In my opinion, the media has a strong influence on society, both negatively and positively.

How could it not have an influence, even if it's to provoke thought? The media is all around us and what surrounds us will have an effect in some manner. I feel the negative images that are disseminated from the media are much more powerful in effecting change in thought, behavior, and even legislation. I believe a great case study that exhibits the effects negative imagery through media can have on a society is the media coverage of the events surrounding the Civil Rights era of the 50s and 60s.

The story of the modern civil rights movement has been told and retold in many different forms. A less-told story, though, is the role of the media in the movement that riveted the nation, led to the dismantling of segregation and the passage of landmark voting and civil rights legislation.The civil rights movement produced a series of iconic images. The 43-year-old Rosa Parks sitting alone in a bus in Montgomery. Elizabeth Eckford surrounded by an angry mob in Little Rock, Arkansas. The valiant James Merideth writhing on the ground after being shot on a Mississippi highway. Buses ridden by an interracial group of riders being attacked and lit in flames in Alabama. Water hoses blasting hundreds of protesters in Birmingham. The attack of peaceful demonstrators at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during what came to be known as Bloody Sunday.And, of course, Martin Luther Kings I Have a Dream speech, delivered before a crowd of 250,000 at the Washington Mall. These images, and the courage of the people who placed their lives in harms way, changed the nation. American television coverage of the Civil Rights Movement ultimately contributed to a redefinition of the country's political as well as its television landscape. It was argued that Martin Luther King, Jr and his associates had an unspoken strategy of using non-violent demonstrations too deliberately provoke violence prone southern and segregationist mobs. As the argument goes, it well know to King and his associates that it would be the publics opposition to overt violence in the face of peaceful demonstration that would attract widespread and sympathetic coverage from the national media. Whether or not King had such a strategy, their efforts resulted in the intense media coverage they needed to fuel their movement. The Civil Rights movement became one of the most publicized events in

United States history. It set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 one of the most extensively publicized legislative battles in United States history.

Many of these events were unfolding at the same time that the television was securing its place in American society. Network news shows were also beginning to expand from the conventional fifteen to thirty minutes format, splitting the time between local and national issues. From the mid to late 1950s, these social, political, technological and cultural events began to converge. The ascendancy of television as the new arbiter of public opinion became increasingly apparent at this time to civil rights leaders and television news directors alike. Thus television's coverage of the Civil Rights Movement changed considerably, especially as the "anti-establishment politics" of the 1960s erupted. Civil rights organizers encouraged the participation of white liberals in the movement because organizers understood that the presence of whites would attract the television cameras and, by extension, the nation. No one was prepared for the tragic events that followed. As it turns out, television's incessant probing into the murders and subsequent month-long search for the bodies of two white, Northern civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and black, Southerner James Chaney did have a chilling effect on the nation. With the death of innocent white volunteers, television was convincing its suburban viewers around the country that the Civil Rights Movement did concern them as well. For it was difficult to turn on the television without news of the Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman search. From late June to 4 August 1964, television regularly and consistently transmitted news of the tragedy to the entire nation. Television ultimately legitimated and lent new urgency to the decade- long struggle for basic human and civil rights that the Civil Rights Movement had difficulty achieving prior to the television age. The incessant gaze of the television cameras on the murders and disappearance of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, following on the heels of the Evers and Kennedy assassinations, resulted in mobilizing national support for the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, it was television's coverage of the Civil Rights Movement's crises and catastrophes that became a prelude to the medium's subsequent involvement with and handling of the later social and political chaos surrounding the Black Power, Anti-War, Free Speech and Feminist Movements. As veteran civil rights reporters went

on to cover the assassinations of Malcom X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, as well as the ghetto uprisings thereafter, a whole new visual and aural lexicon of crisistelevision developed, one that in many ways still defines how television news is communicated.

By 1968, it was clear that television's powerful and visceral images of the civil rights struggle had permeated many levels of American social and political reality. These images had helped garner support for such liberal legislation as the 1964 Voting Rights Act and President Lyndon B. Johnson's 'Great Society" and "War on Poverty" programs, all of which are legatees of the Civil Rights Movement. As volatile pictures of Watts, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and other cities going up in smoke hit the television airwaves, they provoked a strong reaction by the end of the decade, marked by the presidential campaign slogans calling for law and order. Many of the very images that supported the movement, where now instrumental in fueling the national backlash against it. This anticivil rights backlash contributed to the 1968 presidential election of conservative Republican Richard M. Nixon. Again this exemplified how negative imagery of urban riots depicted by the national had direct effect on U.S. legislation