1968 Remembered

In this City Journal article, Christopher Hitchens, Kay S. Hymowitz, Harry Stein, and others recall those heady days of 1968 when young people with fevered brows and unfettered egos were going to change the world. An excerpt from Stein's essay on how the movement altered the press:

From his lofty inherited perch, Pinch has arguably had more to do with that transformation than anyone. But a great many of us who similarly emerged from the campus culture of the sixties did our bit—and then some. For as we came to populate and then dominate the nation’s newsrooms, we remade the news media in our image. John Corry, a 28-year New York Times veteran, says, “Always before, the premise was that as a journalist your job was to tell readers what had happened in the world in the last 24 hours. Today, you can pick up the paper and find the entire front page reflecting nothing but opinion masquerading as news.”

Execupundit trivia question: In an effort to gauge the opinions of young people, TIME magazine sponsored a pre-primary stage presidential preference election called Choice '68 on college campuses across the United States. Which candidate won?

a. Robert F. Kennedy
b. Eugene McCarthy
c. Nelson Rockefeller
d. George Wallace
e. Richard Nixon
f. Hubert H. Humphrey
g. Eldridge Cleaver
h. Lyndon Johnson


[Answer: Richard Nixon ]