The Whole World is Watching

Todd Gitlin. The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left.
University of California Press, 1980

Gitlin--a veteran of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the New Left struggles of the 1960's--is mostly interested in understanding the ways in which the collapse of the SDS and the subsequent degeneration of the New Left into increasingly militant and hopelessly revolutionary sects and sub-sects. He also wants future (as of 1980) resistance and opposition groups to learn from those failures and adjust to the ongoing hegemony of liberal capitalist society.

As such, this isn't really a book of history although Gitlin does believe that a historical approach is important in the middle section of the book, which traces the process by which the mass media first marginalized, then reacted to, and then finally--due to the sheer force of its attention on the fragile infrastructure and naive leadership of the SDS--destroyed the radical challenge to American military involvement in Vietnam. The later, more broad-based 'moderate' antiwar movement, then, was in some ways used by the media as a respectable norm against which the radicals could be conceptualized as a disreputable--and marginalized--other.

Ironically, Gitlin published this shortly before the Reagan era--the liberal establishment represented by the New York Times and the TV network news organizations was on its last legs, something he cannot be faulting for not foreseeing. Part I and Part III are most interesting to those with an interest in New Left politics, media criticism, and the Marxist concept of hegemony. Part II, will also be of special interest to historians interested in a particular perspective on the rise and fall of the SDS and Sixties radicalism in general.