"But it is a hard and frightening fact that neither freedom nor penalty for Bryant and Milam was asked in the name of justice. Acquittal was demanded as a rebuke to 'outsiders' and is a glorification of race supremacy by the five defense attorneys." The prosecutor had spoken of constitutional guarantees, but had also argued on the basis of "outsiders" being kept out, that if the defendants were convicted, it would keep those "outsiders" from being able to say anything negative about Mississippi or seeking to change their "way of life".

It indicates that it was safe to assume that the matter was adjudicated by the jury as it had been argued, that "justice has been spurned and the murder screams in the propaganda mills of the extremists who clash like Matthew Arnold's ignorant armies in the night." It finds that the jury should have been insulted by the summations of both the prosecution and the defense, particularly when the defense had said that it was "sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these man in the face of that (outside) pressure", and that a guilty verdict would make "your fathers turn over in their graves."

It concludes: "The Till case is not the first in which prejudice was called to judge, nor will it be the last. But each time justice is spurned, all of us, Anglo-Saxons, too, are a little less secure and a little less free."

While the editorial makes good points, its initial statement that it could not assess whether the two half-brothers were guilty of the murder begs question as to whether the editorialist had read very carefully the reports which had been published daily during the trial, if not fully in The News, certainly in other papers within the state, indicating, as the Charlotte Observer was aware in its editorial the prior Saturday, that the LeFlore County sheriff and his deputy had taken admissions from the two half-brothers of the kidnaping of Emmett, and that the jury foreman had stated to the press after the verdict that the primary basis for the acquittals had been the failure, in their opinion, of the prosecution to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the body retrieved from the Tallahatchie River was in fact that of Emmett Till, and the argued theory by the defense, completely unsupported by any evidence in the case, that some other group, intent on stirring up controversy, might have planted another body in the river, improperly arguing, apparently without admonition by the court, outside the evidence presented in the case. The foreman also said the jurors completely rejected the testimony of Emmett's uncle, who described the abduction of Emmett on August 28 and also identified his body on August 31, and a third party percipient witness who had seen J. W. Milam outside a barn with a gun, from inside of which screams of pain were emanating and sounds of someone being whipped, that some time not long before that, he had seen a person who resembled the news photos of Emmett riding in the bed of a pickup truck with three other black men in the bed and four white men in the cab, none of whom he recognized. The foreman also said that they had discounted the testimony of Emmett's mother who identified the body as that of her son. The jury could definitely be blamed for such absurd reliance on such preposterous theories, rejecting out of hand, as the jury foreman stated, all of the black witnesses in the case, apparently also the supporting admissions of the defendants verified by the LeFlore sheriff and deputy, and the corroborating fact of identification of the body supplied by the ring on its finger bearing the initials "L. T.", initials of Emmett's deceased father, Louis Till, with his mother testifying that she had given Emmett the ring.

The Observer editorial correctly stated that there were grave deficiencies in the prosecution's case, notably that there was no autopsy performed to establish firmly the identity of the body as being that of Emmett, no identification of the bullet which had caused the bullet wound to his head, with the Tallahatchie County Sheriff, H. C. Strider, stating, again preposterously, that he could not tell whether the hole in Emmett's head was from a bullet or something else, that he had probed the wound with his finger and was unable to locate anything.

It might have also indicated, in addition to those deficiencies, that the prosecution could have easily countered the ridiculous testimony of Sheriff Strider, an undertaker and a physician that the body appeared, when taken from the river, to have been in a state of decomposition for at least eight days since death, when it was discovered only three days after the disappearance of Emmett. But the prosecution did not present any expert witness who might have pinned down to three days the state of decomposition, the prosecution having established, during cross-examination of the physician and Sheriff Strider, the possibility, at least, of more rapid decomposition of an injured body than one which was uninjured, but never having brought it down to the facts of the case by establishing firmly through an expert that the body had been in a state of decomposition consistent with having been in the river for as few as three days, obviously the case in fact, the most glaring dereliction of duty in the prosecution of the case, as the prosecution was aware early on that the defense intended to try to prove, as the primary defense, that the prosecution could not show beyond a reasonable doubt the identity of the body, a theory developed for the press by Sheriff Strider within three days after discovery of the body on August 31.

Again, as with the comparison earlier between the first editorial on the case appearing in The News and the first editorial in The Observer, the latter presents a more sensible and sensitive examination of the case, not being concerned with the peripheral matters addressed by the News editorials, more concerned in the first editorial with whether the South, as a whole, should be held accountable for the death and then, in the latter editorial, ignoring its own suggestion that failure of justice in the case would leave the South to blame, rather seeming to attach blame for the result, not in the jury's racial prejudice obviously exhibited, as gleaned from the jury foreman's post-verdict remarks and their absurd reliance on preposterous theories, but rather in the final summations to the jury by the prosecutor and defense counsel regarding the "outside agitators", something to which the jury foreman made mention as an influencing factor though not indicating how much of an influence it had been.

Whether that disparity in tone between the editorials was the result of former News editor, Pete McKnight, having become in July editor of the Observer, we cannot say, for we do not know who wrote the editorials for the Observer at that time, but it is clear that the formerly more conservative Observer than the traditionally more liberal News, had gradually changed relative to one another, at least in their editorial policies, through time. That observation has been made by others, some of whom were earlier employed at the News, who saw the newspaper gradually change during the 1950's to a much more conservative newspaper, presumably because of the publisher since 1947, Thomas L. Robinson. The differing takes, however slight they are, on this critical case, demonstrate well that relative change. The News appears far more apologetic and somewhat defensive about the verdict compared to the Observer, which was willing to express more plainly that the South, as a whole, with its history of segregation, bore a measure of the blame for such a travesty.

In casting that blame more pervasively, the Observer was looking toward the future, seeking to urge the South and everyone in it to counsel their fellow Southerners to do better, rather than taking the approach that the blame rested solely with the perpetrators of the crime, which would have been the case had it been simply an interpersonal matter involving a vendetta between the two half-brothers and a third party. But, obviously, this case went far beyond a mere personal matter and ranged into brutal infliction of torture to drive home a point to other black people, based deliberately on what the brothers understood was only, at worst, a minor infringement of social conventions of the time and place, to demonstrate plainly to the surrounding populace as a deterring force that they were not going to tolerate any form of change from the existing pattern of segregation, that even a wolf-whistling boy of 14 was not going to get away with such infringement of the social code and conventions which had been at work since after the Civil War and that there would be ultimate penalties to pay for anyone who sought in the least to violate those social conventions.