"Heather Hendershot argues that a moment long understood as sitting at the crux of American political history-the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago-is also crucial to understanding the country's media history. By scrutinizing those events and broadcasts in precise detail, Hendershot documents the emergence of the idea that the media are inherently liberal. As she shows, the public was unwilling to accept what was happening, and when...

1968: in that single year, MLK and RFK were assassinated, Chicago rioted, Nixon triumphed, and Tet exploded. The top music acts were the Beatles, the Doors, Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye. Man circled the Moon. From Civil Rights to Vietnam, from rock & roll to rocket science, 1968 stands out as a concentrated dose of everything we think of as the Sixties.

From the glamorous years of the Kennedy administration to the triumph of the first moonwalk, viewers are escorted through the period's world-changing events, including the Cuban missile crisis; the civil rights movement; the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.; urban riots; the Vietnam War; and the peace movement it fostered.