For two years the committee limped along with modest results. Then in early 1968 two events lent it a fresh sense of purpose. One was the Kerner Report, which condemned reporters and editors for failing to communicate “the degradation, misery and hopelessness of life in the ghetto.” The other was the assassination of Martin Luther King, with its violent echo in Boston’s streets. Shortly after King’s death, the council convened 120 black and media representatives for a weekend conference in New Hampshire. In an apocalyptic mood, accentuated by Robert Kennedy’s assassination, they met virtually nonstop for three days, descending from their green hillside with a new zeal to confront Boston’s racial crisis.
Nowhere was that sense of urgency more acute than at the Globe. After King’s assassination, Davis Taylor pleaded with downtown department stores to underwrite the emergency telecast of James Brown’s concert, “if only for your plate-glass windows.” Meanwhile, the Globe took a hard look at its news staff—then employing just two blacks above the rank of clerk—and immediately recruited four Negro interns from the University of Massachusetts. Desperate for seasoned black hands, Winship reached into the Globe’s own circulation department for a former NAACP public relations man named Dexter Eure to write the paper’s first black column, “Tell It Like It Is.” Soon after the New Hampshire conference, Winship loaned Eure to the media council as its temporary executive director.
In years to come, the committee proved an uneasy alliance. Blacks expressed dismay because Boston’s press continued to reflect “the biases, paternalism and indifference of white middle-class America.” Media members bridled at the “excessive demands and overheated rhetoric” of black leaders. Although the Globe developed doubts about the undertaking, it stuck with it through the early seventies, dispatching senior editors to meetings, supplying a lion’s share of the budget, remaining publicly identified with what one editor called “the press’s effort to atone for 200 years of injustice to black Americans.”
The newspaper’s position was further revealed in its attitude toward the Irish working class. When Charlestown demonstrators staged a noisy demonstration at City Council hearings on the urban renewal plan, the Globe ran a column in the form of a letter from a Townie woman named “Daisy” to her sister “Mazie” in the suburbs. “Wow [it went in part], what a ball we had! Wish you were there. Us loyal Townies almost tore the roof off City Hall. You’d have been proud of us, Mazie, only Ma says it was terrible the way we booed the priests and ministers. But that was our strategy—keep the other side bottled up. Boo them. Yell them down and don’t give them a chance to talk. Ma is old-fashioned, you know. She doesn’t know anything about democracy in action—ha, ha.”
Now and then, the Globe made a gesture toward inner-city ethnics. In the late sixties, it joined City Hall in a sudden rediscovery of Boston’s neighborhoods, establishing an “Urban Team,” running series on white communities like East Boston and Charlestown, lending reportorial—if not always editorial—support to the battles against airport expansion and highway construction, though giving no ground on racial issues.
As the busing crisis neared, the Globe invoked its nineteenth-century support of Irish rights with increasing frequency. “We have decried the double standard at every turn,” it said in a 1973 editorial supporting the racial imbalance law. “It’s wrong when used to exclude blacks from certain schools now, just as it was wrong in our early days when job advertisements carried the tag N.I.N.A., meaning No Irish Need Apply. We refused all ads from businesses which used that label.” But this recital of favors past only intensified current resentments. Like the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party, and the Kennedys, the Globe seemed to have deserted Boston’s Irish in their hour of need.
By the time Bob Phelps arrived in April 1974, white backlash already was threatening to swamp the Globe in a tide of indignation. Determined to wrest the paper off its perilous course, Phelps wasted no time in shifting direction. At a Globe “think tank” that May he asserted that the paper was going to be “fair” and “balanced,” that it would present “all sides” of every issue. In line with the Times’s traditional separation of news and opinion, Phelps said he never read editorials. “I don’t want to know what the Globe thinks about the news,” he said. “I just want the news.”
Those who chafed at Tom Winship’s unbridled enthusiasms were delighted by Phelps’s advocacy of professionalism; those thriving under Winship’s loose rein were dismayed by the specter of oppressive editing. One of those whom Phelps made uneasy was Dexter Eure, by then the Globe’s director of community relations and its principal liaison with black leadership. In the discussion that followed Phelps’s speech, Eure asked him how he could direct the Globe’s busing coverage if he didn’t know anything about the minority community. It was both a question and an accusation, and Phelps tried to defuse it with a quip. “Don’t tell me about minorities,” he said. “I’m more of a minority than you are. I’m part American Indian.”
In fact, Phelps did have some Seneca blood in his veins. But the quip failed to reassure—or amuse—blacks on the staff. Once at a staff meeting Phelps suggested that everyone choose an Indian name. Most of the writers went along, but when it was Carmen Fields’s turn, the young black woman glared up the table at Phelps. “Black Foot,” she said. “And Black Arms. And Black Legs. And Black Head. And Black Neck.”
