Stephen Reese
Murfreesboro, TN
(on theoretical influences on work):
There multiple influences on my work. I draw from all kinds of tradition. Certainly, one contour that worked on me was working was the Frankfurt School, with its gloomy view of the capacities of independent actors to withstand the force of mass culture and the culture industry, as well as their disbelieve of social currents remaining autonomous when forced to operate within a media saturated environment.
I suppose in a certain way I was influenced by a radical version of mass society theory, as it came down to me from C. Wright Mills. I think specifically of Mills on celebrity in The Power Elite, which is one of the few things I've seen written on the subject. It obviously helped me understand the phenomenon of the conversion of leaders into celebrities.
I had read Marcuse in the 1960s, but the fuller body of the Frankfurt School I didn't get to until I read Marty Jay's book, The Dialectical Imagination (1973), before I went back to graduate school.
I had an odd relationship to the department at Berkeley, spending only one year there doing course work. I was at Michigan for 2 years in the 60s and left just short of a Master's degree, which I finished in 1966 while working on my first book (Uptown: Poor whites in Chicago). I spent the next 9 years outside the university doing political work and writing, and didn't go back until 74. When I got back in, I did a year of course work, and then began reading the media sociology field on my own.
At Berkeley, I don't think my engagement in the program was such as to turn me into a collector of traditions. There were lots of traditions in the department, and I suppose some of the social interactionist milieu rubbed off on me via Herbert Blumer indirectly. Troy Duster and David Matza directly had some influence.
My thesis adviser was Bill Kornhauser, who certainly had done one of the benchmark studies in mass society theory, although he had left a lot of it behind.
On the BERKELEY program.
I was in the BERKELEY program because I wanted a general credential to move in and around the social sciences and humanities. Sociology was the most ventilated, the most open, the least closed, and that was what interested me. It wasn't anything in particular about the Berkeley curriculum. It was the ambiance, which was one of attachment to the various humanist traditions within sociology.
There were also people around Berkeley who came from the Lazarsfeld world. Charley Glock, for example, was part of a committee that set up the mass communication program at Berkeley. He had been with Lazarsfeld at the Bureau, but that was certainly not an influence on me--to the contrary.
(The Dissertation)
My dissertation was an anomaly, and for that I owe a debt to Bill Kornhauser, who said do what you want. When I decided, he gave me my head. The main thing he pushed me to do was to develop the theoretical discussion on hegemony--which I'm not sure is a tremendous contribution to theory, if indeed one is needed. But my experience was unusual, because when I went back to school I had published two books, and had some sense of where I wanted to go. So I was given an unusual degree of latitude.
(The BA)
When I got to Harvard I stepped into Math as a matter of course, not with a lot of fore-thought. I was good at math, but also good at other things in high school. I quickly lost interest in Math, however, as a part of my growing interest in politics, but also a conviction that although I was good at math I wasn't that good. I thought I lacked any particular insight. I was good at solving problems others set. At the beginning of my sophomore year I got involved in politics and the peace movement. So by the middle of that year I had a powerful conviction that I wanted some sort of social science major, and the one I was interested in was a new one, an amalgam called social studies. But to major in social studies I would have had to take every one of my remaining courses from their approved list. Too much specialization! I believed in a liberal education, in roundness, all the humane virtues. Then I realized that if I took only one more math course per semester for my remaining two years, I would otherwise be absolutely free to do what I wanted. That's what I did.
I took more history, government, philosophy, and literature courses in those latter two years than anything else. My math honors thesis was related to my political interests--"Archetypical mathematical models in international relations." It was then a matter of course to move into political science for my Master's, but at that point I had no further intention in grad school and didn't imagine an academic career.
(origins of idea for Whole World is Watching)
I tickled some of the ideas for Whole World is Watching in a piece I wrote in 1969 for a movement magazine called Leviathan, "Fourteen notes on television and the movement." Bob Blanner was on my qualifying examinations committee, and I was taking a walk with him as I was trying to figure out what to do for a dissertation after the exams. I originally had some high flying theoretical ideas for a dissertation, and considered writing a history of the idea of scarcity and its impact on social theory. This was a consequence of my thinking in 1969 about why the New Left was coming unglued. I had become persuaded that the intellectual core of the student left had been the belief that human history could now turn a page toward a society beyond scarcity; and that the history of the movement could be written or a history of the dialectic between scarcity and post-scarcity conscsiousness. THis giddy idea was still close enouigh to me in 1975 that I thought I might make a mark as a theorist if I tested it up as a moment in the history of the idea of scarcity. (I was also heavily influenced by Sartre at this point, and he had flirted with the importance of scarcity.) Bob was not so impressed with the grand theory notion but he said he liked this piece of mine from 1969 on television and the movement and asked if I had thought about elaborating it for a dissertation. I had not thought of it, in fact, but when he mentioned it, I did.
