"The whole world is watching!" chanted the demonstrators in the Chicago streets in 1968, as the TV cameras beamed images of police cracking heads into homes everywhere. In this classic book, originally published in 1980, acclaimed media critic Todd Gitlin first scrutinizes major news coverage in the early days of the antiwar movement. Drawing on his own experiences (he was president of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-64) and on interviews with key activists and news reporters, he shows in detail how the media first ignore new political developments, then select and emphasize aspects of the story that treat movements as oddities. He then demonstrates how the media glare made leaders into celebrities and estranged them from their movement base; how it inflated the importance of revolutionary rhetoric, destabilizing the movement, then promoted "moderate" alternatives--all the while spreading the antiwar message. Finally, Gitlin draws together a theory of news coverage as a form of anti-democratic social management--which he sees at work also in media treatment of the anti-nuclear and other later movements. Updated for 2003 with a new preface, The Whole World Is Watching is a subtle and sensitive book, true to the passions and ironic reversals of its subject, and filled with provocative insights that apply to the media's relationship with all activist movements.
"No phenomenon in American life cries out for examination more than the impact of the news media on persons, movements, and events. One need not accept all of Gitlin's provocative conclusions to praise the exacting scholarship that has gone into this study of what happens to an anti-establishment movement performing on an establishment stage."--Daniel Schorr, commentator, National Public Radio
"An enormously useful book. . . . Gitlin writes about the way news organizations, as the category implies, 'organize' the news world, both for practitioners--reporters, editors, and managers--and for the consumers--readers, viewers, and perhaps even more important, decision-makers."--Frank Mankiewicz, Washington Journalism Review
"Gitlin tells us . . . how the New York Times and CBS reported on Students for a Democratic Society, and how their choices mattered for the development of the 60s movement and the containment of serious political change."--Gaye Tuchman, In These Times
From the Back Cover
Praise for the original edition: "No phenomenon in American life cries out for examination more than the impact of the news media on persons, movements, and events. One need not accept all of Gitlin's provocative conclusions to praise the exacting scholarship that has gone into this study of what happens to an anti-establishment movement performing on an establishment stage."-Daniel Schorr, commentator, National Public Radio "An enormously useful book . . . . Gitlin writes about the way news organizations, as the category implies, 'organize' the news world, both for practitioners-reporters, editors, and managers-and for the consumers-readers, viewers, and perhaps even more important, decision-makers."-Frank Mankiewicz, Washington Journalism Review "Gitlin tells us . . . how the New York Times and CBS reported on Students for a Democratic Society, and how their choices mattered for the development of the 60s movement and the containment of serious political change."-Gaye Tuchman, In These Times
Todd Gitlin is the author of fourteen books, including, most recently, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (with Liel Leibovitz); The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals; other titles include The Intellectuals and the Flag; Letters to a Young Activist; Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives; The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars; The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; Inside Prime Time; The Whole World Is Watching; Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (co-author); two novels, Sacrifice and The Murder of Albert Einstein; and a book of poetry, Busy Being Born. These books have been translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. He also edited Watching Television and Campfires of the Resistance.
In February 2011, Counterpoint will publish his novel, Undying.
He has contributed to many books and published widely in general periodicals (The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Boston Globe, Dissent, The New Republic, The Nation, Wilson Quarterly, Harper's, American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review, The American Prospect, et al.), online magazines (tnr.com, prospect.org, openDemocracy.net), and scholarly journals (Theory and Society, Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, et al.). He is on the editorial boards of Dissent and the Progressive Book Club, and a contributing writer to Mother Jones.
He is a regular contributor to the blog TPMcafe.com and the "Entanglements" and "The Book" blogs at The New Republic online.
He has been a columnist at the New York Observer and the San Francisco Examiner. During the 2008 campaign he is wrote a weekly "Sunday Watch" column for Columbia Journalism Review online and the Huffington Post. His poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Yale Review, and The New Republic.
In 2000, Sacrifice won the Harold U. Ribalow Prize for books on Jewish themes. The Sixties and The Twilight of Common Dreams were Notable Books in the New York Times Book Review. Inside Prime Time received the nonfiction award of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association; The Sixties was a finalist for that award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
He holds degrees from Harvard University (mathematics), the University of Michigan (political science), and the University of California, Berkeley (sociology). He was the third president of Students for a Democratic Society, in 1963-64, and coordinator of the SDS Peace Research and Education Project in 1964-65, during which time he helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War and the first American demonstrations against corporate aid to the apartheid regime in South Africa. During 1968-69, he was an editor and writer for the San Francisco Express Times, and through 1970 wrote widely for the underground press. In 2003-06, he was a member of the Board of Directors of Greenpeace USA.
He is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia University. Earlier, he was for sixteen years a professor of sociology and director of the mass communications program at the University of California, Berkeley, and then for seven years a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. During 1994-95, he held the chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been a resident at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California, a fellow at the Media Studies Center in New York, and a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Oslo, the University of Toronto, East China Normal University in Shanghai, and the Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis in Tunisia.
