Googling around for some Freedom Rider info, I came across a 2004 interview with Claude Sitton, the New York Times correspondent in the south during the late '50s and early '60s, in which he describes the kind of direction and supervision he got from his editors.
[Sarah] Buynovsky: Was there any sort of rules set up for you, from your bosses perhaps, did they communicate with you how they wanted the story covered? Or was there any sort of angling between you and management as far as how the story should be covered?
[Claude] Sitton: None whatsoever with The New York Times. They said, “Here are the resources you need. Go get the story.” And my only complaint about my supervision was the lack of suggestions as to what the readers of The New York Times might be interested in. They really left it to me. I have no complaints whatsoever, they never told me how or frequently what to cover. They’d say, “You go to the South, the most important story of that day, you should be on the scene” – whether it takes rental cars, chartered plans, or what have you.” And I chartered a few planes. In fact, when I was covering the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, I had – because I had back-stop, other reporters who came into help me from New York. I had, as I recall, five rental cars checked out, and I had a small plane on standby at the Oxford airport because that story was breaking both in Jackson, Mississippi, and in Oxford. And I had to move quickly between the two places on the same day, frequently, to you know, get to the scene and get the story. You had to be there, you had to see it because if you didn’t, then you had to rely on what others told you, by members of the movement, or by officials. And you know this, they shape what they were telling you to their own interest.
Sarah Buynovsky interviewed Sitton as part of a Syracuse University symposium on Civil Rights and the media.
The full transcript is here: http://bit.ly/9VK0F5