I guess I became convinced of two things--suich a thesis would be manageable, unlike the grand theory scheme, and it would provide a way into rethinking some element of the political and cultural history. of the 60s. It would give me a point of access to write of that history via media.
So I then spent the next year reading in mass communication, sociology and theory, which left me mostly dismayed about the state of the field. When I had written my original piece in 69, I had read a little bit of what I found, mostly coming out of mass culture notions of the 50s, not very much of later media theory. This time in 75 I set out in earnest to explore the field, and was mostly quite disturbed by its shallowness which was the inception of my critique of Lazarsfeld. I wrote Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm (1978) published at the end of my year of reading, 1976, to get it out of my system, and that's how I walked into the field of media scholarship proper. There wasn't anybody doing this sort of thing at Berkeley, so I did it on my own.
I hadn't studied media theory before, but had read a lot of political theory and analysis doing my Master's at Michigan. I wrote my research paper (a sort of thesis) on pluralism, especially via Dahl. I had also done very close reading of the community power literature and a critique of it in 1965. That was something of a dry run for a more elaborate attempt to unpack a paradigm with some care.
(on the impact of WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING)
I think it may have had several ripple effects. First, it's served as a model of comparable studies of the treatment of social movements--its content analysis is the easy part to emulate. People send me them periodically from various parts of the world. Less easy to do is to take the framework of WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING and apply it, not simply to how a movement is led by the media, but how a movement leads media. It's a piece of the work that hasn't drawn as much attention, which leads to a skewed impression of what I had in mind. If I were doing it again this is an impression I would try to correct.
To me the WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING is not a book about how the media distorted the reputation of a social movement. It's a book about the dance between the media and the movement, about a complicated relationship of mutual dependence and about a political consequence ordained not simply by the malevolence or indifference or skews of the press, but by a political trajectory over which the movement also had some control. That is to say, this movement took place within conditions which extended far beyond the existence of certain kinds of media.
I hope the work has encouraged people who know ideology is loaded into media coverage but haven't put their finger quite on what it is, or how it gets there. It surprised me that very little had been written at the time about the movement/media relation. I found during that year of reading, a total of one work that was encouraging, but by 1975 it was already out of print: Demonstrations and communication: a case study (Halloran, Elliot and Murdoch, --70, Penguin). This examined a study of the treatment of an anti-Vietnam war demonstration. It was partly a content analysis, and partly something of an ethnography of how stories were put together at BBC and ITV. It was not concerned with the impact of coverage on a movement, but it encouraged me that somebody had done something like this.
(other Works emulating Whole World)
Robert Hackett has written well on coverage of the on anti-nuclear movement in Canada. Some have tried to extract some more elaborate notion of hegemony from my very brief theoretical discussion. I'm dubious about this, but this isn't the place to explain why, except perhaps to underscore a point I made in the book: that if the concept is to mean anything, hegemony is not a fog that descends on a society, but rather a specific process that has to be mapped. Herb Gans said he thouight I could have done the analyis is Whole World without ever using the word "hegemony," and though I resisted his pointfor a long time, I've come around to agreeing. Jon Elster's critique of the explanatoryh value of the concept of hegemony is very much apropos.
I know the work is a perennial on reading lists. It may be that it's there not because of any particular conclusions or methods but because it affirms there is an intimate relation between media and movements, and also that it suggests that in order to understand a media process you also have to see it withstand a total social process. And maybe it's there simply because it rings bells: distortion, trivialization, and so on. Finally, at the time it was published, there were not many studies that attempted by whatever method to find in any systematic way relations between media in any particular political process, especially a process taking place in society as opposed to, let's say, in Congress. So it stood as a reminder that media are everywhere and among other places in the political process.
(on finding a Publisher).
