Bearing witness, seeking justice, videography in the hands of the people. As you all know from the murder of George Floyd to the recent protests in Iran, videography in the hands of the people can play a key role in protecting our rights and our civil liberties. In MIT we want to make the world a better place, but if you want to make the world a better place, you need to understand how it works. The new ways in which videography is being used by the people provide unprecedented data about the workings of the society we live in. But these data won't deepen our understanding of society on their own. We need the tools of the humanities and the social sciences to interpret the data with rigor, with perspective, and with empathy. I hope that this conference will contribute to that investigation. I'd like to thank our speakers, I'd like to thank students visiting from the Hartford School District who will provide their unique viewpoints as they facilitate workshops. I'd like to thank the conference's steering committee and everyone who helped organize this event. It was a big job. And most of all, I would like to thank Professor Ken Manny who came up with the vision for this conference and who pushed very, very hard to make sure that it happened. Thank you, Ken. And now, just as she walks in, it's my pleasure to hand the microphone to Shass Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Tracy Jones. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. So I have the pleasure of introducing Professor Heather Hindishat. She studies TV news, conservative media, political movements in American film and television history. She has held fellowships at Vassar College, New York University, Princeton, Harvard, Radcliffe, and Stanford. And she has also been a Guggenheim fellow. Her courses at MIT emphasize the interplay between creative, political, and regulatory concerns and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen, big or little. I have to take a deep breath. Students in her class are encouraged to consider the ways that TV and film writers, directors and producers have attempted innovation while working within an industry that demands novelty but also often fears new approaches to character and narrative. Professor Hindishat is the editor of Nickelodeon Nation, the history, politics, and economics of America's only TV channel for kids, and the author of Saturday Morning Sensors, Television Regulation Before the V-Chip, Shaking the World for Jesus, Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture, What's Fair on the Air, Cold World Right Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest, and Open to Debate, How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line. For five years, she was the editor of Cinema Journal, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her latest book, When the News Broke, Chicago 1968, and the Polarizing of America is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press this fall. Now I'd like to welcome Professor Heather Hindishat to the stage. Thank you for that introduction, and there we go. Thank you for that introduction. Thank you all for coming. I'm really honored to be the opening plenary speaker for the conference and to spending the next day or two with you. As a media historian, my objective is always to tell stories about the past, go to archives, find new information about the past, find new ways of understanding what happened, but also to think about how those stories about the past can help us think through various issues in the present. And so that is part of what I'm going to be doing today in telling you about material from my book, When the News Broke, that Tracy just mentioned, which is a book about Chicago in 1968 in August during the Democratic National Convention. It is a story of authoritarianism, of police brutality. For our purposes for thinking about issues of media and technology, it's a story of top-down media production to a large extent. That is to say media produced by companies or like ACBS and NBC or by sort of legitimately authorized kinds of journalists from magazines and newspapers, and to a lesser extent from some underground newspapers, some smaller sort of counter-cultural productions. It is also a story about media production circumscribed by a number of concrete technological limitations. And I'm going to go into a number of those throughout my presentation over the next 45 minutes. And it's also a story with repercussions, with fallout, with following this convention, and the notion of liberal media bias that we hear bandied about sort of took root in American culture. It had been seen as a kind of peripheral, extremist notion, the idea that the media was liberal, that CBS and NBC were liberal, because they were seen as very, very neutral kind of players. And this idea that the media has liberal biases is almost quaint now in the light of accusations of fake news and enemy of the people sort of talk and the kind of polarization that we're seeing. So we're going back to a sort of primordial moment that in some ways helps us understand how we got from there to here, to where we are right now. So as I said, I'm drawing from this book that's coming out in December. Let me start by sort of setting the scene, okay? So the book looks at four days in Chicago and the aftermath of those four days when the Democrats gathered to choose their next candidate for president and vice president. And Lyndon Baines Johnson, the president, had declined to run again, and it was assumed that the candidate would be his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, but thousands of delegates came in and many of them hoped that there would be a different candidate or that at least if it were Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, that he would have a tempered platform on Vietnam. He would have a different approach to Vietnam. Okay. So that's the basics. The bigger story to help us understand going into Chicago is the scene in America at the time that we're in a kind of tinderbox situation. It's clear that we are not just about to win the war in Vietnam, which is what the government had been telling people for a couple of years. There had been a number of high-profile assassinations. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June, which was shocking. And he was expected to be a strong contender to be the nominee for president. He would have had a peace platform. Martin Luther King is assassinated in April. And there's a number of urban uprisings all over the country following the assassination of King. And of course, that had been going back to earlier in the 60s, starting with the famous Watts uprising of 1965. And this is the smallest list of cities where these uprisings happened. D.C., Newark, Detroit famously in 1967 was basically on fire for an entire week. And then Chicago had an uprising following the death of King. And there was a great deal of shooting in the street, and the vast majority of people killed by police were people of color. Right before the Democratic Convention in Chicago, a week or two before, there had been a Republican National Convention where they nominated Nixon in Miami. And there was an uprising there about a mile away from the conference. And the sheriff of Miami famously said when this happened, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. And famously, I say, because it had some traction at the time. But then, of course, more recently, we heard the former president use exactly these words a certain moment during the Black Lives Matter protest following the murder of George Floyd. So it's a phrase even has a great deal of resonance. So it's a powder cake situation. There are obviously some comparisons we can make between then and now, an ongoing crisis of police brutality, particularly targeting people of color. There was a crisis of leadership then