By Catherine Komp, Engagement Director
Over 45 years, Rob Christensen covered local and state politics for the News & Observer. When he started, the newsroom was smoky, “cut and paste” was done with glue and scissors, and veterans who’d been there since the ‘40s still wore fedora hats. As a new reporter, he covered the 1973 election of Clarence Lightner, the first Black mayor of a major southern city. He covered the legislature, governors, all the major political races and presidential elections. Upon his retirement in 2018, former colleague Gary Pearce described Christensen as a wealth of North Carolina political history.
“Nobody worked harder, worked sources harder, listened longer and more closely, learned and remembered more, and wrote closer to the bone than Rob did,” wrote Pearce.
Rob continued pursuing this love of writing and research in retirement, publishing three books. His new one, Southern News, Southern Politics, looks at more than a century of N&O history, with a deep dive into the Daniels family, the paper’s role in supporting white supremacy and segregation, and its influence on public opinion and national policy.
“The News & Observer was just such a powerful paper and it really did send shivers down the spines of government officials,” said Christensen, adding that it earned the nickname “nuisance and disturber” beginning in the late 1800s. “The News & Observer had a major impact in terms of how people nationally wrote about North Carolina, seeing it as a more progressive state, even though it had this white supremacy background.”
This week, we chat with Rob about the N&O’s early days as a mouthpiece for the Democratic party and white supremacy, its later transformation into investigative and accountability journalism and the recognition of its racist past.
Catch Rob speaking about “Southern News, Southern Politics,” published by UNC Press, at the following events:
Wilson County Public Library: Tonight/Wednesday May 14 at 6:30 pm.
Farmville Public Library: June 3, 6:30 pm.
Barnes and Noble, Brier Creek, Raleigh: June 8, 2:00 pm.
South Park Library, Charlotte: June 11, 6:30 pm.
You write about founder Josephus Daniel’s last testament, which appeared in some version in the masthead until 2019, where he wrote “I wish [the paper] to be ‘the tocsin’ and devote itself to the policies of equality and justice to the underprivileged.” Did you see that in the masthead as a young reporter and when did you start wondering about Josephus’s roles in white supremacy and national politics?
The paper, by the time I arrived in the 70s, had for decades been among the most liberal papers in the South. And so that was my orientation. And the editor of the paper was Claude Sitton, formerly the civil rights reporter for the New York Times, who was a legendary figure. And when you went out to cover things, you often caught a lot of flack from conservatives. It was a hated paper by many conservatives and liked by liberals. And so that was the orientation you had.
And Josephus Daniels was everywhere. Not only were his comments on the masthead, but his bust was in the lobby of the newspaper and there was a big photograph of the USS Josephus Daniels naval ship that hung on the wall and in the boardroom there was a big portrait of Josephus Daniels.
As a young reporter, I did not quite understand the racism. But it began seeping in after a while. I’ve always been interested in history and so I read some of the histories of the Daniels era and I certainly began to understand his racist background and how the paper had transformed over the generations from being a very white supremacist paper to being a fairly progressive paper, particularly in the South.
Why did you want to write this book? What about this part of history did you think was important to get out there?
I had completed two history books that had done pretty well. The last book, The Rise and Fall of the Branchhead Boys, was a story of a political dynasty in North Carolina where this father and son were governors and the granddaughter was agricultural secretary. I really liked the idea of multi-generational stories. And then it occurred to me that there was a really interesting story to be told here about the newspaper I’d worked for, the News & Observer. Again, a multi-generational story. And I like stories that not only include biographies of the individuals, but you can include the whole history of the era.
There have been two biographies written about Josephus Daniels and there have been other scholarly works done on that era. But there’s never been a book about the News & Observer and it was pretty clear too by that time that newspapers were in decline and the News & Observer was certainly a part of that decline. So I thought it was timely because I could write about the rise of newspapers and the decline in newspapers.
So it’s not only the story of a newspaper, but of four generations of one powerful family—a very powerful political family that had the ear of presidents. And so that made it a much more appealing story too.
And then, of course, you can’t write about the South or really anywhere in the country without writing about race. And this was a particularly rich story, horrific in some ways of course, about how a newspaper dealt with the issue of race: how did it change and to what extent it changed and how difficult was it and so forth.
And the News & Observer was just such a powerful paper and it really did send shivers down the spines of government officials. It had a lot of influence and impact. And so that was an interesting story to tell as well, how newspapers can influence a state and how it could influence the state’s reputation. The News & Observer actually had a major impact in terms of how people nationally wrote about North Carolina, seeing it as a more progressive state, even though it had this white supremacy background.
So there were just so many interesting angles that appealed to me about the story.
Tell us what you learned about the very early days and Josephus getting it off the ground.
