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Similarly, in Plainfield, N.J., officials contended that TV coverage egged on the rioters. "They gave the impression that the whole town was going up in flames," says Mayor George F. Hetfield. "Soon we had busloads of people coming in from Philadelphia and Newark who were professional manipulators." In turn, TV interviewed the newcomers as if they were experts on Plainfield. A Negro identified by NBC as the pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church claimed that the police were prolonging the riots in order to beat more Negroes. Plainfield clergymen complained to NBC that the man was a recent arrival in the city who was merely assisting in Bible study at Shiloh.
Emergency Code. Among others in Congress, Pennsylvania's Republican Senator Hugh Scott was upset enough by the TV coverage to ask the networks to adopt a code of "emergency procedure" for riots. There had been too much concentration, he wrote, on "sensational aspects and appeals to riot by extremists." Denying that his network had overplayed the extremists, CBS President Frank Stanton flatly turned down any code. It would amount to "censorship by voluntary agreement," he said. "We are not going to make subjective value judgments that the American people are capable of hearing and evaluating some spokesmen for some points of view and that others are unsafe or too dangerous for them to hear."
Bad as it was, the coverage of Plainfield helped make Stanton's point. TV newsmen were not content to accept the word of Negroes who told them that a white policeman had been stomped to death because he had shot and killed a seven-year-old Negro boy. The TV crews lugged their equipment to the city hospital where they got assurances from the staff that it was not a child but a 22-year-old man who had been shot—and he was only wounded.