Radicals and Reactionaries: The Media Assimilation of the Counterculture

RADICALS AND REACTIONARIES: THE MEDIA ASSIMILATION OF THE COUNTERCULTURE

From Fringe to Mainstream

American media, like most aspects of American culture in the 1970s, was dramatically affected by the social changes of the 1960s. While American culture proved fundamentally resistant to many aspects of 1960s radicalism—rejecting, for example, Black Power, Maoism, and revolutionary violence, or only partially accepting aspects of feminism and civil rights—the media almost wholly assimilated the countercultural preoccupations of the 1960s. Self-expression, sexual liberation, recreational drug use, and rock music—major characteristics of the so-called counterculture—all found a place in 1970s media. Magazines, radio, and television had, to some extent, been instrumental in creating the counterculture by publicizing the preoccupations of countercultural centers such as San Francisco, or that of countercultural events such as Woodstock, to the rest of the country. The radical implications of the counterculture (sexual revolution, for example, originally referred to the political upheaval that would follow the establishment of expressive, guilt-free sexual practices) were quickly obscured by the media, which focused on the sensational gloss of the counterculture. The counterculture's insurrectionary "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll" went mainstream. Sexual liberation was co-opted by magazines searching for a more thoroughly eroticized image; drugs lost their rebellious character and became part of pop music's emphasis on partying; rock music became a multibillion-dollar business and spectacle,

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outgrossing film and television. The media organs of a rebellious, subversive counterculture in the 1960s, moreover, pioneered new expressive techniques that transformed the established media in the 1970s. Underground comics somewhat liberalized commercial comic books; libertine and youthful, art-house films demanded a new explicitness from Hollywood; Rolling Stone pioneered a new, impressionistic pop-culture journalism; and FM radio shattered the narrow formats of AM radio stations. Some powerhouse media institutions, unable to grapple with such challenges, died. Both Life and Look magazines ceased publishing during the decade, and veteran newscaster Chet Huntley retired. As the old guard receded, a younger generation stepped in to take its place, bringing to the media an infusion of fresh ideas and approaches.

FM Radio

Perhaps the best example of media's assimilation of the counterculture was the growth of FM radio. In the 1960s FM (frequency modulation, for the type of radio signal) had constituted the backwaters of the radio dial. Although capable of high-fidelity broadcasts, FM was limited in range, and thus commercial advertisers favored AM (amplitude modulation) radio. By the end of the 1960s AM stations were winning the competition for advertising dollars by formatting their broadcasts to feature restrictive Top 40 playlists with songs less than three minutes long (and with their playing speed often slightly increased), and by promoting hyperkinetic drive-time disc jockeys to grab the listener's attention. FM, by contrast, was an oasis of countercultural bliss. Many stations featured classical music and jazz broadcasts aimed at a limited audience. FM rock stations usually featured more laid-back disc jockeys, who, especially at night, provided countercultural observations between record cuts. Increasingly geared to the college audience, FM rock radio adapted to the students' taste for long-playing, progressive, experimental rock. As recording technologies improved, FM turned to such high-fidelity rock records as Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) or Led Zeppelin's untitled album, commonly called "ZoSo " (1972) and made stars of these bands. Advertisers, recognizing the potential of the new FM market niche, began to patronize FM stations. And FM stations, recognizing their new commercial potential, began to format their playlists after Top 40 radio (albeit with a slightly more expansive notion of the Top 40) and hire "air personalities" to introduce records. The music became blander and less rebellious. Metromedia radio abandoned the cooler-than-cool FM disc jockey altogether and tied their nationwide chain of FM radio stations together via an entirely automated, Top 40 playlist. By the end of the decade countercultural FM radio was dead, aside from a few college-owned FM stations with limited broadcasting range. Ironically, as FM radio became more profitable and more homogeneous, AM radio diversified its format, becoming the site of radio innovation in the 1980s.

New Journalism

In the 1970s print journalism also assimilated the counterculture in a fashion similar to that of FM radio. Disgusted with the conservatism of main-stream media, young radicals in the 1960s began their own underground newspapers and magazines, which featured a mix of highly impressionistic reporting on political issues and discussions of drugs, sex, and rock music. Even mainstream journalists such as Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion adopted the new style of reporting, extended in the process into a form called New Journalism, in magazines such as Esquire, Playboy, and The New Yorker. San Francisco-based Rolling Stone was by far the most influential of the underground magazines of the late 1960s and featured a crop of writers—including Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs—- who set even the New Journalism on its ear as they pursued a style of drug-induced exposition sometimes called gonzo journalism. In format and style Rolling Stone was the most successful magazine of the decade and profoundly influenced the rest of American publishing, especially after it became a multimillion-dollar enterprise and relocated to New York. Both print journalism and television focused increasing attention on popular culture, entertainment, and social trends. By the end of the decade Rolling Stone was the establishment, capable of soliciting interviews from prominent public figures and promoting nationwide fads. Its antagonistic response to punk rock, lukewarm acceptance of disco, and promotion of the fitness craze and the Carter presidency all marked it as a bastion of the baby-boom counterculture grown respectable and assimilated.

