White South Carolinians are especially critical of Northern news media—newspapers, periodicals, radio and television. Blithely ignoring the pressure for conformity within the South, the News and Courier criticized Northern leaders who allegedly parroted words which they thought the public wanted to hear. The courage to tell the truth outside the South, complained the lowcountry newspaper, was at one of its lowest points in history.[462]
Alleged reluctance of national news media to present sympathetically the pro-segregation cause has given rise to such terms as the “Paper Curtain” and the “Integration Curtain” and the charge that the South is being “brainwashed” into acceptance of the alien notion of integration. In no other aspect of the desegregation controversy is the cornered and minority status of the South more apparent. With ever increasing frequency, complaints have arisen against pro-integration statements and incidents appearing on national television and radio networks, in national periodicals and in the Northern metropolitan press. Newspapers such as the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Washington Post and Times-Herald are subjected to constant attack. Mass circulation periodicals such as Saturday Evening Post, Look, Time and Life likewise receive special criticism. Among nationally circulated periodicals only the U. S. News and World Report, whose editor David Lawrence appeals to the most reactionary elements in the South, has won South Carolina approval. The Columbia State, for example, had the following to say of Time:
Through stupidity or malice Time has repeatedly followed, with the rest of the blackguard Northern press, this tone of false witness, either directly or by innuendo, against the South. Time has consistently paraded the idea that it is too stupid or malicious to recognize the fact that the South is a part of the United States. Refusing to accept the sword of Robert Lee tendered at Appomattox, it continues by snide inference, malicious innuendo and biased implication to fight the Confederate War against this section, blind to the fact that Time and the rest of the inflammatory press is following the same line of wild-eyed chatter that led to Secession in 1860—with grim determination arraying section against section, gracelessly exaggerating the faults of one, while cravenly covering up those of the other.
Time has double-crossed the American people on so many important issues, through stupidity or malice, that a better name for the weekly would be “Two-Time.”[463]
Instances of racial violence and incidents of discrimination against Negroes in the North and West quite naturally, and rightly, afford grist for the mill to editorial writers on South Carolina newspapers. Statements such as “clean up the mess in your own back yard before criticizing us” and “in the South there is frankness; in the North hypocrisy” are interspersed with “you don’t see any race riots in the South” or “the Northern states are finding that Southerners are not the only ones concerned with maintaining racial barriers.” The racial disturbances at Calumet Park in Chicago and the bigotry displayed by some of the residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1957 were eagerly seized upon by counter-attacking South Carolina editors. That the great majority of people in the North deplored such incidents—as was true of most Southerners in the Little Rock affair—was carefully masked by editorial legerdemain and the views of the rabidly intolerant minority presented as typical. News of racial tension outside the South and in it—insofar as opposition to any and all forms of integration was concerned—is featured by blazing front page headlines that can only further incite South Carolina extremists. Some South Carolina editors, like Thomas Waring of the News and Courier, deplore the fact that similar editorial tactics are not utilized in the Northern press. In a particularly biting editorial Waring declared:
It is too bad no seismograph records the range of press hypocrisy in the North. The handling of the Chicago race riots would have registered severe shocks in some big cities.
Editions of the New York Herald-Tribune for Monday and Tuesday ... contained not a line about a serious racial clash in the country’s second largest city.
The New York Times on Monday printed an Associated Press dispatch seven inches long on page 10. The Times, with unrivaled facilities of its own for gathering news all over the world, did not see fit to print the full AP account. Tuesday’s issue ... contained no story on all further disorders occurring in Chicago on Monday.
The handling of the local story by the Chicago Daily News is also interesting. It was printed on page 3 under a headline saying “Man Fined $50 in Race Flareup.” The Daily News devoted its entire back page to pictures of the earthquake damage in Mexico City. No pictures showed the race riots in the city where the Daily News is published. The riots were called “racial disturbances” throughout.
Does any reader wonder how these newspapers would have displayed “racial disturbances” had they occurred in South Carolina, Mississippi, or elsewhere this side of the Paper Curtain? Race riots aren’t news in the North.[464]