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—I read the news today, oh boy! Not today, actually, but recently: John Lindsay has lost the primary in New York. He says he was defeated by “fear” and “hate.” Later, he says he is for a coalition government. “If you’ll have coalition government in Now York, then why not in Paris at the peace table,” quips an English tourist over coffee. Ho, ho, ho. Harold Wilson hasn’t been doing so well with the trade unions, and the Englishman is trying to stick me for the after-dinner brandy.
I am very glum, because I think I know what the media will make of the attractive John Lindsay’s defeat. They will weep along with him. Not, thy will be done, O common herd, but: how can we circumvent the know-nothings?
But Lindsay’s success or failure is secondary to the apparent problems of race and Vietnam facing America. These are the two problems that preoccupy Europeans who watch our progress and decay with interest and excitement. “What are you going to do about your racial problem” is the statement that has blitzed many a conversation during my year abroad.
When playing devil’s advocate, my reply is usually that Americans may indeed be color-blind. We readily put the “alienated” Negro on T.V. because he is black and deprived and itching to square matters, but we fail to notice his white counterpart (here, there is customarily a gasp of incredulity), who because of his color and the pervasive myth of automatic white success remains inconspicuous.
No one seems concerned that many white people are also “invisible men” who steadfastly resist extremism but are left to stew in a corrosive silence—largely because they do not wish to risk the contempt and mockery of those who denounce them as “racists” if they vote for Yortys or Stenvigs. And yet they do vote, and that should worry some of us.
The German student (of SKO-13) told me that we were “democratic” in spite of ourselves, and I begin to understand him. His notion that our government and our press are controlled by reactionaries is symptomatic of the thinking that has brought us to the point of civil war—at least in the pages and picture tubes of media.
The cafe owner’s wife thinks there’s a war on in America. And there is. It does not promise to be solved by redistributing the money, or giving people jobs they cannot do, or by crushing the opposition. Nor can it be monologued or editorialized away. American society is confused and divided. Fading fast are the faith, cooperation and resolve that are—more than our talent for production and management (though fabulous commodities)–the power of America.
The media—both print and electronic—have played a significant part in radicalizing and reactionizing America. The best illustration of this is the “Negro Revolution,” and then perhaps the student rebellion. Very few Europeans, and I wonder how many Americans, understand media’s role in these revolutions.
That role became apparent in the aftermath of Selma, Alabama, where the riots shocked a nation, and culminated in the protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago years later. What transpired as a phenomenon that awakened the national conscience eventually became—by coincidence as well as design—a method of radicalizing the American conscience. T.V. became a true tool for social policy.
The scenario—the beginning of the electronic Negro revolution—was first flashed from Selma. Public reaction was almost immediate. The fire-hoses, billy-clubs, police dogs and tear-gas did more to dramatize the plight of Negro Americans than decades of patient civil rights work. T.V. provided the first great quantum jump in the movement’s struggle.
That the T.V. cameras showed nothing of the much-debated pro-battle “restraint” on the part of Alabama’s law-and-order forces in the face of alleged provocations by protestors is by now ancient history. The selectivity of the camera crew was at that point overlooked: at the “We Shall Overcome” stage, the black minority needed every benefit it could muster.
In retrospect, Selma and its aftermath in the Freedom marches were tributes to Martin Luther King’s great skill in using media effectively by marshalling his forces to draw maximum impact from media coverage. His was a talent for dramatizing the struggle that his successor, Ralph Abernathy, does not possess: i.e., his “Poor Peoples” march and tent-city campaign was a miserable failure and doubtless created more antipathy than sympathy among the public.
On T.V., howev, even failures can be effective. We had been reading of the Negro’s plight and grievance for years; JT.V. showed it to us with shattering urgency. It revealed “the other America” not only nationally but internationally with all the immediacy, and the simplicity, inherent in the medium.
This was merely the beginning. T.V. not only revealed the other America but also sent it on its way towards inevitable radicalization. Once revealed on the scale T.V. commands, there was little for suddenly broadcast minorities to do but become more radical. To do otherwise would have meant wasting the national (and international) focus and free forum electronic media was providing.
Without T.V., and the fact that other media follow or diversify its leads, the time required by the black minority to move from “We Shall Overcome” to “Freedom Now” to “Black Power” would have been enormously extended. That this time-table was related as well to politics, social guidelines and public sympathy enhanced rather than vitiated the impact of electronic media’s coverage. The relationship between the three categories and the media was pure symbiosis, and still is.
T.V. had already helped revolutionize (or revolt) the poor minorities, who had for years watched images of the surrogate, simplified world of white affluence—that thornless rose of light-skinned life projected by the tube. That aura of plenty without problems (save minor ones that could be solved in a half hour, minus commercials) no doubt had its effect on a generation of youth who had no experience of the white life, say, by having worked in a white household.
Parenthetically, T.V. revolutionized the other way too. Where formerly the Indians in the westerns always got wiped out, we began watching westerns with a moral point—the decent white importuning his follow citizens to treat the Indian with brotherly love and understanding.
