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Show Chicago acid test BY NICK SNOW I have received assurances from Bob and Ted, the two wizard typesetters type-setters at the University Printing Service, that the mechanical error in the machines that put Paul Taylor and his Chronicle nine hundred years ahead of their time has been corrected and that, if "Mediaman" is garbled this time around, it won't be their fault. (There are those who still maintain that the Taylor bunch was that far ahead back in 1967 but even if they were, this is no time to be smug. We haven't come that far in four years, friends.) Onward: (Typesetter's note: Don't let im kid ya The Chrony stall doesn't trust us at all . . . and they proofread everything we set.) What I'm about to lay on you, if my weak base in a Psyche 5 class taken when I was freshman still holds, is called a Stimulus-Response test wherein I give you, the reader, a word and then record and analyze your initial response. Difficult as that may seem, it can be done in a column like this. The idea is that I'll have looked into things far enough to be able to predict response fairly accurately Ready for the test? Here it is: Chicago. Roll it around in your head a 'little, then we'll go on. Discounting those of you who are natives of the Windy City (5 points for your upbringing) and the music freaks who immediately thought of the rock group (no points for you but 3 points and $5.98 for Columbia Records), the Images seen were probably either kids getting their heads busted by cops gone crazy or the sideshow of 1969 that took place in Julius Hoffman's courtroom. In other words, Chicago which may, for all we know, be a very nice city has been done in in the space of a few months. Its image is, to say the least, distasteful. And who did it? The media, friends, the media. Middle class America did not split completely apart the nights of the 1968 National Democratic Convention, contrary to what some people believe. The Generation Gap was not created when families were huddled around their sets watching the insanity that penetrated an otherwise proper (surely) proceeding and turned it into a brawl. The split came a few weeks later when the soothing explanations started coming in about how what came into our living rooms really didn't happen; it was all the fault of the media. Just as the media staged it all for our benefit. A real show. Yep. How many of us remember watching Walter Cronkite switch to Dan Rather on the convention floor and catch this bit of sparkling dialogue: Rather (muffled) : "Take your hands off me . . . What is this?" Cronkite: "Dan, are you all right?" Rather (more clearly) : "Yes, I seem to have got it straightened out. I was, er . . ." Cronkite: "Yes, we saw it from up here. They're acting like hoodlums." hood-lums." Rather: "It's happening all over the convention floor. Even to delegates." Cronkite (mustache curling): "I don't know what we can do about it, Dan." And Rather, who'd made more news himself for anybody any-body conscious of the media impact, straightened his tie and tried to go on. (Some months later, when NET's Public Broadcast Laboratory analyzed mews media impact, Cronkite smiled and admitted he'd "lost his cool" when he'd called the convention cops hoodlums.) There were many things that happened to television news at that convention, some for the last time. When the meeting had ended the night Daley packed the galleries with his loyal employees, four NBC newsmen who'd been on the floor took chairs and, with anchormen Huntley and Brinkley, analyzed the day's events, offering their interpretations in-terpretations of what they'd seen. Six months later, they'd be running seared. A sampling of what the media predicted for Chicago ranges from Life Magazine's cartoon showing battalions of National Guardsmen rising out of Lake Michigan and LBJ flying in on a helicopter for a planned spontaneous birthday celebration to Rampart's grim color section sec-tion showing the slums surrounding the convention center and the signs nearby: "Chicago welcomes the 1968 National Democratic Convention." Con-vention." And the special route from the airport. "Chicago," said one underground, "is a city of old men. Even tlie picturesque Old ToWn, heralded as the city's Bohemian center, is Middle Aged." Chicago was a city of old men before the convention; conven-tion; how did it look after even the Clean for Gene had been attacked by insane cops? The media didn't kill Chicago; Chicago killed itself. The media just brought the suicide into our living rooms. And it's going to be a long time before those of us who saw people our age getting maced by sadists who'd been conditioned to shout "Seig Heil" (according to Tom Hayden's book in this month's Ramparts, a black policeman's testimony which Included this little fact was ruled irrelevant by Judge Hoffman) ever want to go back to Chicago. There's an Irishman who , seems to resemble a bull more than a jig who heads a clumsy political machine in that city. He sports techniques to match his appearance. Except for insane Weathermen and SDSers looking for a confrontation or people willing to fit into his mold, this man does not have the trust of a lot of people I know. What this man staged for the benefit of the media made Chicago a dirty word. No matter how many times Frank Sinatra sings "My Kind of Town," it'll take a long time before I believe be-lieve it because of what the media showed me that week two years ago. Which gave rise to yet another dirty word that I'll look at in the next "Mediaman." The word is Agnewism. |