The whole world is still watching: Critical and personal reflections on/from Todd Gitlin

I never met with Todd Gitlin in person. The timing was never right. I first became familiar with his work as an undergraduate student at New York University, deciding if I wanted to be a practicing journalist or a scholar who wrote about practicing journalists. After a few years of freelance writing, I applied to the PhD program at Columbia School of Journalism, where Todd invited me to sit in one of his courses. I instead ended up in a different doctoral program in communication because I fell in love with Philadelphia and was sick of New York. When, as a graduate student, I emailed him to inquire if he could be the subject of a project about news framing, we entered a global pandemic and could only communicate through Zoom screens, e-mails and phone calls.

I called Todd in the early months of 2020. The term “fake news” had been at the core of (then) President Donald Trump’s attack on mainstream media. It initially seemed like there wasn’t much journalism scholars could and/or would do about it. Throughout the Trump presidency, Todd was one of various journalism professors, academics and practitioners speaking out against the administration’s attacks on mainstream media as well as its role in spreading misinformation. In April 2020, Todd, with other colleagues, published open letters and circulated petitions urging both liberal and right-wing news outlets to base the information they were disseminating to the public on facts and decency, and to stop airing unedited, live White House Task Force briefings. Todd’s evolving perspective on news framing, how we know what we know, and how to continue critiquing not just conservative but left-wing movements still has much to teach us about the state of communication scholarship and activism today.

Todd’s investment in carefully observing how media operated and what they covered largely grew out of the Vietnam War, the televised protests against it, and the public discourse that enveloped the political crises of the time. “The whole world is watching” – the title of the book that Todd would publish after the war – was also a phrase chanted by anti-Vietnam war demonstrators in the midst of police arrests and beatings at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Since the book, the phrase has been a tagline for other left-leaning protests, from the protests against the Iraq War in 2003 to the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011. It has been co-opted by right-wing commentators defending U.S. actions against Islamic violence, it has mobilized campus protests against white supremacist monuments, and has traveled beyond the U.S. context through presidential statements (e.g., President Barack Obama speaking to the Iranian government during the 2009 protests).

Todd’s work revolved around politics and questioning power. He told me he joined the doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley in 1974 primarily because of the people he knew there through their organization and activist work, and not just what they could offer as intellectual interlocutors. What the world had been watching on television directed his scholarly endeavors and interests. Upon arrival at Berkeley, Todd settled into studying the sociology of news. “I was like a kid when I discovered this,” Todd told me. “I fell upon this with delight because it meant that sociology was big and baggy and imprecisely and poorly boundaried, and I liked that.” The flexible nature of the field echoes how he conceived of communication studies, as a strength. “I don’t believe that communication is a discipline, I believe it’s a field of study, it is a field of attention. It’s a place where things happen which deserve study,” he told me.

As a graduate student, Todd began searching for a compelling framework in which to nest his defining project. The “rediscovery” of western Marxism that emerged in the 1950s with the publication of Gramsci’s work, translated to English in 1969, enabled Todd to ground his work theoretically, finding the concept of hegemony particularly fruitful for his dissertation. His dissertation later became the book The Whole World is Watching published in 1980. “My other scheme was so grandly theoretical I would still be working on it,” he chuckled. The story Todd ended up telling was one that examined the ideological framing of the New Left movement in the 1960s through news coverage by CBS and the New York Times during the Vietnam anti-war movement.

Todd had a few things to say about how to not lose one’s mind in the pursuit of a dissertation project. At the time that he was describing to me his own trajectory as an emerging scholar, I was entertaining at least 4 different grand dissertation ideas, hoping they would miraculously fit into one coherent project. Todd’s openness toward the process of how one comes to a scholarly project that also lives in the world outside an academic department, and how messy it can be, gave me comfort. He also taught me that one strong, compelling and grounded idea is not only good enough and essential to maintaining sanity in a dissertation project, it is important to remember that it is only one of many moments that define a scholar. Other ideas, personality, how one treated people, and how one enjoyed life also counted. One can always evolve, change their mind, even admit that they were wrong. The fact that he quickly also moved from idea to idea in other work, between field sites and interests flexibly, reminded me that I don’t always have to be defined by just one thing, that I can grow, and learn, and change course depending on how I can be most present in the world.

For Todd, the role of the media was key in harnessing everyday consciousness and distributing various ideologies. He argued that the U.S. then had a dominant mass market culture industry. The framework of hegemony was a useful framework to describe class domination and how popular consent was shaped. In journalism practice, hegemony manifested through the structure of the newsroom and the way news stories are literally put together and framed. Todd found the mainstream media complicit with hegemonic structures in society. However, not to be completely defeatist, while journalists reproduced and perpetuated these structures, Todd still saw opportunities for potential social change.

Todd’s work on news, its framing, and power structures in academia and in the media remains relevant decades later. The throughline between Todd’s work and my interests was a preoccupation with the global, and about being (or not) being able to do the political work that is necessary as a scholar. He also described his scholarship and what he perceived of his contributions through vivid memories, interpersonal interactions and encounters, disagreements, friendships, and political moments. Scholarship was always about people and not just ideas. He disagreed with many people and their ideas, but those differences in perspective never meant that there was no room for debate and respect. Todd spoke of the many heated public debates he had with people he may have diverged from intellectually throughout the years, but he spoke of them in good humor, between sips of a hot beverage and nostalgic smiles.

