[In the following review of The Whole World Is Watching, Lazere contends that Gitlin's relationship to the New Left brings together a wide variety of perspectives in a clear analysis of the mass media's role in the Left's demise.]

This book [The Whole World Is Watching] gains strength from Gitlin's dual perspectives as a New Left activist (he was, in 1963-64, the third president of Students for a Democratic Society, the main movement organization studied here) and as a politically committed scholar (he now teaches sociology of literature and communications at Berkeley). While many leading figures of the New Left have wandered into dubious ideological paths, Gitlin has continued to command widespread respect within and outside the left for both political and intellectual integrity—qualities whose manifestation in the present book [The Whole World Is Watching] remove from it any taint of being a tract or apologia.

The first of three main parts, “Images of a Movement,” focuses on national media coverage of SDS throughout the year 1965 when it first came under the media spotlight. The study is grounded on his interviews and research in the archives at CBS-TV and the New York Times—selected because they were widely considered most sympathetic to the radical movement.

In rebuttal to the neoconservative view of the media elite as part of a left-leaning “new class,” Gitlin argues (as do other recent critics like Herbert Gans and Gaye Tuchman) that most major media executives and top editorial personnel are allies by class identity and ideology of the industrial, political, and military power elite, devoted to maintenance of a capitalistic corporate state, albeit liberally administered. Their ideology, explicit or tacit, combined with the profit-maximizing interests and daily institutional routines of media corporations, imposed certain distorting “frames” on coverage of radical opposition in the sixties even when newspeople believed they were being fair.

Movement demonstrations, for example, were regarded ipso facto as an undesirable disruption of the normal, valid social order and consequently were covered in the same tone as crime reportage. The media denigrated the more temperate radical elements, such as the SDS “old guard” of which Gitlin was a member, and ignored their substantive concerns while luridly exaggerating violent protest—real or anticipated—and focusing on extremist factions even at the time of the mid-sixties when they were still marginal.

Throughout Part I Gitlin brings a literary critic's astuteness to bear on explicating fine shades of tone and semantic slanting in media reportage. He cites a Dan Rather newscast on CBS in 1976 revealing that the FBI's burglaries and wire taps began in the thirties and continued through World War II and the cold war, reaching a peak ‘“during the civil disturbances of the sixties.” Gitlin notes: “The black and student opposition movements of the sixties, which would look different if they were called, say, ‘movements for peace and justice,’ were reduced to nasty little things.”

In Part II, “Media in the Making and Unmaking of the Movement,” Gitlin examines the effect of media coverage on SDS, drawing from his own files, inside views on and interviews with a variety of movement figures.

In its origins SDS was steadfastly dedicated to non-violent protest and “participatory democracy,” construed as meaning (1) decentralized, widespread national organization intended to minimize the authority of individual leaders, and (2) long-term activism on a number of fronts, including civil rights, community organizing, the campus movement, and opposition to U.S. support of foreign dictatorship. This program, however, ran diametrically against the simplistic frames of the media, which were set for charismatic leader-celebrities and visual, dramatic actions on current “hot” issues that would fit neatly into the limited space of page one or the six o'clock news.

Inevitably, the media's distorted emphasis on movement violence and “stars” became self-fulfilling prophecies: more theatrical and violence-prone figures were attracted to the movement and SDS; media-created “leaders” like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman represented no real organization or constituency at all. Thus Gitlin attributes to the liberal media a large part of the blame for the degeneration, splintering, and eventual disintegration of SDS and the whole New Left—although he is equally critical of the movement's own internal confusions and susceptibility to performing for the media. Moreover, the media's selective emphasis on the crazies helped turn the public against the movement and provided a pretext for official attempts to suppress all opposition.

In a brilliant chapter near the end of Part II, titled “Contracting Time and Eclipsing Context,” and in Part III, “Hegemony, Crisis, and Opposition,” Gitlin shifts into a more theoretical mode influenced by Marxist cultural critics including the Frankfurt School (oddly unacknowledged here), Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall. He postulates that in contemporary capitalist society not only the content but the temporal-spatial structuring capacities of mass media have evolved into modes of social control. The media may seem, as politicians like Spiro Agnew and scholars like Daniel Bell and Daniel Boorstin have claimed, to undermine social stability by their constant quest for novelty and sensation as well as their jumbling of images and realities, the authentic and the factitious. But the main effect in the 60's, Gitlin persuasively argues, was to subvert opposition movements by pulling them fatally into the media's time and space warps, fostering illusions of the efficacy of play-acting at instant revolution and guerrilla warfare taken out of its Third-World context.

At the same time, paradoxically, “the stability of the system is predicated on the institutionalization of change and speed,” for the introduction of novelty is controlled by the establishment and contained within its structural and ideological frames. These frames, which include the regular time structures and stereotypy of TV programing, in turn condition the mass public to a normalized, routinized, domesticated order of experience that makes the majority fearful of any fundamental challenge to the social order.

The ultimate, crucial question his analysis tacitly poses is whether any movement for social change regardless of its merits, being perforce dependent on publicity in today's mass-mediated society, can get its message across through the distorting lenses and ideological filters of the media:

People as producers of meaning have no voice in what the media make of what they say or do, or in the context within which the media frame their activity. The resulting meanings, now mediated, acquire an eerie substance in the real world, standing outside their ostensible makers and confronting them as an alien force. The social meanings of intentional action have been deformed beyond recognition.

The critical reception of Gitlin's book in the mass press he criticizes has provided yet another depressing instance of media framing. Unable to effectively fault his facts or analysis, journalistic reviewers have reverted to stereotypes of academic jargon to denigrate his work on stylistic grounds. He has indeed synthesized a vast array of academic sources, mainstream and Marxist, but surely one of his most admirable achievements is having translated all this sociologese into a lucid style and eloquent personal voice. The carping of defensive critics will not prevent this book from solidifying Gitlin's preeminence among younger American cultural analysts.