Todd Gitlin
Encyclopedia
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written widely on the mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly
Academia
Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...
publications.
New Left activist
In his youth, Gitlin was a political activist, beginning in 1960, when he joined a Harvard group called Tocsin, against nuclear weapons. In 1963 and 1964, Gitlin was president of Students for a Democratic SocietyStudents for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...
; he was elected, he writes, because "none of the other four candidates, each of whom was experienced, was willing to serve," since "we mistrusted power, including our own! Recruiting leaders was hard." (Letters to a Young Activist, p. 117) He helped organize the first national demonstration against
Opposition to the Vietnam War
The movement against US involvment in the in Vietnam War began in the United States with demonstrations in 1964 and grew in strength in later years. The US became polarized between those who advocated continued involvement in Vietnam, and those who wanted peace. Peace movements consisted largely of...
the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, held in Washington, D. C., on April 17, 1965, with 25,000 participants, as well as the first civil disobedience directed against American corporate support for the apartheid regime in South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
- a sit-in at the Manhattan headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank
Chase Manhattan Bank
JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., doing business as Chase, is a national bank that constitutes the consumer and commercial banking subsidiary of financial services firm JPMorgan Chase. The bank was known as Chase Manhattan Bank until it merged with J.P. Morgan & Co. in 2000...
on March 19, 1965. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
Academic career
He graduated as valedictorianValedictorian
Valedictorian is an academic title conferred upon the student who delivers the closing or farewell statement at a graduation ceremony. Usually, the valedictorian is the highest ranked student among those graduating from an educational institution...
of the Bronx High School of Science
Bronx High School of Science
The Bronx High School of Science is a specialized New York City public high school often considered the premier science magnet school in the United States. Founded in 1938, it is now located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx...
, one of New York City's elite public high schools. Enrolling at Harvard College, he graduated with an A.B. degree in mathematics. After his leadership in SDS, he earned graduate degrees from the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
(political science) and the University of California, Berkeley (sociology).
He served as professor of sociology and director of the mass communications program at the University of California, Berkeley, then a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. He is now a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in Communications at Columbia University. During 1994-95, he held the chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been a resident at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California, a fellow at the Media Studies Center, and a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Oslo, and the University of Toronto. From April - May 2011, Gitlin is the recipient of the Bosch Berlin Prize in Public Policy and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin
American Academy in Berlin
The American Academy in Berlin is a research and cultural institution in Berlin whose stated mission is to foster a greater understanding and dialogue between the people of the United States and the people of Germany.The American Academy was founded in September 1994 by a group of prominent...
.
Public intellectual
He has written 14 books and hundreds of articles in dozens of publications, including The New York TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Ha'aretz, Columbia Journalism Review
Columbia Journalism Review
The Columbia Journalism Review is an American magazine for professional journalists published bimonthly by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961....
, Tablet Magazine
Tablet Magazine
Tablet Magazine is a two-time National Magazine Award-winning online publication of Jewish life, arts, and ideas. Sponsored by Nextbook, it was launched in June 2009. Its Editor in Chief is Alana Newhouse....
, The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, Mother Jones
Mother Jones (magazine)
Mother Jones is an American independent news organization, featuring investigative and breaking news reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. Mother Jones has been nominated for 23 National Magazine Awards and has won six times, including for General Excellence in 2001,...
, and many more. He has been a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner and the New York Observer
New York Observer
The New York Observer is a weekly newspaper first published in New York City on September 22, 1987, by Arthur L. Carter, a very successful former investment banker with publishing interests. The Observer focuses on the city's culture, real estate, the media, politics and the entertainment and...
, and is a frequent contributor to TPMcafe
TPMCafe
TPMCafe is a center-left blog portal created by Josh Marshall as a spin-off blog to his popular Talking Points Memo. It debuted on May 31, 2005....
and The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
online. He is on the editorial board of Dissent
Dissent (magazine)
Dissent is a quarterly magazine focusing on politics and culture edited by Michael Walzer and Michael Kazin. The magazine is published for the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc by the University of Pennsylvania Press....
and a contributing writer to Mother Jones
Mother Jones (magazine)
Mother Jones is an American independent news organization, featuring investigative and breaking news reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. Mother Jones has been nominated for 23 National Magazine Awards and has won six times, including for General Excellence in 2001,...
