As I started researching for a topic for the blog post this week I stumbled across a lot of footage of the iconic Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963. I started to think about the events of this weekend, when thousands of Americans marched on Washington again in the National Equity March in the name of Gay rights, and how I hadn’t heard much about it.
The 1963 march on Washington was a huge media event, focusing mostly on radio and television. Cameras captured the images of the huge crowds gathering on the Mall, and also showed blacks and whites marching alongside each other. The visual impact of this event was transformative for a generation.
In contrast, the National Equity March that occurred this weekend did not create as much “buzz,” to use a contemporary term. Most of the information about the march was disseminated through the Internet, a stark change from previous civil rights movements (http://equalityacrossamerica.org/blog/?page_id=19). Today the organizers of the march have many different ways to reach out to the media compared to the civil rights era – they could contact traditional print media, television, online news sites, bloggers, social networking, etc. However when I checked my usual news website on Sunday the story about the march had been pushed down to a hyperlinked headline on the side. Why was this story not sensational enough to be a headline news story?
This made me wonder, is it harder today, with our fragmented and varied media system, to garner widespread support for causes like those of civil rights? If yes, then how can you account for the successful Obama Presidential campaign that seemed to transcend all forms of media? I know there are some fundamental differences between these two civil rights campaigns, but what are the differences between them in their usage of the media to push their message and agenda to the public?
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