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Heather Hendershot in the Washington Post: The 2020 party conventions are actually what the parties have always dreamed of

August 18, 2020

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 is most remembered for the violence in the streets, but there was also chaos inside the convention hall. (Matthew Lewis/The Washington Post)

“Being online will give parties more control of how television viewers experience their conventions.”

A three-day riot just a few miles away, which left three Black citizens dead at the hands of Miami police, should have marred the proceedings. But it didn’t. The conventioneers barely acknowledged it was happening, and the networks mistakenly saw the crisis as completely unrelated to the event. It’s not that the newsmen were pro-Republican, per se. They simply covered the media event that the GOP had staged for them.

Read the full piece at washingtonpost.com.

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Heather Hendershot

Heather Hendershot studies TV news, conservative media, political movements, and American film and television history. She has held fellowships at Vassar College, New York University, Princeton, Harvard, Radcliffe, and Stanford, and she has also been a Guggenheim fellow. Her courses emphasize the interplay between creative, political, and regulatory concerns and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen (big or little). Students are encouraged to consider the ways that TV and film writers, directors, and producers have attempted innovation while working within an industry that demands novelty but also often fears new approaches to character and narrative. Hendershot is the editor of Nickelodeon Nation: The History Politics and Economics of America’s Only TV Channel for Kids (2004) and the author of Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip (1998), Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (2004), What's Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (2011), and Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line (2016). For five years she was the editor of Cinema Journal, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her most recent book is When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America (2022).