. He has been co-chair of the San Francisco branch of PEN American Center, a member of the board of directors of Greenpeace
Greenpeace
Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization with offices in over forty countries and with an international coordinating body in Amsterdam, The Netherlands...
, and an early editor of Open Democracy.
In his early writings on media, especially The Whole World Is Watching, he called attention to the ideological framing of the New Left and other social movements, the vexed relations of leadership and celebrity, and the impact of coverage on the movements themselves. In Inside Prime Time, he analyzed the workings of the television entertainment industry of the early 1980s. In Media Unlimited, he turned to the unceasing flow of the media torrent, the problems of attention and distraction, and the emotional payoffs of media experience in our time.
Gitlin has become a prominent critic of the tactics and rhetoric of the Left as well as the Right. He emphasizes what he sees as the need in American politics to form coalitions between disparate movements, which must compromise ideological purity to gain and sustain power by working together within the two major political parties. He argues that the Republican party has managed to accomplish this with a coalition of what he calls two "major components - the low-tax, love-business, hate-government enthusiasts and the God-save-us moral crusaders" but that the Democratic Party has often been unable to accomplish a pragmatic coalition between its "roughly eight" constituencies, which he identifies as "labor, African Americans, Hispanics, feminists, gays, environmentalists, members of the helping professions (teachers, social workers, nurses), and the militantly liberal, especially antiwar denizens of avant-garde cultural zones such as university towns, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and so on." (from The Bulldozer and the Big Tent, pp. 18–19). He adds that "it is easier [for Republicans] to coax one of two ideological tendencies (usually the Christian right) to compromise for the greater good of conservatism than it is to persuade an identity-based group (feminists, gays, African Americans) to make concessions on what is, after all, their identity as they see it.”
In The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, he and Liel Leibovitz trace parallel themes in the history of the Jews and the Americans through history down to the present.
Quote
Books
- Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (1970) ISBN 0-06-090235-3 (with Nanci Hollander)
- Campfires of the Resistance: Poetry from the Movement, editor (1971)
- Busy Being Born (1974) ISBN 0-87932-073-7
- The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the Left (1980) ISBN 0-520-23932-6
- Inside Prime Time (1983) ISBN 0-520-21785-3
- The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987) ISBN 0-553-37212-2
- Watching Television, editor (1987) ISBN 0-394-54496-X
- The Murder of Albert Einstein (1992) ISBN 0-553-37366-8
- The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (1995) ISBN 0-8050-4091-9.
- Sacrifice (1999) ISBN 0-8050-6032-4
- Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (2002) ISBN 0-8050-7283-7
- Letters To a Young Activist (2003) ISBN 0-465-02738-5
- The Intellectuals and the Flag (2006) ISBN 0-231-12492-9
- The Bulldozer and the Big Tent (2007) ISBN 0-471-74853-6
- The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (2010) ISBN 1439132356 (with Liel Leibovitz)
- Undying (February 2011) ISBN 978-1582436463
External links
- ToddGitlin.net
- Gitlin's page at Columbia University
- Do Less Harm: The Lesser Evil of Non-Intervention, Todd Gitlin's essay in World Affairs
- Todd Gitlin's essays in Dissent
- Gitlin in discussion with Mark Bauerlein
- Video of debate/discussion with Todd Gitlin on Bloggingheads.tvBloggingheads.tvBloggingheads.tv is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers...
- Interview on WikiLeaks with Brooke Gladstone On the MediaOn the MediaOn the Media is an hour-long weekly radio program, hosted by Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, covering journalism, technology, and First Amendment issues. It is produced by WNYC in New York City...
- Interview on The Chosen Peoples with Robert Pollie, The 7th Avene Project
- Interview on The Chosen Peoples with Michael Krasny, KQED Forum