in 68. And because everything went so badly in Chicago, that really helped Richard Nixon get elected to fulfill his promise to restore law and order. Another phrasing that the former president was fond of using. A sort of dog whistle to Nixon for putting down people of color and various other progressive social justice movements in the US. Okay, so that sets you up for just America in 1968 very briefly. The other thing to think about heading into Chicago is what I call a sort of infrastructure of censorship. There are a lot of technological limitations that the mayor of Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley, had put into place. And it's pretty detailed, I won't go into all of them. But a key one is that there was an electrical worker strike that basically prevented live coverage of the convention outside the convention hall. And it was standard for network news people to leave the convention and go to the hotels where the candidates were and to interview them. But also, at this particular convention, there were 10,000 protesters in the streets. There was a story to be told in the streets. And that was very, very hard to do because it's an electrical worker strike. And Mayor Daley was a very authoritarian mayor. He had the unions kind of under his thumb. And it was very telling that this was the one strike that he couldn't settle. This was not someone who often dealt with the problem of strikers, because the unions were sort of in his back pocket and he had a lot of patronage jobs and so on. So it's no coincidence that the strike was not resolved at this moment. There are also technological limitations that create part of this infrastructure of censorship, as I call it. The limitations of news and image gathering, such as the camera weights and sizes and so on. I'll show you some pictures of that in a minute. I'm gonna try to stay away from all these tech-stevy slides because it can be boring. You're like, oh, she's saying the same thing that I'm reading up there. So I'm gonna try to stick to lots of pictures to kind of keep you awake, keep going. And finally, I'll say that part of this infrastructure of censorship was that mainstream journalism had certain professional norms of fairness. What we now call both sidesism, that would be anachronistic to apply then. But with only NBC, CEBS, and ABC doing the news, and NBC and CBS doing the majority of the news in Chicago, there was a sense that they should be very neutral, they should be fair to everyone. And that often meant undercovering the mistakes that Mayor Daley was making, undercovering the police brutality, so that they would not appear to be being unfair to the city of Chicago and to Mayor Daley himself. Now, I mentioned the electrical worker strike, which the fallout from that in the main was that for this convention, you needed thousands, not hundreds, thousands of extra telephone lines installed. And since we have a range of age groups in the room, I'll just say like, telephones had wires that went into the wall. And if you had a major political event, like a convention, you had to install lots of extra telephones. Why? Well, first of all, reporters needed telephones to phone in their stories. And so this is a picture actually from the New York Public Library that I found that I thought was very kind of beautiful. But this could be any hotel in America in some ways, in the 1950s or 1960s. A wall of wooden telephone booths, and if a major news event happened, every one of them would be filled by a reporter on the phone calling in their story to their newspaper. So in addition to your phone booths, you needed extra lines installed throughout town because there's hundreds of thousands or many, many thousands of extra people in town. The networks needed these extra lines to broadcast live outside the convention hall, as I've said. They couldn't set up their trucks outside in the street because they didn't have the electrical lines. And when they found some electrical lines, they were mysteriously cut. And that just sort of kept happening. So there was obviously a little bit of sabotage going on. The delegates themselves, the thousands of people inside the convention hall, needed extra telephone lines installed so they could talk to each other because they didn't have phones in their pockets. And so how were they going to talk about, here's how we can come up with a new Vietnam War platform. Here's how we can, whatever kind of hobnobbing they need to do was seriously stymied by this extreme lack of telephones, OK? So that just gives you a basic idea of how important the telephone issue really was. So coming into Chicago, the assassinations, the crisis of America, the Richard Nixon nomination and all these things would be on your mind to say you're a journalist driving into town.   They tried to hide those. They installed new flowers everywhere. I mean, the roots hadn't even taken root. They pulled them out of pots and just put them around to make it look like there are lots of flowers in Chicago. And in addition to that, you've got welcome signs for Mayor Daley everywhere. Hello, Democrats. Welcome to Chicago. And it wasn't really an option if you didn't feel like putting in your window because they would be like, oh, we'll send the health inspector over right away to make sure, and then you were shut down. So you just said yes. You took the signs in your window. Then let's say you're this hypothetical journalist. You get to your hotel.  You're ready to get to work. The picture of Mayor Daley is on a sticker in the cradle of the phone, right? Welcome to the International Democratic Convention. Again, his face.  So it sort of added insult to injury to see his face as you couldn't get through because there aren't enough electrical lines because of the electrical worker strike. So that gives you more sense of the scene on the ground for journalists arriving in town. And then there are these technological issues that I referenced earlier. Cameras, and this is actually an image from 1964 from the convention in the Republican convention, but it looked very similar to the sorts of cameras you'd see on the floor in 1968.   Then he'd have a cable coming out going to a sound man. Again, all men. Or sometimes the cable would actually go to the reporter. They would have to skip the sound man and just, you know, the reporter would be reporting and also doing working his own sound system. So it's not a very portable system. This is technically a portable system because of this giant plastic harness that you can use so you don't theoretically fall down when you put this giant thing on and you walk around the convention hall. So these signs of things would already be a bit awkward in the street, but of course they weren't possible because of the electrical issues. Another option would be, oh, what about a 16-millimeter camera which weighs only 20 to 30 pounds, depending on if it's got a battery in it or whether it's hand-cranked, right, which would make it lighter. Can hoist it on your shoulder. The issue there, again, for some of the younger people in the room, is that you had to develop film. So you shoot this film in the street and then you have to rush it back to the convention center on motorcycles. And they have trailers set up there where you can develop the film in the trailers and then they have technicians there, the networks to edit it and to get it on the air. So it's not the most efficient sort of system. It's possible, but it's extra hard because you need to turn on lights if it's at night, for example, to shoot. So you have these handheld, large sort of lights. You turn them on and then the police immediately go, aha, I see that light, I see there's a journalist and they take a night stick and they break the light. And then they probably break the camera as well.  