The Whole World Is Watching

"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.

Todd Gitlin is the author of ten books, most recently Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Image and Sound Overwhelms Our Lives (2002). He is Professor of Journalism and Sociology at Columbia University.

Preface to the 2003 Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part 1. IMAGES OF A MOVEMENT
1. Preliminaries
The Struggle over Images

2. Versions of SDS, Spring 1965
Discovering SDS Framing an Action,
I: The Chase Manhattan Demonstration
Framing an Action, II: The March on Washington
to End the War in Vietnam
Identifying SDS

3. SDS in the Spotlight, Fall1965
SDS in the Semi-Dark
The Spotlight Switches On
Making the Most of the Glare
The Media, the Right, and the Administration
Item: The Katzenbach Press Conference
"Build, Not Burn"
Developing Themes, I: The Movement Divided
Developing Themes, II: The Movement Confronted
Developing Themes, III: The Movement Legitimate and
Illegitimate

Part II. MEDIA IN THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE MOVEMENT

4. Organizational Crisis, 1965
The Membership Surge and Prairie Power
Who Will Speak into the Microphone? The
Obsolescence of the Old Guard
From Community to Mass Movement
Political Consequences of the Early Coverage,
and Sources of 50S's Vulnerability

5. Certifying Leaders and Converting
Leadership to Celebrity
The Manufacture of Celebrity
The Vulnerability of Ambivalent Leaders
Celebrity as Resource: Pyramiding
Celebrity as Career: Performing
Celebrity as Trap: Abdicating
Alternatives for Leadership

6. Inflating Rhetoric and Militancy
'The New Left Turns to Mood of Violence"
Revolutionary Will and Action News
The Aestheticizing of Violence in Films
Militancy and the Movement

7. Elevating Moderate Alternatives:
The Moment of Reform
The Tet Crisis and American Elites
Media on a Tightrope: Extraordinary Measures to
Secure Moderating Frames
Moratorium and Mobilization
Routines and Stereotypes

8. Contracting Time and Eclipsing Context
On Discontinuity and the Decontextualization
of Experience
The Vulnerability of a Student Movement

9. Broadcasting and Containment

Part III. HEGEMONY, CRISIS, AND OPPOSITION

10. Media Routines and Political Crises
Theories of the News
Ideological Hegemony as a Process
The Workings of Hegemony in Journalism
The Limits of Hegemonic Routine

11. Seventies Going on Eighties
Implications for Movements
Some Recent Frames: The Treatment of Movements
Against Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons

Appendix on Sources and Methods
The Movement
The Media
On Analyzing News
Selected Bibliography
Index