The Race Beat : The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

From Wikipedia The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book written in 2006 by journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. The book is about the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the United States, specifically about the role of newspapers and television. "Race Beat" refers to reporters whose beat reporting covered issues of race. Read more - Shopping-Enabled Wikipedia on Amazon From Publishers Weekly This Pulitzer-winning chronicle of the role the news media played in shaping the civil rights movement makes its belated audio debut. Richard Allen undertakes the vocal depictions of the players from across the race-relations spectrum with tremendous skill. He manages to portray characters instead of caricatures as the sweeping real-life drama unfolds. Given the length of the recording and the density of the material, listeners should find it particularly helpful that Allen repeats the last few sentences of the previous disc at the start of each new CD. The solid production follows the authors' straight-ahead narrative approach. Journalism students and history buffs with at least some grounding in both the conventions of the news business or the civil rights era are the natural core audience. Others may wish to familiarize themselves with more general resources before tackling such an ambitious offering. A Vintage paperback (Reviews, Nov. 9, 2006). (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South--and the brutality used to enforce it. It is the story of how the nation's press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century. Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen--first Black reporters, then liberal Southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media--revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press--and the journalists responsible for them--profoundly changed the nation's thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and '60s. Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen--black and white--revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation's history, as told by those who covered it.From the Trade Paperback edition.