Gwyneth Mellinger, "Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Dec 6, 2025

Gwyneth Mellinger, a scholar of journalism history and author of *Racializing Objectivity*, explores how the white Southern press manipulated journalism standards to uphold Jim Crow. She discusses the reframing of civil rights coverage, seeing it as a debate over objectivity, and highlights the dismissal of the Black press as biased. Mellinger shares surprising archival findings revealing white editors' complicity in systemic racism and offers critical lessons for contemporary journalists to uncover underlying ideological biases.

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INSIGHT

Objectivity Used To Defend Segregation

White Southern editors framed debates about civil rights as disputes over journalism standards to defend segregation.
They used claims of "objectivity" to portray Black and liberal presses as biased and illegitimate.

ADVICE

Look Beneath Public Claims

Journalists should probe actions, not just public statements, to reveal hidden motives behind claims of neutrality.
Examine private correspondence and archives to uncover conflicts of interest tied to privilege.

INSIGHT

Black Press As Political Voice

The Black press grew from abolitionist roots and peaked in WWII as a powerful voice against hypocrisy.
White editors labeled it an advocacy press while denying their own racial bias and professional inequality.

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“When the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a debate over journalism standards. Many white southern editors, for instance, designated Black Americans as “Negro” in news stories, claiming it was necessary for accuracy and “objectivity,” even as white subjects went unlabeled. These news professionals disparaged media outlets that did not adhere to these norms, such as the Black press. In this way, the southern white press weaponized journalism standards—and particularly the idea of objectivity—to counter and discredit reporting that challenged white supremacy.

Through deep engagement with letters and other materials in numerous archives from editors, journalists, and leaders of newswire services, Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)interrogates and exposes how the white southern press used journalism standards as a professional rationalization for white supremacy and a political strategy to resist desegregation. Gwyneth Mellinger argues that white skin privilege gave these news professionals a stake in the racial status quo and was thus a conflict of interest as they defended Jim Crow. Her study includes an examination of the Southern Education Reporting Service, an objectivity project whose impartiality, she contends, instead affirmed systemic racism. In a pointed counternarrative, Mellinger highlights Black editors and academics who long criticized the supposed objectivity of the press and were consequently marginalized and often dismissed as illegitimate, fanciful, and even paranoid.

Elegant and incisive, Racializing Objectivity unequivocally demonstrates that a full telling of twentieth-century press history must reckon with the white southern press’s cooptation of objectivity and other professional standards to skew racial narratives about Black Americans, the freedom struggle, and democracy itself.”

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