By Steve Haner
Competitors of Richmond’s venerable morning newspaper have long teased it with a derogatory nickname: The Richmond Times-Disgrace. With its decision to stop reprinting 75-year-old front pages for some unidentified offense to some unknown persons, the nickname is fully apt.
“There are terms and phrases that were used in this newspaper in the past – and which appeared in this space as recently as Friday…that are hurtful and, frankly, ignorant,” reads the announcement today in the space where the reproductions had appeared. “We do not condone the use of those words and phrases to describe people or groups. We will no longer run them, even in our archive sections, without clear context.”
The pages have tracked the progress of World War II as it was reported to Virginians of the time. The headlines and photos are easy to see, but it takes a sharp eye to read the stories themselves, usually. If you pay attention, as I have, you get a sense of the spacing and correlation of major events and see whether their significance was noted at the time or went unnoticed until later. It is history’s first draft, as others have said.
Until somebody does not want to face it, or even know it happened. I have searched through Friday’s reproduced page over and over and can find only one thing that might have sparked this woke panic. It was not the five Pacific battlefront stories, and it was not the story on the war’s financial cost It was not the story out of the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, or a story on the Senate’s debate on price controls.
The “hurtful and frankly ignorant” words must be in the story about a House of Representatives bill to abolish Virginia’s poll tax, at least as far as it limited the vote in federal elections. I had read that story closely Friday, surprised that as early as 1945 the House was passing bills to abolish poll taxes. The story is a straight account of the House’s action on that, and also mentions a related proposal for a Fair Employment Practices Committee.
Some unnamed Southern congressional supporter of the poll tax was quoted calling the bill “a communistic step to wreck the Constitution.” That is the only statement I can find that might have triggered the concern somebody might have their feelings hurt. Is that it? Will anybody in leadership at the newspaper own up to the rationale for its self-censorship of its own archives? Inquiring minds want to know.
Update: Another reader (now a former subscriber, apparently) believes it was the use of the word “Jap” or “Japs” in headlines, something that certainly was common with the war coverage. So far, no further explanation from the newspaper.
Inquiring minds also want to know what else will the Political Correctness Editor (or is it a collective?) add or delete in news coverage? I have chided Jim Bacon in this space for his decision to cancel the newspaper coming to his own household, but after this I will think twice about the next invoice. Newspapers should be fearless, independent, and feisty. This one is showing itself to be craven, trapped in the latest leftist fads, and unwilling to irritate anyone.
Someone intimately familiar with its workings, more so than I, reports:
Ill-informed emotion drives everything. We’ve reached a point where institutional journalism is not only structurally incapable of publishing complex truths, it is unwilling to even seek out simple truths. It now engages almost exclusively in the business of manufacturing and maintaining a system of fictions that strokes it vanity, cripples its critics, and boosts its favored groups. It possess only two skills: condemnation and cheerleading.
You can view the poll tax story with whatever lens you wish, but I found it heartening that in 1945 so many in Congress were seeking to end it. The tax was intended to disenfranchise far more than just poor black voters. It was 1964 before the 24th Amendment fully ended it.
Does somebody suffer hurt feelings to learn there was such a thing and that it had defenders among the leaders of the day? Modern ignorant readers would have to know what it was to even understand the story. Is it the claim advocates were exercising communism that offends? The Associated Press probably used that quote because it caused laughs outside of racist circles even in 1945. The poll tax was down to just seven states.
Is the problem the story at the time did not include a “reader alert” such as might appear in such a story today? “As everybody knows, the poll tax is a racist voter suppression tool imposed during the Jim Crow era.” Oh, everybody was so aware in 1945, supporters and opponents. Readers were far more informed then than now. They didn’t need the paper to “interpret” the news.
This was indefensible. This was disgraceful. This calls into question whether any reporting anywhere in your newspaper can be relied upon to be complete and honest. Have fun going back into your online archives trying to add “context” to decades of copy. Just take the archives (filled with potential to offend) offline and continue your fast fade into oblivion.
In journalism as in politics, all fatal wounds are self-inflicted.
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