I tried to publish it commercially at first. In New york the manuscript was rejectred rouglyk 10 times. It was rejected 10 times. The college editor at Oxford wanted to publish it as a trade book, but the trade editor disapproved, thought it "leaned rather too heavily on its thesis." Others thought it over simple. (get correspondence). An editor at Morrow liked it but said he couldn't sell it to his superiors as a commercial book.
(Experience with the U of Cal. press)
Then I submitted it to the social science editor at the University of California press, Grant Barnes. This is a peculiar episode; I don't know another publishing story like it. Barnes started to read it and gave me a call early in the game, within weeks or days of receiving it. He was very excited about it, raving about it. He thought it was fabulous. Then, some time went by, and he wrote me a letter, saying that he thought there were serious problems, maybe I was being unfair to the media, and so on. He proposed to check the manuscript out with CBS and the New York Times--essentially having it vetted. I thought this was an astounding proposal. I wondered whether an editor of a press on another subject would propose that it be cleared by the object of the investigation.
I was at this point (1978/79) teaching at the University of California, and Barnes made me extremely nervous. This was the press at my home university. I'm a first year assistant professor, feeling already politically tainted. Now an editor is blowing conspicuously hot and cold, and proposing to have CBS and The New York Times apprais my analysis and critique of them.
I enlisted some colleagues who had had dealings with the press, and they agreed that Barnes' conduct was highly unorthodox. I knew Ernest Callenbach, editor of Film Quarterly and also an editor at the press specialzing in film books. So I took the manuscript away from Grant Barnes, and gave it to Callenbach, who was happy to have it. He then pursued the project through the press committee of faculty across the University system, which passes on UC press publications. There, I'm told, the book also ran into considerable opposition. I was told that I owed it to Roy Harvey Pierce, a renowned literature professor at UCSD, that it was finally accepted.
(Did the work lead to other Gitlin works?)
After publication I was getting into the routines of academic work. I did feel a desire to clarify the theoretical line of argument, so in 1980 I wrote a long essay rather more to my liking, called "Television's screens: Hegemony in process," published in Michael Apple's edited book, Cultural and economic reproduction in education, in 1982. This was more complicated, far superior to what's in the Whole World is Watching, although still flawed like the concept itself. I think what's in the WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING is clunky and mechanical. I find it odd that it is so frequently cited for its rendition of Gramsci. The essay is not well-known, but it was a shake-down cruise for my work on television and entertainment. I had no more desire for anything elaborate on news, but I kept my hand in. I did what I would call casual, on-the-fly research, and availed myself of opportunities. I didn't have a clear academic agenda at that point.
Like Gans, I've done many other things. I haven't thought much about this piece of my work; I'm always more interested in what's ahead. I have ideas for books I plan to write, but I don't' have a clear (line) through the entirety of my work. I don't particularly understand the entirety or need to.
(transition from News to entertainment)
In the course of my work that bore on what went on in news organizations, I had a whiff of the fascination of that kind of research, a kind of detective work. I wouldn't have the patience to do the kind of ethnographic work that Gans does, but in my own unplanned and unmethodical way, I retained that fascination. In the late '60s I was interested in how entertainment television was beginning to approach and nibble at, absorb and domesticate left-wing movements. I had a long-running interest in popular culture going back to high school, where I wrote satires on tv programs. I had read a little bit about popular culture, but I don't remember when I decided I would do entertainment next. It seemed like a natural progression.
I must have been aware that this would be useful research. Not much had been done, and I was interested in the production of culture.
(explosion of media sociology)
The resurgence of interest in media production of culture is largely generational Scholars like myself, Tuchman, Schudson, and Molotch, I think it's fair to say collectively were like many of our peers quite conscious of the entanglements of media and politics, because of Kennedy and more because of the war. And then of course, Watergate. It was manifest that politics was happening through, and perhaps primarily through, media. Moreover, some of us (I mentioned the Frankfurt school) were influenced by the work of the situationists, especially society of the Spectacle by Guy de Bord, a pamphlet publsished by an anarchist press in Detroit, called Black and Red.
Thus, as a cohort of sociologists we were swept by something happening in reality. It was no longer possible to think about politics without thinking about the communication through which it was happening, however you evaluated the potency of those links.
