Papers presented by Sage M Goodwin since 2019

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

"Making the News: Network Television and the Black Freedom Struggle"

Abstract:

Television entered US homes in the mid-twentieth century, swiftly becoming the nation’s primary source of news. The new medium altered how the nation’s citizens learned about the world just as the fight for Black freedom initiated a war of ideas about the meaning of American equality. Yet historians have neglected to investigate how these revolutions in information and social justice interacted. Conventional narratives take for granted that the powerful new medium helped the media savvy movement. This paper draws on the corporate records of leading networks CBS and NBC, the papers of network executives, producers, and broadcasters, and publicity materials published in the print press and trade journals, to refute such technological determinism. It considers television news as an industry with a history made up of real people making human decisions based on personal biases, journalistic ideals, and corporate interests to reveal how the era’s explosive racial politics shaped the evolution of television news. From the desegregation moment of the early 1950s through to the urban rebellions of the late 1960s, struggles over racial justice proved a public relations opportunity, a reputational concern, and a regulatory stress test for the people who pioneered televisual journalism. The paper argues they navigated the fight for Black empowerment in ways that skewed towards the white power structure setting the industry on a course that perpetuated rather than helped to eliminate American racial inequality. In making these arguments, it uncovers the role that executives’ concerns about corporate profitability played in stymying racial progress. Showing how they conceived of viewers as much as citizens and pocketbook considerations determined their approach to the fight for racial justice as much as journalistic imperatives it helps us to see that television news departments were not resistant to the economic imperatives that drove American broadcasting. Overall, it challenges us to think more deeply about how the relationship between narrative, race, and economics has molded our world.

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