Television

As America's electronic mirror, television quickly seized upon the counterculture. Afraid of losing younger viewers, staid networks and Hollywood production companies cautiously embraced aspects of the counterculture. Since the radical implications of the counter-culture, however, were anathema to television advertisers, media corporations, and most television viewers, television used the counterculture as a whetstone against which to sharpen traditional values. Typical of this process was The Partridge Family, a television program that featured a family whose members, dressed in hip clothes, were a rock band with everyday problems. Similarly, The Brady Bunch featured with-it parents who taught their children—also dressed in hip clothes—traditional family values. The Mod Squad starred three apparently countercultural figures—a white male activist, a female hippie, and a tough male black militant—who on weekly episodes went to work for the establishment as undercover cops. Sonny and Cher, the pop singing duo from the 1960s who appeared to be advocates of the counterculture, hosted a popular variety show whose blandness (they named their infant daughter, an occasional star on the show, Chastity) was offset only by Cher's Las Vegas-showgirl outfits. Antonio Fargas, a black character actor who was featured as a pimp and a junkie in many early 1970s blaxploitation films, ended the 1970s essentially reprising his character on television's police drama Starsky and Hutch. On television, however, his junkie/pimp character was toned down. Still preening and street-smart, "Huggy Bear" was no longer a marginally rebellious, outlaw figure but a cool restaurateur who cooperated with white cops.

A Newsroom of One's Own

Feminism was one of the most important movements of the 1960s to impact media in the 1970s. Feminism in the media began in 1970 when author Susan Brownmiller led a protest demanding both a female editor in chief and a day-care center at the offices of Ladies' Home Journal. Gloria Steinem's magazine Ms., founded in 1972, and New Woman, established the previous year, offered feminist perspectives on American politics and culture. Helen Gurley Brown's Cosmopolitan adopted a feminist perspective, and even general-interest magazines, such as Time and Newsweek, offered stories on the women's movement. In 1975 Time named ten women as its Man of the Year. Newscaster Barbara Walters became the first reporter to earn $1 million per year for her telecasts, and Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham became one of the most respected members of the fourth estate. Even Playboy, setting itself apart from more explicit competitors, purported to champion the feminist cause. Other magazines, such as Playgirl, founded in 1973, catered to a new feminine market for erotic media, as did novels such as Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (1973).

Advertisements

As erotica discovered a new female market, so did advertisers. Feminism was reflected in advertisements of products such as Virginia Slims cigarettes ("You've Come a Long Way, Baby," read the captions) and Enjoli cologne, whose television ads proclaimed, "I can bring home the bacon / fry it up in a pan / and never, never, never let you forget you're a man! 'Cause I'm a woman.… " Irish Spring soap had a woman acknowledging that the soap was intended for men: "Manly, yes, but I like it too," she intoned. The independent woman of the Charlie cologne ads not only signs her own checks but also asks men to dance. Tiparillo cigars suggested that the liberated woman smokes Tiparillos, and the liberated man offers them to her. Liquid Paper proposed itself as a tool of the liberated secretary.

THE TOP TEN TELEVISION
SHOWS,
1973-1974

All in the Family (CBS)	31.2 percent of homes with television
The Waltons (CBS)	27.9
Sanford and Son (NBC)	27.6
M *A *S *H (CBS)	25.8
Hawaii Five-O (CBS)	23.7
Sonny & Cher (CBS)	23.4
Maude (CBS)	23.3
Kojak (CBS)	23.3
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS), 23.2
Cannon (CBS)	23.0
* Nielsen average through 8 May 1974 as reported in Variety

Source:

Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution
of American Television,
revised edition (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1990).

