My point: News media is the driving force behind social change.

Newspaper and local media are the driving forces behind social change. Newspapers, like the Liberator, gave abolitionist a medium to transmit their message to the masses. Journalism martyr Reverend Lovejoy, wrote an article stating that “Slavery is a sin.”Fredric Douglass relied on his Liberator to disseminate his message of freedom. African American activist understood the need for slaves to “plea their own case.” Maria Steward’s anti slavery articles where rejected because “it was unfitting for a woman to speak such way.” She took the role of a teacher and educated the future African American journalist. According to Streitmatter, “News media propagated ideologies and morals.” The first black newspaper helped “slaves to plea their own case.” Media’s power to bring about social change was understood by anti-abolitionist. Reverent Lovejoy’s print station was destroyed by pro slavery mobs. Lovejoy too died in the name of freedom.
The media serves as a guardian of society. Whenever injustice and inequality shows its face, caring men and women pick up the pen and write. During the 1950s Brown vs. Board of Education, schools pleaded that blacks and whites where too different to allow interaction. The development of television allowed African American and whites to interact. It showed the world that they had more thing s in common than they imagined. The Civil Rights movement was “the first TV news Story.” Countless people saw rallies for equality being victimized by police brutality. They saw men and women, black and white, holding hands for equality clubbed to near death by the police. TV helped raise sympathy for the cause. Martin Luther King’s capture in Birmingham and his subsequent interview allowed Civil Right to gain political power. Images like the police dog ripping a protestor’s guts apart compelled the masses to join the struggle for equality. Television and journalism brought to life the injustices and vileness of the world. People slept in ignorance while the world felt apart little by little. The news media’s brought those injustices to life. They forced US citizens to face the cruel injustice perpetrated in their own native soil.