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

Dec 6, 2025

This discussion delves into how the white southern press manipulated journalism standards to uphold Jim Crow laws. Gwyneth Mellinger reveals the hypocrisy behind the concept of objectivity, showing how it was weaponized to dismiss the Black press. The talk uncovers attempts to silence Black voices and highlights the influential roles of specific journalists. Archival revelations expose the complicity of these editors in segregation while they publicly claimed neutrality, urging a reevaluation of press histories and overlooked contributions.

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INSIGHT

Objectivity Used To Defend Jim Crow

White Southern editors reframed civil-rights reporting as a debate over journalism standards to defend segregation.
They used 'objectivity' to position themselves as neutral while marginalizing challenges to Jim Crow.

INSIGHT

Surface Terms Mask Deeper Biases

Institutional racism operates beneath surface language like 'merit' and 'patriotism' to justify other agendas.
Journalists must look beyond stated values to reveal hidden ideological functions.

ADVICE

Look Beyond Public Statements

Do examine what people are doing, not just what they say, to assess bias.
Use correspondence and private archives to test public claims of neutrality.

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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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