Print Matters: Talking With Rob Christensen about The News & Observer’s Legacy 

One North Carolina governor called it “congenitally critical.” Senator Jesse Helms, not surprisingly, was a bit more pointed: the newspaper was “vicious,” a “hit squad,” “cowardly,” and slanderous to the point of libel. Other, more sympathetic readers called it “the most fearless paper in the South.” 

It seems that for however long the Raleigh News & Observer has been printing the news, people have had opinions about it. Now, Rob Christensen, a journalist at the N&O for 45 years, has written a new book about his alma mater paper: Southern News, Southern Politics: How a Newspaper Defined a State for a Century. 

Out this month with UNC Press, the book takes a close look at both the newspaper and the Daniels family, the powerful publishing dynasty that shaped North Carolina politics during their lengthy reign as publishers of the paper. Ahead of the book’s release, the INDY spoke with Christensen about the N&O, the family behind it, and the future of media in the Tar Heel State.

INDY: Josephus Daniels, who published the N&O for years starting in the late 19th century, is a complicated man to understand in today’s time—in how he ran the paper, in his politics, in his legacy. How would you describe him first? A journalist, a publisher, an advocate?

Rob Christensen: You could describe him as a politician who ran a newspaper or a newspaperman who was also a politician. He was both, and that was not unusual in that age. 

He is a hard person to understand today, nearly impossible. I think one person called him part of a group of Jim Crow liberals. That is sort of a mind-boggling concept, because people think of someone who’s a liberal as tied into racial fairness.

But Josephus Daniels was a racist, certainly, and a white supremacist, and that didn’t make him stand out in his day. But he was also progressive in many ways. He was a big supporter of women’s suffrage, organized labor, and public education. He fought antisemitism. He fought the Klan. On so many issues he was regarded as a liberal by people who were his contemporaries. It’s hard to see that today because the racism clouds over all his other progressive ideas and efforts.

That is a good segue to what was going to be my next question. I was wondering if you could put in context how different his more progressive stances at the paper were from most Southern publishers’ when he took it over in the late 19th century and the effect they had in the wider political context.

This was the age of the huge corporations and U.S. Steel and various monopolies. That was the age when railroads were as powerful as any of the social media are today, when you think about Facebook or X.

Daniels was very close to William Jennings Bryan and he helped turn the Democratic Party in the 1880s and 1890s from a party that was pretty conservative to a party that was worried about social and economic justice and fought some of those big corporations. Josephus Daniels was a very influential figure because he was very much a part of that movement of the American political left, whether it was the populism of William Jennings Bryan, the progressiveness of Woodrow Wilson, or the New Deal liberalism with Franklin Roosevelt. 

But he was born during the Civil War. He was brought up during Reconstruction and in the part of the state that was most like the Old South and had the largest African American population. So he was very much influenced by both the racism in that era and the glorification of the Confederacy, and also this real skepticism about big business.

His son Jonathan led the N&O to take a more moderate line on the race issue, but certainly not one that satisfied many in the civil rights movement. How did the N&O navigate issues around race?

Jonathan took over the paper when his father became Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ambassador to Mexico in the 1930s. Jonathan had a totally different background than his father. Jonathan was born in the 20th century, just right at the very beginning of the century. He was raised in Raleigh but also in Washington, D.C., where his father was secretary of the navy under Wilson for eight years. And so he was much better educated [than his father]. 

And he had some different approaches from his father. He was pushing for more racial fairness. Over and over again he would print editorials attacking some of the most egregious examples of racism, police brutality, etc. But he really didn’t feel like he could come out against segregation. In that era, there was no institution in the South of any size that was opposed to segregation. It was the whole ideology that was locked into the whole region. 

You know, Jesse Helms said in 1953 that the paper had been selling out the South. That’s how it was viewed by conservatives. But when we look at it today, it’s like two steps forward, one step back. He and the paper were very, very incremental. And a lot of what he did really doesn’t stand up today as being very progressive, but it was for the South of Jonathan Daniels’s time. 

Over the entire 100-year-plus span of the Daniels family, what kind of impact did the paper have on North Carolina politics? Where did it succeed, and where did it fail?

Former governor Jim Hunt said that the N&O was the second most influential institution in North Carolina, in terms of its politics—the first being the University of North Carolina. So here was the Observer, and it was mainly circulated in Eastern North Carolina. That is the most conservative part of the state, and it was a progressive voice. It gave a lot of politicians political cover to push for more moderate policies, like Terry Sanford, Jim Hunt, Frank Porter Graham, and other people. 

It had a major influence in terms of pushing the state and making it one of the more moderate states in the South. It was a very feisty, crusading newspaper. A lot of things that it pushed did not get passed, but it did mean that, unlike a lot of other Southern states, there was a strong progressive voice. It was a must-read for all the people involved in the political and government world of North Carolina. 

In the last quarter of the book, you look at how the N&O struggles with many of the issues facing the newspaper industry as a whole. Over the past few years, it has lost subscribers, page numbers, influence. What kind of impact do you think it has now in North Carolina? What do we lose as a reading public without a strong, vibrant newspaper?

The N&O, like most newspapers across the country, is greatly diminished. It went, in a few years, from around 270 journalists to around 50 journalists. It is no longer as powerful or as feared. And it no longer has nearly as strong a voice in the capital as it once did. I think the fact that we’ve had the rise of Republican control in the state—well, there are a lot of reasons, but one reason is the diminishment of The News & Observer and other newspapers as a counterbalance. 

Politicians feared The News & Observer. They’re always looking over your shoulder, not only just in the state legislature but at city councils and county commissioner meetings, school board meetings, but also college athletics and labor unions.

There was a real watchdog element to The News & Observer, and that’s diminished. That’s not to say that they don’t still do good stories. It’s just not the same. They still have some very good reporters, but they do not have the numbers anymore, so it’s much more difficult for the paper to carry out its watchdog function. That hurts.

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