Extract

The Pulitzer Prize Board has awarded American journalism’s highest honor to the New York Times more than any other news outlet by far. Ten million paying subscribers help the august news organization gross more than a billion dollars in profits each year. So it might be difficult to imagine that the Times faced an existential crisis at the height of the civil rights movement, waging yearslong court battles against libel suit after libel suit filed by southern segregationist politicians fighting to keep “yankee” reporters from covering one of the most important issues of the day: the fight for equal rights and police brutality waged against civil rights protesters demanding those rights.

Times executive editor Turner Catledge, a Mississippi native, directed the newspaper’s bold coverage of the movement in the 1950s and 1960s. One of the most powerful men in journalism at the time, he wrote personal appeals to his editor friends around the country to intervene in the libel onslaught with amicus briefs and their own coverage of “this new weapon of intimidation” (115). He pointed out in letter after letter that such libel cases affected more than just the existence of the Times.

You do not currently have access to this article.