One network executive frankly confessed at a media symposium that brotherhood and equality could more effectively be pushed in T.V. programming by using the Indian as a substitute for the Negro. As soon as the racial issue opened up, T.V. quickly discarded the “symbolic” Indian and went straight to the point.
The momentum provided by media was most apparent in the changing modes of minority leadership. As a mountain is opened with TNT, media opened new avenues for Negro leadership especially. It became obvious that Malcolm ,. early Roy Innis, or Rap Brown made more arresting T.V. “copy” than the patient, old hands in the civil rights movement with their predictable rhetoric smacking of city hall and academia.
As the tigers (or panthers) began edging out the Toms with pure showmanship and a heady, raw directness, the media phenomenon of instant leaders and instant spokesmen became standard: seen and heard today, spokesman tomorrow. Finally, to revert to the old cliche, it seemed that if a Ron Karenga or an Eldridge Cleaver did not exist, the networks would have had to invent them.
In a sense, they did. Most of the militant leaders are cannily patterned for maximum media impact. The Black Panthers, the Mau-Mau or related paramilitary groups such as Karenga’s US, while borrowing features of Muslim discipline and dignity, are all marked by a rich theatricality, in dress, doctrine and rhetoric. They are true MacLuhanist examples of those who do not vitiate the impact of the new medium by using the old content.
A generation of white youth had dutifully devoured the white-gloved artistry of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Kenneth Clark or Bayard Rustin—while perhaps sneakily basking in the corrosive anger of Richard Wright or Malcolm’s fierce, incandescent logic. D Then, suddenly, we had an entirely new spectrum of black personalities who performed as they proselytized. At first, they were “winging it.”
I think the scope and appetite of electronic media caught the civil rights movement by surprise, as well as the immediacy of its impact on the public. In relative terms, after all those years of crying in the wilderness, the aggrieved Negro got instant feedback after the struggle was plugged into the T.V. tube. And much of it was surprisingly and enormously sympathetic. The change of pace dazed the old leadership and fired the young with impatient enthusiasm. Suddenly, they saw themselves, and saw that others saw them.
Subject only to the selectivity of the network barons, there was a national platform on which almost all views could be aired, demands made, stories told. And even network selectivity could be circumvented by turning a specific “protest” into “news”—an economy and a format which has, again, incredibly spurred the movement’s success. Ralph Abernathy’s Poor People’s march, with its central casting aura, was a good example of this.
I say electronic media took the movement by surprise, one of the greatest being that it has annulled the epoch of the “preachers,” with their commitment to non-violent, Christian striving, and ushered in an era of up-against-the-wall “propagandists,” the younger revolutionaries who understand better than any of their forebears (including Rev. King) the advantages of symbolic role-playing and theatrics in a T.V. society.
The younger blacks, more sensitive to media because they grew up in it, rather quickly transformed themselves from merely “Afro-Americans” to “Black Panthers”—which is to say that they took the lead away from reporters and newscasters, some of whom ventured into the Negro community like they had been assigned to get a story on a mysterious whale cast up on some beach.
I believe the younger militants quickly perceived they were merely “on stage,” like odd, new faces in some sort of socio-political amateur hour. “Telling it like it is” soon became an old script, for T.V. inevitably peddles personalities not truths. While Roy Wilkins or Whitney Young were reasonably pleading the Negro cause on “Meet the Press” or “Face the Nation” (which is radio-newspaper content in the electronic medium), the younger militants were hammering out a new style and rhetoric on the streets of Harlem or in the boondocks of Mississippi—one patently more compatible with the requisites of T.V. Revolution and Soul-with-teeth.
For my purposes (speculating about how the thread of media’s nature and effects runs through national and international trends and movements), a shift of editorial gears is in order. The confluence of black militancy and student rebellion revolve on the hub of electronic media, and it is to student unrest that I want to turn.
My timing is imprecise, but it strikes me that the black militants began shifting their protest to an international level about the time anti-Vietnam protest peaked in America, before the resignation of LBJ. Both the most extreme black militants and students began nudging their forces in the direction of Communist-oriented revolutionary struggle—in word or deed—around the world at about the same time.
Let me leave, then, the black militants at the point where they are urging a hook-up of the U.S. movement to other revolutions in Cuba, Africa, China, etc., with Carmichael in Guinea and Cleaver in Cuba, the Panthers shooting it out in the streets, armed black students occupying Cornell’s campus and a black faction demanding reparations from the churches—all, remember, very openly publicized, stated, threatened or demanded, with boldness, bravado, cheek and dogged conviction.
The wide-spread student uprisings, magnified by media, have hit Americans with a force that far exceeds worry over black militancy. About 89% of us are not colored, but we do have kids, and they have shaken our faith by demanding that a whole roster of “injustices”—of which the racial issue is only one—be set right. The form of their rebellion, and media’s role in it, relate to the civil rights pattern. They have learned more from blacks than vice versa.
