The Commercial Appeal
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The April 8, 2016 front page of The Commercial Appeal | |
| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Owner(s) | Gannett Company |
| Publisher | George Cogswell[1] |
| Editor | Louis Graham[2] |
| Founded | 1841 (as The Appeal) |
| Headquarters |
495 Union Avenue Memphis, Tennessee 38103 United States |
| Circulation |
94,775 Daily 133,788 Sunday (March 2013)[3] |
| ISSN | 0745-4856 |
| OCLC number | 9227552 |
| Website |
commercialappeal |
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 Commercial Appeal is a seven-day morning paper. It is distributed primarily in Greater Memphis, including Shelby, Fayette, and Tipton counties in Tennessee and DeSoto, Tate, and Tunica counties in Mississippi. These are the contiguous counties to the city of Memphis.
In 1994, The Commercial Appeal won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning by Michael Ramirez.
History
The paper's name comes from a 19th-century merger between two predecessors, the Memphis Commercial and the Appeal.
The Appeal
The Appeal had an interesting history during the American Civil War. On June 6, 1862, the presses and plates were loaded into a boxcar and moved to Grenada, Mississippi. The Appeal later journeyed to Jackson, Mississippi, Meridian, Mississippi, Atlanta, Georgia, Montgomery, Alabama and finally Columbus, Georgia, where the plates were destroyed on April 16, 1865, only days before the Confederate surrender, halting publication temporarily of what had been one of the major papers serving the Southern cause. The press was hidden and saved, and publication resumed in Memphis, using it, on November 5, 1865. Another early paper, The Avalanche, was incorporated later in the 19th century. The paper is properly The Commercial Appeal and not the Memphis Commercial Appeal as it is often called, although the predecessor Appeal was formally the Memphis Daily Appeal.
The paper in the 1940s had a well known columnist Paul Flowers who wrote the Greenhouse column.[4]
Civil rights
The Commercial Appeal had a mixed record on civil rights. 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.[5]
In 1917, the paper published the scheduled time and place for the upcoming Lynching of Ell Persons.[6]
During the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, the paper generally avoided coverage.[7] It did take a stance against pro-segregation rioters in 1962. However, its owner, Scripps-Howard, exerted a generally conservative and anti-union influence.[5]
The paper opposed the Memphis Sanitation Strike, portraying both labor organizers and Martin Luther King, Jr. as outside meddlers.[5][7]
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 against black nationalists in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[8]
'Monetizing' controversy
In the fall of 2007, the Appeal touched off a controversial policy that would have linked specific stories and specific advertisers. The proposal was greeted by outrage among media analysts, so the authors of the so-called 'monetization memo'-- the Appeal's editor and its sales manager—quietly withdrew the effort.[9]
Guns Database
At the end of 2008, The Commercial Appeal posted a controversial database listing Tennessee residents with permits to carry handguns.[10] The database is a public record in Tennessee but had not been posted online. After a permit-to-carry holder shot and killed a man in Memphis for parking too close to his SUV and vandalizing it, the gun database suddenly came to the attention of pro-gun groups, including the NRA and the Tennessee Firearms Association. Legislators who supported gun groups quickly drafted a bill to close the permit-to-carry database. The Tennessee Coalition for Open Government lobbied to keep the database public and the bill to close the database did not pass in the 2009 legislative session.
In a February 15, 2009 editorial, the newspaper defended publication of the handgun permit list and suggested it could protect permit holders by steering criminals away from armed households.[11] An independent study released in 2011 found "[Memphis] zip codes with the highest concentration of permits experienced roughly 1.7 fewer burglaries per week/per zip code in the 15 weeks following the publicization of the database, and those with the lowest concentration experienced on average 1.5 more burglaries."[12]
The Commercial Appeal website for the database currently notes that on April 25, 2013, a law was signed that classified information contained in handgun carry permit applications as "confidential" available only to the court or to law enforcement. The State Attorney General did not restrict publication of existing copies of the database; the Commercial Appeal has indicated that it will maintain its April 19, 2013 updated database "until the newspaper determines the information is too outdated and no longer serves the public's interests."[10]
References
- ↑ "George Cogswell named publisher of The Commercial Appeal" The Commercial Appeal, June 22, 2012
- ↑ "Louis Graham Named Commercial Appeal Editor" The Memphis Flyer, June 10, 2013
- ↑ "Total Circ for US Newspapers". Alliance for Audited Media. March 31, 2013. Retrieved June 30, 2013.
- ↑ 1981 reprinted M. Thomas Inge – Conversations with William Faulkner 1999 p92 "M.B. Mayfield .. After complimenting him he told me hesitantly that some of his poems had been published in The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, in Paul Flowers' "Greenhouse" column. When I read these poems I noticed that he had attached a nom de plume to his contributions. He explained that he was afraid the editor wouldn't publish them if he knew that he was black. Faulkner indicated that he knew Paul Flowers and that "
- 1 2 3 Honey, Michael K. (2007). "Hambone's Meditations: The Failure of Community". Going down Jericho Road the Memphis strike, Martin Luther King's last campaign (1 ed.). New York: Norton. p. 129. ISBN 978-0-393-04339-6.
Despite many black protests about it, the Commercial Appeal published Hambone's Meditations throughout the rising tide of civil rights and Black Power movements. Mass-media racism symbolized, Hooks said, that most whites were either blind or hostile to the plight of blacks and that a failure of communication and community existed in Memphis. Yet white editors thought they were at the forefront of change.
- ↑ Goings, K. W.; Smith, G. L. (March 1, 1995). "'Unhidden' Transcripts: Memphis and African American Agency, 1862–1920". Journal of Urban History. 21 (3): 372–394. doi:10.1177/009614429502100304.
- 1 2 Atkins, Joseph B. (2008). "Labor, civil rights, and Memphis". Covering for the bosses : labor and the Southern press. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781934110805.
Like Memphis itself, the editors at the Commercial Appeal and Press-Scimitar felt they had kept their heads largely above the fray during the civil rights battles across the South in the early to mid-1960s, particularly in comparison to the blatantly racist and rabble-rousing histrionics in the two majors newspapers of Mississippi, the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News. [...] Yet the sanitation strike of 1968 and Martin Luther King's involvement proved to many black Memphians that the newspapers weren't that different from their sister papers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South. Blacks picked both newspapers within a week after the end of the sanitation strike to protest the coverage.
- ↑ http://blog.seattlepi.com/trevorgriffey/2010/11/18/memphis-commercial-appeal-assisted-fbis-cointelpro-against-black-nationalists/
- ↑ Barnes, Lindsay (November 8, 2007). "News for sale? Former C-Ville publisher sparks media debate". The Hook. Charlottesville. Retrieved 2008-02-27.
- 1 2 public record (November 8, 2008). "Tennessee Handgun Carry Permit Database". The Commercial Appeal. Memphis. Retrieved 2009-06-29.
- ↑ Chris Peck, "Inside the Newsroom: Case for gun-permit listings trumps emotional opposition," The Commercial Appeal, February 15, 2009.
- ↑ Alessandro Acquisti and Catherine Tucker, "Guns, Privacy, and Crime", January 2, 2011.