How Fake News Was Born by Heather Henderson
NBC NewsWire/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty
Heather Hendershot is a professor of film and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is the author of Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line.
In the weeks leading up to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley turned his town into a fortress. He sealed the manhole covers with tar, so protesters couldn’t hide in the sewers. He installed a fence topped with barbed wire around the Chicago International Amphitheater. He put the entire police force of 12,000 men on 12-hour shifts and called in over 5,000 National Guardsmen. About 1,000 Secret Service and FBI agents were also on duty, as the city braced for the 10,000 protesters who would soon arrive, wound up by a year of political assassinations, urban riots and the raging Vietnam War.
What could possibly go wrong?
With the whole world watching, the three major news networks brought the answer to that question into millions of Americans’ living rooms. They spared barely a second of the ensuing mayhem in their coverage—and in the course of doing so sparked a national debate about objectivity and journalistic integrity. The liberal-minded tuned in and saw textbook police brutality and “Gestapo tactics,” in the words of Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff. But millions of Middle Americans, the citizens Richard M. Nixon would later immortalize as the “silent majority,” saw an entirely different display of excess—on the part not of the police, but of the TV networks.
The Archie Bunkers of America, impassive to the hippies’ and yippies’ plight, saw them playing the newsmen like a fiddle, getting free publicity for their cause and, ultimately, getting what they deserved from the police. The protesters hurled profanities at the cops. They engaged in street theater, nominating a pig as the Democratic presidential candidate. They attempted to sleep in the parks (defying the 11 p.m. curfew) and to hold marches even though permits had been denied by the city. Allen Ginsberg even led the kids in chanting “Om.” The “establishment” response was swift and violent. As right-wing pundit Robert Novak later observed, “The demonstrators came looking for trouble and got what they wanted.” Viewed from that perspective, the 1968 Democratic convention was an inflection point for conservatives who would protest that the mainstream media was, in words that now echo from the White House, “the enemy of the people.”
The violence in Chicago was all-encompassing, and longhairs weren’t the only targets of what the federal government’s Walker Report later described as a “police riot” in the streets outside the convention. Delegates from the convention themselves—accountants in Brooks Brothers shirts, librarians with prim leatherette handbags—who wandered onto Michigan Avenue found themselves flying ass-over-tea-kettle through plate glass windows. Journalists with clearly displayed credentials were attacked, including, most notoriously, CBS’ Dan Rather.
Today, it’s taken for granted that much of our news coverage is slanted left or right, but in the network era there was still a deeply held belief that news could (and should) be completely neutral. The tumult of the 1960s tore apart that notion, even as many viewers struggled to hang onto it. We tend to think of the pre-Watergate era as an Edenic vista of trust and fidelity toward our institutions, especially the media—but the skepticism and stubborn partisan distrust that many feel today was present then, too. The real-time controversy and spin surrounding the shocking images that came from Chicago, many of them revisited here for the first time since August 1968, laid the foundation for the cries of “liberal bias” that hound and undermine the mainstream news media to this day.
This story is too long to republish in full on BFP. For the rest go to:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...968-dnc-219627