What occurred at Selma as a racial issue culminated in Chicago at the Democratic convention as a national issue, the pattern being solidified along the way by various freedom marches, boycotts, the march on Washington and the Pentagon demonstration. By the time the “Battle of Chicago” occurred, the Selma scenario had been refined and streamlined into a battle plan.
The problem is not new. It is how to bring the Cossacks out in full, ugly force. The establishment’s repressive forces must be provoked into the open, made manifest for Americans. T.V. was a tremendous help. Much was made of the fact that “the world was watching. That fact determined, more than anything else, the strategy of the rebels.
Indisputable strains of subversion and paranoia combined in Chicago to ensure the “opposition” would follow the battle-plan. The pro-convention promises of violence and disruption by rebels brought forth with almost Pavlovian precision the counter-threat that heads would roll if disruption occurred. Had Mayor Daley’s lawmen not “overreacted,” protestors would have had to chalk up partial failure. They were not obliged to, however.
“The scene before the Conrad Hilton Hotel was ugly, brutal,” said one editorial. “Demonstrators, bystanders, the press were indiscriminately beaten, and as large groups surged back and forth, the shrieks and chants made a truly fiendish din. And as the demonstrators pointed out repeatedly, the world was watching.”
Indeed, it was, and media pundits were shocked to find that many Americans sided with the police against the demonstrators. When staged casualties and faked brutalities were discovered subsequently by the Kerner Commission, the Daley sympathizers doubtless felt somewhat vindicated. The fakery points up merely how dissidents realize the importance of staging things well. Cornell’s armed occupation was a piece of staging, the sort of grisly, grim role-playing that might not have occurred without the promise of international publicity.
The electronic society is breeding no Walter Mittys; sensation-seeking T.V. invites youthful radicals and dreamers to act out their fantasies in front of the camera. If you have no feeling that numerous youngsters, and quite a few oldsters who recruit them, are living highly symbolic lives inflated falsely by media acclaim, you are missing a central fact of the T.V. society. Mere attention becomes acclaim via the ray-tube, an assignment of national import.
A watching world is a powerful inducement to playacting. But the world watches primarily because the media are in the business Of giving them something to look at—again, a symbiotic relationship that at times threatens us with an unhappy future. There was a joke that two student rebels were at a confrontation and one, spying a T.V. crew, dropped to the ground and began moaning in pain. “Save it,” said his more experienced chum, “the sound man’s out of range.” Approaching, the sound man says, “OK, kid, now!”
How to break the Pavlovian chain? If the backlash feeds on broadcast riot and violence, there are forces who will deliver it as long as media is there to record the “news.” For creation of the backlash is just as much a strategic goal of the true revolutionary as bringing out the Cossacks. It is the radical’s job to create the “police state”—“and why not,” one European student declared, “it is there anyway, just hidden and disguised in the infrastructure. Don’t forget what happened here [in Germany].”
I hadn’t. Eric Hoffer pointed out recently that it was because the Weimar Republic had no Mayor Daley or Chicago police force to fight its battles in Germany that the Nazis came to power. Like Hoffer, a good number of Germans are viewing mounting student violence here and in America with real anxiety. They have seen the results of revolutions of the left and right.
Is there confusion in the information-rich global village? Unparalleled amounts of information move through the airways and cables, but has this led to unity in such issues as Vietnam or an ABM system? Writes Frank E. Armbruster in “The Year 2000,” “The average man in the street, depending heavily on public news media, finds that regardless of the issue, every demand made upon our government both internally and from abroad, is espoused by seemingly ever-present groups in the streets carrying placards condemning our own government.”
“It has become difficult for the average citizen to determine exactly what is the right or wrong of any issue. The result of this is a deep fear in times of crisis from the portentous military threat, great confusion over each new issue that arises, and the gradual erosion of the political will of the populace.” That is Armbruster’s projection—for the year 1985.
Have proliferating media, in the electronic society, united us into a global village? Nationalism and independence movements are at an all-time high, and so many conflicting views and opinions receive the same national focus, the public is swamped with advocacy but few answers. Electronic media are not dissolving national boundaries, but they are breaking up once-monolithic institutions and ideologies. What is left in their place?
A fractured infrastructure and a dazed populace, buffeted back and forth in a hail of conflicting views and special pleading—with words milked of meaning by Humpty Dumpty usage: one moment the Vietnam war Is “unconstitutional” (Fulbright) and later the President has a “constitutional responsibility” to hold “peace” talks without Saigon (Clifford).
One moment we are “helpers” and “advisors” and the next Hubert Humphrey is saying that the South Vietnamese should have no right to hold up peace talks. Announced escalation of bombing is sold to us, only to be discredited in favor of a bombing halt: Communist attacks increase sharply but newscasts state that officials “refuse to see” the attacks as violations of the halt agreement. It’s enough to give any average American a military-industrial complex.
The fine and intricate arts of negotiation and politics (Lindsay says he was defeated by “hate”) have raised deep questions in not-so-sophisticated public circles. A change of guard in America is predicted, and an upsurge of simplistic “law and order.” This is not surprising.
Received in New York on July 31, 1969.
