One of the amazing things about journalism, is just how easy it is to tell two completely different and opposing stories using the same facts. The framing of an issue is the whole ball game.
Consider – what if I told you a story whereby:
1) An unelected magistrate orders the children of a community to be removed from their own neighborhood, and sent to detention centers where “it’s common knowledge that the lavatories in some of these buildings are manned by young toughs who demand money from kids that have to use them.” And where students of the minority race are ”huddled together for protection against roving extortion rings; fifty cents was the going price to avoid a beating."
2) The community, on paper a democracy, is overwhelmingly against this plan. But the unelected magistrate cruelly overrules the elected officials.
3) Agents of state of the state brutally enforce the edict. They bash the skulls of resisters:
The next night, the Tactical Police Force returned en masse and, after removing their badges, went in to even the score. In a matter of minutes they reduced the cigarette machine and jukebox to twisted rubble, demolished several shelves of bottles and glasses, and sent twelve customers to the hospital with assorted head injuries.
Police with vicious dogs accost the mothers who agitate against the plan:
One night, as she was coming home from the Powder Keg office, the Tactical Police Force charged up Bunker Hill Street, enforcing a 10: 00 p.m. curfew. Alice ran for home, but two officers of the canine squad cornered her and several other women in a project courtyard. She didn’t know which were more frightening, the German shepherds baring their fangs or the leather-jacketed cops growling obscenities. Even after the women ducked into a friend’s apartment, the police kept their dogs at the door, potent reminders of their determination to control the streets.
The police even go so far as to beat children who are singing God Bless America during a peaceful school sit-in.
When students again occupied the front stairs on November 21, the headmaster lost his patience. Turning to Captain MacDonald, he said, “We’ve lost control of this situation, Bill. I think it’s time for the police.” MacDonald addressed the students, warning them to go to class, leave the building, or face arrest. The demonstrators’ only response was a chorus of “God Bless America.” What happened next surprised even the headmaster. The front door burst open and in charged a platoon of the Tactical Patrol Force in their leather jackets, boots, and Plexiglas visors. Wading into the students, they heaved them down the staircase. Girls screamed. Boys who resisted got a billy club on the arm or shoulder. Sitting halfway up the stairs, Lisa McGoff was spared the initial charge, but soon cringing with fear, she permitted herself to be herded out the front door. The students huddled in small groups on the sidewalk, still dazed from the TPF assault and shaking with indignation. What right did the police have to violate their sanctuary? It was their school, wasn’t it? Didn’t they have a right to sit on their own steps?
This sounds horrible. What an evil magistrate! What vile people to steal money from kids using the bathroom!
The scenario I described above seems like it would make perfect material for an episode of Eyes on the Prize, about some of the abuses black people faced at the hands of evil conservative white people. It is not. It is the exact reverse. It is the story of conservative white people being abused by liberal whites and lower-class blacks. And my story above all comes entirely from excerpts from the history books about what happened to white families in Boston.
Hopefully, by now I have convinced you that Eyes on the Prize is bad history. Let us now try to trace how such bad history becomes the official history.
The process starts with the “prestige media.” What is “prestige media”? Well, the pithy answer is that it is any media that has been assimilated into the Georgetown-Harvard axis. In Boston, in the 1970s, that meant the Boston Globe.
Any profitable and popular media enterprise becomes a target for ambitious, socially conscious young adults. Thus fresh Ivy League students seek to join such enterprises. Simultaneously, the owners of such enterprises, having achieved financial success, seek to fulfill the basic human need for status and acclaim. Thus, the leaders of such media outlets have a natural instinct to both mingle with the Harvard/Georgetown intelligentsia, and seek their acclaim.
