Media coverage can create organizations that outstrip their actual membership

Evidence

That fall, even though SDS had declined to lead a set of protests against the Vietnam War, the media chose to focus on the organization. SDS already had a bit of a reputation as an anti-war outfit, so perhaps reporters, always pressed for time, had seen the name somewhere and could use it to tell the story. Writing later, SDS president Todd Gitlin recalled that this pushed “a bewildered and incoherent SDS to the center of attention; SDS was suddenly outfitted with a reputation for activity that drastically outdistanced its political reality.” The young leftists had always been skeptical of the corporate press as a matter of course, but they very quickly learned that mainstream journalism, embedded within a certain ideological framework and driven by the logic of capital accumulation, could rapidly reframe reality in deeply misleading ways. At the same time, some of them grasped the enormous power available here, if they could only counterattack in the press with an elegant set of “judo” techniques to finesse their own message into mass media channels. For example, one 1965 SDS statement pointed out that “we have seen antiwar leaflets photostated on the front page of newspapers with circulations in the millions. We could have been at the mimeograph for ten years, and not reached as many draftable young men as the press has reached for us in five days.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 73

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: News must be simultaneously new and comparable to prior events — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 76; Media-created reputations attract members who join a fictional version of a movement — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 74; Media coverage can bestow a movement more reach than its own organizing ever could — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 73 (+1 more)