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Book Review
| Steven D. Classen, Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles over Mississippi TV, 1955–1969, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. 275. $74.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8223-3329-5); $21.95 paper (ISBN 0-8223-3341-4).
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| Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Jackson Mississippi television screens regularly went blank due to "technical difficulties." While the rest of the country saw African American actors appearing on "Bonanza," documentaries on the burgeoning civil rights movement, or poignant images of protest marchers weathering police violence, local stations in Mississippi were at the forefront of an unrelenting battle to censor, control, and regulate public portrayals of African Americans and the impending cultural change of integration. Southern station owners, along with Mississippi's cultural and business leaders, understood that television is not a purveyor of entertainment passively consumed, but instead, as Stephen Classen puts it in his provocative and uniformly interesting book, Watching Jim Crow, television is "something people do" (6). Classen contextualizes the dynamic relation between television and society by examining the struggle over media programming and racial representation in the South embodied in the licensing and operation of two Jackson Mississippi stations from 1955 to 1969. |
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The book nicely describes how local television was nested securely within a confluence of organizations with interlocking memberships whose primary interest was in maintaining the existing, segregationist status quo. These included local business owners catering to both white and African American consumers; the virulently anti-integrationist Citizen's Council; and the state government's Sovereignty Commission, designed to protect Mississippi segregation from the federal government under the euphemism of state rights. The television stations' contribution to this alliance lay in controlling how African Americans were portrayed. National entertainment, news, and public affairs programs were censored. Coverage of black leaders, civil rights issues, and protest, whether originating in the region or nationally, were limited. And local programming carefully crafted to support the current system of segregation was disseminated. The combined impact of these actions was to deny the white populace access to accurate information about the conditions of southern blacks, as well as acting to marginalize the African American community who, like their white counterparts, received television through the filtering of local stations, but unlike their white counterparts were acutely aware of the discrepancy between reality and what appeared on their television screens. |
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The analytical framework presented here is firmly rooted in critical race theory, which argues that law and government, along with their terms of discourse and proof, is designed to perpetuate the dominant political and racial order. Classen includes a compelling description of the procedural limitations imposed on attempts to broaden televised coverage of African Americans through FCC licensing challenges. The agency's formalized review and hearings procedure placed a premium on documentary proof. Testamentary accounts of local television programming and coverage without written substantiation, the bulk of the challengers' evidence, were deemed unreliable. In an age without VCRs and other publicly available recording devices, this approach left the means of proof solely in the hands of the offending television stations. This is a first-rate observation, much akin to the dynamic that gave rise to acceptance of disparate impact evidence and burden of proof shifting in employment discrimination cases in the early 1970s. |
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However, there are several difficulties with Classen's theoretical approach, which muddy an otherwise excellent discussion of the barriers faced by minority voices in their effort to challenge local media bias in the South. Legal formalism is a hallmark of regulatory agency adjudication, which often serves minority voices by providing due process uniformity in highly individualized proceedings. To the extent that one accepts control theories in which agencies serve the purposes of dominant interests, here white station owners, federal independent agencies such as the FCC are far more likely to be captured by nationally based groups, in this case the networks or national broadcasting associations, both of whom by all accounts were at odds with local southern stations' attempts to suppress African American coverage. Deck stacking and agency capture arguments lose some of their salience when other actors can impact agency behavior. In the case of the WLBT-TV license challenge, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals stepped in as an alternate forum, in the course of doing so giving the listening public standing to challenge broadcasters, a procedural ruling that was part of a broader tend that arguably undercut dominant interests' ability to control agency action. Finally, the local southern stations could not separate themselves entirely from the larger national market, whose presentation of African Americans and civil rights issues may have been lacking in many respects, but which was, nonetheless, significantly at odds with the preferences of business and political leaders in Jackson Mississippi. The presence of national broadcasting networks acted as a countervailing force to the local station's attempts to fully control content, and the reach of network programming provided leverage for activists. Popular shows like "Bonanza" and "Hootenanny" allowed students from Tougaloo Southern Christian College to orchestrate boycotts by actors slated to appear in segregated venues, actions that forced white residents of Jackson to confront the opprobrium of communities outside of Mississippi. |
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Theoretical issues aside, Classen's work is well worth consideration. It offers both rich and insightful material, ranging from the impact of consumer rights concepts on local activism, to powerful oral histories collected from those who "lived" the local television in Jackson. |
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| Dawn M. Chutkow
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| Cornell University |
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