Todd Gitlin’s The Whole World is Watching studies the impact of the mass media on the development of the American New Left. More specifically, Gitlin examines how CBS news and The New York Times covered the actions of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1965 and how media coverage confronted that leftist organization with a series of unexpected and untested opportunities and obstacles. Gitlin’s theoretical framework is a combination of Erving Goffman’s frame analysis and Raymond Wiliams’ reworking of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. These two theories work well enough for Gitlin, though readers shouldn’t expect anything particularly innovative or sophisticated from the book. Gitlin argues that the concentrated power of the mass media has changed the conditions in which political movements are created, popularized, criticized, and defeated. While the New Left did successfully publish its own underground newspapers and journals and achieved many victories at both local and national levels, the mass media continually tempted the movement with promises of a truly mass audience and membership, and lured movement leaders with images of political power and celebrity. And once the mass media began paying attention to SDS around 1965, it became hard for the organization to ignore its treatment in the press and to resist taking efforts to actively shape that media treatment. So for better or worse, SDS entered into an ongoing hegemonic struggle to modify the media frames guiding how political events and movements were selected, interpreted, and presented to audiences. Gitlin ignores SDS’s own underground publications and focuses on a rather narrow archive of news articles and films from CBS and The New York Times, but he supplements this material with his own experience in SDS (Gitlin was SDS president right before the period studied). He explains that one of his motives in writing the book was the “experience of disjuncture” he felt when, after returning home from a demonstration or political action, he read or saw news coverage that presented an entirely different reality. Gitlin is extremely critical of SDS’s turn toward the violence of Weatherman, a shift he argues the mass media contributed to, so readers should critically approach Gitlin’s own frame of analysis. Although SDS had already been active for five years, it was not until 1965 that “SDS was discovered by the national media.” Suddenly, “SDS changed irreversibly from an organization that recruited its elites and communicated its ideas face to face, to an organization that lived in the glare of publicity and recruited both elites and members on the basis of reputations refracted in large part through the channels of mass media.” From then on, its “actions were shaped in part by the codes of mass media operations. It conducted its activities in a social world that recognized it, liked it, and disliked it through media images, media versions of its events and rhetoric. To some extent the movement even recognized itself through mass-mediated images.” Over the next five years, SDS and the media would develop a “grammar of interaction” through which they “would recognize and work on the other.” This grammar was continuously changing: “At times, movement and media were symbiotic, at times antagonistic.” The first section of the book focuses on media coverage of SDS around 1965. Gitlin divides this period into five phases: media ignorance of or indifference to SDS; discovery of the organization after the Berkeley Free Speech movement, prompting some sparse but often sympathetic coverage; major media interest after the anti-war March on Washington, which gave SDS new media power but also tended to trivialize, polarize, and marginalize the organization; the development of “an adversary symbiosis” which divided SDS members on whether to be on the defensive or the offensive against the media spotlight; finally, “media treatment entered into the movement’s internal life,” particularly through its influence on recruiting the new generation of SDS members, Prairie Power. As he surveys this first year of negotiations between SDS and the media, Gitlin shows the deleterious effects of the application of existing media frames to genuinely new political movements and documents cases of sympathetic news reporting being censored by editors influenced by the power elite. He also emphasizes the tendency of the media to rely primarily on the statements of government and university officials in coverage of political student actions. This led to an odd division of labor: “The composite effect was that students produce actions while authorities have thoughts.” SDS began engaging in civil disobedience when protestors carrying out a sit-in in front of the Chase Building in Manhattan were arrested in 1965. Drawing perhaps from existing frames for crime reporting, the media throughout the late 1960s used such arrests as the lead into the event, not the event as cause of the arrests. The power of arrests to attract media attention was/is problematic: “Arrests . . . help democratize access to news for powerless and dissident groups. But not even activists bent on arrest for publicity’s sake can get arrested unless the police authorities decide to make the arrest. (Even the grammar of the passive choice shows that the activists remain passive