Tube Politics

American media politics assumed its present character during the Sixties, beginning with the black power movement. Those were the days when the word “black” itself was foisted on us by the radical wing of the civil rights movement—or rather by that wing’s admirers in the media. We have long since accepted the word, but it is worth recalling that most black people didn’t like it. That illustrates the media’s power to alter the national vocabulary.

Some wag quipped at the time that Stokely Carmichael had a following of fifty blacks and five hundred newsmen. I thought of that while watching NBC’s coverage of the feminist Establishment’s latest do in Cincinnati. This time the formal title was the National Women’s Political Conference. Last time, in Houston, it was the National Women’s Conference.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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American media politics assumed its present character during the Sixties, beginning with the black power movement. Those were the days when the word “black” itself was foisted on us by the radical wing of the civil rights movement—or rather by that wing’s admirers in the media. We have long since accepted the word, but it is worth recalling that most black people didn’t like it. That illustrates the media’s power to alter the national vocabulary.

Some wag quipped at the time that Stokely Carmichael had a following of fifty blacks and five hundred newsmen. I thought of that while watching NBC’s coverage of the feminist Establishment’s latest do in Cincinnati. This time the formal title was the National Women’s Political Conference. Last time, in Houston, it was the National Women’s Conference.