So 60 millimeter was not a great option. That said, there is some 60 millimeter footage from the convention that remains that we still study now when we watch today. Another issue going into Chicago and I already mentioned this, the sort of perceived trustworthiness of the networks and the perceived neutrality of the networks. You've got Walter Cronkite as the main anchorman for CBS and he's regularly rated in surveys as the most trusted man in America until the convention where everything goes to hell in a hand basket. You also have NBC's Huntley and Brinkley who are likewise seen as fairly neutral, perhaps in their private life. They tend to vote one way or another and that might come through in a New Yorker magazine profile but the public perception is that they are doing their jobs in a very sort of neutral manner. So I mentioned how if you turn on a light, the bulb would get busted out.  And one thing that's fascinating here is that if you read like interviews with journalists of the time who had covered Detroit or Washington DC or Newark or other cities that had uprisings where the people were in the street and there was a looting in arson and the police were shooting, journalists generally felt that the police kind of had their back, that they were there as a neutral person trying to do their job, they knew they were in danger, they were in the street in the middle of all of this consurgation and so on and they knew that they could be harmed but it was just part of their job but they felt that the police had their back, the police would actually say get out of the way, you know, whatever, they would sort of help them out in certain ways. Chicago was really different. This is the first time when journalists are saying we are actually the prime target for attack and of course another exception there was the coverage of civil rights in the South where journalists were quite often targeted so there's that as well but the level of targeting of journalists was really sort of over the top. This is a very famous image of a Chicago photojournalist Paul Sikera. He's capturing a shot of himself being maced for being a photojournalist and he's actually held the camera up to his face to try to keep the mace out of his face and taken a shot as the mace kind of comes toward him and I say this is famous, this is one of the images from Chicago that's been reproduced quite a bit over the years and if it were today it would be in color but I feel like it resonates quite strongly today. We've seen a lot of images of police harming people over the past few years and the smiling is of course one of the most terrifying things here, this sort of sense of enjoying what they're doing and that is not uncommon in these images from Chicago. It's very alarming. Another famous image is of this New York Times photographer Barton Silverman being beaten for being a New York Times photographer and one thing that's typical about this image is how overwhelmed he is by so many people that 10 cops to one person and in Chicago there are 10,000 protesters who are protesting the convention itself, protesting the war. There are 100,000 people working security. It's 10 to one. So that includes the entire Chicago police force, the National Guard, Secret Service, private security agencies. So the sort of overkill here is quite extreme. In addition to targeting protesters or hippies or some kind, people derided as long hairs as it were at the time, just regular citizens in the street. If you were in downtown Chicago, you were probably gonna be in trouble during those four days in August and this is a lesser known image and one thing I've tried to do in my research on this is kind of retrieve images that haven't entered our mythical archive of the images for Chicago. This is a UPI news service image of a woman fleeing on her bicycle and her child has been tear gassed and there are reports of people just driving through downtown on a motorcycle. They get hit by a police officer or they have a window down in their car and they get maced through the window. So it was a kind of indiscriminate attack on anyone who just happened to be out in public. One of the most famous images of Chicago is this one in front of the Chicago Hilton Hotel. So this is from what came to be known as the Battle of Michigan Avenue on the third day of the convention. And these images from this, I've put in quotation marks, police riot. I'll explain what that means in a moment. They filled TV viewers with anger and specifically anger against the network news which was seen as at fault for showing these images of police brutality and for showing bias against the Chicago police by showing what they did, by reporting what they did. I put police riot in quotation marks because I'm actually referring to a famous statement from the Walker Report which was the name of the government study that was commissioned right after the convention. And speaking of bias, one thing that's so fascinating about the Walker Report is that the creators of that report, commissioned by the government, tell us what happened and they had to do this report in large part because people were so angry and assumed that the network said, just somehow made up this story. They really wasn't that bad or whatever. The protesters deserved it because they provoked the police and they deserved to be beaten. This was the common line. So the government funds this report and the people creating the report go into it, you read interviews with them later, really with a very strong bias toward the police. They assume that what they're gonna find is that the news really did misreport this, that people were very provocative of police and sort of were asking for it and ultimately deserved to be beaten. And as they triple-checked their facts, they found that that was not the case, that this really had been what they described as a police riot, that protesters certainly had engaged in some activities that were hurling obscenities at police, hurling objects at them sometimes. It's not that they didn't do anything to defend themselves, but the police really were at fault. Against everything they felt going into the study, these were the results that they came up with. In the name of bringing in a few other images outside of our mythical archive of Chicago images that get recycled in, say, Ken Burns documentaries or PBS documentaries, whatever, I thought I'd show you just a couple more from the Battle of Michigan Avenue in the McCarthy headquarters. One of the candidates had headquarters in the hotel and they brought people inside and set up a sort of emergency field hospital and they tore up the bedsheets and put them on people's heads, mostly heads, that's where a huge amount of the injuries were. And NBC had hired a war photographer, David Douglas Duncan, to do freelance work for them, which is fascinating. This fellow has just come back from the Tet offensive, from doing this combat footage and then he finds himself doing combat footage in the US. Another image that I find quite striking is from that same night is this room where everyone's being treated and cared for and they're watching TV and in effect, they're watching TV of what happened to them because it's not live, because it takes three hours after this battle happens, over three hours for it to actually show up on TV. So it ends up being around midnight when American viewers and the people that've been beaten see what happened on television. So after all of this, a survey two months later by the University of Michigan asked respondents if they had heard about the police and demonstrators in Chicago and what they thought about the level of police violence. So there was a general sense in the culture that people were angry and et cetera, but how could you gauge this? So they tried to crunch some numbers on this. And what they found was that 12% had not heard what was going on, which is kind of amazing because these are images that in contemporary parlance went viral. They wouldn't say that then. But they were not only on late at night when they finally got to the convention hall, but they were still photos, were in newspapers, they were in magazines, they were the images, the moving images were repeated on the television news throughout the country for days afterwards. It was hard not to see these images, but 12% of the people's surveys said they weren't aware. 