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needed to brief and help any and all of those people and entertain them into long night sessions of drinking at whatever that little club was over there [The Press Club]. They had a grand time. Ashmore was a great guy with a story. Not everyone at the Gazette thought its coverage was fair. Even in the newsroom, which was thought by outsiders to be a hotbed of integrationists, some were critical of the paper’s coverage. Charles Rixse: When I was working with the Democrat, I thought [the Gazette] was highly overrated, as you usually do when you are working against good competition. When I went to the radio and TV station, I was able to step back and look at what everybody was doing, and I suddenly realized that, although they had a definite liberal bias, they were an exceptional newspaper, really exceptional. As far as coverage of the Central High crisis, I really felt a lot of respect for the Democrat. [I think] they did better job of it than [the Gazette] did, but [the Gazette] got the awards for it. McConnell: Do you remember anything in particular about the coverage? Rixse: Well, they [the Democrat] reported accurately, or fairly accurately, things that were going on that we just didn’t bother to write about. I don’t think people reading the Gazette got as accurate a feel for what was really going on around Central High as the people who read the Democrat. Although I can’t say all that Democrat stuff was accurate. Jerry McConnell: Why did you leave the Gazette? Rixse: Well, I was very disillusioned by the way the Third Estate conducted itself during the Central High crisis. I was taught that your first duty as a journalist, as a newspaper person, was to report the facts in a fair and unbiased way. In no instance should you try to control or manipulate whatever was going on to suit your own particular purposes. That is not to say that I was not ever accused of doing exactly that because I am sure I was. Wes Pruden: And there were times in the coverage of the desegregation thing at Central High School when [the Gazette] didn’t play fair. I knew it at the time, and looking back I know it now. The segregationists were painted as unredeemable rednecks who were ignorant and stupid, and some of them were. There’s no question a lot of them were, but not all of them were. And, you know, it was a time when if you—a lot of the press, and the Gazette I would have to include in this—if you quoted a black person, they spoke like an Oxford don, perfect syntax, perfect grammar. The white segregationists were quoted as they spoke . . . My father [The Rev. Wesley Pruden, president 192 1957 of the Capital Citizens’ Council] read the Gazette every day. He never cancelled his subscription . . . My poor mother, whose life was shortened by that whole episode because she had extraordinarily high blood pressure, and that was at a time when there was very little way to treat it. She died young. She was only fifty-nine when she died, and I really think the Central High thing shortened her life. I can remember on several occasions my mother would be reading the paper, and she would be crying because there would be references to my father she thought were unfair. I remember one time—she wasn’t crying . She was just kind of angry, and my father said, “What’s the matter?” And she said, “Oh, this old Gazette!” He said, “Well, what are they saying?” So she read a statement. She said, “Listen how they quote you,” and she read it. My father said, “Well, that’s what I said.” “Well, I know, but they didn’t have to put it in the paper.” [Laughter.] Robert McCord: There were a lot of people those days, Ken, who, as you know, said, “Well, the Gazette’s news columns are just as bad as the editorial page. They’re so wrapped up in this thing that they’re distorting the news,” what have you. I’m sure you heard that probably every day. Was there any basis to that? Ken Parker: I can truthfully say that in ten years at the Arkansas Gazette, no one ever told me to write a “policy story.” It was always write the story and write it...

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