The Press and the South

Last Wednesday Thomas Hayden, former editor of the Michigan Daily, and Paul Potter, an officer of the National Student Association, were beaten up by a member of an angry mob in McComb, Miss., as a reward for their efforts to compile a neutral report on school integration. The incident, aside from adding to countless instances in which local Southern authorities have failed to provide adequate protection for such serious observers, sharply illustrates the scandal of national press coverage in the South.

Hayden in currently free-lancing for a number of college newspapers, trying to report events which the national press has chosen to ignore or suppress. When Northern newspapers and weekly news magazines do get around to commenting on lynchings or riots such as those in Monroe, North Carolina, their information is so scanty that the average reader gets only a fuzzy and incomplete picture. Although the wire services generally send writers and photographers to survey the scene, the stories seldom find their way to the pages of newspapers outside the immediate area.

It is, to say the least, unfortunate that big-city dailies with the organization and the money required to protect reporters covering integration in the South, do not bother to do so. The time-honored task of any newspaper worth the name is to report all the news--and "fit to print" should not be a criterion if it means that the national press deletes information which might prove embarrassing or distasteful to local, state, or federal governments.

The citizens of the United States have both the right and the obligation to know what's going on in the South. A courageous individual, such as Hayden, should not have to do the job of the national press. He should not be harassed, as he was, by local authorities who pronounced his identification inadequate, or deserted by the police, as he was, when attack seemed imminent. But more important, it should be obvious that a lone reporter is incapable of making up for the failures of national news service. If the American press is really interested in fulfilling its duty to the public, it had better get on the job in the South.