Superwomen

Television programmers suggested to girls that having muscles and superpowers was perfectly valid for women. Saturday-morning television introduced a superheroine named Isis on The Shazam Isis Hour in 1975, and she received her own program, The Secrets of Isis, two years later. One segment of The Krofft Supershow featured Electro Woman and Dyna Girl. On prime-time television Lynda Carter revealed amazing powers (and a fair amount of skin) as Wonder Woman (who, in original comic book form, appeared on the cover of the July 1972 issue of Ms.). As the Bionic Woman, Lindsay Wagner could run faster and hit harder than any man—except for the Six-Million-Dollar Man, of course. In the comics themselves, a new character named Ms. Marvel was introduced in 1977 by Marvel Comics; "This female fights back!" readers were promised.

Stereotypes or Role Models?

Wonder Woman and the Bionic Woman were not the only feminist characters on television. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, Rhoda, Alice, and Phyllis all featured strong, independent women characters. The popular blaxploitation films—which often featured quasi-feminist leads, as in Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974)—spurred ABC to launch a weekly series in 1974, Get Christie Love!, starring Teresa Graves as a black woman who karate-chopped the bad guys while purring, "You're under arrest, sugar." The dual message—both feminist and sexist—of shows such as Get Christie Love! was more fully expressed in the phenomenally successful Charlie's Angels, which debuted in 1976. In Charlie's Angels three women detectives mastered evildoers on weekly episodes—clad usually in bikinis, tight-fitting sweaters, or other revealing clothing. While the Charlie's Angels characters were resourceful and independent, they were also fashion-conscious and glamorous. The program, along with Three's Company and The Dukes of Hazzard, provided the basis for the phrase jiggle TV. Feminists of the day worried that programs such as Charlie's Angels and advertisements such as those of Virginia Slims represented a step backward for the women's movement. As author Pagan Kennedy puts it, "We who grew up in the …late seventies learned that women could be powerful, but only if they dressed the part."

New Faces

Ambiguous messages were also characteristic of the growing multicultural character of American television and other media. The racial and ethnic pride of the late 1960s and early 1970s was reflected in many shows, from prime-time sitcoms to children's shows, offering multiracial, ethnic, and all-black casts. Variety shows and sitcoms such as The Flip Wilson Show, That's My Mamma, What's Happening!!, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and Sanford and Son featured black casts, often in realistic urban settings; The Tony Orlando and Dawn Show, Chico and the Man, and Welcome Back, Kotier featured ethnic characters of all descriptions, usually played for laughs. White ethnics were featured in dramas, especially detective shows, including Kojak, Baretta, Columbo, and Starsky and Hutch. And of course Archie Bunker, of All in the Family, made the white, working-class everyman a television star. The problem with such ethnic visibility was that it often portrayed stereotypes that bordered on the bigoted. By 1978 Time protested against the absence of strong black fathers on television, and in 1980 Ebony dismissed almost all black characterizations on television as implicitly racist. While the miniseries Roots (1977), a story of a African-American family, was told with intelligence and sympathy, it was the exception. In the 1970s television expanded its repertory of ethnic characters, but only enough to include the clichés.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

American television during the 1970s was more diverse than at any previous point in its history. In their efforts to reach as many markets as possible, network executives promoted shows aimed at target audiences, resulting in a wide viewing spectrum ranging from children's shows to youth-oriented fare to adult situation comedies and dramas that tackled previously taboo subjects. Nothing, however, could prepare Americans for the latest British invasion when Monty Python's Flying Circus came to public television beginning in 1974.

Monty Python, a group of six talented and inventive comedians, offered—as a common lead-in on their 1969-1974 British television show promised—"something completely different." Even the antics of the later Saturday Night Live comedians seemed sane by comparison. Monty Pythons Flying Circus featured skits by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin on dead parrots, the Department of Funny Walks, boxes of chocolates with nasty surprise centers, and other inspired silliness. While the comedy of Monty Python was often distinctly British, capable of being simultaneously intellectual and ribald, it scored a hit with many in the United States.

Their success in England and the United States led the troupe to expand into movies, beginning with And Now for Something Completely Different (1972), with skits based on the television show, and continuing with Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) and The Life of Brian (1979). The group disbanded in the early 1980s, though its members have often appeared in other members' independent projects.

Source:

The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus: All the Words, 2 volumes (New York: Pantheon, 1989).

