be objective when reporting on race issues. Despite the fact that the white editors were spouting all kinds of white supremacist nonsense, they felt that they themselves could separate their private bigotry from their “objective” public reporting.
I had always wondered why reporters felt the need to announce the race of people in news articles, rather than just representing them as people. The book included the time when a man in Michigan brought his newborn triplets into the hospital in a basket, after his wife unexpectedly gave birth at home. This heart-warming human-interest story was rapidly picked up and published across the country. But then a picture was published that showed he was Black. The southern papers were furious. They had been deceived! “…the attached wire photo came along which for our readers completely ruined the story.” “White” was the default race. People in the news were considered white unless stated otherwise, highlighting POCs as being “others.”
Southern editors “needed to know” race so they could determine whether a story was worth printing. When AP stories came through depicting Blacks as intelligent, law-abiding citizens, they weren’t interested. They only wanted stories about Blacks being violent and anti-social. They objected to stories in the Northern press that highlighted segregation in the South (which represented southerners as ignorant bigots) while ignoring stories about discrimination in the North. (A 1956 house I bought in 1986 in Indianapolis came with a deeply buried paragraph in a covenant that I could never sell it to a family of color. While that bit was illegal and not enforced, it had never been taken off the community books. This is the only place where I would agree with the Southern editors. The North was throwing stones without looking at itself as well.)
It was also interesting and highly telling that white editors didn’t want to include Black reporters on their staff, because they didn’t think Blacks could be objective when reporting on race issues. Despite the fact that the white editors were spouting all kinds of white supremacist nonsense, they felt that they themselves could separate their private bigotry from their “objective” public reporting.
November 6, 2025
An important book. Lots of repetition though.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews