The history of American journalism is inextricably linked to white supremacy. The News & Observer’s role in the Wilmington coup was hardly the first or final example of a weaponized press. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson established the Kerner Commission to examine the underlying causes of civil unrest in Detroit, Chicago, and other cities where racial inequity meant, essentially, the existence of two societies: “One black, one white—separate and unequal.” The report excoriated the press corps for failing to cover the story of race in America and directed news outlets to diversify. “The journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring and promoting Negroes,” the commission found. “Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective.” In 1978, the organization now known as the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) set a goal of building a journalism workforce that reflected the racial makeup of the US population by the year 2000.
That deadline came and went. Black and other journalists of color agitated for meaningful change in newsroom culture. Yet the press remained overwhelmingly white and continued to make egregious mistakes: in the eighties, with slanderous tabloid reporting on the Central Park Five; in the nineties, with alarmist coverage of the outrage over police abuse of Rodney King; and in the 2010s, when the New York Times called Michael Brown, a Black teenager fatally shot by a white police officer, “no angel.” Consider the industry’s hand-wringing over “objectivity” and, in the case of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the barring of a Black reporter from covering Black Lives Matter protests.
In 2000, ASNE pushed its target date for diversity back five years, and newspapers began to issue apologies for past wrongdoing. In 2004—the fortieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the Jackson Sun, in Tennessee, acknowledged that it had ignored or downplayed local civil rights efforts in its pages. Next up was Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader, which likewise apologized for failing to cover the struggle for equality in its home city. Mississippi’s Hattiesburg American apologized for ignoring the 1964 Freedom Summer protests; in Alabama, the Birmingham News ran a series of photographs depicting the fight for civil rights—images its editors had previously suppressed. A similar apology ran in the Waco Tribune-Herald, in Texas, for coverage of the gruesome 1916 lynching of a seventeen-year-old named Jesse Washington.