NEGRO NEWS IN THE DAILY PRESS: A PUBLICITY FRAME OF REFERENCE.

The article presents information on news about Afro-Americans in the mass media especially with regard to the daily press. In a study of Afro-American news in the daily press of Columbus, Ohio, the author found two of the above possible action programs freely espoused by action groups. Some leaders wanted the newspapers to leave out all identification of race while others were trying to persuade the papers to label in "good" stories while suppressing the label in "bad" ones. All race relations leaders interviewed expressed the idea that the Afro-American is getting better treatment in the Columbus newspapers than he got ten or fifteen years ago. They all agreed that the main change for the better came about within the last 12 years, but they disagreed widely as to exactly when or why the change occurred. The author's content analysis of Columbus newspapers was designed to find out when and under what circumstances the change came about and with which action program goal it was most consistent. Admitting wide differences in methodologies, in units and in samples, comparisons were made, nevertheless, between the handling of Negro news by Columbus newspapers in 1938-1948 and the handling of Negro news in other places as reported by the research of various analysts. So far as amount of news is concerned, the present study seems to show that Columbus newspapers printed a little more Afro-American news than did the average metropolitan daily