You could say that Michael Socolow was born into media history. His father was Sandy Socolow, the executive producer of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and right hand to “the most trusted man in America.” Sandy worked for CBS from 1956 until 1988, covering all the upheaval of those decades. Michael Socolow’s own career in journalism began at another of the twentieth century’s inflection points: on June 17, 1994, he was the night assignment desk editor for CNN in Los Angeles when O.J. Simpson hopped into a white Ford Bronco and took off up the 405 and into the annals of television history.
Socolow says that he left journalism because there was “too much O.J. Simpson.” But he didn’t abandon the field entirely—he is now a media historian at the University of Maine. Last week, I reached out to him to ask what historical precedents we might look to at this extraordinary media moment, following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and amid the drama over Joe Biden’s place on the Democratic ticket. But—perhaps surprisingly, given his job—Socolow said that trying to force current events into the mold of historical precedent does not give full credit to the “sui generis” moment we are currently living through. “Can we finally agree we’re in uncharted & largely unknown political territory?” Socolow asked recently, on X. “I know *everyone* prefers to orient themselves by grabbing the ‘historical precedent life raft’ but if we’re not going to mislead ourselves, let’s face the ambiguity & novelty of this situation.”
As was also the case in 2020, this year’s news cycle has put many observers in mind of 1968, in particular. The campus protests against the war in Israel and Palestine, which intensified following arrests at Columbia University, seemed to resemble the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War that had played out on the same quad in Upper Manhattan. (Today, protesters will descend on Washington, DC, where Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is scheduled to address Congress.) The attempted assassination of Trump reminded various media outlets of the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. As if on cue, Biden withdrew from the presidential race over the weekend—echoing Lyndon B. Johnson, who did the same ahead of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which was overshadowed by protests and violence. This year’s DNC will play out next month—in Chicago. There will be protests.
And yet, according to Socolow, these references are misleading: they may suggest that we are less unmoored than we feel, but they don’t prove we know anything about how the current political climate will play out. This week I spoke with Socolow about the media’s reliance on historical analogies and how it does a disservice to both history and current events; the humility required to face unprecedented moments honestly; and the value of saying I don’t know. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
KL: Why do you think that looking for historical precedent when covering the news—like trying to understand 2024 in light of 1968—is not the best approach?
MS: The first reason is we don’t have hundreds of American boys coming home in caskets from Vietnam. The historical parallel breaks down right there. Atmospherically, every newspaper in America had obituaries of kids who were eighteen to twenty-two years old. In some ways, you could argue that you can’t understand any of it—the assassinations, Chicago—without that background. The interesting thing is that a lot of the educated people who are making the historical analogy of 1968 are overlooking those deaths because they probably don’t have a deep personal connection with the working classes. Remember how the deferments worked in Vietnam; who had their sons, uncles, and brothers killed. We don’t even have to get into other variables like the media ecology of the different societies of ’68 and today.
Aside from the tangible differences, why do you take umbrage with the media focusing on historical precedent in order to understand the current moment?
Let’s be clear, history sells. Letters from an American—a newsletter from a historian named Heather Cox Richardson, bringing history to contemporary politics—has over a million subscribers right now; CNN’s prime-time viewing audience is averaging around five hundred thousand. There’s a huge commercial appetite to make historical analogies. That’s why MSNBC has all these historians on all the time. We’ve had this for a long time—it goes back to Arthur Schlesinger working with the Kennedy White House and Eric Goldman, who was a Princeton history professor, writing for Time magazine and advising LBJ. The idea isn’t new that there’s this huge hunger to put contemporary politics into historical analogy.
History should be humbling. We shouldn’t be confident; we shouldn’t say, Oh, history tells us to do x, y, and z. The process of earning a PhD in history made me realize, for instance, just how much historical contingency there is—how many different ways every single situation might have turned out. That’s a humbling process. When somebody stands up and announces, History tells us x, it presumes, a) that there’s one story of history that everybody agrees on, and b) that history can be simplified into a moral or ethical lesson rather than a serious consideration of all the other alternatives that may have happened.
You have said that using historical references can be comforting during unprecedented moments. What is it that you think is so unsettling about not having a historical reference?
We all like history. We believe in it almost spiritually. Think of the Santayana quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We believe that intuitively. So to say, We are in a new world where the value of history as a guide is going to be lowered will result in increased anxiety, uncertainty, and ambiguity. It puts you out there in a disorienting public culture, so nobody does it. There’s no commercial imperative to say, I don’t know what’s going to happen. You can’t sell that book. You can sell a book that says “Trump is Hitler.” You could sell a book that says “Trump is Jesus.” But you can’t sell a book that says “I’m not sure who Trump is.” To examine something as beyond unprecedented in a disorienting world is to amplify and intensify public concern.
When discussing ideals, we can forget there is a bottom line attached to this work. Do you believe that the commercial imperative of historical precedent is more of a driver than the avoidance amplifying public concern?
An example is Rachel Maddow. People tune in to Maddow because she has a doctorate from Oxford and can [talk about] history—like Spiro Agnew, Nixon, the Confederacy—and people believe her because of her incredible credentials. It makes you feel more secure that the world can be oriented in this way. That’s her draw on MSNBC. Flip this and think about how few truly unprecedented moments have been introduced in the American media sphere. It makes me think of the moon landing; when we walked on the moon, Cronkite took off his glasses and he could not say anything. There was no historical precedent. The closest you might get is Columbus and Magellan in the age of explorers. That’s an example where history failed you, Cronkite, and everybody—because it was mind-boggling. That’s the opposite of somebody on TV calming you down and telling you that We’ve been here before, we understand this, we recognize it: Putin is Hitler; Ukraine is Hitler attacking Poland. That puts these moments into a context that’s easily digestible. Then it has commercial value, too, which is the scary part of the media.
