Todd Gitlin

Todd Gitlin (born January 6, 1943, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 5, 2022, Pittsfield, Massachusetts) was an American political activist, author, and public intellectual best known as a media analyst and as an internal critic of the American left.

Gitlin was born into a liberal Jewish family and attended public schools in New York City. After graduating as valedictorian from the Bronx High School of Science, he studied mathematics at Harvard University, graduating in 1963. He later obtained a master’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan (1966) and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley (1977). He taught at Berkeley (1978–94) and at New York University (1995–2002) before joining Columbia University (2002) as a professor of journalism and sociology.

Gitlin was a young founder and early president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a flagship organization of the 1960s New Left in the United States. While he later grew disenchanted with the revolutionary radicalism of the SDS, he continued to move in left-wing antiwar circles during the decade. In the 1970s Gitlin commenced a successful career as a sociologist, focusing on media studies.

Writing from a consistently left-liberal perspective, Gitlin nevertheless targeted a number of what he considered to be leftist shibboleths. They included a reflexive support for identity politics and multiculturalism and a tendency to cede the issue of patriotism to the political right. A persistent theme of his writing was the need for the left to cease defining itself solely as a protector of individual and group rights or as a countercultural opponent of middle-class society. He encouraged progressives instead to focus on issues—such as economic justice, corporate power, and the promise of democracy—that could unite all Americans. At the same time, he attacked the role of conservatives in fomenting the so-called “culture wars.” His media criticism, in particular, emphasized how a profit-driven news industry stifled dissent and perpetuated the political status quo, especially during the second administration of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush.

Gitlin wrote for several progressive publications, such as Dissent, as well as for scholarly journals. His memoir-history, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987; rev. ed. 1993), was a critique of the New Left that influenced pessimistic views of its legacy. His other books included The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (1980; rev. ed. 2003), Inside Prime Time (1983; rev. ed. 1994), The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (1995), The Intellectuals and the Flag (2006), and Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (2012). Gitlin also published the novels The Murder of Albert Einstein (1992), Sacrifice (1999), and Undying (2010). Busy Being Born (1974) was a collection of poetry.