Mr. Oberbeck is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner, on leave from Newsweek, Inc. This article may be published, with credit to S. K. Oberbeck and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
Marciana Marina, Isola D’Elba—The part that media play in the twin currents of revolution and reaction now swirling in the United States is a phenomenon missed by many Europeans. They have not yet experienced the problems that go with proliferating media forms as we have in America.
The impact of electronic media was felt clearly in France during the riots of last spring. The recent French elections depended heavily on T.V. The same things are true in Germany, the Scandinavian countries and Italy to a lesser extent. T.V., and more importantly radio, played a decisive part in the resistance of the Czechs during the Warsaw Pact invasion.
There can be little doubt that, as Europe has been eagerly soaking up American methods of management and marketing, she will likewise adopt the manners and methods of our media especially in politics and news reporting.
This will add to the confusion in the “global village,” a confusion most apparent when one looks through the media (both print and electronic) at current events in the United States. The following anecdotes should serve as examples.
“You are democratic in spite of yourselves, you Americans,” a radical German student told me. “Your leaders and your press are controlled by reactionaries, but the problems cannot be covered over. That’s why you have violent people in your streets; that’s why your cities are burning…It happens here, too, and it will spread.”
His remark, made many months ago, came back to me the other day, while I was sitting in a sea-side cafe on this gem of an island reading the Paris Herald Trib. The owner s wife came by, pointed to a picture on page one, and said: “Vietnam.” There was a hint of question in her tone, but more conviction.
The news photo was of uniformed, helmeted men, rifles bristling, all crouched as if taking cover from sudden sniper fire. Berkeley, the caption said. “No,” I replied, “It’s a college in America, out in California.”
“But, that’s really a war,” she exclaimed (Ma, E proprio una Guerra!), and zoomed off to flag in some English tourists who had been casing the terrace. When she passed by several minutes later, she nodded emphatically—as if she had gone and confirmed it somewhere—and repeated: “Proprio una guerra.”’
These two snippets of experience, and several others to be mentioned, contained a curious mixture of truth and falsehood, of logic and misinformation, of objectivity and partisanship. And they help illustrate the incredibly selective nature of the information the media pass on.
For we are “democratic” in spite of ourselves—democratic by default, if you will. And there is a war on in America. After 14 months away from the U.S.A., it seems to me a very serious war—as it seems to many, many Europeans who are watching us carefully.
Take the German student’s statement. He was a 23year-old, neatly bearded, only mildly antagonistic parroter of Marcuse and Mao. He had never been to the United States. Beyond the galloping relativity of his use of the word “reactionary,” he explained that the incidence of violence and riot In the U.S. proved that repression existed.
Whether he had ever read the New York Times, Washington Post or knew the programs of the ADA mattered little; he was positive they were “reactionary.” For him, what “democracy” there was in the U.S. was reflected in the left-wing extremism with which he heartily identified. The firebombs and Black Panther shoot-outs were to his mind simply logical reactions to our “domestic imperialism.”
I have heard the same sort of reasoning from U.S. students; it illustrates how very far leftward a good deal of social sentiment among the young has drifted. The extent to which the young cleave to the ideologues of violent revolution presents an interesting problem for the defenders of what a slightly older generation would call not “reactionary,” but “liberal.”
This problem, which lately seems to be escalating into a struggle, is reflected in what are forebodingly described as the bellwether elections of “law and order” candidates Sam Yorty and Charles Stenvig of Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Despite general hostility from the “respectable” press to these candidates, and generally warm endorsements of their opponents, they won.
The media reaction I saw here was a gnashing of teeth, grave warnings of “backlash” sweeping the country, and dire notice of the rising tide of “fear” and “racism” in America.
The people had spoken, as democracy is designed, but to many minds, they had not spoken well, or bravely. Even Joe Alsop managed to sound somewhat concerned. Yet, rather than pondering the volatile implications of these elections, the most widely circulated press simply continued its pre-election line—which was generally that a vote for Yorty or Stenvig was a vote for fear and racism. After the final tally, most prestigious pundits merely gloomed over fears confirmed.
This seemed an interesting reaction to “democracy” in action. And it was symptomatic of a grave danger facing American society: the danger of no longer being able to talk openly or debate freely about our problems and differences of opinion. It is through talking to confirmed ideologues of the extreme left that one realizes what a vast gap separates American opinion.
In America, as in Europe, the airways are heavy with the socio-political Muzak which passes for honest debate. But, in fact, a forum for true debate is largely unavailable to anyone in the U.S. whose ideals, values and convictions are to the right of center. This is less true of Europe, with its long history of conservative traditions and openly affirmed political categories of socialist, communist, radical, tory, etc.
