I'm afraid I can't offer specific information on headlines relating to major events, but I do know a little regarding the general social attitude, which was reflected in the media discourse of the conservative white newspapers.

I'm basing most of this on a collection of essays edited by Sue Onslow, Cold War in Southern Africa. I remember reading a second book which more explicitly described the contrast, but sadly I'm about 5,000 miles from my footnotes - if anyone else can remember what the title is, please let me know in the comments!

The rhetoric of apartheid was broadly based on two strands: a nominally non-racial anti-communism, as reflected by the use of the Suppression of Communism Act (1950) to censor anti-apartheid activists; and an explicitly racialised fear of non-whites, in particular blacks.

Although these two strands can be identified, in practise they were heavily reliant upon each other. Communism was particularly associated with black anti-colonial uprisings of the kind feared by white South Africans. As in the Southern US, anti-apartheid activists were regularly accused of being communists. Many were, indeed, communist, and the South African Communist Party (SACP/CPSA) was closely involved in a number of anti-apartheid activities - Mandela himself was a member of their central committee. Nonetheless, fears of communism were largely expressed in lurid terms of Marxist takeovers and orders from Moscow. The aspersions cast upon leading civil rights movement characters were echoed, and much of the civil rights movement in the US was interpreted as the impact of communist agitation. Communism, however, was something of a secondary fear compared to the view of the US South as a vision of a South African future.

The more significant racial component was the focus of many of these fears. White South Africans explicitly drew connections to the US South, both in terms of demographics and policy. To them, the US South was an example of the failure of any kind of desegregation, and proof that small acts of segregation (e.g. schools, drinking fountains, beaches) were simply too little. The acts of protest and resistance were interpreted as the social disorder stemming from allowing blacks to live alongside whites. The Fanonian ur-fear of miscegenation also featured heavily in popular white imaginings of the US South, with images of sexually predatory black men and vulnerable white women used to bolster arguments for more complete systems of segregation.

These reactions, of course, only represent the white response to the civil rights movement, and their profound discomfort when faced with the spectre of majority rule. I'm sadly not too familiar with black responses to the civil rights movement. The 1960s were a comparatively quiescent time for the anti-apartheid movement, and by the 1970s the explicitly peaceful message of Martin Luther King Jnr. was being rejected (with some qualifications) by the Black Consciousness Movement. My reading is a little too light to speak with much authority, but certainly in my reading of their work they tend to draw upon African / Caribbean thought to a greater degree than US - the likes of Fanon, Senghor and Cesaire providing a more tangible connection to post-colonialism.

In short, for whites the US South and the civil rights movement represented a failure and a feared vision of what could happen in South Africa if apartheid was, at any point, relaxed. While black South Africans were certainly aware of the movement, it was - although I qualify my opinion - less of a cultural touchstone than the anti-colonial writings of Africa and the Caribbean.