Do you think Cronkite’s response to the moon landing—speechless, taking off his glasses—was the best way to respond to circumstances that are unprecedented or chaotic like these past few weeks have been?
We’re in a different world. Cronkite was a reporter, and when he did not have words for the person standing on the moon, he completely channeled the audience watching, because none of us could have had words for what was happening. The commercial imperative for Cronkite was to channel his audience—to participate in the experience. In today’s world, the commercial imperative is to be a pundit and to speculate. That’s where the money is; the money is not in reporting. The Washington Post and the New York Times aren’t competing with the Associated Press. The basic facts everybody shares, so the value-add today is to get on TV and spout your speculation. It would be disingenuous of a media educator to say to a twenty-two-year-old reporter today, Stick to the facts like an AP reporter, don’t get over your skis on Kamala Harris. It’s an entirely different universe when that AP reporter has to compete with punditry and a million people pontificating.
If we’re not to reference prior assassinations, presidents dropping out of races, or any other historical parallels, how should journalists approach contextualizing such a chaotic news cycle?
The role of broadcast journalism for fifty years was to orient you with the world. That is why David Brinkley’s Washington commentaries and Eric Sevareid’s CBS news commentaries would break into reporting and give you two minutes explaining why the news of today matters to you and how you should think about the world. In its own, very interesting way, these commentators—whether they were Brinkley, Sevareid, or Howard K. Smith—would try to level and be honest with the audience about what it meant in a way that the punditry doesn’t today. So there was more of an—I don’t know how to phrase it—honest, even-handed, centrist, middle-of-the-road attempt at gaining a consensus orientation to whatever the disorienting news was.
There really isn’t a call for that as much as there was. Though I say that with one caveat. The number one news source for Americans in 2024 is David Muir’s World News Tonight [on ABC]. For all that we talk about Fox News, nine to ten million people watch Muir’s classic, centrist-consensus news product daily. And so there clearly is an audience for that kind of thing.
Is there value in journalists saying I don’t know?
New media was supposed to be brainy, in-the-know, and cool. You were supposed to get clues about society from Vice, and then Vox invented a thing called “explainers.” You’re selling this idea of real confidence in the ability to orient your audience. There’s tremendous value in saying, Okay, we’re in entirely new territory here, and here’s how history can help, but here’s how history can also mislead us. I believe that there would be real value in that honesty with your audience. It would do more to assuage fears rather than just pretending they’re not there.
Having been a journalist breaking news and a historian piecing together the past, both endeavors are tremendously humbling. Before you get to the public presentation of your work, journalists know how much is missing. Journalists know the holes in their stories that the audience doesn’t. Some historians know just how much contingency and just how many variables are selected to create the portrait, but the public doesn’t know that. One thing that would be very helpful is if both journalists and historians were to be more honest about the holes in their stories: the alternatives, the contingencies, the variables, what they truly know versus what they think they know. I find it difficult to say, History tells us with certainty. I love it when I see a reporter saying We simply don’t know yet.
Other notable stories:
- Tonight, President Biden will address the American people directly for the first time since his decision to drop out of the race, in a speech from the Oval Office. Meanwhile, momentum continues to build behind Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice president, whom he backed to succeed him over the weekend; yesterday, she addressed a boisterous rally in Milwaukee that was broadcast on TV. Trump pledged to debate Harris, possibly more than once—but he also attacked ABC, the network that was slated to host Trump’s second debate with Biden in September, and has recently floated doing it on Fox instead (a probable nonstarter for Harris). And, amid Harris’s ascent, viewership of Veep, a sitcom about a hapless fictional vice president, has surged on the streamer Max.
- For the newsletter Popular Information, Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby report that Eugene Ramirez quit as the host of the national evening news broadcast at Sinclair, a company that owns a chain of local news stations, earlier this year “over concerns about the accuracy and right-wing bias of the content he was required to present on air”; a Sinclair spokesperson savaged the story, but Ramirez later appeared to confirm it. In other jobs news, Zeteo, a new outlet founded by Mehdi Hasan, added Prem Thakker, formerly of The Intercept, and Kat Abughazaleh, formerly of Media Matters for America. And the WNYC show On the Media promoted Micah Loewinger to full-time cohost.
- This week, Google scrapped plans to eliminate cookies—which help advertisers to track users across the internet and target them with ads, but are anathema to privacy advocates—from its Chrome browser. The news is a win for the adtech industry, but Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton writes that it’s less clear how online news publishers should react; the status quo was hardly good for their advertising businesses, and Google says that it still intends to increase “user choice” around cookies. Ultimately, Benton writes, “publishers are still pawns in a game they don’t control.”
- Recently, we reported that a media regulator in France would soon have to decide whether to allow TV channels that currently use state-owned terrestrial frequencies to keep them—a process that some observers hoped might rein in channels owned by Vincent Bolloré, a hard-right billionaire, even if others were skeptical. This morning, the regulator said that one Bolloré channel—C8, which has often been fined for breaching broadcasting rules—would lose its status, though another, CNews, was retained.
- And—after the French interior minister announced that the country’s security services had rejected thousands of accreditation requests for the Paris Olympics, including on espionage grounds—Russian officials accused their French counterparts of disrespecting press freedom, and of “paranoia.” The comments came as French authorities arrested a Russian chef for allegedly conspiring to “destabilize” the Games.
ICYMI: More Than Ukraine Fatigue
Correction: This post has been updated to remove an error pertaining to Howard K. Smith.
Kevin Lind is a CJR fellow.