“The Race Beat” is about more than how journalists covered stories from 1954 (when Brown v. Board of Education ruled against “separate but equal” schools) through the passage of civil-rights and voting-rights bills in 1964 and ‘65. It’s about how the press and the story they covered became inextricable. As Roberts and Klibanoff put it, “There is little in the civil-rights movement that was not changed by the news coverage of it.” Increasingly, such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr. virtually created events for the media to report. By picking target cities, they cast telegenic antagonists in the drama: in Birmingham, Ala., Police Commissioner Bull Connor; in Selma, the beefy, brutal county sheriff, Jim Clark.
The police, wrote one segregationist editor, “upstaged the stars beyond the wildest dreams of King.” And King kept his eye on the prize. In Selma, Roberts and Klibanoff write, “Flip Schulke of Life magazine saw Clark’s posse shove children to the ground. He stopped shooting photographs and began pushing the men away … ‘The world doesn’t know this happened, because you didn’t photograph it,’ King lectured Schulke. ‘I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up’.”
What is the media’s proper function? What is “objectivity”? Roberts and Klibanoff are pragmatic veterans who don’t try to draw bright lines in this ethical murk. But they do know about decency and common sense: impeccably straight news reports do become editorials when right and wrong are obvious. “The Race Beat” has good characters, good yarns and good thinking. Just as important, though, it’s got a good heart.
