Having been raised in what journalistic cliche calls a “close knit community,” I’m deeply suspicious of the glorification of communities in the media. Some of the closest are also some of the nastiest.

I take as my text an essay by the great Jessie Daniel Ames, called Editorial Treatment of Lynchings (1938).

In a section The Dilemma of Editors, Ames writes:

Editors are good citizens. As individuals they condemn lynching. Lynching gives the South the wrong kind of publicity. It makes it a bit more difficult to attract outside capital and to increase immigration of the right people. The South wants all possible “outside” agencies with money to invest to invade its section, but this invasion must come on local terms, chief of which is that the native population must be allowed to handle their “peculiar situation” in the traditional way. Thus must editors sit on the stationary horse while desiring to ride rapidly into the sunrise of progress and prosperity.

But you have to look outside of Ames’ work to find a really excoriating example of a community and its newspaper in cahoots.

The lynching of Matthew Williams in Salisbury, Maryland in 1931 was headlined by a newspaper over a hundred miles away in Baltimore: ‘SHORE MOB HANGS, BURNS NEGRO; Mob of 2,000 Hangs and Burns Accused Negro at Salisbury; Over 2,000 Men and Women Applaud as Accused Killer Swings From Noose; 40 Gallons of Gasoline Poured on Victim. The lynching produced one of H.L.Mencken’s most famous and damning editorials.

The local paper, the Salisbury Times reported the lynching on its front page like this:

This paper is today omitting the details of the demonstration which occurred last night when Matthew Williams Handy, confessed slayer of D.J. Elliott, was hanged in the courthouse square, for the very obvious reason that almost every reader of our paper has had an opportunity to learn of them first hand from eye witnesses.

The facts which form the background for the demonstration and the direct causes are also well known and a repetition of them would be superfluous. The slaying of Mr Elliott was deplorable as was also the mob scene.

Mencken noted how the Salisbury Times:

went to almost incredible length of dismissing the atrocity as a ‘demonstration.’ Well, the word somehow fits. It was indeed a demonstration of what civilization can come to in a region wherein there are no competent police, little save a simian self-seeking in public office, no apparent intelligence on the bench, and no courage and decency in the local press. Certainly it would be irrational to ask for enlightenment in communities whose ideas are supplied by such pathetic sheets as the…Salisbury Times.

Mencken’s stand, and the stand of his own paper cost it subscribers and advertisers. In Salisbury, and Maryland’s Eastern Shore, it was dismissed as no more than metropolitan disdain. Condemning the lynching wasn’t even popular in Baltimore itself, Mencken noted. Nor did Mencken’s intervention mobilise support for anti-lynching legislation in Congress.

The Salisbury Times shut up shop in 1964. Another community newspaper forced out of business…