Spotlights and Shadows: Television and the Culture of Politics

Do MASS MEDIA, and especially television, define and manage political life? It is widely suspected and feared, but vaguely. Since this is a very large and neglected territory, I'm going to say some things that are sketchy and general in order to frame some more specific, more definite points. Out of the whole territory I'm going to stress these topics: how TV, especially the news, shapes political language and thought; how consciousness is trivialized by the fetishism of the fact; how the process is internally contradictory, as illustrated, crucially, in TV coverage of the Vietnam war; how TV flattens consciousness about movements, and within movements; how it backfires, how for a time it amplifies opposition, certain types of opposition, and then how it ends up devouring movements. I'm going to talk about how it affects movement leadership and the structure of movement organizations. I'm going to sketch the history of this process in the sixties and seventies, trying to show how media responded to the emergence of a new political situation (which they helped to create). I'll illustrate as much as I can by referring to one night's network news.