in the situation: they must get arrested.) When the power to define news is, in effect, turned over to the police, the media are serving to confirm the existing control mechanisms in society.” The next section of Gitlin’s book details the media’s impact on SDS over the next five years. The primary consequences of the media’s focus on SDS included: “generating a membership surge and, consequently, generational and geographical strain among both rank-and-file members and leaders”; “certifying leaders and converting leadership to celebrity”; “inflating rhetoric and militancy”; “elevating a moderate alternative”; “contracting the movement’s experience of time, and helping encapsulate it”; finally, “amplifying and containing the movement’s message at the same time.” Gitlin is particularly critical of the inability of SDS and the New Left’s leaders to handle the spotlight shown on them without becoming celebrities. Part of the problem was the “movement’s internal structure,” “the discrepancy between its values (‘no leaders’) and its organization,” a bureaucratic hand-me-down from the old left. Another factor was the lack of any adult equivalent of SDS, so that movement leaders who “graduated” from the organization often had little place to go but into the media’s eyes. The antiwar movement also contributed by equating effectiveness with numbers, which led leaders to actively seek out media attention. Gitlin argues, “it was the war that counterbalanced [SDS’s] halting search for decentral authority structures and processes, and that rationalized the destructive performances of the movement stars.” Leaders, when transformed by the media into celebrities, often lost all contact with and accountability to the movement base. “They floated in a kind of artificial space, surrounded by halos of processed personality; the media became their constituency.” In general, finding the middle ground between bathing in celebrity status and abdicating all media attention was difficult for many movement leaders. Gitlin summarizes the problem: “Faced with the lures and pressures of a world of instant fame, the movement lost control of its ability to certify and control its own leaders. Celebrity as a political resource for the movement, as a means toward political ends, lapsed into a personal resource to be invested, hoarded, and fought over – or abandoned. The movement’s leaders, ambivalent from the first about leading, had trouble keeping track of the sources of their authority and the obligations it entailed. The rank and file wanted their leaders to lead, but were uneasy with them at the same time; the mixed message they sent made the leaders’ situation as untenable as it was tempting. The cultural apparatus’s structured need for celebrity harmonized with, and selected for, the ambitions of movement leaders.” Gitlin also spends a great deal of time analyzing the media’s role in amplifying and exacerbating the militant and violent tendencies of the movement (towards which, it must be remembered, Gitlin is personally hostile). He argues that media coverage led to inflated rhetoric and militancy, to the need to always up the spectacle of mobilized bodies and violence in order to receive media coverage. The media contributed to this escalation by focusing primarily on the events themselves, not the political reasons behind them. SDS faced the fact that the media often would only lightly cover an event if it did not expect violence. “Where a picket line might have been news in 1965, it took tear gas and bloodied heads to make headlines in 1968. If the last demonstration was counted at 100,000, the next would have to number 200,000; otherwise it would be downplayed or framed as a sign of the movement’s waning.” “The result was that newsmaking power was passing into the hands of the more theatrical leaders and militant activists, agents provocateurs, and the police.” The media contributed to growing militancy and violence, which prompted further state repression, which was responded to by even more militancy and violence. For Gitlin, this cycle led to the dead end of Weatherman, which in its first phase privileged street fighting and the “trashing” of the city, all in front of the cameras. But as sympathy for the antiwar movement grew, the news also began to reverse its frame and give more attention to moderate positions. This media shift contributed to the growing divide in the New Left between the moderates and the militants, and also helped fuel the latter’s emphasis on revolution. “As opposition to the war became more widespread and legitimate, as moderates came to speak of unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam, much of the radical movement that had tried to articulate and focus that opposition found itself curiously stranded and desperate, frantically summoning up extravagant political world views about a coming revolution to explain and justify that feeling to themselves. Lacking a sufficient political base, the flamboyant sects resorted to the engine of revolutionary will – which gave them no political base, no political resonance, but a disproportionate access to the media.” The final result was a media-induced cybernetic nightmare: “Acting, producing mediating images, reacting hastily to the unanticipated consequences of those images, the movement entered a feedback loop without correcting errors.”