For example, throughout his career, Todd continued to critique various branches of social theory. “When Foucault came along, and I read him and others, I thought people were going overboard,” Todd told me. He began writing essays on the issue in 1987, mainly for Dissent magazine. “For me, it wasn’t that it was possible to know the truth, it was that it was both morally necessary and politically advisable to find a way of forming a moveable consensus of what reason can deliver,” he said. He was especially influenced by Judith Litchenberg’s essay “In Defense of Objectivity Revisited” (1996), which he found “quite convincing and rigorous” (he still recommended an updated version of the essay to his students when I spoke to him). “Her argument is that one should not let the difficulties of establishing objectivity stand in the way of the effort … that it is valuable to make the effort. I still believe that. And that’s how I come to the question about fake news,” he said. He stood by never giving up the concept that, though there may not be a definitive one, “some interpretations are better than others.” Having read a fair amount of literary theory in the 1980s and 1990s, Todd was still “very unhappy with the ‘anything goes’ spirit.” His discomfort led him into debates with Stanley Fish at Berkeley which became “one of the most unpleasant experiences” he had ever had at a university “because [Fish is] a cynic,” Todd stated. “The audience was made up of English department graduate students; they were cheering him on, and I was this sociological intruder.”

Todd also debated Bruno Latour sometime in the mid-1990s. “He [Latour] later changed his views; I’m not saying I did that,” Todd chuckled. “I wanted to work within the framework of the Enlightenment. I was not willing to throw it overboard, so I debated Latour on that question.” Todd described this approach as “old fashioned,” saying: “I was going to be a neo-traditionalist.” It is this stance that he continued to embrace to assess what the media was doing during the Trump administration and beyond, and how scholars should study it. “The project is not simply: You have your view and I have my view – Fox News gets to have its say, and the New York Times gets to have its say, and its different strokes for different folks,” he said.

As I have listened to the audio of our conversation, I am saddened that between the many difficulties that Covid presented, the demands of being in a PhD program, and other life events, there were no further conversations before his departure. After vaccinations and boosters, I expected an in-person meeting over coffee to continue the conversation. I would have asked Todd to say more about where communication studies is going. I would have pressed him on the very white and very male implications of the “Enlightenment ideals” in scholarship that he had referred to numerous times, as values he wanted to hold on to. I would have shared with him my anxieties around the ongoing role of so-called “public intellectualism” in a world that is literally and figuratively on fire.

I have been thinking about his words published in Dissent in the Spring issue of 2011, on an issue many in academic and in public scholarship are afraid and reluctant to speak openly about because of its political and personal risks. Questions about the global, power, the media, and the state of Israel have come even more into the spotlight since the fall of 2023. Todd was vocal and wrote openly about Israel and his own positionality as a scholar and a human. He was often conflicted between, on one hand, defending Israel’s existence, and on the other hand, acknowledging the terror that Palestinians face under state violence. He supported boycotting goods produced in settlement territories while also pushing back against calls to boycott Israeli scholars altogether. In Dissent, he said: “Today, the state of Israel feels to me like a personal trauma, a huge, heartbreaking disappointment, a world-historical opportunity forgone, a danger to the Jews, a burden – and also a nation to which, like it or not, I am fastened, where people I love and admire carry on an immensely, grievously difficult struggle for decency against tall odds.”

I would have asked more questions about how we know what we know, and how we decide as a group, as scholars, and as whole disciplines to orient ourselves in uncertain times with terrifying political stakes. But there is at least some comfort in cherishing and reflecting on the things that Todd did leave us with and the lessons we can learn from them. He left us with a robust record of his adaptability and his willingness to bridge disciplines, to have difficult conversations, to be honest about where we stand and why.

When I first got admitted to Columbia, instead of the initial dry e-mail I expected, Todd left a voice message on my phone on a Sunday afternoon. I missed that call because I was in the middle of a church service when my phone rang, and my mother was sitting next to me. I also missed the voicemail because I notoriously do not listen to voicemails from unknown numbers. The next day, Todd wrote:

Dear Florence, I don’t know if you have gotten any of my phone messages, I was calling to let you know that I’m very pleased to inform you that the admissions group in the PhD program in Communication has enthusiastically¹ accepted you to join our 2018 class. We are awfully impressed not only by what you’ve done but what you intend to do.

He then proceeded to list his phone number, Skype and other ways I could reach him, even over the weekend. To hear that from a scholar you admire, even if it may sound generic to some, was soothing to a harrowing time applying for graduate programs as an international student, a Black woman, a freelance journalist and not what I considered a “serious scholar” at the time. I was not sure I had “done” anything, but if I had managed to fool Todd Gitlin! I will miss the kind of mentorship and warmth that Todd offered, even when it seemed he had nothing to really gain from it besides fun and curious conversation, and even when there was a risk that I would give him a hard time. I really hope to be the kind of mentor and person who is there to help others take-up space, enthusiastically and without apology.

Notes

¹ I highlighted enthusiastically in my printout version because that is better than “reluctantly”