Book Review: Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement, by Aniko Bodroghkozy

Abstract

Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement. Aniko Bodroghkozy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 280 pp. $50 hbk.Why should rising young journalists of the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter age care about television shows and reporting from the bygone era of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States? In a compelling, well-researched book, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement, Aniko Bodroghkozy points to the persistent chal- lenges that television actors, producers, and news program reporters grappled with then, with lessons for the present and future. Bodroghkozy's accounts of how racism wove its way into televised narratives' contrasting myths and the imagination of American life with facts of its often unequal, lived reality are gripping.Bodroghkozy is an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. She has published widely on American film and television, focusing on social justice movements from the 1950s to the 1970s. In Equal Time, she traces key televised moments in the U.S. Civil Rights movement, from its absence from early entertainment programs, to its being prime time viewing material for the televised debacle at Selma's Edmund Pettus bridge. She notes the stalemate for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the movement in the bloodless, hence televisually unengrossing, reports of the failed Albany campaign for voting rights.In news reporting, she contends television served up images of individual worthy black victims for white audiences to perceive as aspirational civil rights subjects. She analyzes racial normalizing through specific, if inaccurate, camera pans of trium- phant interracial participants of the March on Washington in 1963, and events culmi- nating with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and beyond. Examining real news events as a foil against which audiences would compare the idealized, often minstrelsy por- trayals of African-Americans living with whites, she brings readers into an intimate world of denial and engagement with America's racist practices.Bodroghkozy recounts with vivid details longstanding problems of racial, ethnic stereotyping in televised entertainment and news programs, finding structural and cul- tural obstacles to fair and balanced reporting. She demonstrates the lack of truly radical shows that could have burst the white power bubble in pop culture. Such difficulties continue to be faced in the ever segmented, fragmented world of present- day television and within the larger, multimedia landscape linking cell phones, web- sites, and other emerging technologies. For these reasons, this book would be an excellent addition to classes covering issues connecting infotainment with race and class. Bodroghkozy analyzes the ways pervasive attitudes creep into, and are perpetu- ated by, key decision-making members in television production.Her method combines textual analysis of both news reports and sit-com prototypes, and later, more established television shows like Good Times, with audience analysis from texts ranging from internal studio memos to audience letters to producers. Bodroghkozy recreates for readers the preferred media frames of the time. …