This paper examines the role of the media during the pivotal years of the black freedom movement. Television was a relatively new means of disseminating the news, and, as journalists were starting to define its uses, activists were building their case and fighting for civil rights. Televised images helped develop public understanding of the cause, but also clarified many of the more radical movements that arose at the time. The media was an important factor in the general success of the civil rights movement and the general opposition to the black power movement by giving continual visuals to both points of view.
The years following World War II were ones of significant cultural changes in America. One important change was the result of the development of television, technology that broadcast images across the entire country to boxes located within individual homes. Sig Mickelson (1998) writes, ôThere had been some limited television before the war but it was little more than a rich manÆs toyö (p. 1). He notes that technological advances of the 1950s ôcombined to simplify the reporting and recording process and reduce time elapsed between event and transmission. It also enabled producers and reporters to experiment with new devices and new processes to make their reports more interesting and attractiveö (p. 2). As television was being invented and refined, programmers were also inventing and refining the language of mass media.
Another significant change was in the news stories that the new technology covered and, by that coverage, also influenced. Protest movements that worked to raise public consciousness about a wide variety of social issues provided provocative visual fodder for nightly telecasts. As Michael Kazin (1995) observes, ôTelevision newscasts . . . showed abundant footage of angry young blacks, young whites with long, glistening hair, and a variety of antiwar protesters who were at once determin...