Sitting in on history

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro sit-ins, a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. Back then, blacks weren't served at lunch counters in the South. Four North Carolina A&T students sat down and ordered coffee and doughnuts and refused to move until they were served. They were arrested. Word of their peaceful protest spread, thanks to newspaper and network TV news, and more students took up the cause throughout the South.

Howell Raines covered the civil rights movement and later served as executive editor of The New York Times. In an op-ed piece in today's Times, Raines, recounts how the news media helped fuel the sit-in movement.

It took only one national telecast of Nashville students being assaulted at the lunch counters to demonstrate that segregation everywhere depended on the unconstitutional application of police brutality.

He also discusses how today's news media, so different than that of 1960, might have affected the movement differently.

Surely the civil rights movement would have been hampered by the politicized, oppositional journalism that flows from Fox News and the cable talk shows.

Being a good journalist means being ethical and responsible. It also means having an awareness of the injustices of the past, and of the present.