It is essentially the lack of public forum in America that is responsible for what is described as “backlash” and racism. The lack must be laid to the door of the media, and Academe, from which so much of media and government’s material derives. What looks to be happening in America just now is exactly the democracy by default that German student was describing—except its political stripe is reversed.
When no true public forum exists where real, substantive alternatives can be at least aired, the citizen’s last resort is the ballot box—with which millions of Americans, to the profound disappointment of progressives, are now expressing their real feelings and preferences.
The miscalculation of the pollsters was indicative of the mood of these millions, especially in the Yorty election. That they may have purposely misinformed the polltakers—out of shame or fear of mockery—is a grave symptom; that they are denounced as racists when they express dissatisfaction or anxiety in the privacy of the voting booth—shamed collectively by most of the media—will likely inflame their frustration and sense of futility.
This is the sort of reaction that is polarizing America—that has already alienated the millions who, for example, voted for George Wallace. Wallace appealed to a body of U.S. citizens who doubtless feel their gains and property threatened and want to keep them, but much of his acclaim derived from his tactic of speaking out on the most volatile issues in the most provocative manner.
In the epoch of electronic media—the “global village”—this is a tactic the more vocal left-wing lights have used to excellent advantage. Like Lenny Bruce, they have divined the efficacy of “talking dirty,” or turkey.
England has experienced the same phenomenon in Enoch Powell—in part because the racial issue, as he plays it, appeals to them what’s got and wants to keep it. But I was down in front of the Parliament as the Smithfield meat porters came in bloodied smocks to picket for Powell. And the fact that he raised the most “unrespectable” issues in the most “unrespectable” language (refusing to paper over a British problem because it was not couth) fired these common laborers with zeal and excitement.
Of such are Oswald Mosleys made, and that was the reference with which the British media, almost to a man, sought to blacken Powell—just as American media attempted to associate Wallace with Hitler. The English media are essentially left-wing (the BBC’s T.V. coverage of the Vietnam war has been, even to liberal minds, incredibly slanted) and their automatic frontal assault on Powell will doubtless win him wider support. American media were guilty of a similar Pavlovian response to Barry Goldwater.
To Europeans with whom I spoke who are not committed anti-Americans, what our press (and theirs) described as a rising tide of reaction in America appeared more as a long-postponed recovery from what looked like mounting anarchy from here. They were, save for the committed students of the revolutionary left, surprised to discover this recovery characterized as a slide back to the basest roots of benighted, back-country America.
But they have known real fascists and the true consequences of cruel dictatorships and seem more careful in their reactions to unattractive upsurges of opinion or emotion from the populace. Having followed the news, I admit I was similarly inclined. “Reaction,” with all the dark import of left-wing myth rubbed into it, is as imprecise a word for America’s swing away from permissiveness as “conspiracy” (with all the right-wing import) would be for the quite open, highly visible program black militants or the SDS crowd are carrying out.
Most Europeans I talked with—and they were people who generally had position or property to protect—found it curious that the Yorty and Stenvig victories produced such a collision of fingers at the journalistic panic-button. From their own media, and what of ours they saw, they had an impression that America was experiencing a measure of civil war. Our critics saw neo-Nazis, or worse, neo-McCarthyites, coming out of the woodwork.
I got my stateside news almost exclusively from the Paris Trib (which carries New York Times, Washington Post and the major wire services), Newsweek, Time and the Voice of America on radio (plus American Forces Network from Munich), but noticed that French and Italian coverage generally followed our own. Our news set the tone.
Some journalistic reactions were astonishing. New York Timesman, Max Frankel, post-Yorty’s victory, wrote: “Mayor Sam Yorty rose from the ashes of Watts and created enough fear of his black opponent, Thomas Bradley, to get himself reelected…Did Mr. Yorty, to take the case at hand, represent the backlash of bigots?…Or did the know-nothings, swelling the voter turnout to a remarkable 80 per cent, demonstrate the power of their hatred of blacks and liberals and radicals by giving Mr. Yorty an unexpected 53 per cent?”
Just who is hating who here? The blanket accusation that anyone who voted for Yorty “hates” Negroes, liberals or radicals will do more to promote hatred for Negroes, liberals and radicals (and perhaps the Now York Times) than almost, anything Sam Yorty might have said.
Newsweek, citing Yorty’s shabby tactic of pointing out Bradley’s appeal to CPUS chief Gus Hall, commented in its story: “Almost nightly, television broadcasts of campus violence at Berkeley, Stanford and San Francisco State helped fan Yorty’s brush fires of fear.” The implications of that intriguing sentence, never elucidated, are manifold. Did Yorty’s people arrange for such programming? Was there some sort of unfair collusion between the T.V. station and the candidate? Didn’t these events take place, or should they not have been shown at campaign time?