In the 1970s, the Boston Globe was the most popular and influential paper. Even Southie residents who hated its politics had to buy it because they could not live without its sports section:
Yet the Globe’s sports page kept the paper popular in the antibusing neighborhoods, and the antibusers found themselves prisoners of the Globe’s hold on Boston’s consciousness. As one astute observer of the Boston scene put it, “The antibusers’ focus on the Globe was entirely rational. If it [an event] wasn’t mentioned in the Globe, it didn’t happen.” (Boston Against Busing, p. 156)
And it became even more popular when the FCC brought the hammer down on in its competitor, the Boston Globe:
The Globe had opened an impressive lead in circulation when in March 1972 came the decisive stroke it had sought for so long: completing fifteen years of litigation, the FCC found the Herald guilty of improper lobbying, revoked its license for Channel 5, and awarded it to a competitor. Stripped of its principal revenue producer, the Herald stumbled on for three more months, then sold out to Hearst, which merged the empty shell with its own daily to create the Boston Herald American. This left the Globe virtually unchallenged as New England’s dominant newspaper. (p. 494)
The editor of Boston Globe liked to hob-knob with the liberal elite at Harvard and he recruited Ivy League students heavily:
The capital of that world was across the river in Cambridge, whose dinner parties and salons Tom [Winship, editor of the Boston Globe] now frequented, forging friendships with John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others. Cambridge was the Massachusetts equivalent of Georgetown, where, ever since his days on the Post, Tom had hobnobbed with journalists like Ben Bradlee and Mary McGrory. All through the Kennedy and Johnson years, liberal intellectuals, politicians, and newsmen shuttled along the Cambridge-Georgetown axis and, increasingly, it was to those red brick enclaves that Tom Winship looked for his closest friends, his social values, his political commitments. Whatever he collected on that circuit was scrupulously recorded on a reminder pad, then scattered through the newsroom in a blizzard of story suggestions.
Tom was determined to inject some of this youthful iconoclasm into his own staff. For decades the Globe had been like a pudding, with a thin crust of Yankee editors, a thick custard of veteran Irish subeditors and reporters, and here and there a few raisins— an Italian, an Armenian, a Jew or two. Many of the reporters were sons of printers and mailers, for the Globe was a benevolent institution: the Taylors never fired anyone, and although they had fended off the Newspaper Guild, they always paid above Guild scale, with usually “a little something extra” at Christmas.
Seeking a different breed, he recruited young reporters at the Harvard Crimson and Yale Daily News. Soon the newsroom was filling up with earnest young men and women, bristling with mid-sixties visions.
..
The Sunday magazine produced an issue on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Revolution (with contributions from Communist writers),
…
But boldest of all was the Globe’s decision to give its first political endorsement in seventy-two years. The occasion: the daunting prospect of Louise Day Hicks as mayor of Boston. Davis Taylor and many of his Yankee editors were New England “abolitionists,” quick to support the Southern civil rights movement. Although slow to act on the same principles in Boston, the Globe soon threw its full weight behind the struggle for school desegregation, fair housing, and equal employment practices. But its reaction to Mrs. Hicks’s 1967 candidacy grew from something more than a passion for racial justice. In part it was a matter of class. The huge marshmallow of a woman in her tentlike dresses was patently from a different social order— the frumpy world of the Irish middle class that the Globe had only recently left behind. Her election would make Boston look like a goofy city. Ben Bradlee would say, “Hey, who’s that idiot mayor you’ve got up there.” The Globe, at last on its way to national recognition, would be just another bush newspaper in a bush town. (Common Ground, p. 492-494)
It is also noteworthy that the people running the Globe were not of the same tribe as the ethnics in South Boston and Charlestown. Nor were they impacted by the busing:
Moderates and militants alike saw Globe editors and reporters as advocating a social policy with which they did not want to live, since most of them lived in the suburbs. Those who lived in the city, if they had school-age children, did not send them to public schools. Indeed, of the paper’s top twenty editors, all but two did reside outside of Boston, as did most reporters. Antibusers loved Billy Bulger’s crack that to telephone the Globe’s “urban team” after 5 P.M. you had to dial “1” first. (Boston Against Busing, p. 156)
The young liberals at the Globe had grown up watching the Civil Rights movement on TV. They had been conditioned to see black people as the good guys and a certain type of white person as the racist villain. They believed that progressive university graduates had a social mission to help eradicate this racism.
And thus, the Globe consistently supported integration, and underplayed the real concerns whites would have.
