When the News Broke: Chicago 1968

When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America

Authors Heather Hendershot and Simon Balto will discuss the implications for our understanding of the news media of one of the most pivotal moments in American political history—the 1968 Democratic convention.

This program will be held in-person at the Newberry and livestreamed on Zoom. The online version of this event will be live captioned. Please register below.

“The whole world is watching!” cried protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention as Chicago police beat them in the streets. When some of that violence was then aired on network television, another kind of hell broke loose. Some viewers were stunned and outraged; others thought the protestors deserved what they got. No one—least of all Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley—was happy with how the networks handled it.

In this Meet the Author event, join Heather Hendershot and Simon Balto for a discussion of Hendershot’s new book, When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America. In her book, Hendershot revisits TV coverage of those four chaotic days—not only the violence in the streets, but also the tumultuous convention itself, where Black citizens and others forcefully challenged southern delegations that had excluded them, anti-Vietnam delegates sought to change the party’s policy on the war, and journalists and delegates alike were bullied by both Daley’s security forces and party leaders. Ultimately, Hendershot reveals the convention as a pivotal moment in American political history, one in which a distorted notion of “liberal media bias” became mainstreamed and nationalized. As Hendershot demonstrates, it doesn’t matter whether the “whole world is watching” if people don’t believe what they see.

When the News Broke is available to purchase at the Newberry bookshop, and Hendershot will sign copies after the talk.

This event is co-sponsored by the Chicago Collections Consortium.