Activism Gitlin became a political activist in 1960, when he joined a Harvard undergraduate group called Tocsin, against nuclear weapons. He went on to become vice-chairman and then chairman of the group. He helped organize a national demonstration in Washington, February 16–17, 1962, against the arms race and nuclear testing. He helped organize the first national
demonstration against the
Vietnam War, held in Washington, D.C., April 17, 1965, with 25,000 participants, as well as the first civil disobedience directed against American corporate support for the
apartheid regime in South Africa—a sit-in at the Manhattan headquarters of
Chase Manhattan Bank on March 19, 1965. In 1968 and 1969, he was an editor at and a contributor to the
San Francisco Express Times, an underground newspaper, and wrote regularly for underground papers via
Liberation News Service. As of 1993, he was a member of the
Democratic Socialists of America. In the mid-1980s, he was a leader of Berkeley's Faculty for Full
Divestment and president of Harvard-Radcliffe Alumni/-ae Against Apartheid. He actively opposed both the
Gulf War of 1991 and the
Iraq War of 2003. He vocally supported both the
bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the
occupation of Afghanistan in 2002. In 2013, he became involved in the alumni wing of the Divest Harvard movement, seeking the university's
exit from fossil fuel corporations. He was also active in a Columbia faculty group supporting such divestment. He generally opposed the
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and left-wing anti-Zionism, but was also a critic of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and a proponent of boycotts directed specifically at settlement goods. He rejected the comparison of Israel to Apartheid South Africa.
Academics After teaching part-time 1970–77 at the New College of
San Jose State University and the Community Studies program at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, he worked for 16 years as professor of sociology and director of the mass communications program at UC Berkeley, then for seven years as a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at
New York University. Starting in 2002, he was a professor of journalism and sociology, and starting in 2006 he was also chair of the Ph.D. program in communications at
Columbia University, where he also taught the
Core course Contemporary Western Civilization as well as an American studies course on the 1960s. During 1994–1995, he held the chair in American Civilization at the
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been a resident at the
Bellagio Study Center in Italy and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California, a fellow at the Media Studies Center, and a visiting professor at
Yale University, the
University of Oslo, and the
University of Toronto. During April and May 2011, Gitlin was the recipient of the Bosch Berlin Prize in Public Policy and Fellow at the
American Academy in Berlin.
Public works Gitlin wrote 16 books and hundreds of articles in dozens of publications, including
The New York Times,
Los Angeles Times,
The Washington Post,
The Boston Globe,
Haaretz,
Columbia Journalism Review,
Tablet,
The New Republic,
Mother Jones, Salon, and many more. He was a columnist for
The San Francisco Examiner and the
New York Observer, and a frequent contributor to TPMcafe and
The New Republic online as well as the
Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2016, he wrote regularly on media and the political campaign for BillMoyers.com. He was on the editorial board of
Dissent. He was co-chair of the San Francisco branch of PEN American Center, a member of the board of directors of
Greenpeace, and an early editor of
openDemocracy. He gave hundreds of lectures at public occasions and universities in many countries. In his early writings on media, especially
The Whole World Is Watching, he called attention to the ideological framing of the
New Left and other social movements, the vexed relations of leadership and celebrity, and the impact of coverage on the movements themselves. He was the first sociologist to apply
Erving Goffman's concept of "frame" to news analysis, and to show
Antonio Gramsci's "
hegemony" at work in a detailed analysis of intellectual production. In
Inside Prime Time, he analyzes the workings of the television entertainment industry of the early 1980s, discerning the implicit procedures that guide network executives and other television "players" to make their decisions. Amanda Lotz argues that
Inside Prime Time remains an important book, demonstrating how to analyze television on an industrial level. In
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, a memoir and analysis combined, he develops a sense of the tensions between expressive and strategic politics. In
The Twilight of Common Dreams, he asks why the groups that constitute the American left so often turn to infighting, rather than solidarity. In
Media Unlimited, he turns to the unceasing flow of the media torrent, the problems of attention and distraction, and the emotional payoffs of media experience (which he called "disposable emotions") in our time. In
Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street, he distinguishes between "inner" and "outer" movements and analyzes their respective strengths and weaknesses. In
The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left,
The Sixties, The
Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked with Culture Wars,
Letters to a Young Activist, and
The Intellectuals and the Flag, Gitlin became a prominent critic of the tactics and rhetoric of both the left and the right. Supporting active, strategically focused nonviolent movements, he emphasizes what he sees as the need in American politics to form coalitions between disparate movements, which must compromise ideological purity to gain and sustain power. During the
George W. Bush administration, he argued that the
Republican Party managed to accomplish that with a coalition of what he called two "major components—the low-tax, love-business, hate-government enthusiasts and the God-save-us moral crusaders" but that the
Democratic Party has often been unable to accomplish a pragmatic coalition between its "roughly eight" constituencies, which he identifies as "labor, African Americans, Hispanics, feminists, gays, environmentalists, members of the helping professions (teachers, social workers, nurses), and the militantly liberal, especially antiwar denizens of avant-garde cultural zones such as university towns, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and so on." (from
The Bulldozer and the Big Tent, pp. 18–19). In the 2010 book
The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, he and Liel Leibovitz traced parallel themes in the history of the Jews and the Americans through history down to the present.
Novelist Gitlin published three novels:
The Murder of Albert Einstein (1992),
Sacrifice (1999), and
Undying (2011). His final novel
The Opposition was published posthumously in 2022. It follows a group of 1960s activists through the decade and includes an update on how their lives ended up afterwards. According to a review by Alexander Riley in
Public Discourse, "One can easily connect some of his characters to real historical persons who, like the book’s author, were involved in the left activism of that period." == Quotes ==