media
As America became embroiled in social unrest, primetime television became a relatively undisturbed universe, offering an increasingly world-weary country a chance to escape into the fantasy worlds of suburban witches (Bewitched) and hillbillies in LaLa Land (The Beverly Hillbillies), coddling audiences with comforting platitudes to their easily resolved dilemmas at the end of half-hour programs. These shows offered a sense of conformity and stability lacking in the United States which, through the migration of African Americans from the south to the north, resulting in what was called the White Flight to the suburbs, and the growing tensions resulting from the generation gap between adults and youth, saw a rise in civil unrest over racial segregation, the civil rights movement, and the war in Vietnam.
"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses." - Malcolm X Newspaper and magazine articles from the 60's
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While most of primetime television ignored what was happening in the United States or presented these problems through the coded language of analogies and metaphors, the network news broadcasts were the only real venues in which these issues were presented and discussed. In fact, during this decade, the news broadcasts played an enormous role in shaping social attitudes and policies toward civil rights and the Vietnam war.
Watch some of the commercials played in the 50's and 60's
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The 1960's were the decade of television news. During the decade most newspaper markets underwent severe rationalization; in New York the number of major daily newspaper shrank from seven in 1959 to three in 1967. Total newspaper circulation in the city was reduced during the same period from 5.1 million to 3.5 million. Total circulation for all newspapers in the United States rose slightly to 62.1 million by 1971 but remained stagnant thereafter.
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