The Whole World is Watching. by Todd GitlinReview by: Anthony OberschallSocial Forces, Vol. 59, No. 4, Special Issue (Jun., 1981), pp. 1339-1341Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2578015 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 06:32

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:32:25 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews /1339

Chapters 2 through 5 show the derivation and application of this model in a case study of Anglicanism from the Tudor period in England to the early nineteenth century in the United States. The model offers an interesting way of focusing and analyzing the social forces which have led to denominationalization of the Church of England over nearly three centuries.

Into Denominationalism is a useful book. It extends the church-sect typology by incorporating the second continuum of universe maintenance, which allows the analysis of both intra- and extra-organizational developments. I consider Swatos' model more useful than that in Beckford's Religious Organization (a work surpris- ingly omitted from the references). Swatos' model can incorporate Beckford's systems analysis, while retaining theoretical continuity with the sociology of religion, which Beckford's approach does not. Swatos' model also takes account of meaning systems as crucial for the analysis of religious organizational develop- ment, and also of secularizing tendencies in modem societies.

Swatos' model suggests interesting applications beyond those of the monog- raph: the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and in Canada between 1750 and 1975; contemporary developments in the Unification Church in the United States; the religious organization of the Hutterites, from a sixteenth century European sect to a twentieth century North American sect; contemporary religious developments in South America.

I highly recommend this book. It is worthwhile reading, based on theoreti- cally informed scholarship and presents an important extension of church-sect theory.

The Whole World Is Watching. By Todd Gitlin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. 340 pp. $12.95.

Reviewer: ANTHONY OBERSCHALL, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Of all the processes important for understanding the rise and decline of recent opposition movements in the U.S., the character and impact of mass media coverage has been the least studied and understood. Gitlin has gone a long way toward filling this gap with a well-written, informed, and balanced account of the "movement-media dance" ("the media needed stories, preferring the dramatic; the movement needed publicity for recruitment, for support, and for political effect") during the crucial 1965 to 1972 period of the student and anti-war movements. Though the study centers on SDS, the New York Times, and CBS News, Gitlin skillfully interweaves information from a wide range of sources on the movements, the news media, and American politics to provide a broad view of this period and to offer some ideas about why a radical opposition movement was not permanently established out of the turbulence of the late 1960s. His sources include interviews with print and television journalists, editors, and producers; an intensive qualita- tive analysis of news coverage of crucial movement events and of background stories; and SDS documents and activists' recollections. Gitlin himself at the time was one of the SDS Old Guard. His account is authentic and authoritative.

The first part of the book deals with the character of media coverage of SDS and anti-war activity in 1965, on the eve and during their first spurt of growth.

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:32:25 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

1340 I Social Forces Volume 59:4, June 1981

There never was a single viewpoint imposed by either the Times or CBS on anti-war and New Left coverage, but Gitlin shows that an earlier latitude of coverage, and occasionally sympathetic and accurate treatment, became in time "framed" in a fashion that denigrated, trivialized, and marginalized the movement. The accent was put on the appearance, age, and style of the participants instead of their message about the morality and horrors of the war. Arrests, violence, Viet Cong flags, communists, right-wing counterdemonstrators, were highlighted out of proportion to their importance, especially in headlines, photographs, and captions. SDS was depicted as a single purpose, anti-war organization. Coverage of the anti-war movement relied increasingly on statements from the authorities. Yet Gitlin also shows that growing militance and dissension within the New Left were not invented by the media: they were actually happening. And, for many new recruits and SDS chapters, opposition to the war was the only issue despite the National Office and the official SDS position.

What would have been more accurate coverage? Gitlin turns to the internal evidence-contrasting better researched, longer Times and CBS stories with the daily fare, and examining coverage in The Guardian, documentary evidence, and participants' accounts. Gitlin shows that the moderate-pacifist wing of the anti-war movement was also subject to unfavorable framing, although to a lesser degree. One wonders whether coverage of routine public affairs, elections, and primaries is any less distorted than that of opposition movements.

