
Princeton University Press
Heather Hendershot, When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)
Katherine Cramer Brownell, 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023)
What Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s 1949 novel "1984," keeps trying to avoid in the book is the telescreen. It’s a screen, a speaker and a microphone all in one; it’s in every home and every workplace, every street and forest and park; it’s always on, always listening, always seeing. Finishing the novel on the remote Scottish island of Jura in 1948, as Stalin was ascendant, after we had dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and seeing the national security and surveillance state forming, Orwell imagined it to be oblong, a “metal plaque” – something that looks like “a dulled mirror,” he wrote. This was before television and well before desktops, laptops, and cell phones had become omnipresent. In 2024, of course, we can imagine it as an endless Zoom call (Good G-d!) – always on, on every device beside and surrounding you. And connected to Google. And the people controlling Google are the government. And the main thing the government is interested in using it all for is – to Google you!
Orwell had figured out that what goes into our heads – all the sights, all the sounds, sensations from the other senses, too – determines our reality, and that we can be conditioned by the media we absorb, especially if we are forced to absorb it, to believe anything that producers of that media want us to. “If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality,” the novel tells us. And “reality,” Orwell writes, “is inside the skull.”
Orwell imagined a single Ministry of Truth, the “primary job” of which, he wrote, is not only to reconstruct the past but “to supply the citizens” with “newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programs, plays, novels – with every conceivable kind of information, instruction or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling book to a Newspeak dictionary.” The Ministry in 1984 has “huge printing shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs”; a “teleprograms section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors”; a records department, with “armies of reference clerks” whose job it is to draw up lists of books and periodicals “due for recall.” The Ministry produces music, too – songs that are “composed entirely by mechanical means” (ChatGPT, anyone?) “on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.” But it’s the telescreen that’s the key instrument in dystopian Oceania for delivering what Orwell calls “reality control.”
Media scholars like Heather Hendershot (at MIT) and Katherine Cramer Brownell (at Purdue) do readers a huge favor in their work when they write extraordinary books like the ones above about television and look at its relationship to state power and control. These two books tell us how the national leaders we vote into power now are increasingly television, or telescreen, people. Kennedy was our first television president – the first to hold live press conferences in front of the cameras – and definitely our first telegenic chief executive. Lyndon Johnson’s family empire was based on broadcasting holdings across Texas; his wife, Ladybird, owned so many of them in her name, LBJ called himself the “broadcaster-in-law.” Nixon came out of the country’s biggest TV market – California. Reagan had been a movie actor on the silver screen and then a television spokesperson for General Electric. And Trump had been a TV star in NBC’s “The Apprentice,” one of our reality (reality-control) teleprograms, to use Orwell’s word, that portrayed him as a self-made millionaire and genius decisionmaker in front of millions of American viewers every week. With Trump, all this happened as Rupert Murdoch was building up a whole pro-Trump Teleprograms Department – Teledep, in Newspeak – at the Fox equivalent, replete with radio, internet, books, newspapers, a film studio, you name it, of a modern Ministry of Truth.
Control over media technology is never a quiet battlefield: it’s always the seat of warfare. Hendershot’s book – ostensibly about four days in Chicago – explores in extraordinary detail the fights – including the physical ones – over communications technology here. The Democratic Party set to nominate the party’s candidate for president at a time of war in Vietnam, violence against the Civil Rights movement, and the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy, among others. There were three and only three television networks then, and all three covered the proceedings. It became the top-rated television event of 1968. Fifty-one million households wound up tuning in.
Mayor Richard J. Daley, the party boss of Chicago, wanted the cameras and print journalists to cover it only the way he wanted. He told the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to go on strike in order to limit the number of new telephone lines available to reporters for voice calls and the transmission of live images out of the city. He had pay phones near the convention jammed with dimes so journalists couldn’t call out. He made sure the phones in office buildings next to the convention site had their wires slashed, too. He denied parking permits for the networks. He sealed manhole covers with tar so that protestors couldn’t hide in the sewers. He threw barbed-wire around the convention amphitheater and put the entire police force of 12,000 men on 12-hour shifts. But he could not wield absolute control, and the extraordinary violence that erupted in Chicago that summer became the story that was broadcast live on our telescreens.
Brownell’s book is a fantastic read covering a much longer time period but also about reality control. People in charge – at the helm of media companies, the financial analysts, the politicians, even the journalists – sold us the coming of network television and then the coming of cable television as the answer to previous media systems that had failed democracy. But as Brownell puts it, the rise of cable, much like the rise of all the other media here, “was never about enhancing democracy.” “It was about making money and forging strategic partnerships between an industry and the elected politicians who wrote the rules in which that industry operated.” It was about “how to structure media institutions [. . .] central to political power.” It was Marshall McLuhan who said, “We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.” If that’s the case, we had better understand what’s coming next – and fast!
Peter B. Kaufman lives in Lakeville and works at MIT Open Learning and is the author of “The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge.”
Kaufman will discuss the award-winning book "Overreach, The Inside Story of Putin and Russia's War Against Ukraine" by journalist Owen Matthews on Saturday, Jan. 6, at 4 p.m. at Scoville Memorial Library.
SHARON — Angela Derrick Carabine, 74, died May 17, 2025, at Vasser Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was the wife of Michael Carabine and mother of Caitlin Carabine McLean.
A funeral Mass will be celebrated on June 6 at 11:00 a.m. at Saint Katri (St Bernards Church) Church. Burial will follow at St. Bernards Cemetery. A complete obituary can be found on the website of the Kenny Funeral home kennyfuneralhomes.com.
