Author: hshot@mit.edu
When the News Broke
Chicago 1968 and the Polarization of America
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo183630531.html
A riveting, blow-by-blow account of how the network broadcasts of the 1968 Democratic convention shattered faith in American media.
“The whole world is watching!” cried protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention as Chicago police beat them in the streets. When some of that violence was then aired on network television, another kind of hell broke loose. Some viewers were stunned and outraged; others thought the protestors deserved what they got. No one—least of all Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley—was happy with how the networks handled it.
In When the News Broke, Heather Hendershot revisits TV coverage of those four chaotic days in 1968—not only the violence in the streets but also the tumultuous convention itself, where Black citizens and others forcefully challenged southern delegations that had excluded them, anti-Vietnam delegates sought to change the party’s policy on the war, and journalists and delegates alike were bullied by both Daley’s security forces and party leaders. Ultimately, Hendershot reveals the convention as a pivotal moment in American political history, when a distorted notion of “liberal media bias” became mainstreamed and nationalized.
At the same time, she celebrates the values of the network news professionals who strived for fairness and accuracy. Despite their efforts, however, Chicago proved to be a turning point in the public’s trust in national news sources. Since those critical days, the political Right in the United States has amplified distrust of TV news, to the point where even the truest and most clearly documented stories can be deemed “fake.” As Hendershot demonstrates, it doesn’t matter whether the “whole world is watching” if people don’t believe what they see.
“A disturbing clarity into the current biased news coverage is revealed through analysis of past industry reporting standards.”
—Library Journal
WBEZ Chicago interview: How the 1968 DNC changed the relationship between media and politics
Slate -The Gist Podcast
Trial by Firing Line
How conservative champion William F. Buckley Jr. argued with his friends, how he argued with his foes, and why he thought there should be no argument about Donald Trump.
You didn’t have to agree with William F. Buckley Jr. to marvel at his intellect, his swiftness, and his wit. Starting in 1966, Buckley got to show off his skills every week on Firing Line, his pioneering television show devoted to debate. Heather Hendershot watched nearly 1,500 episodes of the show, and though she still doesn’t agree with Buckley, she admires how he created a place for high-minded argument. Hendershot is the author of Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line.
Hoover Institution Talk on Open to Debate on C-SPAN2
Hoover Institution Talk on Open to Debate to air on C-SPAN2’s Book TV, December 3 and 4
Watch the Video: https://www.c-span.org/video/?417964-2/open-debate
The L.A. Times
The conservative rich kid who found his place on television and in politics
How’s this for a story line? Rich kid grows up on the East Coast, not far from Manhattan. He’s utterly convinced of the rightness of his ideas and not at all shy about telling people who disagree with him that they’re wrong and making it abundantly clear that he thinks he’s smarter than they are. His out-there personality draws the attention of television producers, he gets a TV show, becomes a national celebrity and runs for office as a world-class provocateur, taking on both Democrats and the leaders of his own Republican Party. Even though he has never run for anything before, he runs for the biggest office on the ballot and he is quite clearly the intimidator, not the intimidated.
That’s the premise of MIT professor Heather Hendershot’s new book, and as you’ll have immediately realized, it’s a true story. The rich kid is Bill Buckley.
Read the article: http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-buckley-debate-20161026-story.html
The Atlantic Monthly
In the Age of Trump, No Wonder Republicans Miss William F. Buckley
The conservative thinker’s work is a reminder of how intellectually self-satisfied politicians and cable-news have become.
William F. Buckley Jr. could have made Donald Trump quiver with impotent rage. This is a guy who sent Ayn Rand postcards in liturgical Latin just to make her mad, and then bragged about it in her obituary. In part because of his trollish panache, the founder of National Review and longtime host of the television showFiring Line was a conservative mascot in life, and he has become mythologized in death. The 2016 election has made it clear that no one quite like Buckley is working in media today: Republicans are hurting for a cocksure slayer of pseudo-conservative invaders.
No wonder two Buckley retrospectives have come out this October. Open to Debate, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology media-studies professor Heather Hendershot, examines Buckley’s tenure on Firing Line and the diverse ideologies represented on the show.
Open To Debate on The Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal
Politico’s excerpt from Open To Debate
Politico’s excerpt of Open To Debate features several pages from Chapter Four- Chivalrous Pugilism: How Firing Line tried to KO Women’s Lib
William F. Buckley Was No Feminist, But He Was an (Unintentional) Ally
By inviting female intellectuals onto his TV show and taking their arguments seriously, Buckley showed that their ideas were worth listening to—giving feminists a platform to reach an influential audience.
“William F. Buckley was not a feminist.
This hardly constitutes a shocking revelation. In the 1960s, the women’s liberation movement was not a welcome cultural turn for him. He could, by contrast, more fully understand the pressing concerns of the civil rights movement, and acknowledged that racism was a pernicious problem. Likewise, he understood that countercultural youth—antiwar activists, poets, musicians—were seeking a better world, even as he disagreed about what made the world flawed and what would make it better.”
The National Review
Firing Line at 50
by NEAL B. FREEMAN
It is the contention of liberal scholar Heather Hendershot that Firing Line, the long-running television series hosted by William F. Buckley Jr., was bracing, original, occasionally electric, frequently heuristic, and, all weighty things considered, a major contribution to civilized discourse. Allowing for typical professorial understatement, I think she may be on to something.
Professor Hendershot, who teaches media studies at MIT, has just published a magisterial account not only of a television program, but also, more ambitiously, of the political culture from which it sprang and within which it thrived. She tells this story with style and insight and good humor, some of the latter borrowed from WFB but much of it her own. The gem of her hefty book is a long introduction that limns memorably the narrative line and the leading character, all of it based on what appears to be, as the leading character might have put it, Stakhanovite research.
Read the review here: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2016-10-24-0100/heather-hendershot-open-to-debate