1968: State-Sanctioned History

As a student of American history, I had absolutely no intention of tuning in to see Tom Brokaw's latest rehash of 1968. And as one who once performed manuscript-doctoring on a mass media company's book about 1968 I felt I knew what to expect: the usual nostalgia-tinged, history-as-headlines gloss, replete with groovy soundtrack.

But flipping through the channels last night, I alit on Brokaw's 1968 for a moment of exemplary illustration--not of the '60s, but of one of the mechanisms by which Americans are kept ignorant of history and current affairs alike:

VO/BROKAW: "But America wasn't the only country in turmoil. While there was rioting in Chicago [shots of Mayor Daley's police beating protestors at the '68 DNC in Chicago]...Communist tanks crushed a democratic uprising in Prague"

Those who have read Manufacturing Consent will know what to look for in the excerpt above: The use of the passive voice to describe the actions of the state (or, as is often the case, a state friendly to the interests of the U.S. government), and the use of the active voice to describe the actions of an enemy of state interests.

Who were the unidentified rioters in Chicago? One might fairly assume from this "documentary" that it was those dirty hippies; or those with a touch more cultural memory might answer that it was Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman's Yippies. Alas, no: according to Rights in Conflict, the report of the incident submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, what happened in Chicago in 1968 was a "police riot." Did some of the protestors act as provocateurs? Yes. But the rioting was done by the police, who (according to the report) engaged in "unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night," violence made "all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat."

Do not think that I imagine some grand conspiracy to distort history; none, in fact, is needed. I write for television, so I know how these things work: the much more likely scenario is that a writer with (at best) a passing familiarity with the subject at hand was called upon to write the script for Brokaw. He knows--or discovers that--"there was rioting" at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. From there, he either parrots a source that cast the rioting in the passive voice or, if he has discovered that an official report blamed the rioting on the police, feels that, even with official sanction, such an allegation seems a touch, well, radical to put in Tom Brokaw's mouth in 2007--and so he pasteurizes the potentially infectious truth.

This is how we manage to get news--and history--that appears to report events but which, demonstrably, divorces facts from context and strips events of significance. And this is another example of why, as we prepare for another year of political conventions, elections, and other catastrophes--while looking back on Chicago '68 and New York '04--we need take care not to rely on the state-rationalizing narratives provided by corporate media.

P.S. Of course, those who bother to view the trailer on the History Channel's website are given fair warning that Tom Brokaw knows fuck all about the 1960s, subject of his no doubt ghost-written book Boom! (which is, frighteningly, Amazon.com's #1-ranked book in the "history" category), as in the promotional interview he helpfully informs us that "the '60s weren't just Paul Simon [solo career began in 1970], James Taylor [a virtual unknown until the 1970 release of his second-album, Sweet Baby James], and the Beatles [even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then].