Friday, July 30, 2010
Todd Gitlin: The Whole World is Watching (1980)
Todd Gitlin’s The Whole World is Watching studies the impact of the mass media on the development of the American New Left. More specifically, Gitlin examines how CBS news and The New York Times covered the actions of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1965 and how media coverage confronted that leftist organization with a series of unexpected and untested opportunities and obstacles. Gitlin’s theoretical framework is a combination of Erving Goffman’s frame analysis and Raymond Wiliams’ reworking of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. These two theories work well enough for Gitlin, though readers shouldn’t expect anything particularly innovative or sophisticated from the book. Gitlin argues that the concentrated power of the mass media has changed the conditions in which political movements are created, popularized, criticized, and defeated. While the New Left did successfully publish its own underground newspapers and journals and achieved many victories at both local and national levels, the mass media continually tempted the movement with promises of a truly mass audience and membership, and lured movement leaders with images of political power and celebrity. And once the mass media began paying attention to SDS around 1965, it became hard for the organization to ignore its treatment in the press and to resist taking efforts to actively shape that media treatment. So for better or worse, SDS entered into an ongoing hegemonic struggle to modify the media frames guiding how political events and movements were selected, interpreted, and presented to audiences. Gitlin ignores SDS’s own underground publications and focuses on a rather narrow archive of news articles and films from CBS and The New York Times, but he supplements this material with his own experience in SDS (Gitlin was SDS president right before the period studied). He explains that one of his motives in writing the book was the “experience of disjuncture” he felt when, after returning home from a demonstration or political action, he read or saw news coverage that presented an entirely different reality. Gitlin is extremely critical of SDS’s turn toward the violence of Weatherman, a shift he argues the mass media contributed to, so readers should critically approach Gitlin’s own frame of analysis. Although SDS had already been active for five years, it was not until 1965 that “SDS was discovered by the national media.” Suddenly, “SDS changed irreversibly from an organization that recruited its elites and communicated its ideas face to face, to an organization that lived in the glare of publicity and recruited both elites and members on the basis of reputations refracted in large part through the channels of mass media.” From then on, its “actions were shaped in part by the codes of mass media operations. It conducted its activities in a social world that recognized it, liked it, and disliked it through media images, media versions of its events and rhetoric. To some extent the movement even recognized itself through mass-mediated images.” Over the next five years, SDS and the media would develop a “grammar of interaction” through which they “would recognize and work on the other.” This grammar was continuously changing: “At times, movement and media were symbiotic, at times antagonistic.” The first section of the book focuses on media coverage of SDS around 1965. Gitlin divides this period into five phases: media ignorance of or indifference to SDS; discovery of the organization after the Berkeley Free Speech movement, prompting some sparse but often sympathetic coverage; major media interest after the anti-war March on Washington, which gave SDS new media power but also tended to trivialize, polarize, and marginalize the organization; the development of “an adversary symbiosis” which divided SDS members on whether to be on the defensive or the offensive against the media spotlight; finally, “media treatment entered into the movement’s internal life,” particularly through its influence on recruiting the new generation of SDS members, Prairie Power. As he surveys this first year of negotiations between SDS and the media, Gitlin shows the deleterious effects of the application of existing media frames to genuinely new political movements and documents cases of sympathetic news reporting being censored by editors influenced by the power elite. He also emphasizes the tendency of the media to rely primarily on the statements of government and university officials in coverage of political student actions. This led to an odd division of labor: “The composite effect was that students produce actions while authorities have thoughts.” SDS began engaging in civil disobedience when protestors carrying out a sit-in in front of the Chase Building in Manhattan were arrested in 1965. Drawing perhaps from existing frames for crime reporting, the media throughout the late 1960s used such arrests as the lead into the event, not the event as cause of the arrests. The power of arrests to attract media attention was/is problematic: “Arrests . . . help democratize access to news for powerless and dissident groups. But not even activists bent on arrest for publicity’s sake can get arrested unless the police authorities decide to make the arrest. (Even the grammar of the passive choice shows that the activists remain