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BRIAN: We’re going to take a short break. When we get back, how media coverage help or hurt protests. A words from today’s sponsor.

Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, millions of Americans have staged demonstrations, from the Women’s March on Washington in January, to protests at town halls across America. What you think about those protests probably depends on where you get your news.

JOANNE: Take, for example, the Women’s March on Washington in January.

MALE SPEAKER: The whole world was watching. History being made in Washington, in Boston, in Los Angeles.

WOMAN SPEAKER: Apparently they are unable to separate the process of our freedom of elections and the institution of the presidency from their litany of causes. I think–

JOANNE: We’re going to let you guess which is Fox News and which is MSNBC.

PETER: Back in the summer of 1963, TV coverage of the historic March on Washington suffered from a different set of biases. Back in the good old days, there were three major TV networks that dominated broadcast news, and they all claimed to be the same kind of objective. But, for the better part of that decade, their coverage was pretty consistent and asked largely one big question, whether there was violence or maybe the potential for violence.

The lead up to the March on Washington, one of the most peaceful mass protests in American history, was no exception.

ANIKO: We have the Birmingham Campaign in May of ’63, which, of course, everybody remembers; the dogs, the fire hoses, confrontations in the streets, particularly with schoolchildren.

PETER: This is Aniko Bodroghkozy, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. She talked to co-host, Ed Ayers, a few years back.

ANIKO: What we don’t remember as much is throughout the rest of the summer of 1963, leading up to the March, there were other civil rights kind of flash-points, particularly in the northern South. So Cambridge, Maryland was a major civil rights battleground that got a lot of coverage, and there was a lot of violence, again, not by the African-American civil rights protesters, but the way that campaigns like this tended to get covered was news men– and they were all men– tended to often go into the passive voice. So it was never really clear, at least in the way they were narrating news stories, who was perpetuating the violence.

So, this news frame is violence inevitable gets attached to the coverage leading up to the March on Washington.

ED: Now, TV is still a pretty new thing in 1963. And how did all three networks– if people can imagine such a situation– how did they plan to cover the March on Washington?

ANA: Covering something as big as what the March on Washington was presumed to be was a big job, and so the networks actually pooled their resources. One network had a pool of cameras in one place, another at the Lincoln Memorial. So this is something that the networks had some experience doing, particularly with things like presidential inaugurations, but they had never done anything like this for a protest march.

ED: And so, what happens on the actual day?

ANA: Well, we know what happens on the actual day. I mean, we’ve all seen the images and the pictures, and, you know, they’ve come down to us 50 years later as these inspiring images of nonviolent, dignified, purposeful protest. But what’s interesting when you look at the coverage, and I looked at the coverage of both ABC and CBS, the television cameras seemed to be very specifically looking both for crowd shots, but then there’s always this cutting in to what I like to call portraits of dignity. And then, always, this search for a few white marchers to insert among the African-American marchers.

You would think, from looking at the television news coverage, that whites made up about half of the 250,000 people who came to the March on Washington, because the news directors seem to be so insistently looking for white people to center their images on surrounded by African-American marchers. But we get this image of peaceful, dignified marching to the point that you get news commentators, kind of over and over again, suggesting this is like a picnic. It’s a joyous occasion, you know, nothing like the concerns about violence being inevitable. You see, of course, it’s the exact opposite.

ED: That it was never an inevitable in the first place. You know, never pay attention to what we were saying before.

ANIKO: Yeah. Well, of course, if the news personnel had really kind of dug a little bit deeper and looked at the way that Byard Rustin, who was the main organizer of the march, and the SDLC, which was Martin Luther King’s organization, and the other civil rights organizations that came together to plan the march– had they actually covered the strategies that the civil rights organizations were using to ensure that things remained nonviolent, that news peg just would never have materialized. Because everything about the organizing was to ensure that people who came to the march knew what they were coming for, and they had been given their marching orders, you know, they were told to dress well, they weren’t told. They were quite explicitly told the eyes of the nation, the eyes of the world are going to be on you.

ED: So we can’t imagine that the TV reporters just allowed themselves to show hour after hour of this footage without saying something critical about it. What kind of commentary that would sort of add some narrative tension to this did they lay down?

ANIKO: Well, when the journalists start to kind of reassert their position as journalists, you know, because they don’t want to spend too much time celebrating just how wonderful this is, because, you know, that’s not being a journalist. You know, the violence is inevitable news peg that, of course, has disappeared. And what ends up happening is, the new news peg tends to be, well, this won’t have any impact on Congress.

So, here we have all three networks, you know, expending a huge amount of their resources, time, and effort to cover this march, and then they kind of end up coming to the conclusion that– but the march is not what is going to change any minds or influence Congress, because that’s not where politics happens. Politics happens in the voting booth. Politics happens in discussions with your congressman. Politics is not what happens when people are marching in the street.

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PETER: That was Ana [INAUDIBLE], media studies professor at the University of Virginia. She was interviewed by our co-host Ed Ayers.