In the face of such misgivings, Phelps made several structural changes in the editorial operation. He established a “story editor” system to compensate for the Globe’s notoriously weak copy desk. In June 1974, every reporter was assigned to one of four story editors, who closely supervised his articles from inception to publication. And he stopped reporters from doubling as columnists, covering a news event one day, coming back the next with subjective commentary. Most of the reporters were not pleased; they saw Phelps’s innovations as a shift from what had long been a “writer’s paper” to a more rigidly controlled “editor’s paper.”
Winship himself was unimpressed by Phelps’s punctilio—he had never been one to sacrifice excitement for order—but he let the new man have his way. For Tom was more worried than he acknowledged about the Globe’s capacity to cover the impending busing confrontation. That spring he dispatched Bob Healy to newspapers in four cities—Denver, Detroit, San Francisco, and Riverside, California—which had experienced school desegregation. On his return, Healy produced a confidential memo describing what each paper had learned. Among other things, he concluded: “It is important that someone, other than the newspaper, play a leadership role in support of school integration…. Make sure that black attitudes on busing are known. No one should get too far ahead of the black position…. As the time for implementation of the system approaches, anticipated violence and the statements of violence should be carefully avoided in the news columns…. Finally, it might be a good idea for a Globe editor to live in Boston.”
The last point particularly worried Winship. Of the paper’s top twenty editors, all but two lived in the suburbs. Chris Lydon had urged his friend Bob Phelps to live in the city, where he could learn its ethnic and class attitudes firsthand, but, ardent ornithologists, the Phelpses bought a home not far from Winship in Lincoln. Even Irish reporters generally settled at one remove from the inner city in enclaves like Scituate and Hingham. The Globe’s prevailing voice was that of a Harvard-educated lawyer from the suburbs—affable, humane, and well intentioned, but no longer entirely comfortable in the city of his youth.
Irish politicians loved to twit the Globe about its suburban orientation. State Senator Billy Bulger, an acerbic wit from South Boston, regaled audiences with an apocryphal anecdote: “I was talking with Tom Winship not long ago. I said, ‘Mr. Winship, how do you know so much about Boston?’ He said, ‘Well, we have an Urban Team.’ I said, ‘How can I get in touch with them?’ And he said, ‘You just call the regular number during the day, and in the evening you dial long-distance.’ ”
Such gibes cost Tom some sleepless nights. The cri
tics had a legitimate beef, he thought. Originally he had favored a metropolitan plan under which city children would be bused to the suburbs and vice versa, but once the Supreme Court barred such “cross-district” busing in the Detroit case and the Globe began lecturing city dwellers about their obligations under Garrity’s order, Winship wondered whether he ought to be living in a rambling farmhouse at the end of a wooded lane in Lincoln. (What fun the Irish pols would have if they knew that the two Vermont Morgans grazing in Tom’s pasture were named Seamus and Clancy.) During that summer of 1974, riding the 7:52 train to work each morning, he toyed with the idea of buying a house in the city, but his wife was more committed to country living, less afflicted by liberal guilt. They stayed where they were.
The Globe’s anxiety was aggravated that summer by pressure from a newly aroused Boston Community Media Committee. At an all-day meeting on July 10, black members demanded that the press commit itself to “implementation of the law,” express its commitment through both “advocacy journalism and straight reporting,” and “use its awesome power to influence leaders in the private sector.” The press agreed to work toward these ends. That summer president John I. Taylor represented the Globe at a series of meetings designed to assure that the press play a “positive role” in the fall’s events.
An ad hoc committee went to work with indisputable vigor, consulting other “opinion leaders,” distributing 50,000 bumper stickers which read: “Take it easy, for the kids’ sake,” cooperating with Boston’s Advertising Club in the production of radio-TV spots on which sports heroes like Bobby Orr and Carl Yastrzemski drawled, “It’s not going to be easy, but that never stopped Boston.”
Meanwhile, black demands were reinforced by pressure from Mayor White, who had both institutional and political reasons to play down any violence that might develop in the autumn. In two meetings with media representatives and two more with “on-air talent”—none of which was publicly reported—White and his aides urged the press to handle racial incidents judiciously, avoid any language or pictures which might exacerbate tensions, and put the best possible face on desegregation.
These proposals found their readiest acceptance among radio and television executives, who viewed the committee as a convenient means of satisfying FCC requirements that they respond to community needs. Not burdened by such considerations, newspapermen were more wary of “pack journalism,” more alive to the dangers of “news management.” By midsummer, several Globe representatives had raised warnings about the process. But the Ad Hoc Committee—with John Taylor’s participation—plunged ahead with its most controversial project, a “Boston Media Statement” proclaiming the press’s own commitment to the court order. Early that summer, it drafted a declaration which said, in part, “We shall spare no effort, nor overlook any resource at our disposal, to ensure that everything possible is done to make integration work … because the law tells us it is right and necessary.” Eventually cooler heads prevailed, settling on more modest language: “We need all Bostonians to help make school opening this September safe and quiet. We have a mandate from the federal court to desegregate our schools. Some of us agree With that decision; some of us don’t. But there is one thing we can all agree with; we love our children and we want no harm to come to them. We all must come together to that end, because it is our kids that count.” Signed by twenty newspaper, television, and radio executives—John Taylor for the Globe—it was released on August 25, just two weeks before the first buses rolled.
