2024 is not 1968 − and the Democratic convention in Chicago will play out very differently than in the days of Walter Cronkite

A sign welcomes delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 1968, with helmeted police officers standing by. Bettmann/Getty Images by Heather Hendershot, Northwestern University The presidential nominating conventions every four years are political events, but they are also media events. Since the advent of television, Democratic and Republican national convention organizers have sought to tightly stage-manage their gatherings for home viewers, and they’ve often succeeded. But not always. One of the worst misfires was the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when anti-war activists on Michigan Avenue chanted to the TV cameras “the whole world is watching,” as Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police beat them with billy clubs. In the convention hall itself, delegates staged their own protests for the cameras, and Daley’s security forces famously punched CBS newsman Dan Rather. Images of that chaos circulated for months, and the Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey never fully made up the points he lost when Americans saw that violence on their TV sets. As an expert on the 1968 convention and, in particular, on how TV news covered that crisis, I’ve been thinking about how Chicago might handle – or mishandle – the Democratic convention as both a political and a media...