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The Commercial Appeal

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The Commercial Appeal
File:Commercial Appeal logo.png
File:The Commercial Appeal front page.jpg
The July 27, 2005 front page of
The Commercial Appeal
TypeDaily newspaper
FormatBroadsheet
Owner(s)E. W. Scripps Company
PublisherGeorge Cogswell [1]
EditorChris Peck
Founded1841 (as The Appeal)
Headquarters495 Union Avenue
Memphis, Tennessee 38103
 United States
Circulation147,598 Daily
178,082 Sunday[2]
ISSN0745-4856
OCLC number9227552
Websitecommercialappeal.com

The Commercial Appeal is the predominant daily newspaper of Memphis, Tennessee, and its surrounding metropolitan area. It is owned by The E. W. Scripps Company, a major North American media company. Scripps also owned the former afternoon paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, which it folded in 1983.

Like most market-dominant daily papers, the CA is a seven-day morning paper. It generally takes a liberal point of view regarding editorial positions. The Commercial Appeal 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 unusual 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, and finally Montgomery, Alabama, where the plates were destroyed on April 6, 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.

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.[3]

In 1917, the paper published the scheduled time and place for the upcoming Lynching of Ell Persons.[4]

During the heat of the civil rights movement, the paper generally avoided coverage.[5] It did take a stance against pro-segregation rioters in 1962. However, its owner, Scripps-Howard, exerted a generally conservative and anti-union influence.[3]

The paper opposed the Memphis Sanitation Strike, portraying both labor organizers and Martin Luther King, Jr. as outside meddlers.[3][5]

'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.[6]

Guns Database

At the end of 2008, The Commercial Appeal posted a controversial database listing Tennessee residents with permits to carry handguns.[7] 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.

References

  1. ^ "George Cogswell named publisher of The Commercial Appeal" The Commercial Appeal, June 22, 2012
  2. ^ "2009 Top 100 Daily Newspapers in the U.S. by Circulation" (PDF). BurrellesLuce. 2008-09-30. Retrieved 2010-04-13. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  3. ^ a b c 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. {{cite book}}: Text "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." ignored (help)
  4. ^ Goings, K. W. (1 March 1995). "'Unhidden' Transcripts: Memphis and African American Agency, 1862-1920". Journal of Urban History. 21 (3): 372–394. doi:10.1177/009614429502100304. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  5. ^ a b 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.
  6. ^ Barnes, Lindsay (2007-11-08). "News for sale? Former C-Ville publisher sparks media debate". The Hook (newspaper). Charlottesville. Retrieved 2008-02-27.
  7. ^ public record (2008-11-08). "Tennessee Handgun Carry Permit Database". The Commercial Appeal. Memphis. Retrieved 2009-06-29.
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