Media and Revolution

As television screens across America showed Chinese students blocking their government's tanks in Tiananmen Square, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, or those first missiles of the Gulf War searching their targets in Bagdad, the connection between media and revolution seemed more significant than ever.

In this book, thirteen prominent scholars examine the role of the communication media in revolutionary crises - from the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s to the upheaval in former Czechoslovakia that remains unresolved today. Their central question: Do the media in fact have a real influence on the unfolding of revolutionary crises?

On this question, the contributors diverge. In his examination of the power of the newspaper in the French Revolution, Pierre Retat argues that the press does not bring about the revolution but is a part of the revolutionary process. Popkin shares Retat's conviction that changes in media praxis are essential symbols of the nature of revolutionary upheaval.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, taking the opposite view, argues that the extensive attention paid to the effects of worldwide television coverage of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square masks the fact that the Chinese students were essentially reworking protest rituals rooted in their country's history and culture long before the modern media era. Owen Johnson, in his essay on the Czechoslovak press during the "Velvet Revolution," likewise downplays the role of the media.