He lectures frequently on culture and politics in the United States and abroad (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Greece, Turkey, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, Morocco). He has appeared on many National Public Radio programs including Fresh Air as well as PBS, ABC, CBS and CNN. He lives in New York City with his wife, Laurel Cook.
This review is from: The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left, With a New Preface (Paperback)
Yes. Establishment supporters would like you to push this book aside. The media in those days was neither conservative or liberal. It was both and neither. I remember when local TV news (I lived in the Phili area) had editorials from their staff. One night would be a conservative view, another night would be a leftist or a radical view. The media outlets, in general were a lot more independent. Sure they were owned by rich guys and rich stockholders, but not all of those people were controlled, bought and paid for by the establishment. The media reported much more fairly then. The reason why hippies were seen and heard more and more on TV is because they WERE a cultural phenonmenae and people wanted to know and see and hear what they were about in order to form an opinion. The music people were listening to reflected that cultural change and difference and was therefore "news" as well. People spent a lot of money making a choice to purchase that counterculture music thru concerts and records and others wanted to know why and get a grip on what was happening in their world. That IS news. But the establishment at that time didn't fully understand the importance of TV to influence the masses UNTIL the hippies and their ideas spread like wildfire and gained general acceptance which eventually changed law. When Nixon debated Kennedy in 1960, they both failed to understand how even their physical appearance influenced how people viewed them. They both made mistakes. But by 1972, Nixon had learned and often came off looking and sounding pretty good. I even liked him although I lean liberal. Most establishment types, and even my parents, held that TV was primarily for entertainment and not to be taken too seriously. But as the public turned against segregation, Viet Nam, beating hippies (who were after all thier CHILDREN or their neighbors children) and occaisionally saw some stuffed-shirt politician behave like an ogre or say something insane and vote the idiot out of office ONLY THEN did the ruling elite realize that TV was a factor in influencing thought and action. Only then did they take it seriously. The young people of the time already "got" this and used it to their advantage. While their moms and dads were busy working or being tired from working, the kids were watching Elvis shake his hips, the Beatles long hair, Bob Dylan on the Mike Douglas show, The Temptations and Bill Cosby on The Hoolywood Palace thinking why do we want to segregate and oppress people like the Temptations and Bill Cosby and how unfair and evil that is.
As far as David Crosby and drugs...It's a well known fact that pot and LSD were used for years without problems. The CIA experimented with them to use them for truth-getting and mind control but failed. At the time, they were not illegal. The hippies used and abused them for creativity enhancement and mind expansion which the establishment hated. They didn't want free-thinkers to challange them or change the status quo. SO they funded the importation of heroin and cocaine, which eventually many counter-culture movement leaders began to use and OF COURSE it destroyed them. That was the plan. The whole movement fell apart. The leaders were so messed up that they became ineffective and irrelevant and some of them went to jail. How many FBI and CIA went to jail for bringing those drugs in though?? Exactly none. Mad yet? The media today is mostly if not entirely controlled by the neocon establishment and their supporters and benefactors. There is no such thing as a liberal media---then or now. Back then, they just reported BOTH sides and were fair and the establishment decided that was not good so they have since established control over the news and to some extent even what we see as entertainment.
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This review is from: The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left, With a New Preface (Paperback)
This isn't the only book Todd Gitlin has published about the late 1960s anti - war / counterculture movement.
He is dead wrong here about CBS, the New York Times and other "establishment" media deciding from the get - go to portray the flower children as an "oddity." On the contrary, the major media gave the scruffy baby boomers their own voice. Abbie Hoffman regularly gave press conferences at which he railed about the non - existent "children for breakfast program" while he was surrounded by microphones clearly labeled "CBS," "ABC," etc.
At your local public library you can find oversized index books for the New York Times from 1968, 1969 and 1970 that list numerous citations for Abbie Hoffman.
Mr. Hoffman ended up like the character of Alex in "The Big Chill." Jerry Rubin eventually forgot what his mother told him about looking both ways before you cross a busy highway. Musician David Crosby, who warned his fans that President Nixon was coming to get them (reaching more people than any journalist), eventually served six months in solitary confinement for narcotics. Then almost 20 years later (with Bush in the White House) he got busted for narcotics again.
Mr. Gitlin treats those guys as heroes in this book. He needs to accept the inevitable. The only person in the 1960s who was free, white and over 21 to whom we owe thanks is Lyndon Johnson. He almost singlehandedly criminalized racial segregation in all stores, restrooms (1964) and real estate offices (1968). He pressured the U.S. Supreme Court to desegregate public schools "at once." It did. Yes, Johnson allowed 56,000 Americans to die in Vietnam, but then he retired from politics, suffered from depression, died prematurely and left us to pick up the pieces.
Time to move on. Mr. Gitlin, you are wrong about the Establishment stilling the voices of the baby boomers at their peak of anger. It never did. They screamed and complained on network television and in widely read newspapers. The sane ones waited 20 years until they came to power. Bill and Hillary studied hard, treated their many professors with respect, and eventually confronted their dirty linen about inhaling, draft dodging and fraudulent savings and loans. The dream is over, Mr. Gitlin. Find out what it's about.
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