[...] The people in charge of recording the "first rough draft of history," as journalism is sometimes called, ignored sit-ins and marches, or relegated them to small notices in the back pages.
The omissions by the city's two newspapers, the Lexington Herald and the Lexington Leader, weren't simply mistakes or oversights, according to local civil rights leaders and former employees of the newspapers. The papers' management actively sought to play down the movement.
The rare march or protest that made front-page news usually involved arrests of demonstrators and was described in the terse, clipped tones of a police report.
"It was a standing order that an effort at a dining room or restaurant or march would not get Page One coverage, that it would go inside," said Don Mills, an editorial page writer in 1968, who later became editor of the Herald.
"The management's view was that the less publicity it got, the quicker the problem would go away."
That stance was not unusual among newspapers across the South. But from today's perspective, many experts agree that the decisions made at the Herald and the Leader hurt the civil rights movement at the time, irreparably damaged the historical record and caused the newspapers' readers to miss out on one of the most important stories of the 20th century. [...]
| This week's must-read is Linda Blackford and Linda Minch's Lexington Herald-Leader article "Front-page news, back-page coverage"
posted in articles on July 4, 2004 11:56 PM | t (0)
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