End Riff

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BRIAN: Joanne, Nathan, just how wrong can the media be? I mean, here we are, at the cusp of a decade of mass protests that is going to remake what politics is all about, and, somehow, the media– they just don’t see what’s happening in front of their very own eyes.

NATHAN: I mean, and they’re partied to that transformation. Right? I mean, the creation of a national civil rights agenda, which the March on Washington was totally focused on trying to generate, runs directly through the proliferation of the television, the newspapers, the kind of mass media outlets that are covering that march. But I think, it’s also really important to keep in mind that, part of what was supposed to happen with the March on Washington, by amplifying the platform of jobs and freedom, by thinking about the centrality of nonviolent direct action to any movements going forward, was to try to standardize black politics and standardize kind of civil rights politics.

ED: And shine a light on it, right?

NATHAN: It was. It was. And it didn’t come without certain costs. So when they decided, for instance, not to allow women to speak at all on the day of the march, that was a bad look in terms of a national movement. And, you know, Malcolm X was as critical as other observers about the fact that there wasn’t more militancy, right. And so what the press saw as a benefit, he actually saw as the limitations of the march. And he and he called it a picnic in a pejorative sense. But that dampening, I think, you know, was another feature of their efforts to nationalize their claims.

ED: As shown on the national network news.

NATHAN: Right.

JOANNE: So you’re talking, Nathan, about the nationalization of it helping standardize the local. And I would add, also, empowering it. I mean, again, I keep talking about the American Revolution, because, boy, that was a big protest.

NATHAN: That’s what you’re here for. No, it’s OK.

JOANNE: I’m an 18th century historian. But that’s also a moment in which you have a sense of a general problem, but you have a lot of local organization about this general problem. And what makes it, or what helps really create a revolutionary moment is the newspaper. Spreading that, and nationalizing it, in a similar way to what you’re talking about here, Nathan. Creating a national audience, and suggesting that there is a national something going on, so that while the local is still there and still in operation, there’s a power that wasn’t there without that kind of frame. It’s easy to forget how colonies were like little nation states, and that there wasn’t any kind of national anything. And so the impact of these newspapers– kind of like we’re talking about here with the television– was pretty impressive.

ED: And is it also fair to say that, in that case, it brought a lot more participants into politics than had existed before?

JOANNE: Yes. And partly though but by empowering and sort of putting a lot of steam into what was happening locally. But yes, I do think that’s true.

NATHAN: You know, what’s so remarkable about this is, it’s almost like we expect movements now to have a certain kind of standardized look.

ED: Right.

NATHAN: Right? I mean, certainly, nonviolent direct action is a big part of that marches in open public places, but I was even thinking about the 2011 march in Occupy Wall Street, where there was a real critique that was leveled largely by the media, that the activists in Zuccotti Park, in New York, and elsewhere, didn’t really have a demand, or there wasn’t a single platform piece that they could point to say, this is what we want the government to do in response to massive wealth and inequality, for instance, right? So they had great rhetorical terms. I would say the notions of the 99% versus the 1%– that totally stuck. But, I mean, I don’t know if anybody could quickly rattle off what the platform was, or what the ask was, of that protest, right? In a way, that critique feels like it stuck a little bit.

ED: And they didn’t have something else, Nathan. They didn’t have the kind of leaders that the press needs to go to get good quotations.

NATHAN: Right.

ED: To center stories around that one or two charismatic individuals. Thank Martin Luther King, for instance.

JOANNE: Framing. We’re talking about framing again.

NATHAN: Absolutely. This goes back to that point, right, about the media and the media’s approach to these protests, and there is still, even with the March on Washington in ’63, a kind of– let’s say– let’s call it conservative leadership model. That is absolutely one of the reasons why the movement becomes so fragile by the late 1960s; with assassinations, with co-optations, you can more easily demobilize a lot of these movements, if you can identify kind of top heavy parts of the movement structure and basically decapitate them, right? I mean, all of this, I think, really did provide a certain kind of lesson from movements going forward, in the 2000s and elsewhere, but, not without certain costs, like a lack of messaging or certain kinds of vagueness, at least from the part of some of the folks who are less sympathetic politically.

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ED: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep that conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your burning history questions. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter @BackStoryradio. And feel free to review the new show in iTunes store. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

MALE SPEAKER: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by History Channel; history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Ernest, Emily Gaddick, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Julie Thompson is a researcher. Additional help came from Sequoia Carillo, Emma Craig, Aidan Lee, Courtney Spagna, Robin Blue, and Elizabeth Spach.

Our theme song written by Nick Thorburn. And other music in this episode came from Catsa and Paddington Bear.

Brian Balogh is professor of History at the University of Virginia and Dorothy Compton professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is professor of the Humanities, and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert BackStory Adams associate professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

BackStory was created by Andrew Windom, for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

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