TV NEWS BECOMES A PROPAGANDA WEAPON

Until the 1960s, news had always been the neglected stepchild of the television business. The nightly news broadcasts were only 15 minutes long. CBS News anchored by Walter Cronkite, who was not yet the most trusted man in America, was the first news program to expand to 30 minutes in September 1963. Breaking news bulletins were not much older. If you wanted in-depth coverage of current events, you still read the major daily newspapers or maybe a weekly newsmagazine. The reason is television is a medium that was initially invented to entertain, not inform. There simply was not enough profit in telling American viewers what was going on in the world. Further, the world looked

Birmingham in 1963 that ignited public guilt and outrage to a point where legislation securing the rights of African Americans was finally passed in 1964 and 1965. As people watched white Birmingham firemen turn powerful water hoses on defenseless black protesters, many of whom were children, it was clear to all who the victims were and who the perpetrators were.

The success of the Civil Rights Movement in securing the moral high ground proved the propaganda value of TV news. Like all tools, however, TV news can also be exploited by the dark side. As black grievance turned from peaceful marches to sometimes violent riots as the decade wore on, it didn't take long for the movement's white supremacist detractors to use TV news to paint blacks as a violent and predatory people in the minds of both whites and blacks, especially in middle America. Network and local TV news showed cities burning all over the country, from Watts to Detroit to Newark, and blacks looting. The culmination was Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in April 1968, when TV audiences saw curfews enacted and Army National Guard troops patrolling the streets in tanks and cordoning off the Capitol with rifles and barbed wire. The criminalization of the black man had begun.

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white Americans watching their fellow black Americans fight for their right to full citizenship, equality and respect.

To its credit, CBS News, especially when Edward R. Murrow was leading its broadcasts, often faced down opposition from its corporate overlords to alert the public to the dangers of McCarthyism and the Atomic Age, worker exploitation and environmental pollution. However, while all these were important, what really made television news indispensable to the average American was the Civil Rights Movement.

From the beginning, civil rights leaders all agreed that for their movement to succeed, they must appeal to the conscience of white Americans, and the only way to do that was to get them to watch what was happening to them in the South on television. It was TV reporters delivering stand-up accounts from Little Rock in 1957; Anniston, Alabama, in 1961 (during the Freedom Rides); and

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Thus, here is America in 2023, still feeling the aftereffects of a TV propaganda war for the hearts and minds of Americans over how they view their fellow black Americans. From cities in flames, TV news advanced to the drug war of the 1970s and 80s, Hillary Clinton's "super predators" of the 90s, and the police shootings and beatings from Rodney King to Tyre Nichols.