Race Relations and the Philadelphia Press

Few students of the newspaper would claim that the metropolitan dailies reflect accurately the social attitudes of the people in their circulation areas. The modern newspaper is a gigantic business venture which only the very wealthy can undertake. Consequently, on most matters the press presents the viewpoint of the elite rather than that of the masses. On fundamental economic and political issues it makes little difference which paper the readers select because of their essential similarity. In one respect, however, the Philadelphia press seems to agree with the prevailing feeling of the community. We refer to the amount of Negro news published in the four papers that were in continuous existence between 1908 and 1932, and the writer's observation of the past eight years, namely, that the most common attitude in Philadelphia is one of indifference to Negroes unless a Negro interferes in some way with the habits or the beliefs of white men. Our samples included one issue per week for the first six months of these years: 1908, 1913, 1918, 1923, 1928, and 1932. For the four papers (The Evening Bulletin, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Public Ledger, and the Philadelphia Record), the Negro news is less than one per cent of all news, and in none of the six years did any paper use more than two per cent of its news space for Negro news. During this period Negroes constituted from 7 to 11 per cent of the Philadelphia population. There is an absolute decrease in the number of column inches of Negro news published between 1908 and 1932, and a decrease of more than 75 per cent in the number of column inches of Negro news per 10,000 Negroes in Philadelphia

Race (biology) · Sociology · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Race, History, and American Society

• Black migration at the margin of freedom

  Open Access•Nanda R Shrestha, Wilbur I Smith et al.•International Journal of…•2003

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