12% didn't know what they thought about it. 18% of American surveyed felt that too much force had been used in Chicago. 23, sorry, 32% thought it was the right amount of force, and 25% felt that it was not enough force. So that is 57% of people who are pro police coming out of this, which is, it's amazing. It's a very high number. And at this point, I'll just add for a few more numbers, the American population is about 88% white identified Americans. So this is seen as like to a survey of white attitudes at the time. And I'll also add that the Democratic National Convention was the single highest rated program in all of 1968. So just to give you a sense of how many people were actually watching this, not just the people who saw the aftermath of the images. So what are a few takeaways at this point? Well, a majority of Americans sided with the police in Chicago against protesters, hippies, and hippies, and by extension against the media. Most felt that TV over reported police brutality, didn't provide enough context that showed why protesters deserved the treatment they got. And the reality from my own research findings is that the media under reported police violence in Chicago out of this sense of fairness and the professional norms that I cited earlier. 5% of the coverage, okay, 95% of NBC's coverage and CBS's coverage was inside the convention hall and three to 5% was in the streets. So the amount of violence they showed was actually pretty small, right, percentage wise. And yet people felt that the news had shown too much. What's fascinating to me when I think about this in comparison to today and these reactions is, and I'm not sure anyone live streaming this can see my hands, but I'm holding my hands up to my face. Let's say that I'm holding a camera and I'm filming this room right now like this. Okay, so the critique at the time was, well, you showed this, but you didn't pivot left or right, right, so you didn't show the whole room. And if you had taken more footage and edited it together better, you could have told a better story. All right, you just did a bad job. You didn't get the right images. You didn't tell the right story. We know that stories are created. They're not just found. They're not just neutrally out in the world, but they have to be created and put together. And that's a very different argument than someone saying, okay, you put your camera here and what you show me was fake. It simply didn't happen. Now, there's all kinds of ways to explain that. I mean, in a sense, it's a kind of ontological shift in how you perceive picture telling in reality. And of course, today we have deep fakes and we have imagery that can be much more literally fake than what you could see in 1968. But obviously it also speaks to a new level of authoritarianism and what President Biden recently called semi-fascism or what one might simply call fascism in terms of attitudes about the news, among other things. I talked about the findings from that University of Michigan study, which are rather famous, but there are less often cited findings from that same study about attitudes of black respondents, which at this point are about 10% of the US population. In the entire pool of black respondents overall, 63% said that police use too much force. For blacks under 50, the percentage was 78% of people who felt that police use too much force. And for blacks with at least some college education, police use too much force, 82% of the time. So obviously we see a very big difference here.  The Amsterdam News, the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier.  But also in the mainstream media, the New York Times, et cetera, one hears black Americans saying that Chicago demonstrated or at least should have demonstrated to the white majority the reality of police brutality that blacks face every day. And heading into Chicago, the Reverend Jesse Jackson predicted is speaking to some organizers. He said, you know, it looks very likely people are gonna be beaten in Chicago because Mayor Daley is saying as much before the convention even starts. And he predicted that this could be helpful for the movement because it would bring home the reality of what police brutality was like for white middle class Americans for the so-called silent majority. And of course, that didn't happen. I do think that this white on white violence and this is part of the findings of my research on this was a kind of tipping point for Americans. And there's a kind of incoherence here because on the one hand, a lot of viewers of white middle class viewers seeing this on TV, they already have very negative attitudes about hippies and yippies, about war protesters, long hairs. If you ever seen Dragnet episode from 1967, the kind of right wing hostility towards anyone with long hair or a beard who looked different, who didn't shower enough, these kinds of complaints and sort of the disgust in the culture was pretty widespread. So on the one hand, you have people sort of cheering on the police. But on the other hand, you have people who have grown tragically sort of used to seeing white on black violence in the course of Watts and Detroit and other uprisings throughout the country. And the white on white violence is a kind of tipping point for them sort of feeling like, wow, now things have really sort of gone over the edge. Now America has reached a crisis point and what can we do to fix it? How can, what is our way forward? And unfortunately, in my opinion, the answer to that question, what can we possibly do was the election of Richard Nixon. That's sort of how this played out. I argue that the network news didn't fail viewers by exhibiting a so-called liberal bias towards the Chicago police, but they did fail viewers in certain ways. And now I wanna take just a few minutes to move inside the convention hall. Most of the historical traction around Chicago has been outside in the streets. But if we move inside the convention hall, we find that in addition to undercovering violence in the name of fairness and so on in the streets as I already mentioned, they also avoided a sort of deep contextualization that would help viewers get past the horse race elements of the nomination process. And this is probably true of a lot of conventions.  Who's behind? What are the votes? What are the numbers? And those are sort of the professional norms. But what that meant was they were missing out on the social justice issues that were in play in the convention hall. Where you had challenging delegates from so many states, from Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, virtually all the southern states, delegates showed up saying, the delegates that the official delegates brought in were not properly elected. We weren't allowed to vote on these delegates. Voter suppression in play and we would like to be seated instead of say the delegates that came in from Mississippi. And in Mississippi they won and the other delegations lost in different ways. It's very complicated procedural stuff and that's I think why the networks undercover did in part is it's really hard to explain all the ins and outs and the Roberts rules of orders that were in play. But they ultimately said as procedural stuff and they didn't really get into the social justice issues that were happening. So I feel like that was a failure of the news in Chicago. They did cover some aspects of the crisis in the convention hall. This is a photo of some of