Page 278 - Culture Society and the Media

268 HOW THE MEDIA REPORT RACE
(Breichner, 1967, p. 98). In the South there was at one time an unwritten rule
that photographs of blacks should never appear in print (Myrdal, 1944, p. 37), a
practice which sometimes had absurd consequences, for example, as late as the
1950s, one Southern newspaper, the Times-Picayune, scrupulously scanned
photos of street scenes and edited out offending blacks with scissors and airbrush
(Harkey quoted in Harland, 1971).
In this case the prevailing attitude to blacks was that they did not form part of
the audience—or at least not a part worth catering for. The point was that
publishers thought that whites who would form the vast majority of the
readership had little or no interest in news about blacks. Where there were
particular commercial reasons for seeking a black audience, some newspapers
produced a special edition (indicated by one or more stars) in the black
community, though apparently most whites were unaware of its existence while
many blacks thought they were buying the regular edition (Myrdal, 1944, p.
915). Matters changed with the civil rights movement of the early 1960s in the
South and with the civil disorders of the late 1960s in the North. But the change
in reporting was more one of quantity than quality. The black struggle for civil
rights became almost routine front-page news, but the Kerner Commission
observed that the media, ‘have not communicated to the majority of their
audience—which is white—a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness
of living in the ghetto. They have not communicated to whites a feeling for the
difficulties and frustrations of being a Negro in the United States’, and the
Commission repeated the criticism that news about blacks continued to be
written as if they did not form part of the audience (Kerner Report, 1968, pp.
210–11). But the living conditions enjoyed by blacks in Northern cities were of
little interest to whites; they did not constitute a ‘problem’. The problem
appeared to arise for the white audience only when blacks embarked on actions
such as boycotts, violence, demonstrations or disorders which could be seen as a
threat to the white majority. Indeed, it might be pointed out that the Kerner
Commission itself exemplifies this: it was set up not because of the degradation
of living in the ghetto but because this degradation had finally led to disorder.
Tunstall (1972) quotes the comment of a British journalist on the vast amount of
media coverage of the 1965 riot in Watts (Los Angeles): That was a story which
commanded attention. Blood on the streets. You can’t do better than that’. And
Tunstall adds (p. 20): ‘Riots in which many people are killed (in a place with
whose white inhabitants the intended audience can be expected to identify) fulfil
all the requirements of a big news story’.

THE MEDIA DEFINITION OF RACE
To gain a rather more systematic idea of which aspects of race in Britain make
news, Hartmann et al. (1974) examined every thirteenth copy of the Guardian,
The Times, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror between 1963 and 1970.
They concluded that there was a quantitative similarity in the handling of race by