On today’s show, we will be speaking Heather Hendershot about her new book, When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America, which revisits the TV coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and compellingly argues that this convention was a pivotal moment in American history when the notion of a liberal biased media became mainstreamed and nationalized.

About Our Guest

Heather Hendershot is a professor of film and media in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. Her most recent book is When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarization of America. She is also the author of: Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line; What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest; Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture; and Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip.  Heather also edited the anthology Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics, and Economics of America’s Only Channel for Kids, and she is a former editor of Cinema Journal, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Heather received her BA from Yale University and her MA and PhD from the University of Rochester.  She has held fellowships at Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Vassar College, and she has also been a Guggenheim Fellow.