news clips of civil rights movement: did they influence viewers?

In "Media and Minorities," Larson describes two ways that the media coverage of the civil rights movement was interpreted. In general, media coverage of protests is typically brief. It focuses on either the violence or energy of the crowd but does little to explain what they hope to accomplish. Coverage of the civil rights movement focused on images of conflict during protests, in some ways encouraging stereotypes of blacks as aggressive, but they did not interview black protestors for their opinions or motives. In news coverage, the reporters often interviewed white people for their perspectives on the movement. One interpretation of the news coverage was that the images that were captured of white policemen violently abusing black protestors directly influenced individuals and important politicians to end segregation. However, Larson pointed out that if one looks at events and results of media coverage more realistically, there was not necessarily a strong connection between media coverage and the changes in opinions. For example, Larson says, "It was in the South, where the newspaper and local television coverage was least supportive of the movement, that attitudes changed the most during the late 1950's and early 1960's" (159). Changes in oppinions of the politicians and others did not tend to correspond to the timing of news coverage or to where news coverage was more supportive of the movement; Changes appeared to be independent of the influence of media news coverage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYqsJizN4gI
This series of clips from television covering the civil rights movement are interesting as the coverage deals with segregation. In the beginning of this video, you see white women protesting what I assume was the integration of black children into this white school. As the chapter mentioned, the news featured the opinions of the white individuals, holding the microphone to their mouths and listening to their perspectives of what was happening. One of the women claimed that this wasn't a matter of segregation, yet she carried a sign and did not allow her children to attend school that day. The news lacked objectivity in this type of coverage, because if they had asked the mothers of black children for their opinions about what was happening we would have heard something different. It appears that this white woman's perspective may have been in the best interest of the television station- the view being that segregation wasn't the issue but it is just inconvenient to expect black children to integrate into different schools. This keeps things "simple" and avoids controversy- they don't have to face the real problem facing America by not allowing it to become personal and this may have been the method that some news stations chose to use.