THE MEDIA AND OUR COUNTRY'S AGENDA
575
the
New York Times.
Interestingly, one of the panel members was Ger–
ald Boyd, who was then one of several assistant managing editors of the
Times,
and is now the managing editor. One of the other panelists was
Gay Talese who, a quarter of a century earlier, had been a very cele–
brated reporter on the
New York Times
and wrote a widely read, pop–
ular book about the history of the
New York Times.
Gay had long since
left the
Times
and was enjoying a very successful career as a freelance
journalist and author. When he came into our little auditorium, he came
over to me and said, "I think you'll be very interested in what I have to
say today." This is the story he told .
Twenty-five years before, he had been one of the
New York Times
reporters covering the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama.
It
was a
very celebrated event, as you will recall. It was brutal and it was an
epochal episode in the civil rights movement. Gay thought that it would
be interesting for a journalist who had been a witness to the civil rights
march to write about Selma twenty-five years after the march, about the
process of desegregation in the South. This is a big issue, particularly for
a liberal New York newspaper. By that time, Max Frankel was the exec–
utive editor, and Gay Talese called Max and said he'd like to do this as
a freelance assignment. Max said, "Oh, that's a great idea. You know
we'll provide you with whatever you need. Photographers and so on."
So off to Selma went Gay Talese. The first thing he discovered was that
the man who had been mayor of Selma twenty-five years earlier, and
very much involved in organizing the brutalities that occurred at that
time, was still the mayor of Selma, Alabama. Additionally, the big
upcoming event of the weekend was that the mayor was presiding over
a wedding at City Hall, in which he was marrying two members of his
staff, a white woman and a black man. I don't think you have to be a
journalist to recognize that this was a fairly sensational story. Gay got
permission from the bride and groom and the mayor for photographers
to be there to take pictures. He wrote a big story about it, which, alas,
never appeared in the
New York Times.
When he finished telling this, in rather vivid detail, he turned to Ger–
ald Boyd, the assistant managing editor of the
Times,
who is black, and
said, " I was told at the time that one of the editors of the
Times
killed
my story. Were you the editor who killed my story?" And Gerry Boyd
said, "Yes . I did kill your story." Gay said, "Well, why?" And Boyd said,
"Oh, all these stories about mixed race marriages, they've gotten to be
sort of boring." This, of course, was a totally dishonest reply, as every–
one recognized. The story was not in perfect alignment with Boyd's pro–
gram for the
New York Times,
which was to emphasize black
