Burying the Story

Chicago editors are understandably gun-shy when they have to handle a story of local racial violence. In 1919 a race riot lasting seven days resulted in 38 dead and 537 injured. At least 1,000 Chicagoans were left homeless. And for their sensational treatment of the affair, Chicago's editors earned a large share of the blame for unduly inflaming their town. In 1951, another brace of riots in bordering Cicero again raised head lines to fever pitch, and with the same result: public censure for the papers.

After that, Chicago newspapers be gan to tone down their stories of local racial incidents. In 1955 the City News Bureau spelled out its own policy, which has been taken over as an informal code by the mass media in the city. The code calls for responsible treatment of stories, brevity, the absence of superlatives or inflammatory adjectives, and warns reporters to avoid use of the word riot. "If riots actually occur," says the code, "we should be in a position that no charge of riot incitement can be placed against us." Radio and TV stations, which tend to make a Holly wood set of many a news story stage, have gone along with the code. They promise to keep their cameras as hidden as possible from scene-stealing rioters.

The Chicago code has worked well restraining headline-happy editors. Trouble is, the editors have been going it one better. In the most recent racial flare-ups (TIME, Aug. 9), only the most persistent newspaper reader in Chicago could find the brief, terse ac counts almost invariably buried deep in his newspaper. During a week of nightly rumbles near the Negro ghetto of Chicago's South Side, 178 arrests were made, and seven policemen were injured. But after the second night of brawling, the morning Sun-Times merely tucked a few paragraphs at the bottom of its obituary page; the Tribune, treaming a Page One banner on integration problems in Chicago schools, buried its own version of the riot under a one-column headline on page four.

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