Newspapers came and went with unbelievable frequency back in the 1800s. They were almost fly-by-night organizations. They often were associated with political parties. They appeared, they disappeared, they merged, they came out with different names.
At the time, Raleigh was like a town of like 10,000 people so it was a small town and it wasn’t much of a retail area until later in the 20th century. And so a lot of their financing came from patent medicines of dubious value. The paper struggled financially early on and Daniels had the help of one of the richest men in North Carolina. Julian Shakespeare Carr was a big textile man and the town Carrborro is named after him. And he was also a racist as well. He financially had an important influence on helping Josephus Daniels get the paper off the ground.
Early on, the paper was, as many papers were, dependent on political patronage. It was started as the voice of the Democratic Party. And it depended on printing contracts from the state in order to publish it. That was financially important for the financial success of the paper. So the paper had to be either on one side or the other in terms of getting political patronage or it wouldn’t have lasted.
One of the things that later emerged was that Josephus Daniels was very determined to push the paper beyond that so that it could have commercial advertising so it could be supported even if it lost the state printing contracts.
There were no journalism schools back then. It was an era of yellow journalism. Not only in North Carolina, but nationally you saw the lies and distortions, race baiting and several white supremacy campaigns.
So there were very few standards or ethics involving newspapers. And it was also a pretty wild scene. The newspapering was very personal. In the news columns, politicians would be attacked and called terrible names. There would be fistfights. Josephus Daniels would get into fistfights on the streets of Raleigh and even in the legislature. There was one story about one legislator being really upset about the News & Observer and he comes into the newsroom with his big gun, looking for the reporter who wrote the story. And the reporter takes the chair and cracks him over the head, knocks him senseless. And as the city editor said, “Well, we better get a doctor because it’s a little hard to explain a dead legislator in your newsroom, right?”
Those were the kind of wild and woolly days. If you remember the classic play and movie Front page, which was set in Chicago, this was sort of like the southern version of that.
So there were really no standards, no ethics. There was no effort to cover both sides of the story. Papers were really propaganda tools. And, like the News & Observer, they were just barely making it financially.
You write that both Josephus and his son Jonathan were newspaper editors and deeply involved in party politics at the same time.
Today you would look askance at that sort of thing—a newspaper publisher being heavily involved in a political campaign. Josephus was essentially a democratic activist. You could make the argument or at least raise the question: was he a newspaper man involved in politics or was he a politician who owned a newspaper?
And his son Jonathan was writing speeches for Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and other politicians while also editing the paper, which today would be considered unethical in traditional journalism standards. But that was not true back then. You had lots and lots of editors and newspaper publishers who were often political figures in their own right. They were seen as political figures and nobody would have thought twice about, “Should a newspaper publisher be running for political office?” That was just not a question people asked at that time.
Josephus Daniels used the News & Observer as a campaign mouthpiece for democrats & Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 presidential campaign. After that, Wilson appointed him Secretary of the Navy. What kind of power did Daniels have on national and foreign policy?
He did become a powerful man and people forget that now because It’s been so long; he died in 1948. At the time, there was no Secretary of Defense over the Secretary of the Navy, so it was a much more powerful position then. And he was Navy secretary during World War I and he was an important figure and often a very controversial figure.
Wilson was elected in 1912, he was reelected in 1916. And there were all these billboards across the country asking people to vote against Woodrow Wilson in order to get out Josephus Daniels. I mean, who today would ever think of running a billboard saying defeat Donald Trump because we don’t like the Navy Secretary? But that was what was happening back in 1916.
He was very much a bluenose. He was a big Methodist and he hated drinking. Among other things, he ordered all the booze off the ships. Then a group of naval officers came to see him to see if they could get that turned around. And Daniels said, no, I believe seamanship and booze shouldn’t be mixed. The officers asked, what should the men drink? And Daniels said they should drink coffee. So they began calling their coffee a “cup of Joe.”
He also closed down all the red light districts around naval bases because he thought venereal disease was killing more naval men than World War I. And one of the biggest things he closed down was Storyville, in New Orleans, which was one of the largest red light districts in the country. He closed down one of the economic drivers in New Orleans, 28 blocks. So he had an enormous effect on the social mores of the country.
From the very beginning of your book, you outline the racist beliefs of Josephus Daniels and subsequent generations like Jonathan, who also helped preserve segregation and Jim Crow policies. How did they support white supremacy and continued racial injustice, both through the News & Observer, but also through the political connections and roles that they had.
There was a substantial difference between father and son in terms of race. And that’s not surprising because Josephus was born 1865. He grew up in a cotton town in eastern North Carolina with a large black population. And his racist white supremacist views were pretty mainstream for that time, in that place.
