Summary

Articles in the Los Angeles Times expressed shock in the wake of the Watts uprising, which seems disingenuous to Theoharis as the paper had covered the growing civil rights movement in the city over the preceding decade. This same decontextualization of the long-standing civil rights struggle also occurred in Boston with articles published in the Boston Globe. Both papers would receive Pulitzer Prizes for their decontextualized coverage of respective civil rights issues in their cities. While journalists who braved the violence of the South in this era to report on the movement were lauded, they often couched their coverage of civil rights issues at home in paternalistic righteousness and respectability politics. Because most national American media outlets were in the North, these hypocrisies went largely unchecked. While the biases of Southern...