Police Riot, Chicago, 28 August 1968: Leading members of the liberal media establishment telegrammed Chicago Mayor, Richard Daley, condemning the way his Police Department repeatedly singled out and deliberately beat newsmen, allegedly to "prevent reporting of an important confrontation between police and demonstrators which the American public as a whole has a right to know." The American public backed Dick Daley and his cops.
FOR THE LIBERAL US NEWS MEDIA, 28 August 1968 was “the day the music died”.
That was the day Chicago’s finest unleashed what a later inquiry would describe
as a “Police Riot”. In full view of the TV networks’ cameras, the Chicago
Police Department fired canister after canister of tear gas, sprayed gallons of
mace into people’s faces at point-blank range, and rained down torrents of
billy-club blows on unarmed anti-war protesters, delegates to the Democratic
Party’s National Convention, and – horror of horrors – working journalists. CBS
News’s Dan Rather was roughed up as the cameras rolled, prompting his
colleague, Walter Cronkite, to declare live, on nationwide television: “I think
we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan.”
It was shocking stuff, and the newspaper publishers, their
editors, and the network bosses weren’t afraid to say so. Confident that they
spoke for the overwhelming majority of decent, civic-minded American citizens,
the owners of America’s largest and most liberal media institutions roundly
rebuked the behaviour of the Chicago Police Department and their brutal boss,
Mayor Richard Daley.
Imagine, then, the liberal establishment’s profound shock
and dismay when the overwhelming majority of decent, civic-minded Americans
backed Mayor Daley and his rioting policemen. In the fortnight following the
riot, the Chicago Mayor’s Office received 74,000 letters supporting his
response to the anti-war protests. Fewer than 8,000 were critical of the way
the Mayor and his Police Department had handled the situation. The nation’s
pollsters confirmed these correspondents’ sentiments. Political pundits would
later say that Richard Nixon did not win the 1968 presidential election on 2
November; he won it on 28 August.
The American public’s response to the Chicago Police Riot
had a noticeably chastening effect on the liberal US media. Writing just a week
after the event, the widely syndicated US columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner,
Joseph Kraft, drew attention to the deep class divisions that liberal
journalism at once reflected and exacerbated:
“On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income
whites sure of themselves and brimming with ideas for doing things differently.
On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low income
whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovators.”
“In the circumstances,” Kraft concluded, “it seems to me
that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand
Middle America. Equally it seems wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent
restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at
all times the agent of the sovereign public.”
Thirteen years later, and 13,000 kilometres south-west of
Chicago, the “sovereign public’s” view of the news media was strikingly
similar. In 1981: The Tour, his
history of the 1981 Springbok Tour, Geoff Chapple describes an encounter
between a crowd of Hamilton rugby patrons denied their match with the South
African team, and a 25-year-old Radio New Zealand reporter from Auckland:
“He was slung around with radio-telephone gear, and he was a
target too. The rugby crowd shouted at him: ‘You caused all this to happen, you
bastards!’”
If one listens carefully, amidst all the clamour of protest
at the possible cancellation of TV3’s liberal news and current affairs
programme, Campbell Live, there is an
unmistakeable echo of the same outrage that gripped the champions of a free
press in Chicago and Hamilton. It is also a pretty safe bet that most of it is coming
from “highly educated upper-income whites sure of themselves and brimming with
ideas for doing things differently”.
In his famous post-Chicago column, Kraft invoked the
medieval Catholic Church’s concept of “plenary indulgence” (the wholesale
forgiveness of sins) to convey some sense of the invincible moral confidence that
afflicts so many liberal journalists. That the judgements flowing from such
confidence might be construed (by those required to live in circumstances of
considerably less moral clarity) as a species of reproof never enters their
heads.
Also absent from their calculations is the uncomfortable fact
that, in a robust secular democracy, truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are
what the majority say they are. Nothing makes the majority madder than being preached
at by those who came second.
If as many New Zealanders voted for Campbell Live with their remotes as currently watch Seven Sharp, its future would be assured.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 April 2015.
