Revolution Televised.pdf

Was the Revolution Televised? 25
Black Journal, a series that premiered on public television in 1968.
Black Journal was created by African Americans, distributed by public
television, and eventually seen in syndication. The show provided
an alternative to mainstream news and incorporated various black
viewpoints on contemporary incidents that affected the African
American population.
Remembering the ’60s
Perhaps more than any other people, Americans have been locked in a
deadly struggle with time, with history. We’ve fled the past and trained
ourselves to suppress, if not forget troublesome details of the national
memory, and a great part of our optimism, like our progress, has been
bought at a cost of ignoring the process through which we’ve arrived at
any given moment in our national existence.
Ralph Ellison, The Shadow and the Act
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, television was arguably the most
significant tool of entertainment, even while network television was
struggling to position itself as a serious outlet for the news. As onetime
reporter for CBS news Robert Schakne describes, “The whole
process of changing television into a serious news medium happened
to coincide with the civil rights movement.” 2 Peter J. Boyer,
a writer who covered television for the New York Times during the
era, agreed, stating that the Civil Rights movement was
the first running story of national importance that television fully
covered. . . . Television brought home to the nation the civil rights
struggle in vivid images that were difficult to ignore, and for television
it was a story that finally proved the value of TV news gathering
as opposed to mere news dissemination. 3
With this focus on the Civil Rights era as a source of ready material,
it is important to explore the political attitudes expressed by
network television, the types of information that television disseminated,
and how these attitudes changed over time with the evolving
agendas of black political organizations.
A strong sense of nostalgia permeates American society for the
newsmen of the 1950s and ’60s, such as Edward R. Murrow and
Walter Cronkite, involving a belief that this was a time when news
was trustworthy, objective, and inspired social change. Indeed, as
the chapter discusses, this was part of the rhetoric of the networks.