The protestors deliberately staged a media event for television coverage

Evidence

Drasin’s seventeen-minute Sunday begins as an urban pastoral. Children play, people enjoy ice cream, interracial couples hold hands as mounted cops look on. An NBC camera crew is briefly visible; clearly Young and Humes have orchestrated what would later be called a media event. Presently, the folksingers parade into the square—the original guitar army—some holding homemade signs. Young, in jacket and tie, is the designated spokesman. He jaws with the seasoned cop regarding the inalienable right to sing in the square. There is some dancing around the fountain as well as sitting in. … Dialogue gives way to pushing and screaming. Cops attempt to clear the square. Humes is arrested while trying to get a badge number. The movie ends as it began with the silent spectacle of cops around the fountain as kids play. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 299

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘originary guitar army’ and staged media event connects to the earlier civil-rights movement chapter and later counterculture chapters. — connects to: The televised event supersedes and substitutes for the historical event it depicts — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 177; Well-planned protest spectacles can dictate front-page coverage — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 369; Brazilian television coverage legitimated the protests into a mass movement. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 400 (+6 more)