Jonathan was a 20th century person. He was born in 1900 and he grew up not only in Raleigh, but also in Washington, D.C. for eight years, where his father was Secretary of the Navy. He had a Guggenheim fellowship in Europe. So it was a different era, a different century. He was far more educated than his father. So he had a much more liberal views on race than his father did. His father was a segregationist until the day he died in 1948.
In 1933, Jonathan, in his early 30s, became editor when his father became ambassador to Mexico under Franklin Roosevelt. He began moving the paper in a different direction. By today’s standards, it’s still fairly racist. He always supported segregation until the end. But I think he moved as quickly as he thought he could, given the paper circulated in eastern North Carolina, which in the 1960s was one of the hotbeds for the Ku Klux Klan. And he had also moved as fast as he could because he had his father overlooking his shoulder who he adored and who he was very much a segregationist.
So Jonathan changed the tone of the paper. The paper began denouncing lynchings and denouncing police brutality and prison brutality and brutality on the chain gangs and all that sort of thing. And so he would continue to say he was for segregation but he began moving the paper towards racial justice. It wasn’t going as fast as Black people wanted, and it was going way too fast for most white people. So it was like two steps forward, one step back, essentially, if you want to look at Jonathan. He was very incremental in his approach.
But you have to realize that in the 1930s, 1940s, when Jonathan became editor, Black people had no say in their government. The cops were white. The judges and prosecutors were all white. The juries were all white. And so there were very few outlets to actually throw a spotlight on racial injustice. Most newspapers would not do that because of the racism in that era.
But the News & Observer was one of those and it was strong enough so that by 1953, Jesse Helms told a Raleigh audience that the News & Observer had been selling out the South for several generations. Now, again, looking back from the perspective of 2025, a lot of his stances were not as progressive as one might think. But for his time and place, in the South in the 1930s and ‘40s, they were pretty progressive.
I wanted to ask you about Nell Battle Lewis. In 1920, she rode up on a horse to the N&O’s office with her riding gear on, walked in and asked for a job. Tell us what you found out about this journalist, the first female staff writer for the N&O.
Nell Battle Lewis was a fascinating character. She came from an old Raleigh money and she applied to the News & Observer on kind of a spur of the moment and on the spurs of her horse. This was the 1920s. Initially, she was shuffled off to what they call the women’s section, essentially to cover parties and teas. But she was given a column and she began using that column to become a leading voice in the South really for social justice. She was a big defender of labor unions and decried the treatment of women and people who were involved in prisons and she was essentially a liberal social justice crusader.
Now, her story had some unexpected twists. She apparently had some mental health issues, and I don’t know enough about them really to describe them. But she essentially left the business for a while. Her family was very conservative. And when she later returned to the paper, back in the 40s and the 50s, she had become very conservative and she did a 180 degree flip and became a big segregationist. But in the 1920s, she was regarded by some people as kind of a female HL Mencken. A really forceful figure and an advocate. She had a law degree and she was involved in various reform movements for women’s prisons, that sort of thing. But she’s also a problematic figure.
Let’s jump to the 1970s era when you started working at the N&O. How did the paper transform under Claude Sitton and the last Daniel’s family owner, Frank.
Claude Sitton was a fascinating character as well. He was the leading reporter in the civil rights movement. He covered the South for the New York Times at a time when it was very, very dangerous to do so. And he was everywhere: everywhere there was a march or a shooting or any big controversy, he was there. And he was fearless.
There’s this one story about him called in by some civil rights workers in South Georgia during a voter organizing effort. And the sheriff comes in and threatens him and threatens the crowd and took the license plate numbers of everybody at the church. And the sheriff goes up to Claude Sitton and says “Who are you?” And Claude Sitton turns to him and says, “I’m an American. Who are you?” One of the reporters with Claude Sitton said, “I thought we were all going to die at this point.” And in fact, the church was later burned down and Claude found his tires cut and sand put in his gas tank. So it was a very dangerous time.
He later became national editor at the New York Times. Then he moved back to North Carolina, and became editor of the News & Observer. He brought a much higher level of professionalism to the newsroom. He began investigative reporting at the paper, in a serious way.
And Claude Sitton brought a toughness. He was not scared and he faced the Klan down time and time again in the deepest parts of the South. He just wasn’t scared—of Jesse Helms or any of the other big politicians in the state. He would go jaw to jaw with them.
Can you talk about both your personal experiences and the research you dug up as the paper started to address the white supremacist history of the News & Observer. You write about Orage Quarles III and Melanie Sill helping lead an effort to address the N&O’s role in white supremacy and the Wilmington massacre.