Bradley did not get a bad tally for a candidate in racist America. James Reston observed that “Bradley got 47 per cent of the vote in a city that has only 18 per cent Negroes,” but went on to weigh in with the obvious conclusion that “Mayor Yorty’s appeal to fear of the black militants plus the fear of anarchy on the…campus during the recent riots apparently brought out a large and decisive conservative majority.”
These shaming references to fear and racism sprang to mind when I read later (in the Paris Trib) of detective Stenvig’s surprising election. The story was printed next to another headlined: “16 Panthers Indicted in Kidnapping,” which commenced “A Cook County grand jury indicted 16 members of the Black Panthers Party yesterday on charges of kidnapping and torturing a man and a woman suspected of stealing a riot gun from the gang’s Chicago headquarters…” A propane gas torch was the instrument of torture, the story declared, and the couple was Negro.
At first glance a selective example, this sort of juxtaposition (Random chance? Sick humor make-up man?) is characteristic of newspapers today—even allowing for the fact the Paris Trib has to squeeze its sensational news into few pages. I remember another Trib story of the Panther’s Easter bomb plot, run next to an item about Ralph Abernathy’s dissatisfaction over his treatment in Washington. It is a slightly schizophrenic experience to turn from such horror stories to editorials which shame readers for their abject capitulation to fear and racism. But instead of dealing directly with such cruel ironies (or firing the make-up man), media—and T.V. is redolent of such odd juxtapositions of horror and appeal-to-reason—cries out against the “bigots” while the fast growing popularity of a Hyakawa (or even the smoldering, tacit approval of a Mayor Daley) inclines them not to thoughtfully examine the nature of public exasperation or perturbation, treating it as an obvious symptom indicative of societal disease, but to cry, like a fearfully broken record, “shame, shame.”
Such a reaction to “democracy,” to the “voice of the people,” is not lost on Europeans, who have a longer history (and a more apocalyptic history) of responding to, or trying to bend, public opinion. Surely, responsible men of media can recognize that Sam Yorty would have no fuel to fan into brush fires of fear without California’s (and the nation’s) remarkable incidence of campus violence.
Certainly, they can understand—since few of them live in ghettos—that appeals to fear would be ineffective had there been no Watts, Detroit, no Fred Evans shoot-out, no Easter bomb plot in New York, no assassination plans for moderate Negro leaders by black extremists, no Communist Junkets by Stokely Carmichael and Eldrige Cleaver, etc.
And I count it an important “etc.” in view of the astonishing irony that while media pundits are castigating the “know-nothings” of Los Angeles and Minneapolis, student anarchists and gun-toting black militants—with a great deal more cool ability to read the “power structure’s” defensiveness and weakness than the pundit’s to read the public’s exasperation are marching boldly and toughly (with the courage of conviction) into deans’ offices and church pulpits and plainly saying: “Fork over.”
Nothing, to revert to the cliche’, succeeds like success. Who, in fact, is doing most of the plain, volatile talking? And succeeding admirably in the bargain (at least for the moment)? The backlash of bigots? Or the armed militants at Cornell? Even Max Frankel would be pained to admit that the know-nothings, to the consternation of the pollsters, are confining their ultimate thoughts to the privacy of the voting booth. And this is a sad and dangerous symptom in a media-oriented society in which the Carmichaels and Cleavers can openly report they are buying guns to kill white racists or spew hip filth at assembled I.B.M. executives, and find themselves widely reported in the media.
And, like the bigots who elected Yorty and Stenvig, however much media may deplore these “extremists,” they are still broadcast as palpable realities into America’s living rooms. While they are legitimate “news,” extremists on the other end of the political spectrum are accorded quite different treatment.
This is a perhaps fatal flaw in America’s media—its nature and its stewardship, one that is polarizing the nation. It is so selective, its credibility is now disastrously in jeopardy. Bill Buckley talks beautifully and H.L. Hunt has a commanding pile of money; beyond is a never-never land. And America is now faced with the unhappy notion that this forbidden territory is larger than was once imagined. The knowledge that media, most importantly electronic media, “revolutionizes” in both directions Is now made manifest. Backlash, blacklash, extremists left and right—all are somehow irrepressible “news.”
Americans, and Europeans as well, are watching for both sides. Which way the media revolution goes is of paramount interest, even to those who do not quite understand just how it has come about.
Received in New York on July 31, 1969.