And, of course, McLuhan was in the atmosphere, raising very interesting questions, though often in a degraded form. I first read McLuhan in 1967, but had heard of him in the early 60s at Harvard (The Guttenberg Galaxy). I later went to Expo '67 in Montreal, which was very much under his spell, and I was enthralled. McLuhan was both an obsevevr of the ubiquity of media and also himself a product of it. Many things were being said about the impact of media--the Kerner Commission, the Einsenhower Commission on violence. Joe McGinniss had published The Selling of the President in 69. We were also the bearers of some of that consciousness. We were also in varying degrees inhabited by the debunking spirits of the 60s and were interested in the constructionist powers of media (for Tuchman, women, for me, the New Left).
(Identification with sociology)
I've always been an inter-disciplinarian. I was imperfectly socialized into normal sociology, but I have some interest in theoretical questions at work in sociology. More recently, since I'm writing a book on the multi-culturalism dispute, identity politics and universalism, I've been reading a good deal in and learning from the literature on ethnic and race relations, and also nationalism and cultural formation. So I have curiosities from which I turn to sociology.
(Craft)
I work erratically--as steadily as I can. I can generally write during the school year. You get a lot done if you do a little at a time. I formed that habit early. I can't live tolerably without writing. I did a lot of journalism in the '60s which got me in the habit of seeing words pile up into sentences which pile up into pages. Research is another matter. In the case of WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING, much of the source was in my desk, my files, and in my brain. The study of the Times was easy, that's one reason why so many people study it and, of course, neglect to study other less accessible sources. The CBS research took going to New York. Inside Prime Time required going to the field, but most of my other work doesn't require field research, I'm more unbuttoned about my research and so I do it when I can. But the writing is second nature.
(other Influences)
I never took a course from David Riesman, but he was very influential for me. He was one of the faculty advisers of this peace group, Tocsin, I was involved with as an undergraduate. Of course, I had read The Lonely Crowd, which was an important work for my generation. I got to know him pretty well, and had many conversations, not mostly, thugh, about popular culture. What I did absorb from him was a feeling for society and for social activity; a sense that actors act in terms of symbols that mean to them, or, to put it less stodgily, that as an analyst of society one should take seriously what people take seriously. I think that had an effect on me.
I mentioned Mills, who was something of a model for me of omni-curiosity, of controlled passion, but also of the willingness to let the chips fall where they may--including all over your pet ideas. His doggedness over time mattered to me.
I was a close student of Mills during college and after. (Harvey Swados article on Mills writing).
My criticism of the WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING is basically and implicitly delivered in my subsequent book, The Sixties. That's the story I wanted to tell about the movement directly, not through the window of media relations. This meant telling the story of the movement as a social world, of course among other social worlds, in a setting. This, then, is my benchmark: my own version of the truth of the New Left, which was in certain ways obscured and deformed and deflected by the mass media.
I resist and criticize a form of media research in which you simply demonstrate a skew to a form of coverage and then rest your case: voila', ideology. To me its not sufficient to demonstrate that the media carry points of view. What else are they supposed to convey? It's also necessary to make an effort to develop a more comprehensive view of the truth. I don't like the pure, relativist perspectivism that followed from the belief that once you've demonstrated there is a skew you've done enough. It's not enough to know that the media think that you are a bunch of extremists. I want to know what you actually do. I think it's a dodge to point out a skew without taking and defending a position on whether the skew is legitimate.
So in The Sixties I make a much more elaborate argument about the experience that was deformed and influenced by the media. It's not that I think the movement was innocent, and was then raped. I rejected that position in WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING, but that point has been frequently missed. When I heard renditions of the book fed back to me, I didn't like the way they tasted. I didn't think the movement was innocent or passive. So in a sense, the second book is a supplement to what I did in the WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING. I find it odd to run into people especially in media studies who know WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING, who think it is my last word on the New Left, when it wasn't.
There's a late chapter in WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING on the spreading and containment of the movement's views. There's an idea that's more important than the space I allotted. While the images of the movement were deformed, with important political consequences, it was also true that some of the ideas of the anti-war movement and in the Left did go into circulation, as in any media-saturated society, through the channels supplied by and controlled by the mass media. And that was in many ways a social good.
Social change did take place. The story I told was a dark story, a tragic story, but part of the darkness was that there was lightness as well. In a way the New Left was a sacrifice on an altar, and the result of the sacrifice was the diffusion of anti-war ideas.