Later, press critics would submit that statement as evidence that Boston’s media had compromised their credibility by engaging in cooperative efforts verging on self-censorship. There could be little doubt that some institutions temporarily abandoned objectivity. The Herald American’s lead story on the morning school opened read like a sermon: “The safety of 94,000 children and the salvation of Boston’s historic standing as a community of reasonable and law-abiding families are at stake today as the city reopens its public schools.” Lovell Dyett, operations manager of the NBC outlet, put it most explicitly when he said, “We are going to use television to create an atmosphere of compliance with Judge Garrity’s order.”
The Globe’s position was more complicated. Bob Phelps, with his Timesian sense of propriety, had no use for either the Media Committee’s or the Mayor’s exhortations, assiduously keeping his distance from both. When Time magazine later suggested that the Globe had been part of a civic conspiracy to “play it cool” and “downplay any incidents of violence,” Phelps and Winship were furious.
But the Globe needed no conspiracy for it to treat the busing story with special care. For generations the Taylors had never doubted they were citizens of Boston first and newspapermen second. In Tom Winship that tradition was reinforced by Phil Graham’s brand of liberal activism. Since the early sixties, when it lobbied for Ed Logue’s appointment as Redevelopment director, then got him the resources he needed, the Globe had rarely hesitated to put its muscle behind objectives it regarded as salutary. Uninhibited by traditional journalistic objectivity, which he once described as “a code word for playing it safe,” Tom Winship periodically mobilized his news pages for crusades to control handguns or prohibit the sale of beverages in non-returnable bottles. Behind the scenes, Winship and Healy cooperated with Kevin White, Frank Sargent, and other officeholders on projects to advance the public weal. Prospective candidates, zealous legislators, advocates of every stripe danced attendance on the Globe, seeking its patronage. If power-conscious Bostonians had once asked, “What does Lake Street think?”, now they wondered, “What does Morrissey Boulevard say?”
To Davis Taylor and Tom Winship alike, the Globe’s responsibility in that fall of 1974 was clear: to guide Boston through its travail with the least possible injury to all parties. In mid-August, Phelps drafted and Winship issued an extraordinary document, a “Memo to All Hands” containing thirteen “guidelines” for busing coverage. Taken one by one, most were journalistic platitudes: “We talk to all sources dispassionately, keeping our views to ourselves,” “We check out rumors and tips, not print[ing] them unless substantiated.” But some reflected unusual anxiety: “In such a delicate situation, it is imperative that headlines be scrupulously accurate, that headline words be chosen with delicacy …” “The editing of stories regarding the integration situation also should be done with utmost care.” And some seemed significant precisely because Phelps and Winship felt it necessary to say them out loud: “We print an accurate record of what our reporting finds. If there is violence, we say so…. We do not suppress news because it doesn’t fit our views of what we hope happens…. Above all, we must remember that the Boston Globe’s credibility is at stake. Our news columns must be believed—not just by those who agree with our editorial policy, but by those who disagree. Our aim is to convince all that the Globe is committed to the goal of seeking out the truth.”
A few days later, when assignments for the opening day of school were handed out, veteran Globe staffers were flabbergasted at the battle plan Phelps had devised: a small army of reporters—sixty in all—was to be deployed across the city, manning every site of potential trouble. “You almost got the feeling that by covering every base, we were covering our own asses,” one reporter recalled. “We were suffering one of the most massive cases of corporate angst in history.”
Despite this meticulous preparation—or perhaps precisely because of it—the Globe’s opening-day coverage set off acrimonious debate both within and outside the newspaper. Although angry crowds had stoned black children in South Boston, injuring nine and leading the Mayor to prohibit gatherings of three or more persons, the Globe appeared the next morning with a reassuring headline: “Boston Schools Desegregated, Opening Day Generally Peaceful.” The lead story emphasized “a minimum of confusion and disruption throughout the city,” saving South Boston’s troubles for the third paragraph. Page one was dominated by a large picture of black and white elementary students bathed in ethereal light as they g
ot acquainted in a school yard, while the Globe’s lead editorial, headlined “A Fine Beginning,” suggested that the day’s events “had to be regarded as a plus.” The Herald American took a similar tack, as did most local television and radio stations.
This contrasted sharply with the national media, most of which focused relentlessly on the disruptions. “Violence Mars Busing in Boston,” headlined the New York Times over a story by its Boston correspondent, John Kifner, who opened with “Rock throwing, jeering crowds in South Boston,” waiting for the second paragraph to report that “other parts of the city were calm.”
Soon recriminations were flying back and forth, the national press accusing the locals of cover-up, Bostonians charging out-of-towners with yellow journalism. One confrontation took place at Harvard, where Globe editors and national reporters gathered to discuss busing coverage. Late in the evening, after several drinks had been consumed, Bob Phelps got into a heated altercation with the Times’s Kifner.
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