What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy. Edward P. Morgan. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. 405 pp.
The late A. J. Liebling, press critic for The New Yorker, proclaimed from time to time that, “By not reporting there are a lot of things you can avoid finding out.” In this book, Edward P. Morgan, university distinguished professor of political science at Lehigh University, recounts what we avoided finding out about the 1960s and how that has shaped our stereotypes of the decade. This book is a must-read for journalists and journalism students not only because it tells us of important media history, but also because of the implications of that history for today.
Morgan begins by discussing what he refers to as the “contradictions between capitalism and democracy” that create tension because of the inequality of wealth. He said these contradictions came to a head in the post-World War II period and spawned the forces that generated change in the 1960s. The changes came in participatory democracy, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, war protests, education, and women’s liberation in the 1960s. He examined the coverage of these areas in great detail, looking at coverage by the New York Times, the three news magazines, and the television networks. To this he adds in the center of the book thirty-five pictures that said a lot about media coverage in the sixties.
He found a consistent pattern in coverage that cut across issues: Coverage was from the establishment perspective, and demonstrations were seen as driven by small groups of deviant individuals. The press underestimated the size and significance of these movements, and was quick to cover violence and blame it on the protestors. Thus was the stereotype formed of the Baby Boomers agitating, pushing a misguided agenda, and thereby bringing on turmoil.
Having lived through the 1960s myself, I am not surprised by Morgan’s findings. I remember the daily briefings by U.S. generals in Vietnam that became known as the “5 o’clock follies.” I recall that the claim by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that he could see the light at the end of the tunnel became a national joke with some of us, who wondered if, “Isn’t that the headlight of a locomotive coming toward us?” Those were indications that we were not being told the whole story of the war. And we knew it.
And while the news media minimized the antiwar movement through the mid-1960s, I also noticed that the Gallup Poll reported growing opposition to the war, until by 1968 more than half of Americans opposed it. The social agenda was not set by the press or by the politicians, but by the public itself, and it took at least four years for the press and the politicians to catch up.
We were told that the demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago rioted, but I watched the coverage on television and doubted that interpretation. Morgan points out that civil rights coverage focused on a few big events, like the Rev. Martin Luther King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and the situation at Selma in 1965, but the press generally missed the story of the life blacks lived.
It took the Watts riot to get that point across, and those of us in professional journalism and journalism education were at least chagrined at the discovery that the Los Angeles Times, one of our great newspapers, did not have a single African American in the newsroom, and had to send someone from the advertising department to cover the story.
Likewise, those of us who were paying attention knew that women’s liberation was not about bra-burning—which was an iconic myth—but about real issues of equality that were important for our country. Morgan also points out that movies and TV entertainment also contributed to the disinformation about the 1960s by building scenarios around the establishment stereotypes of the time, and thus helped perpetuate them.
To some extent, the American people recognized that the media were not serving them well. At stake was the credibility of the media, and as journalists and journalism students read this book they should ponder what price the media—especially the press—paid in credibility for their reportorial failings. They also should wonder if we are walking down the same path again as the media offer increasingly inadequate coverage of major concerns of today. Is it good reporting to discuss the federal deficit and never mention the role that tax cuts have played? Is it good reporting to cite Social Security as one of the causes of the deficit, when in fact it has paid its own way and has a surplus of $2.7 trillion? Does it reflect good reporting that you can get a much more complete and more accurate picture of Afghanistan from Greg Mortenson’s 2009 book Stones Into Schools than from our news media?
Morgan has done us a service by refreshing the memory of the 1960s for those of us who were there, and informing those who were not there. But simply looking back is not enough. This book challenges us who are involved in journalism to look ahead and do a better job than was done in the 1960s, or we’re all doomed to repeat our mistakes.
GUIDO H. STEMPEL III
Ohio University