Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlinis an American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written widely on the mass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly publications...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSociologist
CountryUnited States of America
everyday furniture environment
Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.
bunch kids
It's not a bunch of green-haired kids with punctures in their faces.
america american-sociologist fancy term
The fancy term for what America has squandered in the past year and a half or so is legitimacy.
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I have no action plan, and as a writer I don't want to get hung up on the advantages and disadvantages of particular strategies.
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Again, the only trends that interest the corporate boys and girls are demographic and businesslike. I doubt the think tank reports interest them much.
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You're in the news business and you're in the business of arresting the attention of people and prying them away from what they take for granted. They must read the next day's paper and so on. While the desire to gain attention is a dynamic in journalism, it's not the only one. The predominant dynamic since journalism's inception has been the desire to capture the attention of people. Another dynamic is the extension of democratic enlightenment.
anxious confused generally life people threatened ways
People who feel that their ways of life are threatened or feel generally anxious or confused about the way things are going are disposed to look for causes.
access journalism
Access journalism has become the ends, not the means.
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It's too hot to handle. He was scathing toward Bush and it was absolutely devastating. They don't know how to handle such a pointed and aggressive criticism.
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Can't address the big fact that the bulk of life is taking place under the pressure of an onslaught of images.
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As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the first step to imagining what we might want to do about it.
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So every day I'm mindful as I watch the Bush crowd extend their sway into policies of every imaginable variety, and over almost every square foot of earth, that the control of the American state is a matter of urgency.
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The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter.
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The only people available to change the world are the people now living in it, with all the beliefs they bring along - however retrograde those beliefs may appear to those of us who see ourselves as enlightened.