It hadn’t been totally ignored by the paper. I’d written some columns about it. But it hadn’t been addressed in a major way. And it wasn’t just the News & Observer, to be honest. There was a state commission that was looking at the issue and planned to issue a big report. So there was a movement afoot, essentially, to put a spotlight on this very dark part of North Carolina’s history. And so what the News & Observer did, with Melanie Sill as editor and Orage Quarles as publisher, they decided to hire an outside historian to do a big special section, a supplement, that looked at the paper’s role. And it won some awards and I think the Charlotte Observer ran the same thing because the Charlotte Observer was involved in the white supremacy as well.
I wouldn’t say it was fearless to do this because the timing was right. People were talking about this. There was a state commission on this. But the paper didn’t blink. They said, let’s address this head on and they did.
The paper went through a significant transition when it was sold in 1996 to McClatchy. How do you think that has impacted the paper over the last few decades?
The Daniels family, like a lot of families, was getting more and more pressure to sell out because like a lot of companies, not just newspaper companies, it was owned by the family. And it was one of the last family, big family-owned papers in the country. Each generation is more scattered around the country and there’s more and more people and they’re less and less involved with the prestige of the paper. And they’re more interested in the money they can get out of it and you get more out of it if you sell the paper.
And so the family sold the paper in 1996 for over $300 million which is more than Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post a number of years later. So they got top dollar. Timing was everything. The family, wisely from their point of view, sold the paper before the industry began its collapse. And they sold to McClatchy, which based in Sacramento California, was also a liberal democratic leaning newspaper. And that’s one of the reasons the Daniels family sold it to McClatchy. They didn’t want to be reading a conservative paper in their hometown after having sold it.
And so things went pretty well for a while with McClatchy. It was getting lots of national recognition. It was hiring lots of reporters and its editors were moving up into other important positions around the country in terms of larger papers. So it had a very good reputation.
Then we had the industry collapse and McClatchy made a huge error in buying the Knight Ridder newspaper chain. This was a smaller fish eating a bigger fish and it was doubling down on old media just as the old media was about to collapse. It was a pretty bad idea and put the McClatchy chain in heavy debt which meant huge losses. Things would have been bad even without that bad move because as we all know advertising dried up as things went online.
But the newspaper, like every other paper, went from something like 260, 270 journalists in the early part of this century to something like 60 journalists today. And so it’s been a huge drop.
The News & Observer story here is not any different from other regional newspapers. It’s been a national phenomenon.
You have so many fascinating details that you’ve pulled out through your research, from a description about an early subscriber getting the N&O via two trains and a horse and buggy to the stale and dirty bathrooms in the former N&O building. What primary sources did you find the most interesting to go through?
I find research fun even though it can be quite time consuming. Because you’re looking for needles and haystacks, right? You’re looking for those telling details and so forth. So I was lucky in part because the Daniels’ wrote a lot of books. Jonathan wrote 21 books. Josephus wrote a five-part autobiography that was longer than any presidential autobiography. And then there have been a number of books that were scholarly books including one about Josephus Daniels in Mexico. Another one wrote about Jonathan Daniels and his up and down progression on race. So that was extremely helpful.
Then, because they were authors and they liked history and they were newspaper people, they left the voluminous letters which were at the Wilson Library at Chapel Hill. Those were, of course, priceless. The publisher and founder, Josephus Daniels was down in Mexico as ambassador but he still had some control of the paper. So there were letters between him and his son, Jonathan, who was in Raleigh running the paper. You get these conversations going on that normally would have just been in the hallway or the back office, but they’re in print in letters. For example, courtesy titles for Black people. The N&O had courtesy titles for white people, but not for Black people. And so you get a conversation between Josephus and Jonathan in these letters saying should we really do this? Is this really fair? You get an insight into things you wouldn’t normally get because you had the founder of the paper far off and but still had his hand in everything.
To wrap up, you look at so many monumental parts of history during the nearly 130 years of the N&O. Did writing this book make you reflect about the role of local news right now, at this point of history?
Well, of course it did. And this is not an original thought, most people involved in journalism understand that newspapers have played an important role in civic society and part of it is as the watchdog. I think there was one Stanford University study of Pat Stith, the investigative reporter at the N&O, that 31 laws were passed in North Carolina based on his stories. And so there was the tremendous watchdog role, not only of government and public officials, but of labor unions and of sports programs and to a large degree, that’s gone. Not totally gone, but it has been greatly reduced. And that’s a problem.
But there are also the problems of the impact on the public square: how did the big rock concert go last night and what do we think about the new symphony conductor or the guest pianist for the symphony? How do we feel about the Stanley Cup playoffs or the Carolina Hurricanes? This was a way for a community to think about what was going on in their town and the commonality of it. That’s lost with the decline of newspapers. It’s not just the political. We used to have a music critic and we used to have a restaurant critic and we had an architecture critic, a theater critic. And on and on and on and on. And all those things are gone and has left life in our community here in the Raleigh area much thinner and not as rich.
