The Revolution Will Be Televised: How Mass Media Made Mass Protest

In the second half of the twentieth century, it came to be widely believed that the natural way to respond to social injustice was to take to the streets and protest—the more people the better. This historical development can only be understood in the context of the emergence of mass media. In several of the world’s most advanced capitalist countries, movements seeking political change found themselves overwhelmed by the power of radio, television, and newspaper coverage. Even when explicitly seeking to avoid mass demonstrations as their preferred tactic, they were swept up by the attention granted to them. Media coverage multiplied the effects of their actions in ways the activists had never imagined; moreover, it transformed the very structure of the movements themselves.

The inventions of writing, and then printing, and then the photograph—and finally the development of the ability to reproduce sound and moving images—were all technological leaps that profoundly transformed human society. Indeed, it is likely that the idea of a “nation” itself was related to the ascendance of the printing press. It is strange to remember this now, but for the vast majority of human history, we could only see what was directly in front of our faces, and the only language we could experience had to be produced by living vocal cords within a few meters of our ears. This is, strictly speaking, how our bodies developed to experience life. It made little sense to “demonstrate” to the entire country with a protest march if only a tiny percentage of the population was going to see it, and rulers could simply choose to ignore it.

Of course, people always had ways to react against ruling elites. These interventions were sometimes violent or imposed direct costs on the targets—people got killed, property got destroyed, grain was seized by the population, and so on. The academic terminology for the wide set of practices people used in these moments, from the ancient world to the twenty-first century, is “contention” or contentious politics.

The US sociologist Charles Tilly noticed that across history, when people protested, they tended to reproduce practices that already existed around them. They drew upon an existing “repertoire” of contention. That metaphor is fittingly theatrical and musical. There are a set of instruments and routines that a community has, a selection of performances everybody knows, and they use them in an improvised way. In moments of rebellion, people turn to what is familiar, even if something unfamiliar might work much better. In sixteenth-century France, Tilly shows (through an analysis of early national media) that people would have never thought of demonstrating or organizing a rally or strike in the way we do today. They did, however, know how to run a tax collector out of town, force down the price of bread, or put on a charivari, the performance of a group belting offensive songs outside the home of a local offender, demanding retribution before they will shut up. Over time, innovation occurs, and new routines of contention emerge as cultures change, but this process is relatively autonomous from the underlying causes of the revolts.

*

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new repertoire of contention was forged through chaotic interactions with the firms that were charged with reporting the news and making profits.

In 1951, British pacifists inspired by the Indian revolutionary launched “Operation Gandhi.” They sought the removal of the US military from their country, the end of nuclear weapons, and the withdrawal of the UK from NATO. Like Black civil rights organizations in the USA, they were a highly disciplined, tightly organized group committed to nonviolence and willing to suffer personal consequences. They underwent extensive training and made concerted attempts to present themselves as upstanding citizens rather than kooky vegetarian eccentrics (in the years just after World War II, pacifists often had that reputation). And, like Gandhi himself, they learned that actions unreported by the media would often amount to nothing.

In the beginning, they considered two different approaches. The first was to launch a bold “umbrella” campaign in central London, with the umbrella symbolizing the futility and absurdity of trying to protect oneself from a nuclear explosion. They would parade with umbrellas in Grosvenor Square, suspend them from balloons over the capital, and carry them as they followed prominent figures from the US around the city. This was seen as too provocative. Instead, they chose to go out to military bases and atomic energy plants far from the city. Their activism took the form of a direct moral appeal to the people they hoped to convert. But out in the middle of nowhere, workers at the military-industrial complex simply ignored them, local farmers mocked them, and the media didn’t send anyone to cover them. The pacifists found this embarrassing and ineffective. They realized they really needed to get people’s attention. This may seem obvious to us now, but at the time they were learning by doing. One thing the pacifists figured out quickly was that they had to explain the meaning of their activities to passersby. They addressed this by making pamphlets.

Mass actions had never been on their agenda, both because they knew their causes were unpopular, and because absolute discipline was considered essential. But over the next few years, British dissidents—especially a group called the Committee of 100 led by philosopher Bertrand Russell—learned that assembling “very large numbers” in cities was the best way to make a splash. Shivering in a field somewhere was not. But the shift to mass protests created a troubling problem—how could you maintain strict discipline as numbers swelled?

In 1960 in the United States of America, a group of young men founded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a left-wing association inspired by the heroic achievements of the Black civil rights movement in their country. The largely white students admired campaigns carried out by rock-solid organizations such as CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), and they were horrified by the domestic social conditions that made them necessary. By this time, the United States—a Western European settler colony that rapidly expanded in size after its founding in 1789—had become by far the most powerful nation in the world, and it had never granted full citizenship to its nonwhite population.*

Students for a Democratic Society had its institutional roots in an old anti-Communist organization, but the members rejected anticommunism as a guiding philosophy for policy. They fiercely opposed US foreign policy during the Cold War, especially the interventions that took the side of colonialism in the Third World. SDS supported civil rights and advocated for a more socialist economy, and it also took aim at an emerging process that affected students more directly. Advanced industrial society in both the capitalist West and the socialist bloc had undergone a profound bureaucratization that pushed individuals far away from the spaces where real decisions were made, and away from each other. In their influential 1962 “Port Huron Statement,” SDS members proposed “participatory democracy,” which would mean that individuals engage directly in decision-making, and a system in which “politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community.”

