Cooling It in Boston

Ever since the urban riots and campus protests of the 1960s, journalists have been sensitive to criticism that they tend to exaggerate violence, and that the mere presence of TV cameras and crowds of reporters can detonate a volatile situation. Boston faced precisely such a hazard this month when public schools opened under a controversial integration plan involving busing. Local news coverage, however, was an uncommon paradigm of restraint.

That collective cool was no accident. In an unprecedented display of cooperation, 20 local news executives--including general managers of the city's radio and TV stations and publishers of its two major dailies, the Globe and the Herald-American--issued a statement last month urging "all Bostonians to help make school opening this September safe and quiet." The 20 are members of the Boston Community Media Committee, a group founded six years ago largely to promote more sensitive coverage of minority-group affairs. More important than the statement, the executives agreed to downplay any incidents of violence. "We went about it from the standpoint of our civic responsibility," recalls Lamont Thompson, New England area vice president for Westinghouse Broadcasting. "We made a very strong commitment to the mayor that although we would cover the totality of the news, there would be no inflammatory material, and unpleasant incidents would be written up judiciously."

Film Only. Judiciousness took a number of forms. Television stations declined to take the obvious step of posting camera crews at intersections where bottle and rock throwing might be expected. Assignment editors, by and large, did not put photographers on school buses carrying blacks into white neighborhoods--vehicles that were likely to be stoned. News directors agreed to avoid live broadcasts of violent incidents. Instead they used film, which could be edited first. Print and broadcast executives alike agreed to limit their reporters' privilege of crossing police lines, so that such trouble spots as South Boston High often had to be covered from a distance.

In some cases, restraint involved outright self-censorship. When two black teachers at South Boston High were beaten and their cars were smashed, the incident was ignored at WGBH-TV, the local public broadcast outlet, because station managers considered it to be inflammatory. Editors at WCVB-TV deleted from a film clip a shot of a white student making rude gestures in the presence of black children. A story about the arrival of a Ku Klux Klan officer in Boston that appeared in an early edition of the Evening Globe last Thursday was missing in later editions.

Brighter Picture. As a result of those efforts, Bostonians received a slightly different and more encouraging picture of the week's events than readers of out-of-town papers or viewers of network news reports. While a Globe headline last Tuesday reported sanguinely that EXTRA POLICE HOLD DOWN S. BOSTON TROUBLE, the New York Times led its account in a more negative manner: "Chanting bands of white youths roamed the streets of South Boston today, protesting court-ordered integration." Network correspondents, who were not a party to the speak-softly agreement, found that there was occasional disagreement between them and local TV newsmen. When NBC Field Producer Robert Toombs checked in at the network affiliate, WBZ-TV, a station employee who had been watching the network's reports yelled, "You're blowing the whole thing out of proportion!" Complained NBC Correspondent Robert Hager: "My God, South Boston is going to hell, and everybody here says things are quiet."

Though South Boston did not quite go to hell, Hager's remark underscored a dilemma for journalists. The agreement to play it cool was well intentioned. That most Boston newsmen cooperated in carrying it out doubtless helped authorities to maintain a degree of order in a potentially calamitous situation. But there is a danger in self-censorship. In its desire to avoid provocative excesses, the Boston press came perilously close to a kind of news management that can distort coverage just as surely as sensationalism. To dictate the tone of reportage even before the event occurs can create a group-think approach that is unhealthy for newsmen and unhelpful to their audience.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.