Yesterday: When the masses and the mass media intersect

Funny thing. No one asked Paul, John, George or Ringo whether to vote for Barry Goldwater or Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was less than three months past when, unbelievably and for the first time in my young memory, Mom and Dad let our family stay home from Sunday night church services so we could watch The Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show. Yet, that nation-jarring tragedy seemed like an ancient memory on Feb. 9, 1964, something from a different time. No one would have thought to link the two events ― neither culturally, politically nor in any other way.

Politics and entertainment were different worlds. The months were long and distant from each other. Thankfully, there was yet no Super Bowl to compress them all into an angry, simmering wad of suspicion and angst and conspiracy. A crevasse was forming, to be sure, and it would eventually assume political dimensions. For the time being, it was thought to be merely generational, but it was front-page news just the same.

And still is.

Our Barbara Vitello, who alternates between court reporting and entertainment writing, described this week the feelings of many of us “of a certain age,” as she not-so-delicately put it, as we think back 60 years to that February Sunday when the Beatles riveted the American imagination beyond what even Elvis Presley had done. And her report left me tangled in journalism-related reflections.

The most prominent is the inescapable Taylor Swift connection. Every couple of years or so, a new entertainment phenom captures our attention at levels reminiscent of those early Beatles years, but I can’t recall anything as pervasive and immense as Taylor Swift’s popularity. It is the first such sustained spectacle in my memory to rival the mania attached to the Beatles in the early 1960s.

And it has so many cultural tendrils that were just beginning to form in 1964 ― the sweep of electronic media’s reach, the social distance between generations, the influence of performers on social norms, the normalization of public obsession, anxiety about seemingly vast changes in cultural values ― as well as many that could not have been imagined six decades ago ― perhaps most obvious the diffusion produced by a dominant social media industry as well as, ironically, the power of that industry to concentrate attention on a single person or event.

Somewhere in here, the word gullibility, also squirms into the discussion. It’s easy to scorn the ludicrous notion emerging thanks to social media that Taylor Swift has pre-engineered a Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victory out of which she will transform the brainwashed rabble into an invincible force for the presidential election of Joe Biden. But such public hysterias are hardly new to our time. Conspiracy theories still abound about the Kennedy assassination. It took years to finally dispel the rumor that “the real” Paul McCartney had died in a car crash. Millions of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was a massive fraud.

All of it fostered, nurtured, tolerated and thriving at the interconnection between mass media and the masses.

It may seem odd to accept that, in a world beset by war, crime, political animosity and social mayhem, a 60 years-past performance on national television can be both suburban and front-page news. But as we’ve seen this week, it certainly can.

Now, let’s wonder whether someone will be building this theme around the phenomenon of Taylor Swift, and if so how, in 2084.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.