the pro-peace delegates in the convention hall holding up these stop the war signs which if you look closely you can see the fold lines and the signs and that these protest signs were printed overnight secretly on pages of the Chicago Tribune. They didn't arrive in Chicago with a nice paper order they'd put in place with a contract with a printing company. It was all very seat of the pants once they realized they wouldn't be allowed to bring in their protest materials. So they had to print these overnight, fold them up and hide them in their clothing to bring them in because you were only allowed to come in with Hubert Humphrey material and material that supported the Lyndon Mains Johnson sort of line on the war. So you had to sneak in the anti-war signs and people brought in bed sheets. They stole bed sheets from the hotel and they painted stuff, the war on the bed sheets. They hid things in their hats because the women wore these giant hats and they pulled them out of their hats. I mean, it was really very inventive. And the media covered that pretty well. It was a good story. It was an entertaining story in many ways. They also covered violence against themselves. Dan Rather was famously slugged by Daily Stugs which I've put in quotation marks not because they weren't thugs but I'm quoting Walter Cronkite who sort of lost his cool when Dan Rather was punched and fell out of the ground. Less often remembered is that Mike Wallace also got caught up in a tussle and punched the ground and after that he was actually arrested taken out of the convention hall. In terms of a delegate protest, we did see a reasonable amount of coverage of Julian Bond who was protesting the Georgia delegation that had been selected by Governor Lester Maddox, one of the most famous segregationists in America sort of just up there with George Wallace. Another key moment inside the convention hall that the networks under covered was Fannie Lou Hamer's appearance speaking for the Alabama Challenging Delegate. So she had been a key player in 1964. She's back in 68. The Mississippi challengers were seated in 68 and now she's speaking up for the Alabama challengers who ultimately lose. And I'm just gonna put in a quick plug for this new book until I'm free by Keisha Blaine who is now a professor at Brown University that speaks to the importance of Fannie Lou Hamer's and historical figure and as the subtitle puts it her enduring message to America. I wanna highly encourage that one for you to pick that up. And finally, there's another issue that they didn't cover very well at the convention which was Reverend Channing Philips was the first national party black nominee for president. It was a symbolic nomination. Everyone knew that he wasn't going to win, he wasn't a contender but it is quite interesting that this is the first time this happened at a convention in 1968. So a name that has largely been lost to history I think. And I'll just show you one last image from inside the convention hall. This is Eddie Anderson, a young delegate from California. As things come to a head with the bond, Julian Bond challenge against the Georgia delegation, things just sort of spiral out of control in the convention hall. It's 2.45 in the morning and they have business planned to keep them going to at least 5.30 in the morning. But the hall just erupts in anger around what's been happening around the Georgia delegation and then this fellow, Eddie Anderson sets his credentials on fire or he tries to. They're not really very flammable. It's a symbolic gesture and the news rushes over because of course this is amazing. Like visually, it's quite a story.  And this is sort of the straw that breaks the camel's back finally it's over and they adjourn early and then pick up again the next day. Okay, so that's just a handful of images from inside. So they were not only thinking about what the issues of social justice and brutality and so on are in the streets but also what was happening in the convention hall itself. Let's turn to the aftermath. These are immediate aftermath of people's anger at the networks as I've already said. Letters running to CBSR 11 to one against the network. In terms of media responses, the local Chicago media fights back. They create a new publication called Chicago Journalism Review, which is sort of the Chicago version of Columbia Journalism Review if you've heard of that. A publication that is about news, bi-professional news people, but with a strong critical edge. How can we be critical of news that our colleagues, our peers are producing? Another immediate reaction on the media front is a number of films produced by an upstart film group in Chicago called Film Group. And I'm gonna show you a four minute clip and then head into my final comments from a film called American Revolution 2, Battle of Chicago, which they released in 1969. And I will just note that there is some profanity in this clip and I will also note there's a cutaway. There's two cutaways that might be hard to understand. If you don't have all the context, one is they have some white folks from Appalachia who are in the film because one of Film Group's objectives was to get black people of Chicago and Appalachian transport to Chicago to talk about their common cause around labor issues and suppression by Mayor Daley. And you'll also see a shot of Mayor Daley when he is talking about his shoot to kill and shoot to maim order that he put out during the Chicago uprising after the death of Dr. King. So just a little context to help that make more sense for you. See, black people have been demonstrating and going on for, I don't know how long. And we've been getting our heads beaten, what not. We knew what was gonna happen when those folks went down there because we have seen the pigs on the scene. We know what he's like. We know what he's capable of.   And so everybody gets up tight when a few hunkies get their heads beat. What did they do when we was getting our heads beaten? So I don't even wanna deal with why they got their heads beaten.  I just wanna deal with black and black liberation.  Have my baby in one hand, my gun in the other and walking up to some hunky, all hunkies, saying I'm here, motherfucker, to get what's mad. Right on. But like all over the city of Chicago, each person like black power is doing its own thing and other than the Irish power, whatever you wanna call it, we're all people and all poor folks.  They worked on you with that thing. We realized a whole lot so like Dillion, all we realized we in the same boat. Power blows from a bare level gun. Power blows. Did you feel that something had to be done about daily before the Democratic convention? That's right.  He doesn't sit up there and got so much power, man. Tell her he works in Hitler. I said to him very emphatically and very definitely.  Sure, everybody get a gun, go down the street and every dark one you see, shoot. You know what I mean? They're all evil. But after it kind of calmed down and everything else, why, there was a different story to them. To shoot to main or cripple, anyone looting, any stores in our city. Isn't he after all the man who coined the phrase good government is good politics? He does believe it. And he thinks good government includes the suppression of leftist dissent. Well, there it is, man.  So his colleagues come up there and told him, say, look here, man, you got to modify this thing. So he goes and modified, but still mean the same thing. But when they had this convention, they said, this is my city and you all can't do what y'all gonna do. So he figured that these black brothers is gonna start some of these things.  You know, like, you know, when you playing football or something like that, you know how to coach, keep coaching and tell you, say, well, look at that, we got to do this and we got to do that. So naturally, Jack, when this convention comes, these hippies and hippies come in, but there ain't no black folks, they don't care who they are there.  