Ask a random selection of present-day American journalists to explain the motives and aspirations behind their choice of vocation, and you are likely to get the same high-minded answer. It will come in several varieties: the desire to transform public consciousness, to clear away the obstacles to enlightened progressive reform, to shine the searchlight of publicity on injustices and abusers of power, or merely to serve as the voice of public conscience. But the focal point is nearly always the same: It is the desire to “make a difference” for the public good by being agents of change. For the past four decades or so, those who sought out the journalistic profession, particularly if they came into the business through a university school of journalism, have been increasingly likely to see journalism, even more than politics, as the most effective tool with which to change America, and thereby make a difference, both politically and morally.

Such was not always the case, of course, even though there have always been crusading investigators such as Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker scattered among the ranks of American journalists. The press has always seen itself as an exposer of untruth and corruption in public life, but the center of gravity shifted decisively with the coming of the postwar civil rights movement. That was the moment when mainstream print and (especially) broadcast journalists began to grasp the enormous consciousness-raising power at their disposal, power that they could exercise by publicizing and making vivid the cruelties and abuses of the Jim Crow South, thereby effecting a revolution in public attitudes in the Northern states, and hastening the end of segregation. For anyone promoting the idea that the press should serve as an active and selfconscious agent of social change, the civil rights era is always Exhibit A.

In “The Race Beat” (Knopf, 512 pages, $30), journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff have provided an account of this turning point in American journalistic self-definition. Their book provides strong evidence that, far more than Vietnam or Watergate, it was the experience of the civil rights movement that shaped the ideals of the journalistic profession as we know it today. And there is much to be said for that perspective. No account of the Montgomery bus boycott, or the Little Rock school crisis, or the violent integration of the University of Mississippi, or the firehoses turned on the peaceful Birmingham marchers by the infamous Bull Connor, or any number of other such signal moments in the movement’s history would be complete without notice being taken of the role played by writers, photographers, television reporters, and cameramen in recording these things, and conveying to the rest of the country a steady flow of damning images of ugly white Southern resistance and noble black Southern protest. Without the cameras, these giant trees would have fallen unheard and would not have changed the nation’s consciousness.

The book does rather less, however, to support the proposition that the mainstream press took much initiative in uncovering these stories, or behaved with impressive nobility, at least not until it was relatively easy for it to do so. Indeed, in the early postwar years, the mainstream press showed little interest in the South, and even the most liberal Southern editors were likely to distinguish between naked racial inequity, which they opposed, and racial segregation, which they supported. It was the courageous but vulnerable black press that covered the stories of lynchings and other forms of racial injustice, stories that the mainstream white press chose to ignore. The story of feisty papers like the Birmingham World and remarkably courageous editors such as Emory Overton Jackson is given very little space here, compared with more famous but also more complex figures such as Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette and Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, whose opposition to segregation was (as the book shows) painfully slow in coming, and really arrived more out of the pressure of events than out of personal conviction.

More generally, the book makes it clear that the events themselves, far more than journalists’ willingness to cover them, defined the trajectory of the era. The careful sequence of legal challenges to segregation put forward by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for example, culminating in the Brown decision in 1954, owed little or nothing to the journalists who covered them or to the national public opinion they might have shaped. The one clear exception to this rule, ironically, was the extremely activist role played by the then-segregationist James Jackson Kilpatrick of the Richmond News Leader in formulating and organizing the strategy of “massive resistance”in the wake of the Brown decision, a tale that may well be the single most vivid account in the entire book.

Clearly Messrs. Roberts and Klibanoff are imbued with the ideal of the journalist as moral hero, and one might have expected a book such as this one to be highly inspirational. But their own evidence presents a more ambiguous picture, and their clumsy, breathless, relentlessly cliché-ridden prose, which often reads like David Halberstam on a serious bender, does their story no favors. The book is very sloppily put together, with an often confused timeline, frequent repetitions, and multiple introductions of the same characters and events. One has a sense of what’s coming from the book’s opening sentence, which reads like a candidate for the Bulwer-Lytton contest: “The winter of 1940 was a cruel one for Gunnar Myrdal, and spring was shaping up even worse.” And just what was the problem? The distinguished Swedish economist (and Social Democratic politician) was experiencing a bad case of writer’s block in finishing up his Carnegie Foundation funded study of American race relations. Ah, the horror. And to make matters even worse, the Nazis were overrunning Europe, making it even harder to concentrate.

As this example suggests, Messrs. Roberts and Klibanoff go to rather excessive lengths to underscore the role played by Mr. Myrdal’s reform-minded critique, “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy” (1944), and more generally by white intellectuals and writers, in shaping postwar American racial attitudes. Of course, they are not entirely wrong to do so, and anyone who is interested in reading old war stories about the young John Chancellor or Sander Vanocur or Jack Nelson will find their book engaging if frustrating reading. But the really interesting part of the story, which this book does little to explore and in the end treats as an unfathomable mystery, is the struggle of the black press, which followed these stories before the white press became engaged, and in the face of fearsome obstacles. They did not need Mr. Myrdal’s book to know the score on things, and in fact Mr. Myrdal referred to the black press with admiration as a “fighting press” and marveled at the way it attacked white power with “impunity.” The difficult conditions under which its reporters had to work, themselves subject to all the rigors of Jim Crow, were harsher by light years than anything that the white Northern press experienced.

And yet it was their writings that helped inspire and prepare a new generation of black activists for the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as setting the table for the elite journalists when they finally arrived. There is in this book a bit of the assumption that a story is not a story until the New York Times has covered it. But the book itself tells a different story, albeit between the lines and by omission.