The Commercial Appeal
The Commercial Appeal (also known as the Memphis Commercial Appeal) is a daily newspaper of Memphis, Tennessee, and its surrounding metropolitan area. It is owned by the Gannett Company; its former owner, the E. W. Scripps Company, also owned the former afternoon paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, which it folded in 1983. The 2016 purchase by Gannett of Journal Media Group (Scripps' direct successor) effectively gave it control of the two major papers in western and central Tennessee, uniting the Commercial Appeal with Nashville's The Tennessean.
Type
Mike Jung[1]
Mark Russell[2]
1841 (as The Appeal)
495 Union Avenue
Memphis, Tennessee, 38103
United States
94,775 Daily
133,788 Sunday
(March 2013)[3]
The Commercial Appeal is a seven-day morning paper. It is distributed primarily in Greater Memphis, including Shelby, Fayette, and Tipton counties in Tennessee; DeSoto, Tate, and Tunica counties in Mississippi; and in Crittenden County in Arkansas. These are the contiguous counties to the city of Memphis.
The Commercial Appeal won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its opposition of the Ku Klux Klan's operations in the region. In 1994, the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning by Michael Ramirez.[4]
Content[edit]
Civil rights[edit]
The Commercial Appeal has had a mixed record on civil rights. In 1868, it published an article by former confederate general Albert Pike that was critical of the methods of the Ku Klux Klan, but lauded their aims of white supremacy.[12] In 1917, the paper published the scheduled time and place for the upcoming Lynching of Ell Persons.[13]
Despite its Confederate background the paper won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for its coverage and editorial opposition to the resurgent Ku Klux Klan.
From 1916 to 1968, the paper published a cartoon called Hambone's Meditations. The cartoon featured a black man, Hambone, that many African Americans came to regard as a racist caricature.[14]
During the Civil Rights Movement, the paper generally avoided coverage of the topic.[15] It did take a stance against pro-segregation rioters during the Ole Miss riot of 1962. However, its owner, Scripps-Howard, exerted a generally conservative and anti-union influence.[14]
The paper opposed the Memphis sanitation strike, portraying both labor organizers and Martin Luther King Jr. as outside meddlers.[14][15]
During the late 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) leaked "information of a derogatory nature regarding the Invaders and other black nationalist militants," some of which may have been fabricated by the FBI itself, to a Commercial Appeal reporter who then used that information to write articles critical of the Invaders. This manipulation of The Commercial Appeal was part of the FBI's counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) against black nationalists in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[16]