The police were there. The police, all this military force were there for the black people there. That's right, man. But we was cool. We laid dead. We gonna dig and see what happened. But yet, still, the police, they got to whip somebody because they fired up. They just got to whip somebody. They don't care who they were. And like, when the white folks did, they said, look here, baby, no.  But now, you working with them black folks, it's the same.  You don't whip my kids, baby. That's my man. He has stood as lawyers, doctors and so on and so forth, and these middle-class blues white folks, they going to college, they got dope. They folks got dope. People like us, guys, we ain't got no dope. If we go to college, we got to go on, you know, athletic scholarships and so on and so forth. So, we did do that, we did, this is my country. He blocks off a whole neighborhood now, and if people live there, they can't raise their wonder. It's hot. They can't raise their wonder.  You know this, man, don't you? I just want to see how far, you know, the, you know, I do. Yeah, well, I know what he's saying. I may not have been able to see the watermark, but this is from Chicago Film Archives, and this material is online. So you could watch all the productions of Chicago Film Group on your own, and I highly encourage it. Even this small little clip, it's so resonant. There's so many interesting things happening. You've got this one young woman who is just like, I don't care about the convention. It's irrelevant to me.   He notes that like the bourgeois doctors and lawyers and so on are seeing their own children being beat, and how impactful this was. And also he notes that like black people were sort of out of this. There were black protesters in Chicago, but very few, it's a very small number. It was very, very much a white event. And a lot of the local blacks either sort of hid out or left town, because if you were known as an agitator or a troublemaker, daily was likely to arrest you before the convention happened, just to come to your house and have his police take you away. So a lot of people, if they could, they left town. Okay, so these are the sorts of perspectives that we're sorely lacking from TV news coverage of events. And they show what image-making in the hands of the people rather than sanctioned corporate media makers can produce a much wider range of perspectives. Just to quickly finish up here, I already said that one of the aftermaths of this was Nixon getting elected, and he basically weaponized the idea of liberal media bias. And that idea became nationalized and normalized. It was no longer necessarily a right-wing or fringe kind of position as it had been before the convention. In the long term, is this the beginning of a crisis that culminates in Trump's fake news accusation? Well, not exactly, right? That's thin history, and you don't wanna just draw a straight line, but maybe you draw a more of a dotted line between these events. And we can guardedly see this as a tipping point moment. The idea of bias got traction, it grew, so it's a seed that took root. It found roots in right-wing fundraising and as an element of the culture wars, which is obviously still an issue today. Interestingly, 50 years later, the Walker Report's conclusions are widely accepted. The notion that what we saw was actually a police riot is widely believed, but there's no cultural memory of the dominant notion in 1968 that TV news had gotten the story wrong. The idea that the news media is inherently liberal, though, has stuck as a rhetorical weapon of the right. Today, we hold cameras and telephones in our pockets. Gathering of images of police brutality is no longer wholly dependent on the largesse of media institutions. So what difference does or should that make? That is exactly what we are here to discuss today and tomorrow. Thank you, I will stop there, and we do have a few minutes for discussion. Questions, we have like 10 minutes, so I would love to hear from you. If you have a question, please come up to the mic on the side, and there's one here too. Hello, Professor Henderson, thank you so much. I'm Cherise LePrie, MIT alum, and professor at Syracuse, and I was actually just having a thought the other day, I was really taken by the distinction between the shot being short-sighted, not showing the broad thing versus what's in the shot is fake. And one of the things that I've been really thinking about is when we watch the footage, the young woman who shot the footage of George Floyd's last moments, we see other people holding cameras, but that other footage has not had the same traction. And so I'm now starting to think, well, where is that footage? Is it just living on people's cameras? Did it never get shared? After her name became public and she became a public figure, I wouldn't want to, good on her, thank you. I wouldn't want to be that. So it's just a thought that I think, I would love to hear your perspective on when we know that there's other footage, but that has not been the footage. Thank you. That's a good question, thank you. I will say that around any major news event or news that becomes a major news, things that happen that become major events, news agencies are looking for every single person who had a camera there and reaching out, whether it's through social media, emailing people, whatever they can do to collect that footage. So it's impossible to me to think that all those other cameras, people holding all those other cameras weren't contacted by network news, by journalists and so on, by online news aggregators, whoever. So the footage surely has been seen and I wonder if the footage that has become the footage, that we take as the iconic footage is simply, and it's horrible to say, the best shot, the best vantage point that showed the most, is that why it is the winning footage, I hate to use that word, but that has become the footage of that moment. And my guess is that is probably correct and that other pieces of footage were also acquired for legal use, but have not trended in media and then reproduced so much because they were from a different angle, they were from the wrong angle, that kind of thing. That is my instinct on this. I would also suspect that, and this is what's gonna feel different from 68 for sure, is that the conspiracy theories around these other images are probably abundant somewhere, that someone's saying, well, if you look at that guy on the left, he sees what's really happening, which is not a murder at all, this kind of thing. But we haven't seen the footage so we don't know, and it's just like the Zapruder footage and the grassy and old kind of stuff of like, oh, if we could just see the other images, we'd see something different. So I'm sure there's some fomenting around those other images too, but thank you for asking about that. I think it's a really important question. Yeah. Hi, along that lines, I was wondering if you could talk about the process of the mythologizing of specific images. You talked about how there are really some images that have really become part of this mythology and you've done a lot of work to find those images that were kind of ignored. So what made an image want to be mythologized and what made one that was potentially equally powerful to be forgotten? Forgotten, yeah, that's a very good question. The question was about what makes certain images mythologized from this moment and others not. And the Battle of Michigan Avenue, so-called, on Wednesday night, that is 17 minutes of police beating people, which the networks ran in full, hard to imagine now in a short attention span culture of 10-second news clips, right? That's the footage that gained the most traction because it was most widely seen initially. That's part of why it gained traction. There's two kinds of footage there. One is the overhead.  