Civil Rights in the Sixties

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Civil Rights in the Sixties

Public opinion and media coverage of the civil rights struggle

?The news media played an important and significant role in shaping public opinion especially during the civil rights movement and transformed it in ways that helped shape public opinion towards unjust laws.
?"American television coverage of the Civil Rights Movement ultimately contributed to a redefinition of the country's political as well as its televisual landscape. From the 1955 Montgomery bus boycotts to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, technological innovations in portable cameras and electronic news gathering (ENG) equipment increasingly enabled television to bring the non-violent civil disobedience campaign of the Civil Rights Movement and the violent reprisals of Southern law enforcement agents to a new mass audience" (Everet, 2011).
?For one, the news media helped to bring about changes in attitudes and practices especially in the South creating an opening for the press to take on new roles by reporting on unjust laws, contrary to what they did in the past.
?"Without new laws and a transformation of the old system of ''Jim Crow Justice,'' the civil rights revolution might have failed. And without the news media's increasingly careful coverage of King's activities-and the powerful responses it drew-it seems unlikely that public opinion could have been mobilized to demand change" (Nelson, 2011)
?Television by 1955 had found a secure place in most American homes. As a changing news media began to show the whole country how the law was applied-or misapplied-in the South, public opinion cried out for change since they could watch the events unfold on their television sets every night. And the rule of law became an instrument for ending terrible injustices and changing a whole society.
?In the early 1960s, when King began leading demonstrations aimed at desegregating public accommodations in Birmingham, he was well aware that coverage on the evening television news was essential to moving public opinion. Riveting images of Birmingham Police Commissioner Bull Connor's officers using dogs and fire hoses to attack defenseless blacks, including women and children, sparked such national outrage that Congress passed the 1964 Public Accommodations Act.
?In Selma for example, King had a voting rights drive simply because it allowed "it offered villainous antagonists who made for good television drama-Governor George Wallace, first and foremost, but also Bull Connor and Selma's Sheriff Jim Clark" (Nelson, 2011). Clark's people were seldom armed with clubs whips, and cattle prods, savagely attacked peaceful civil rights demonstrators severely injuring many.
?Once again television broadcasts and newspaper reports of the brutality provoked a public outcry. Public pressure became so intense that Congress, despite the heated opposition of some powerful Southern political leaders, passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In signing the bill into law, President Lyndon Johnson described it as ''one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.'' (Nelson, 2011)
?In the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education, and the brutal murder of 15-year-old Emmet Till in ...