Sam Waterston
On June 7 at 3 p.m., the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington will host a benefit screening of “The Killing Fields,” Roland Joffé’s 1984 drama about the Khmer Rouge and the two journalists, Cambodian Dith Pran and New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, whose story carried the weight of a nation’s tragedy.
The film, which earned three Academy Awards and seven nominations — including one for Best Actor for Sam Waterston — will be followed by a rare conversation between Waterston and his longtime collaborator and acclaimed television and theater director Matthew Penn.
“This came out of the blue,” Waterston said of the Triplex invitation, “but I love the town, I love this area. We raised our kids here in the Northwest Corner and it’s been good for them and good for us.”
Waterston hasn’t seen the film in decades but its impact has always remained present.
“It was a major event in my life at the time,” Waterston said of filming “The Killing Fields,” “and it had a big influence on me and my life ever after.” He remembers the shoot vividly. “My adrenaline was running high and the part of Sydney Schanberg was so complicated, so interesting.”
Waterston lobbied for the role of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for years, tracing his early interest to a serendipitous connection while filming in England. Even before Joffé’s production was greenlit, he had his sights set on playing the role. “I knew I wanted the part for years even before it was a movie that was being produced.”
What followed was not just critical acclaim, but also a political awakening. “The film gave all of us an intimate acquaintance with refugees, what it is to be a refugee, how the world forgets them and what a terrible crime that is.”
In Boston, at a press stop for the film, two women asked Waterston a pointed question: now that he knew what he knew, what was he going to do about it? “I said, ‘Well, you know, I’m an actor, so I thought I’d go on acting.’ And they said, ‘No, that’s not what you need to do. You need to join Refugees International.’” And join he did, serving on the organization’s board for 25 years.
Both Schanberg and Dith Pran, whose life the film also chronicles, were “cooperative and helpful … in a million ways,” Waterston said. Upon first meeting Pran, Waterston recalled, “He came up to me, made a fist, and pounded on my chest really hard and said, ‘You must understand that Sydney is very strong here.’ He was trying to plant something in me.”
There were more tender gestures, too. Schanberg used the New York Times wire to relay that Waterston’s wife had just given birth while he was filming in Thailand, adding to the personal and emotional connection to the production.
Though “The Killing Fields” is a historical document, its truths still resonate deeply today. “Corruption is a real thing,” Waterston warned. “Journalism is an absolutely essential part of our democracy that is as under siege today as it was then. It’s different now but it’s the same thing of ‘Don’t tell the stories we don’t want heard.’ Without journalists, we are dust in the wind.” Waterston added, “Democracy is built on the consent of the governed but the other thing it’s built on is participation of the governed and without full participation, democracy really doesn’t stand much of a chance. It’s kind of a dead man walking.”
When asked what he hopes the audience will take away from the screening, Waterston didn’t hesitate. “This is the story that puts the victims of war at the center of the story and breaks your heart. I think that does people a world of good to have their hearts broken about something that’s true. So, I hope that’s what the impact will be now.”
Tickets for the benefit screening are available at www.thetriplex.org. Proceeds support Triplex Cinema, a nonprofit home for film and community programming in the Berkshires.
Scott Reinhard, graphic designer, cartographer, former Graphics Editor at the New York Times, took time out from setting up his show “Here, Here, Here, Here- Maps as Art” to explain his process of working.Here he explains one of the “Heres”, the Hunt Library’s location on earth (the orange dot below his hand).
Map lovers know that as well as providing the vital functions of location and guidance, maps can also be works of art.With an exhibition titled “Here, Here, Here, Here — Maps as Art,” Scott Reinhard, graphic designer and cartographer, shows this to be true. The exhibition opens on June 7 at the David M. Hunt Library at 63 Main St., Falls Village, and will be the first solo exhibition for Reinhard.
Reinhard explained how he came to be a mapmaker. “Mapping as a part of my career was somewhat unexpected.I took an introduction to geographic information systems (GIS), the technological side of mapmaking, when I was in graduate school for graphic design at North Carolina State.GIS opened up a whole new world, new tools, and data as a medium to play with.”
He added, “When I moved to New York City, I continued that exploration of cartography, and my work eventually caught the attention of the New York Times, where I went to work as a Graphics Editor, making maps and data visualizations for a number of years.”At the New York Times, his work contributed to a number of Pulitzer Prize winning efforts.
In his work, Reinhard takes complex data and turns it into intriguing visualizations the viewer can begin to comprehend immediately and will want to continue to look into and explore more deeply.
One method Reinhard uses combines historic United States Geological survey maps with “current elevation data (height above sea level for a point on earth) to create 3-D looking maps, combining old and new,” he explained.
For the show at Hunt Library Reinhard said, “I knew that I wanted to incorporate the place into the show itself. A place can be many things.The exhibition portrays the exact spot visitors are from four vantage points: the solar system, the earth, the Northwest Corner, and the library itself.” Hence the name, “Here, Here, Here, Here.”
He continued, “The largest installation, the Northwest Corner, is a mosaic of high-resolution color prints and hand-printed cyanotypes — one of the earliest forms of photography. They use elevation data to portray the landscape in a variety of ways, from highly abstract to the highly detailed.”
This sixteen-foot-wide installation covers the area of Millerton to Barkhamsted Reservoir and from North Canaan down to Cornwall for a total of about 445 square miles.
For subjects, he chooses places he’s visited and feels deeply connected to, like the Northwest Corner.“This show is a thank you to the community for the richness that it has brought to my life. I love it here,” he said.
The opening reception for the show is on June 7 from 5 to 7 p.m. On Thursday, June 12, Reinhard will give a talk about his work from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the library.“Here, Here, Here, Here” will be on display until July 3.
Scott Reinhard’s 16-foot-wide piece of the Northwest Corner is laid out on the floor prior to being hung for the show. L. Tomaino
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