On Media, Protest, and the Antiwar Movement

"Stated in its simplest form, it is that television provides a new (or, possibly, restores an old) definition of truth: the credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the trust of a proposition. 'Credibility' here does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness (choose one or more) conveyed by the actor/ reporter.

This is a matter of considerable importance, for it goes beyond the question of how truth is perceived on television news shows. If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude. I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar." (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves, 101f)

What comes first—the media's exploitation of the sensational as symbolic, or the activists? Humanity has a strange capacity for being able to see things from another perspective. And yet what happens when technology like television enables us to create perspectives from which no one would have seen a situation otherwise? There is a strange tension through Small's account. It is laced with instances where he accuses the media of bypassing the milk-toast activists at any given demonstration and attending primarily to those radicals who outwardly engage in controversial sensation—be it anything from holding a communistic banner, or engaging in violence. And the media is willing to do this despite the fact that it is not representative of the majority of demonstrators.

Now on the other hand, Both Tracy and Small address the rising sense within these pacificist groups that they need to be attentive to the antics of their demonstration in order to properly gain awareness and expose the injustice they seek to expose. All of a sudden, everyone is understanding what is happening based on the influence of the media coverage—an entirely manipulatable perspective that no single person would have otherwise experience. I expect Small understands the poignancy apparent when he recounts, "Columbia University, in the media center of the United States, was the setting for one of the most important and violent clashes of the era."¹

Neil Postman, one of the fathers of media ecology, wrote extensively on the news in an era of television. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) he writes with prophetic prescience: I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville. (105) It is ironic to see Tracy describe the Chicago protest: "The remnants of the SDS spun into new realms of irrationalism marked by a glorification of dadistic violence, evident in 1969's puerile "Days of Rage."² So then, we circle back to our original question: do we shape our communication mediums? Or do they shape us?