Blacks in the News Media

Report Outline
Black Demands for Media Influence
Growth and Crusades of Negro Press
Issue of Separation or Integration
Special Focus

Black Demands for Media Influence

Four years have passed since the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders issued its report blaming the news media for contributing to “the black-white schism in this country.” The commission found 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.” The news media were urged “to do everything possible to train and promote their Negro reporters to positions where those who are qualified can contribute to and have an effect on policy decisions.”

Since those words were written, more black journalists and broadcasters have been hired and a few, like Hal Walker of CBS-TV, Thomas A. Johnson and Earl Caldwell of The New York Times, William Raspberry and Robert Maynard of The Washington Post, and L. F. Palmer of the Chicago Daily News, have achieved prominence. Nevertheless, the number of black professionals in the news media remains far below the proportion (11 per cent) of blacks in the population.

During the past year, blacks have been demanding a larger role in the news media. Tony Brown, dean of the Howard University School of Communications and executive producer of public television's “Black Journal,” told the Black Communications Conference at Howard University on March 3, 1972: “Black people have spent most of their lives fighting the struggle of self-hate that every white institution teaches blacks. By promoting black pride through black journalism, we can provide an antidote to his psychological self-destruction.”