Search

We examine the role of the press in Alabama during the "massive resistance" to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954 on school integration, and the extent to which newspaper editorials relied on social and legal rationales for segregation based on the High Court's earlier Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. All three of Plessy's rationales for institutionalizing segregation—states' rights, a dual system of "social rights" based on race, and the doctrine of "separate but equal"—were widely adopted by the press. This contrasted with the approach of "natural law" preservationists who relied on "pure racial ideology" in fighting integration. A content analysis of Birmingham News editorials from 1960 to 1964 found support for our thesis that "mainstream" segregationist newspapers were more likely to use "pragmatic" rationales based on "constitutional" arguments rather than "natural law" arguments to defend segregation. This approach was seen as more effective in persuading the public outside the South on the merits of the "southern way of life." Thus, Birmingham News editors consistently supported "political equality" of races to the dismay of staunch segregationist leaders in Alabama such as Governors John Patterson and George Wallace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The press in Alabama covered major events taking place in Germany from the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1933 through the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Journalists in the state provided extensive coverage, and editors did not hesitate to opine on the persecution of the Jews in Europe. Yet, Alabama's white-run press failed in the end to explain the events as a singularly Jewish tragedy. The state's black-run press, for its part, used the news of the mass killings of the Jews to warn against the dangers of conceptions of racial superiority—a primary concern for black southerners living in the Jim Crow South. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: This paper examines how national and local newspapers in the United States frame Chinese product recalls in 2007. First, it reviews literature on international communication and framing. Second, it content analyzes the presentations of the Chinese product recalls in two leading national newspapers, including the New York Times and the USA today, and six major newspapers from five Southern states, including Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Third, it compares media representations of Chinese products in the two national newspapers with those in Southern newspapers. We argue that American media are still dominated by stories from the U.S. perspectives and Chinese sources are less likely to be cited. Even though Southern newspapers play an important role in constructing local knowledge, their limited scope of coverage and perspectives constrain their role in reporting international news. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article discusses the efforts of the Alabama newspapers to promote the development of roads throughout Alabama by the Alabama Good Roads Association (AGRA) and the Alabama Highway Commission in 1911 and 1912. Other topics include the history of the Good Roads movement and its opposition since 1880, the efforts of newspaper promotion to secure funding for road building, and the efforts to include proposed roads on the 1913 Alabama road map.