The Whole World Is Watching

"The whole world is watching!' chanted the demonstrators in the Chicago streets in 1968, as the TV cameras beamed images of police cracking heads into homes everywhere. In this classic book, originally published in 1980, acclaimed media critic Todd Gitlin first scrutinizes major news coverage in the early days of the antiwar movement. Drawing on his own experiences Todd Gitlin (he was president of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-64) and on interviews with key activists and news reporters, he shows in detail how:
- the media first ignore new political developments;
- then select and emphasize aspects of the story that treat movements as oddities;
- demonstrates how the media glare made leaders into celebrities;
- estranges leaders them from their movement base;
- how it inflated the importance of revolutionary rhetoric, destabilizing the movement, then promoted 'moderate' alternatives--all the while spreading the antiwar message. "

Discuss this relative to Abbey Hoffman and Chicago Seven, John Kerry and the VVAW, Martin Luther King and SCLC.