Jessica Birthisel | Sept. 23, 2010
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| Photo by Jessica Birthisel |
| Doctoral candidate Bill Gillis is exploring conservative accusations of liberal bias of the 1960s and 1970s. He presented his research at the Wednesday colloquium. |
Gillis, the second presenter in this fall’s School of Journalism Research Colloquium, spoke Wednesday in the Ernie Pyle Lounge.
Colloquia organizer and associate professor Mike Conway introduced Gillis. It was a fitting introduction, said Gillis, because it was in Conway’s historical research course that the seed of this larger dissertation project took root.
Gillis' original research paper considered the mass cancellations of subscriptions to two major Louisville, Ky., newspapers, The Courier Journal and the Time,s as a result of their editorial support of the desegregation of public schools via busing.
The practice of busing sought to eliminate residential segregation by transporting suburban white students to mostly black schools and vice versa. The busing movement was an effect of the 1954 Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled segregated schools unconstitutional.
Initially, says Gillis, people interpreted this ruling to apply only to segregated schools in the South.
“By the late ‘60s, outside of the South, the Brown decision began to affect schools in the North,” said Gillis, and that was through busing.
Soon after the practice began, Gillis said, anti-busing protestors, mostly white homeowners, organized rallies and pulled their financial support from the newspapers they believed supported the liberal civil rights agenda.
It was through this topic of busing that conservatives accused the papers of a liberal media bias, Gillis explained, something that hindered the papers’ economic success.
“In a two year period, [the Courier Journal and the Times] lost 25,000 subscribers, or 6 percent,” said Gillis.
After this initial project on busing in Louisville, Gillis expanded his analysis to consider other instances and occurrences of liberal media accusations and the conservative publications that make them.
“I’ve been trying to cast my net further,” he explained.
His dissertation work now revolves around two arguments. First, says Gillis, criticism of news media was a vital part of conservative politics in the 1970s.
His second argument, and one that he’s still developing, is that these conservative movements of the 1970s were supported by a “robust” network of conservative publications that focused on liberal media bias, among other topics.
His research found that the media outlets labeled as liberal included major television news networks and newspapers, national news magazines and the Public Broadcasting System. The criticism was found in the conservative publications, including city and weekly newspapers, media watch publications, homeowner publications, anticommunist religious publications and single-issue publications devoted to specific issues such as busing.
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| Photo by Jessica Birthisel |
| The Northeast Detroiter was a homeowner publication that criticized the 1970s news media of a liberal bias. Gillis found that some newspapers suffered circulation drops if perceived to have a liberal bias. |
During the presentation, Gillis showed many examples of these conservative publications’ discussion of liberal media bias, including articles, opinion columns and even advertisements for educational tapes that could teach people how to talk liberal friends and neighbors out of their political views.
Gillis concluded his talk by describing what scholar Jacquelyn Dowd Hall calls “the long civil rights movement.” Many people consider the civil rights movement to run from 1956-1968 in the South, said Gillis, not giving much consideration to the civil rights work done before and after Martin Luther King’s involvement in a specific region of the country.
By exploring civil rights support and backlash through the 1970s in a more widespread geographic region, Gillis says he hopes his work contributes to that goal.
More:
- Columbia University professor Michael Schudson will speak at 4 p.m. Oct. 4 at Fine Arts 015.
- Dean of Undergraduate Studies Michael Evans presents at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 6 in the Ernie Pyle lounge.
- Read more about the colloquia.
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