US newspapers played a prominent role, from Reconstruction through the 1960s, in promoting lynchings, massacres and other forms of racist hate

Why is this surprising?

People living in the year 1900 where a whole lot more racist than today, and that doesn't matter what job they held.
 
The only documented "lynching" in my city I have been able to find is not what I would necessarily consider a lynching. Black man shot his wife, when police came to arrest him he shot 7 of them, killing one, and when he bolted from the house he was barricaded in when someone in the crowd gathering around set it on fire, he was shot to death in a hail of bullets. Yet, that is our one official lynching.
 
Our media was complicit in lynchings and Civil Rights violations

Not just in the South

There was no outrage
 
The county I grew up in had 39 lynchings between the mid 1920s to early 1960s plus other racial murders. Reading he old newspapers about them I agree they had a part in getting folks riled up.
 
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