A story that one knows the facts from the beginning can really drive home how the media can distort it through emphasis of certain details, omissions, and an inaccurate description. The auction of the letter sent to Clear Channel regarding Rush Limbaugh was the perfect example. Every news organization, including Fox News, spun the story differently. I was expecting Fox News to be the most accurate in relating the details, but no, each time the story was mentioned on various shows, the viewer got a different and inaccurate description of the events. I sat there, listening to the Fox hosts descibe the story and thought, no, no, no, that's not what happened. It's like mild torture to know the truth and listen to a lame attempt at describing it...

More than 45 years later, I remain angry and hurt over how badly the press performed during demonstrations to integrate all eating places in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1961 and 1962. (I think those were the years: I have a lot of clips from then, which I have carried with me over the decades, but not once looked at since. Perhaps I won’t until my temper cools, which likely will be when my body cools, too.) 

Civic leaders in Cambridge, seeing integration of eating places as necessary (desirable, too), chose to integrate the eating places where the town’s tiny middle classes of both races would eat: better food and higher prices. The idea was that people would discover that one could sit down and eat in a place with people of the other color doing likewise. No problem. Demonstrators, who included a hot-headed rabble-rouser from Georgia, and he was that, wanted all places integrated, including eating places frequented by whites that no sane black would want to be near--nor most whites. 

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The press portrayed Salisbury, roughly 50 miles away, as a forward-looking community that had done what Cambridge had not done, integrate its eating places. As I recall, LIFE included a major, Page One photo and related article praising Salisbury and condemning Cambridge. But this then-young reporter in Cambridge moved along to report for The Salisbury Times. My editor there, Oscar Morris, said that he had been on that city’s secret committee to integrate eating places. Salisbury was larger and the group decided that they could integrate all the eating places in the center of town--but they would allow eating places in residential areas to remain segregated. As in Cambridge, the partial integration was intended to be temporary, a way station, letting hotheads and bigots in both racial communities get used to integration. 

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Not a bit of understanding of the similarities and differences in the people and situations in both communities ever entered any outside press report. (The Baltimore Bureau of the AP, which knew something of Cambridge, was the only outside press unit to convey something of Cambridge’s realities.) 

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I worked as a newspaper reporter for nearly eight years; I value a press that reports fairly and truthfully on matters of significance to the polity. It’s so saddening and infuriating to know that the press continues to be deeply bigoted and ignorant, uncurious and lazy, more concerned about relaying a fiction that comforts their prejudices than with discovering truth. So much has changed since the early Sixties. So much remains the same: one cannot trust most in the press to discover the truth, a different matter from telling the truth. For all we know, reporters and correspondents blindly relaying one side of the Jena story imagined they were telling the truth. It appears they were not.

the media were downright lazy in their efforts to find the
truth. Often, they simply reported what they'd read on blogs, which
expressed only one side of the issue.

Why should that surprise anyone? The minute two races are involved, the template is set by the media and the race hustlers. In Duke, it was: Black women accuses white men of rape: 'Nuff said; get a rope.

In Jena, the reverse: white victim, black defendants: racial injustice.

These "journalists" reported myths as facts concerning Katrina even after the myths were shown to be myths. These "journalists" reported myths as facts concerning the war in Iraq even after the myths were shown to be myths. These "journalists" reported myths as facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election specifically Florida balloting even after the myths were shown to be myths. These "journalists" reported myths as facts concerning Jena even after the myths were shown to be myths.

The best indicator of future behavior is past behavior.

So why is anyone surprised that "journalists" keep reporting myths as facts?

Their "journalistic" motto is "never let facts get in the way of a good story."

 Wow!

Thanks for the article.  The links are invaluable.

It reminds us all to be skeptical.  The sad point is, the real story is the media's coverage and how it reflects stereotypes of the south.  The media and those who exploited it brought racial tensions and violence to a community that would have on its on peacefully resolved a non-issue.

Being from North Louisiana, I can not believe how bad the national media botched the reporting on this matter.  We should have blamed this on the war in Iraq.

Hear me out.

The war was at this time going well, and the media needed a story, invented or not.

OR

Maybe we could have blamed Global Warming.  Because of the unprecedented heat, the shaded area under the tree was a coveted cooler spot.  Since there was limited room under the tree, the normally shade-disenfranchised blacks, were treated as second class, sun baked citizens. 

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With Democrat revisionist history and liberals guaranteeing the future (global warming, nuclear destruction, etc.) only the future is certain; the past is always changing.