And so there are TV cameras on top of trucks, but they're not transmitting live, but they're capturing images that are bringing back to convention hall for Walter Cronkite to put on the air. And those images from on top of the trucks are high angle and kind of far away. And then the local affiliate of CBS comes in with 16 millimeter cameras and they're on the ground. And so they get a more personal approach because you can see people's faces as it's happening. And MEC didn't have those people on the ground. So CBS had better footage because you could actually see people and identify people and so on. And CBS probably repeated that footage on the ground quite a bit because it was very, very good footage. And then that way contributed to the dissemination. And I said they went viral using contemporary language, but contributed to that vast spread of these images. And then you have a handful of still images. I'm sure a lot of people took still images, especially journalists, but their cameras were destroyed so often that a lot of that stuff didn't come out. So in a way, part of the issue is a sort of positive images because so many were destroyed so you focus on the ones that you have. And the next stage of answering that question would be to like go to the producers of WGBH television, like Vietnam television history from I think it was 1984, where this is one of the first places I saw this imagery in a few years after this famous documentary series came out. They had one episode called the Home Front USA. And it was a key moment in 84 of mythologizing the 60s and what protest was and a handful of images and the Chicago images were right there. And then I started noticing as I watched more documentaries made after that up to say the Ken Burns Vietnam series that came out a year or two ago. I keep seeing the same street images and I don't know if it's because WGBH selected these in the early 80s, but that could be part of it. I've seen these images on Colbert, where he's doing a parody. He did a parody of about the former president where he's comparing it to, he's comparing now to 1968 and he cuts back and forth with imagery and he shows BLM imagery and then he shows Chicago 68. And they're some of the same images that I just showed you. So they kept being recycled and it becomes a sort of anomalous when you see an image you hadn't seen before. You're like, oh, this one, how did this get in here? And one example of that is some very on the second day.  And she's saying like, why can't I just leave with, what's going on? And there's no voiceover because it's news like done so quick and dirty kind of news, like they got the footage, they put it together and Cronkite only interjects once. He just says, that's a grenade launcher, just to emphasize. And then at the end he says, well, I don't think any commentary needs to be made. You've all seen it. Good night. Like he ends with that. And you would think that that imagery would have become iconic. And it has eventually later, like over the past few years I've seen it in some documentaries, but it sort of disappeared for 48 years. So I'm not sure, I haven't really answered your question, I've just said, correct. Things don't get mythologized and you know, how does it happen? I don't know. But hopefully that gives you a little bit of, at least a sense of like how I try to tell the story and kind of like a detective follow the leads and figure out what got traction where. Yeah, sure. Thank you for your talk. It's so unlike me to ask a technology question, but what resonated with me the most about your talk was this moment where the police were drawn to the light in order to put it out. Yeah, yeah. Right? So I feel like there's a lot to be said here in the relationship between bearing witness and shedding literal light, right? And I'm wondering if much was made about that fact in 1968, right? That is to say, you know, here is this like literal technological moment of shedding light and police brutality looked like wanting to suppress that truth telling in by any means necessary. It's a great question. I mean, really, when people, when the news reported on the destruction of equipment, like lights, cameras, lenses, they tended to say how much they cost, not in a metaphorical way, in a literal way of like, well, that was a $300 lens, you know, what? And there's not a lot of talk of it among media people because of their own reluctance to be the story. They wanted to tell the story. They didn't want to be the story. And that's part of the undercovering of violence I think in Chicago is a concern like it's not about us. We don't understand why police are beating us because we haven't had this problem all the time in the past. But if we report that, who cares about us? It's about the political event. You know, we're a neutral party here to record it. So getting into issues like the destruction of the light would be to self-serving, would be the sort of professional norms that would dictate talking about this or not talking about it. I will back up though and say that this attack on journalists was more common at certain moments in the deep South during the battles over desegregation and at Ole Miss when there was a white riot about integration, Dan Rather is out with a news cameraman. He's working the sound. The cameraman is working the camera. They have one light and they had a system where they would turn on the light count to 15 and then turn it off and run while they were shooting. Stop enough that you had to to film but then run. And so they were using these short spurts so that the light wouldn't be destroyed. And then at a certain point, part of their problem was one of the dictums of shooting these kinds of situations was you should go bloody and go high. Go for the bloodiest images, the images of confrontation and get as high up as you can so that you're safe from it. And that's that CVS footage I was referencing for the last question of like on top of the news trucks and in Ole Miss they couldn't find a high spot. So they were running along the ground. They would between those 15 seconds they would lie on the ground because they were being shot at and so on. And that's the only time I've heard someone actually like talk about the light and this is in one of his memoirs in a really kind of dramatic technical way that obviously has resonance beyond the technical. Right, I have a couple from online. Great. First is more of just a covets that wow this is powerful. And then the second one, great presentation. What do we make of violence against the media or those bearing witness? How does this, how does that impact future coverage and memory? Wow, well it impacts future coverage and memory because if you can't cover it then how do you create memory? Well, to a large extent through images and through collecting audio and then you have people who are there and if they haven't collected the images or the audio then the memory is just inside these physical bodies and they have to tell it back to you. And then a filmmaker comes in and doesn't interview with them and now we have the audio because someone tells their memory of what happened. So it becomes a sort of convoluted rolling kind of process. Now I'll stop there with that question. Any other questions? Oh, here's one, great. Is that Chris? Hey. Hey man, I'm good, how are you? Good seeing you Heather, thanks so much. Nice to see you. So it's kind of a film nerdy question. I couldn't help but think of medium cool coming out right around this time. So I'm wondering how you situate that in relationship to what you're saying about the news of how much is it challenging that imagery, how much is it sort of countering it itself? Like what impact did that have in relationship to the TV news that you are speaking of? Medium cool is a film by Haskell Wexler