Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now by Peter Bacon Hales

Author:Peter Bacon Hales [Hales, Peter Bacon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

12.1. Bob Dylan singing “When the Ship Comes In” with Joan Baez, March on Washington, August 1963.

Dylan and Baez may have made little impression on the vast black audience on the Mall, but they did serve a very different purpose. Seeking to defuse the racial charge of the march, which Soviet propagandists had already propagated globally as a evidence of American hypocrisy and injustice, the U.S. Information Agency hastily purchased a dual portrait of Dylan and Baez rehearsing offstage and disseminated it to USIA outlets worldwide, showing a softer, younger, whiter, and more romantic picture of the event.

It was a long day. It’s doubtful Dylan remained on the site,5 but it’s nearly certain he heard King’s speech at the end—as most Americans did, via the uninterrupted coverage of CBS television and the now-arrived cameras of ABC and NBC. The presence of more than thirty-five network cameras and more than five hundred technicians, interviewers, and commentators marked the full transition to a different media economy. While the Universal Newsreel of the event took weeks from March to movie house, enabling writers, editors, and narrators to craft an interpretation of the event, the networks were faced with responding immediately, cutting in and out of regular programming,*3 frantically writing copy for the news narrators to read, editing film to bring viewers up to the live action when coverage returned. In a prelude to what the Vietnam War would do to the corporate control of media, the event itself overwhelmed the mechanisms of correction, shading, and interpretation from above. Instead, the networks, desperate for drama, took the narrative given them and simply amplified it.6

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