The Movement Dr. Parker Made: Father of Media Reform Turns 100

[Commentary] America has always had media critics—from Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin in 1775 to the folks at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and Media Matters for America today. And they have played a vital role in exposing the mistakes and misdeeds first of subservient newspapers and more recently of broadcast and digital news outlets. But the media reform movement that steps from complaining about irresponsible and malicious broadcasters to actually holding them to account is a more recent phenomenon. And it is entirely reasonable to suggest that the man who initiated what we today understand as a national media reform movement is Dr. Everett C. Parker, the amazing activist who successfully challenged media complicity with the Southern segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s.

Dr. Parker wrote a new chapter in American history with the fight he led, as founding director of the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, to deny the license renewal of a powerful Southern television station that refused to cover the civil rights movement. “Every movement has thousands of individuals, whose names we never know, forming its backbone,” recalls the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “The civil rights movement, for instance, was the product of countless individuals standing and working together throughout the South and across the country. But there are always those individuals who emerge to give a face to a movement—provide leadership, vision and moral authority. In the area of media reform, it was Rev. Dr. Everett C. Parker.”