who was famous as a director of photography as a cinematographer and then he made this film about Chicago. It's called Medium Cool as a take on Marshall McLuhan who had the idea of cool media versus hot media. And TV he thought was cool, not funky cool but cool versus hot. You know, like anyway, don't get me going about Marshall McLuhan. I disagree with him about many things. But so he titled his film this way and then he goes to Chicago during while things are happening, right? And it's scripted. It's a mix of scripted material starring Robert Forster who you may remember from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. As a young man, he's in this movie shot in 68 that comes out in 69 and it's a mix of documentary footage of the time and then scripted material and Forster gets involved with someone from Appalachia which speaks exactly to these images from the Chicago, from film group where they're very interested in this as a political issue in Chicago. And along with that network news footage, those images from Medium Cool become part of the historical record and part of that assembly of images we have but unofficial. In other words, I emphasize the kind of top-down news production but here we have an independent filmmaker who happened to be in town and managed to take images. I would encourage you to check it out if you're interested in this topic. That said, it's not 90% images in the street. It's maybe 10 to 20% images on the street and it ends with the crises in the street and with tear gas and with shots of the news vans going by with the cameras stuck on top and so you do get some of that documentary footage but it's not exclusively that kind of footage.  So on the one hand, one might celebrate neutrality in news gathering that you don't gather news just to make an argument for or against something but this film is arguing like how can we be neutral? When we're dealing with fascism, authoritarianism, Vietnam, this is not a time for news gatherers to be neutral and so I think that is a key contribution that medium cool makes to this part of the discussion. So check out the criterion disc. Any other questions? Okay, great. Question and comment. So what stands out a lot about this and I guess what I like about it and there's a lot to like about the violence but it makes me think about how Martin Luther King wanted the protests to be captured on the media so that people could see all this racism and get to see, like let's see, like let people know what's happening to us and what's happening to black people and what I like about what you've done is the extent to which you've highlighted the violence against the media also because I don't think that it, well I know I mean and from my being a teacher, from my being a student that just wasn't talked about as much as it's like the violence against black people and it makes me wonder though because the media is in charge, if any of that like was to, like how, it makes me think about how much it contributed to racism in the sense of it's like all right, there's white people that are, like there's a story out there about these white people that are already being racist against black people and we don't wanna make it seem like that white people were harmful to other white people like let's not make it seem like white people were, those, you know, at that time were just like that cruel or that bad. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on why a lot of this violence against the media story just wasn't told as much and I appreciate you bringing it to like. Thank you. I mean it wasn't told as much because the media wanted to deemphasize it, again that idea we don't wanna be the story we wanna tell the story and following the convention with so many attacks on them I mean just from a sort of public relations standpoint the last thing that people wanted to do was say like well we were beaten up, look how Dan Rather was beaten. And so that was really underplayed, underplayed and Dan Rather was sort of a kind of macho kind of like well it's all in a day's work, Walter it's all fine, you know, everyone kind of underplayed it because that was like the professional norm but it was also something that really was amplified after the attacks and a great example of that not telling that story is that in TV Guide and I'm gonna say maybe six months I may not be memory right but the head of NBC News, Ruben Frank wrote a piece for TV Guide about the convention and TV Guide at that point had the highest distribution of any magazine in America, right? If you wanted to hit the biggest number of people in the magazine it was either TV Guide or Readers Digest and TV Guide had just a little more than Readers Digest and Ruben Frank had already catalogued all the news coverage and found, okay we did 3% of street violence and 97% in the convention hall whereas CBS did more like 5% and 95, okay so he puts out those numbers and he basically said don't blame the messenger. We showed you this little piece of what we saw and it's what we saw, you know and so he's sort of just fighting for the objective reality of these images and he deliberately does not mention anything about the attacks on the news and in internal memos he says like I just told the story this way you know and he got praise from Robert Sarnoff and all the big wigs over him were like yes this is perfect, thank you you went to the mainstream venue and you didn't make us look whiny and you didn't make it look like we were saying we were the victims you just stood up for journalistic integrity and that is a journalist's integrity is a real thing but it's also a mythologized thing it's also about professional norms and the ethics of professionals but that's how that violence against the media got de-escalated and you really didn't I mean during the civil rights crises when journalists were under attack like Dan Rather at Ole Miss like I was just saying like they didn't talk about that then it was something that would come out five or 10 years later in a memoir that's when you're allowed to tell your personal story you're writing as an important figure telling your memoir not as a newsman you know you wouldn't go on TV and say this is a terrible thing that happened to me at Ole Miss you save it for your memoir sure, thank you anyone? Okay I think that is the last for our questions please join me in thanking Professor Hindesha for her talk Thank you all


Registration has opened for the 47th annual Hillbilly Days Parade. Most people are thinking, it's January, there's snow on the ground. Why are we talking about Hillbilly Days? Well, our friends over at the southeast Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, the Shriners, Pike County Tourism, Pikeville City Tourism, and of course the Appalachian Maritalis Arena have been thinking about Hillbilly Days since last April the day after it was over. Do you worry about having enough money to last throughout retirement? Give Reed Potter at Raymond James a call. Reed has 26 years experience helping folks enjoy their best life in their retirement years. Those hoping to participate must fill out an online application and pay a $50 registration fee. Anyone is welcome to apply to be in the parade and most any vehicle or trailer is accepted. Many participants in the parade create fun themed floats while some simply drive nice vehicles to show off and promote their church, business, or organization. For the first time in a while, a marching band has even signed up to participate in the parade. In the last few years, we had an 18-wheeler flatbed go through. All dolled up, kind of looked like a farm setting out in the field thing. You can do that. You can take your pickup truck. Do anything you want to with it. All applications for the parade must be submitted by April 12th. To apply, you can visit hillbillydays.com. For Mountaintop News, I'm Kelsea Fidell.