Coming Out

Homosexuals were even less successful in being portrayed positively in the media. Like feminism and multiculturalism, gay liberation was an extension of the 1960s counterculture. The Advocate, a magazine established in 1967 for gay and lesbian readers, continued to survive and even prosper through the 1970s, but, apart from its objective discussions about gays and lesbians, most images of homosexuality in the media were closeted and capable of passing for straight. The most notorious example was Three's Company, a sitcom about two women sharing an apartment with a man who pretends to the homophobic landlord that he is gay; why such a landlord would tolerate a homosexual tenant, but not heterosexual tenants living together, is left unaddressed. A more respectful approach (but still played for laughs) could be found on ABC's Soap, which featured Billy Crystal as one of the first openly gay characters on network television. The Village People, titans of the disco boom (enormously indebted to the gay subculture) sang campy gay songs ("Macho Man," "Y.M.C.A.," "In the Navy") whose coded messages went right over the heads of middle America. The antidisco backlash on radio during 1978-1979 was in part due to the fact that straight, white suburbanites finally got the joke. The most common image of the homosexual in the media during the late 1970s was the stereotype of the sexually obsessed pedophile promoted by antigay activists such as orange-juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant. Denouncing homosexual "recruitment" in the public schools and the "unnaturalness" of homosexuality, Bryant and her political pressure group, Save Our Children, succeeded in rescinding civil rights ordinances protecting gays in Miami and other communities. Ironically, homosexuals were pioneering both the consumerist sexuality (one reason disco was such a hit) and alternative family structures. By the time Bryant denounced them, homosexuals had begun to enter the mainstream.

Nostalgia

Gays were not the only American group experimenting with alternative family structures. The counterculture had championed communal relationships, and, as the divorce rate climbed in the 1970s, more and more Americans considered alternative family structures. Popular television sitcoms featured single mothers (The Partridge Family, What's Happening!!, One Day at a Time), divorcées (Alice ), and implausible families (The Brady Bunch, a marriage between a widower with three boys and a widow with three girls; Mork and Mindy, an earth girl and alien man). Archie Bunker, of All in the Family, began the 1970s in a traditional household, but by the end of the decade (with the rest of the characters either dead or moved to California) was forced to find his family at Archie's Place, a bar he ran. The ensemble comedy, such as Taxi and WKRP in Cincinnati, constructed de facto families in the absence of real ones. Television, ever the agent of fantasy, also responded to the breakdown in the postwar family by returning to imagined ages of stability and tradition, and nostalgia television was born. Happy Days, itself an indirect spin-off of the hugely successful nostalgia film American Graffiti (1973), created a timeless world of the 1950s, where even the delinquents, such as Fonzie, had a heart of gold. Laverne and Shirley, and The Sha Na Na Show existed in some strange cross-breed 1950s-1970s world where doo-wop and blow-dried hair coexisted. Little House on the Prairie returned Americans to the rugged family values of the pioneer days; The Waltons managed to make the Great Depression seem cozy. Nostalgia television, part of a national mania for a roseate past also expressed in movies and novels, was symptomatic of a deep loss of cultural center and a desire to avoid confronting the present. These trends would coalesce in the development of a conservative culture at the end of the decade.

Conservative Culture

Conservative culture affirmed what the counterculture denied: absolutes, tradition, sexual denial, hierarchy, and mainline religion. Ironically, conservative culture developed because of the success the counterculture had in transforming the cultural landscape. As women and ethnic groups, for example, gained a more certain definition of self, and as advertisers refined ever-narrower demographic groups, conservatives, especially southerners associated with evangelical and fundamentalist denominations, also sharpened their communal identity. Organized by political leaders such as Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, and Jerry Falwell, such conservatives moved into media institutions abandoned by the counterculture. AM radio stations, for example, were purchased inexpensively during the 1970s by evangelical groups who reformatted the stations for religious programming and right-wing talk shows. UHF television stations, and later cable television, both less profitable than mainstream channels, became the basis of a broad-based Christian broadcasting empire during the 1970s. Specialized magazines, such as Commentary and the National Review, appealing to the sense of disenfranchisement felt by many conservatives, lambasted the "liberal" bent of mainstream media. Most important, conservatives developed innovative communication techniques, such as direct-mail solicitation, which swelled their numbers, and found ready advertisers, such as Coors beer and Wal-Mart department stores, to support their programming. By the end of the 1970s the insurrectionary culture in America was no longer that of the 1960s radical but that of the 1980s conservative. The success liberal media had in assimilating the counterculture had created its own counter with the rise of conservatism.

Sources:

Mike Benton, The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History (Dallas: Taylor, 1989);

Marcia Cohen, The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988);

Gary Grossman, Saturday Morning TV (New York: Dell, 1981);

Amy Janello and Brennon Jones, The American Magazine (New York: Abrams, 1991);

Pagan Kennedy, Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 1970s (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994);

Suzanne Levine and Harriet Lyons, and others, The Decade of Women: A Ms. History of the Seventies in Words and Pictures (New York: Paragon, 1980).