passive in the situation: they must get arrested.) When the power to define news is, in effect, turned over to the police, the media are serving to confirm the existing control mechanisms in society.” The next section of Gitlin’s book details the media’s impact on SDS over the next five years. The primary consequences of the media’s focus on SDS included: “generating a membership surge and, consequently, generational and geographical strain among both rank-and-file members and leaders”; “certifying leaders and converting leadership to celebrity”; “inflating rhetoric and militancy”; “elevating a moderate alternative”; “contracting the movement’s experience of time, and helping encapsulate it”; finally, “amplifying and containing the movement’s message at the same time.” Gitlin is particularly critical of the inability of SDS and the New Left’s leaders to handle the spotlight shown on them without becoming celebrities. Part of the problem was the “movement’s internal structure,” “the discrepancy between its values (‘no leaders’) and its organization,” a bureaucratic hand-me-down from the old left. Another factor was the lack of any adult equivalent of SDS, so that movement leaders who “graduated” from the organization often had little place to go but into the media’s eyes. The antiwar movement also contributed by equating effectiveness with numbers, which led leaders to actively seek out media attention. Gitlin argues, “it was the war that counterbalanced [SDS’s] halting search for decentral authority structures and processes, and that rationalized the destructive performances of the movement stars.” Leaders, when transformed by the media into celebrities, often lost all contact with and accountability to the movement base. “They floated in a kind of artificial space, surrounded by halos of processed personality; the media became their constituency.” In general, finding the middle ground between bathing in celebrity status and abdicating all media attention was difficult for many movement leaders. Gitlin summarizes the problem: “Faced with the lures and pressures of a world of instant fame, the movement lost control of its ability to certify and control its own leaders. Celebrity as a political resource for the movement, as a means toward political ends, lapsed into a personal resource to be invested, hoarded, and fought over – or abandoned. The movement’s leaders, ambivalent from the first about leading, had trouble keeping track of the sources of their authority and the obligations it entailed. The rank and file wanted their leaders to lead, but were uneasy with them at the same time; the mixed message they sent made the leaders’ situation as untenable as it was tempting. The cultural apparatus’s structured need for celebrity harmonized with, and selected for, the ambitions of movement leaders.” Gitlin also spends a great deal of time analyzing the media’s role in amplifying and exacerbating the militant and violent tendencies of the movement (towards which, it must be remembered, Gitlin is personally hostile). He argues that media coverage led to inflated rhetoric and militancy, to the need to always up the spectacle of mobilized bodies and violence in order to receive media coverage. The media contributed to this escalation by focusing primarily on the events themselves, not the political reasons behind them. SDS faced the fact that the media often would only lightly cover an event if it did not expect violence. “Where a picket line might have been news in 1965, it took tear gas and bloodied heads to make headlines in 1968. If the last demonstration was counted at 100,000, the next would have to number 200,000; otherwise it would be downplayed or framed as a sign of the movement’s waning.” “The result was that newsmaking power was passing into the hands of the more theatrical leaders and militant activists, agents provocateurs, and the police.” The media contributed to growing militancy and violence, which prompted further state repression, which was responded to by even more militancy and violence. For Gitlin, this cycle led to the dead end of Weatherman, which in its first phase privileged street fighting and the “trashing” of the city, all in front of the cameras. But as sympathy for the antiwar movement grew, the news also began to reverse its frame and give more attention to moderate positions. This media shift contributed to the growing divide in the New Left between the moderates and the militants, and also helped fuel the latter’s emphasis on revolution. “As opposition to the war became more widespread and legitimate, as moderates came to speak of unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam, much of the radical movement that had tried to articulate and focus that opposition found itself curiously stranded and desperate, frantically summoning up extravagant political world views about a coming revolution to explain and justify that feeling to themselves. Lacking a sufficient political base, the flamboyant sects resorted to the engine of revolutionary will – which gave them no political base, no political resonance, but a disproportionate access to the media.” The final result was a media-induced cybernetic nightmare: “Acting, producing mediating images, reacting hastily to the unanticipated consequences of those images, the movement entered a feedback loop without correcting errors.”
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