Gitlin's analysis of the sources of media frames and routines rejects a model of top-down manipulation of journalists and reporters by political leaders and economic elites, by way of media executives, editors, and producers. Rather the sources are the political and professional socialization of all levels of media personnel into the dominant liberal corporate ideology, and the commercial, technological, and organization organizational imperatives of news work and mass media organizations. This line of thinking accords well with Epstein, Roshco, Gans, and others. One wishes Gitlin had instead spent more of his theoretical effort confronting his ideas about the New Left's rise and decline with current social movement theories.

Impacts are taken up in Chapters 4 through 9. Most obvious was the membership surge in SDS, which overtaxed its capacity to integrate newcomers into the small face-to-face network of the Old Guard, resulting in communications gaps, internal division, weak transmission of a radical political culture, and predilection for action over analysis and organization building. More important, the mass media dramatize and simplify social conflict by personifying causes and groups through a highly visible leader, making him a media star. This process converts movement leaders rooted in organization and accountable to members into celebrities reaping high rewards from without. Although some resisted, most did not. Personal advantages and short-term movement gains were compelling: large audiences, fund raising, access to the "whole world." As someone tells it: "either you allow the media to make certain people stars, or you don't get your message over the air." Gitlin does note that the media did not arbitrarily create celebrities: they were already leaders with a proven record of activism.

What followed were rivalries, inflated rhetoric, militant posturing to stay in the limelight, loss of touch with active members at the grassroots, lack of realism about the movement's true strength. Although many reasons existed for increased

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:32:25 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews I 1341

militancy and radicalism in the New Left, satisfying the media's hunger for novelty and drama in return for access was a major one. In the end, the New Left, Mayor Daley, the Johnson and Nixon administrations, authorities and public alike ac- cepted the media image of the movement as a serious revolutionary force.

Gitlin does not maintain that the mass media were responsible for the destruction of the movement. The New Left had too narrow a social base; its goals were too ambitious. He does think that the New Left paid a high price in the movement-media dance: it was the weaker partner forced to play by the media's rules, yet that was its choice. Nevertheless, even had it shunned the limelight at the center stage of the anti-war movement in favor of long term grassroots organizing among the poor, minorities, and working people, I for one think the New Left would have been of little consequence.

Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. By Gaye Tuchman. New York: Free Press, 1978. 244 pp. $12.95.

Reviewers: JOHN P. ROBINSON, University of Maryland, and HALUK SAHIN, Cleveland State University

This is an ambitious work. It is ambitious both in scope and in the intellectual resources it utilizes. In examining news as a way of constructing reality, Tuchman draws on her own empirical observations of the dynamics of news organizations, on certain findings of American researchers, on the methods of "interpretive" sociologists such as Schutz and Goffman, and on various insights from the critical news theory being developed by Marxian scholars in Britain.

She selectively borrows concepts and ideas from these divergent approaches and makes a valiant effort to integrate them into a cohesive analysis of news as organizational work, social knowledge, and ideology. Her own extensive participant-observation in four separate news media organizations in the New York City area provides the descriptive background. Making News becomes not "only an empirical study in the sociologies of mass communication, organizations, and occupations and professions, but also an applied study in the sociology of knowledge."

The book begins with Tuchman's description of news as a frame through which the public learns of its relation to the outside world. We find out, by means of concrete examples, that this important function is usually a by-product of organiza- tional needs and requirements rather than resulting from an abstract conception of public's right to know. The spatial and temporal arrangements by which newswor- kers are able to routinize the unexpected are spelled out more fully and clearly than in her previous work on the topic. She vividly illustrates how apparently disparate stories can be covered by common narrative devices and reliance on official sources to validate the omnipresence and omniscience of existing sociopolitical institutions.

Tuchman thus makes a forceful and convincing case for news being a reproducer (in the Althusserian sense) of the status quo. She explains how the news organizations cast a "news net" that closely parallels the distribution of power in society, catching only certain kinds of "fish" at points where the activities of legitimated institutions and the organizational needs of newswork intersect. She

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:32:25 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions