Southern Newspapermen Charge Bias To Harvard Liberals, Northern Press

"What seems to be the Harvard response to the deep problems of the South is wrong," a member of a panel of southern Nieman Fellows told a Leverett House audience last night.

"I do not object to what is said here but to what is not said; nor to what is charged, but the way it is charged," John Hamilton, Nieman Fellow from Virginia, explained. "Too many members of the faculty have felt obligated to tell anti-South jokes, and too many students have felt obligated to laugh," he said. And sometimes, he added, the faculty member has been poorly informed.

Supporting Hamilton's plea for a more thoughtful approach to the South's problems, John Nelson of the Atlanta Constitution charged that the northern press and the national news media have tended to report sensationally rather than accurately.

KKK Story Dead

"The Ku Klux Klan rides again" story is often run by northern newspapers, when the truth is that the KKK is dead, Nelson said. It lives on only in the mind of Northerners.

The charge of poor reporting can also be levelled at the wire services, Nelson continued. A race riot after a football game in Boston turned up on Atlanta wires as "a riot," with no mention of the race of the participants.

Similarly, because northern newspapers often rely on wire services for coverage of racial issues in the South, there is no attempt to provide background information to explain the Southern view.

States Differ

Northerners often do not understand the differences existing in the South between urban and rural areas, or between states. "The phrase 'Solid South' has more alliteration than truth," said Gene Roberts of the Raleigh News and Observer.

In North Carolina, Roberts said, Negroes hold many positions in city and state governments, and schools in major cities have been desegregated without incident. In Virginia, on the other hand, the 1954 integration-order resulted in the closing of public schools. As yet there are not public schools open in Prince Edward County, Virginia.

"Mad as Hell"

In Mississippi, according to John Emmerich, Jr., managing editor of the McComb Enterprise-Journal, things will get a lot worse before they get better. Freedom riders in that state aggravate the white Southerner, Emmerich added, and "make him mad as hell."

Voting rights for the Negro should be the immediate objective of integrationists, the Nieman fellows agreed. "Southerners feel that eating is kind of a social things," Emmerich explained, "but it's difficult to rationalize the denial of the vote."