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Todd Gitlin

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author of Letters to a Young Activist. He is currently working with Liel Leibovitz on a book about chosen peoples.

Recent Articles

We Disport. We Deride.

Todd GitlinJan 21, 2003

"FOX NEWS ALERT," screams the screen, in red. "FOX NEWS LEARNS OF POSSIBLE THREAT TO NY HARBOR." Do we have your attention now? Who cares if FOX's reporter goes on to say that the New Year's Eve threat is "uncorroborated, noncredible [sic] and suspect"? Attention will be paid.

Showtime Iraq

Todd GitlinOct 10, 2002

The pregame show is ticking toward the opening kickoff. The networks are up- dating their SHOWDOWN and COUNTDOWN logos, upgrading their drumrolls and trumpet snippets, cueing their cruise missile videos and maps of hitherto obscure regions. The color commentators and military consultants are sipping their coffee in the green rooms, getting pumped. War is the spectacle of spectacles, and for television news there's no business like spectacle business. To air debate about whether war makes sense is decidedly a lesser priority.

Film Business

Todd GitlinMar 06, 2002

Work is the dirty secret of contemporary life -- to
judge by the movies, at any rate. Although work is where people experience
roughly half their waking hours over the course of four or five decades, working
life is not considered glamorous or electric enough to hold the attention of
audiences. Filmgoers, after all, treat the movies as a respite from (among other
things) working life. Yet much of our experience of human relations takes place
at work: the victories and defeats, purposes and routines, thrusts and
counterthrusts, lies and impositions, passions large and small, affections and
disaffections, actions, reactions, ambitions, thrills, and disappointments that
frustrate and animate life.

Straight From the Sixties: What Conservatives Owe the Decade They Hate

Apocalyptic intemperateness, paranoia, a loathing of compromise, a demonization of the enemy -- where have we run into this before?

Todd GitlinDec 19, 2001

The politics of the Gingrich revolution of the
nineties are locked in a strange obsession with the politics they purport to
repeal—the politics of the late sixties. House Majority Leader Dick Armey,
Republican of Texas, forthrightly set out the conventional loathing: "To me
all the problems began in the sixties." But the troops of the New Right are
far more nourished by the sixties than they appreciate. The sixties provide the
right both an evil to extirpate and a libertarian ethic to emulate.

State of the Debate: Indelible Colors

A book by two political theorists argues that new, cultural definitions of race can be as insidious as the old, biological ones.

Todd GitlinDec 07, 2001


WORK DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY


K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political
Morality of Race (Princeton University Press, 1996).

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