Objectively speaking, these were some of the richest and most comfortable individuals that had ever lived on planet Earth. They spent their time learning so they could take important jobs in the most powerful nation in the world. But this generation of students often felt like they were little more than cogs in an educational machine that was increasingly integrated into the capitalist military-industrial complex. They were indeed important to the economy, which needed scientists and technicians, and their numbers were inflated by a demographic boom, meaning the balance of power shifted decisively to the young in the 1960s.

SDS was not focused on large demonstrations, and had rarely thought about interacting with the media. It was a small group aiming to directly organize students, without a mass communications strategy. Its members were hesitant to create rigid structures or leadership positions with clear duties, which was a radical deviation from the way older organizations like unions and political parties had always operated. In the first half of the 1960s, SDS grew slowly through face-to-face outreach and personal connections as it experimented with new forms of political organization. But in 1965, an unexpected surge of attention engulfed the organization.

That fall, even though SDS had declined to lead a set of protests against the Vietnam War, the media chose to focus on the organization. SDS already had a bit of a reputation as an anti-war outfit, so perhaps reporters, always pressed for time, had seen the name somewhere and could use it to tell the story. Writing later, SDS president Todd Gitlin recalled that this pushed “a bewildered and incoherent SDS to the center of attention; SDS was suddenly outfitted with a reputation for activity that drastically outdistanced its political reality.” The young leftists had always been skeptical of the corporate press as a matter of course, but they very quickly learned that mainstream journalism, embedded within a certain ideological framework and driven by the logic of capital accumulation, could rapidly reframe reality in deeply misleading ways. At the same time, some of them grasped the enormous power available here, if they could only counterattack in the press with an elegant set of “judo” techniques to finesse their own message into mass media channels. For example, one 1965 SDS statement pointed out that “we have seen antiwar leaflets photostated on the front page of newspapers with circulations in the millions. We could have been at the mimeograph for ten years, and not reached as many draftable young men as the press has reached for us in five days.”

All of this presented two problems. First, who was supposed to do this? SDS didn’t have a press office, and its loose, quasi-leaderless structure made it difficult to decide who was supposed to speak for the organization. Rifts emerged as the media identified arbitrary spokesmen and celebrities. And secondly—paradoxically— the popularity bestowed on the group created an even bigger issue. SDS was flooded with new members, allowing it to grow at a rate of 300 percent in a single year. But these new arrivals did not want to join SDS— they wanted to join the organization they had read about in the newspaper, which didn’t actually exist. They showed up with longer hair, less ideological commitments, and a strange set of assumptions about the organization.

But because of the loose and “participatory” nature of SDS, there was no formal process for integrating and educating new members. They had paid intentionally little attention to organizational questions. In some cases, the new recruits (who were never actually recruited) simply set up their own new chapter somewhere, without ever speaking with the old guard. Gitlin came to the conclusion that both leaderlessness and unexpected, rapid growth spelled the end of the movement. By 1967, some protesters were complaining about “structure freaks,” those who wanted to have any organization whatsoever.

Gitlin eventually came to some conclusions about the way mass media worked and what constituted a story for the modern press. To qualify, the phenomenon at hand would have to be new—it was called the “news” after all—and it would have to arrive with intensity and surprise the audience. The media would inevitably choose from a huge assortment of existing facts and illuminate just one of many truths. Furthermore, any story had to be readily comprehensible to the general public. It had to fit into preexisting categories and correspond to the range of things that people already knew about and considered possible. In other words, it must be comparable to something that has already happened. It must be “old,” at the same time.

As the decade wore on, some members of this generation got caught in a perverse feedback loop. The individuals that quite liked media attention sought more of it, consciously or unconsciously adopting tactics that would provoke more coverage. But none of that changed the simple fact that the US government wanted to continue the war in Vietnam, and could afford to treat the demonstrators like a noisy minority (with frequent help from the press). As mass protest emerged as the predominant instrument of the antiwar movement, the original SDS leadership decided to retreat from the scene and go back to their roots. They had never wanted to privilege street demonstration, nor become a single-issue anti-war shop. They committed themselves to a new initiative called the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) and moved into the inner city to organize African American communities in the United States.

*Even the limited successes of the Black civil rights movement must be understood in the context of the geopolitical situation abroad, and the putative commitment to democracy and equality at home. The Soviet Union accused the US of being a fundamentally racist society, and elites in Washington were increasingly embarrassed about proving them correct. Like the UK, the United States had some of the highest levels of media saturation in history. In a very different context, when people demonstrated in 1960 against another apartheid system in South Africa, a US Cold War ally, authorities simply gunned them down, killing or wounding 250 people in the township of Sharpeville.

__________________________________

Excerpted from If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution by Vincent Bevins. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.