But King is not forgotten: Harper & Row, for example, have announced the creation of a $1000 dollar literary prize in King’s name, various US politicians are concerned–extremely concerned–that Martin’s peaceful message be remembered–and new garbage is received from Memphis daily.
Newspaper space and position is a strange thing anyway: one tends to get the feeling that news events come already labeled PAGE ONE, ABOUT 10,000 WORDS. Take almost any non-filler story in the paper, fill it out with statistics and comments about informed sources, and imagine it on the front page: bang, it’s important news. Somewhere, some editor has to sit down and decide whether an assasination will sell more papers/ attract more interest than, say, a gold crisis.