Friday A/V Club: Equal Time for Surrealist Subversion

After the police
riot
at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the city
government made an
hour-long documentary
to try to salvage its reputation.
Stations that broadcast the film were then required, in what may be
the single most hilarious application of the
Fairness Doctrine
in TV history, to give the organizations he
attacked equal time to respond. Forty-five minutes of their hour
were allotted to the American Civil Liberties Union and the
National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, who made
what was reportedly—I haven’t seen it—a levelheaded description of
how the Chicago cops overstepped their bounds. The other 15 minutes
were allotted to the Yippies, who made this:

Harlan Ellison reacts to the show
here
. He also, for some reason, complains about Stevie Wonder’s
mannerisms. Did anyone edit Harlan Ellison’s TV column? Just
asking.

For more on the Yippies, go here.
For past installments of the A/V Club, go here. And for one more
response to the city of Chicago’s film, reported in the October 15,
1968, issue of Tempo, read on:

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