The media were also there in force, waiting patiently and apprehensively. Norman Mailer was there and Allen Ginsburg, Jean Genet and Terry Southern. And at about midnight the policemen were there too.

Veteran NBC correspondent Jack Perkins' narrative of NBC's films of what happened read like this:

In the darkness and confusion, policemen used their nightsticks with great zeal, clubbing and injuring about 60 people. Seventeen of them were newsmen--there trying to cover it--including a CBS cameraman . . . an NBC cameraman and NBC News reporter John Evans.

They beat cameramen to keep them from filming policemen beating other people, and newsmen not in spite of the fact they were newsmen but because of it.

This suppression of the news and these beatings were in direct violation of police orders, but they happened. And none of the newsmen we talked to had ever seen anything to match it in any other city in this country.

This direct affront to their city was probably enough to anger most proud Chicagoans. Policemen and viewers, however, were upset by the alleged lack of objectivity in reports like Perkins'. From them arose the charges of slanting the news. Mayor Daley claimed the media had been unfair by not giving the taunting, obscenity-shouting protesters equal time in their coverage. Television, he charged, had shown only his policemen's reaction, and not the provocations they were reacting to.

The director of public relations for the Chicago police department lodged this complaint:

All over America people came to the conclusion that the television networks--in particular NBC and CBS--had not been fair in reporting the events in Chicago.... Needless to say, it was not the role of television to side with the officials of the City of Chicago or the Chicago Police Department.... But, by the same token, it was not the role of television to be the ideological allies of the mob. It was not television's role to slant the news day after day in favor of the revolutionaries and against the elected representatives of the people and the police.

Northshield concedes that his camera crews may have focused too exclusively on the police. But he does not apologize for it. He is convinced the police over-reacted and that nothing the demonstrators did, or could have done, justified the police response.

POLICE objections to the networks' coverage raised an even larger and more fundamental issue, however -- the question of objectivity in television journalism. One of the Chicago police officials' main complaints was that "reporters give their personal opinions of the events they are covering." About the only mitigating result of Chicago, according to one official, is that networks may now "see that a credibility gap has existed between themselves and the people they seek to inform...and, as a result, go all out to strive for objectivity in reporting."

Northshield dislikes blatant editorializing on TV; he is mildly contemptuous of the kind of thing Eric Severeid does for CBS. But he says with unabashed frankness that "there is no such thing as objectivity in television reporting, not so long as it involves human feelings." And he does not apologize for it. And anyway, the public outcry against the networks was not a reaction against non-objective reporting or the result of a credibility gap between network and public. On the contrary, he says, the outcry resulted from the complete credibility TV has for the public -- the result of merging what a viewer sees on a TV screen and his own experience.

NORTHSHIELD'S explanation of why TV was abused after Chicago is something like the "messenger-bearing-bad-news" theory, with a McLuhanesque touch. Television, he says, has become more than a vicarious experience for the American viewer. What happens on the TV screen is as concrete a reality as anything that happens in his own life. What happened last summer was that ugliness intruded into the viewer's life through TV one time too many, and he rebelled.

1968 had been an ugly year for news. The mire in Vietnam looked deadlier than ever until March. The new year got off to a bad start--the Pueblo was seized. Early summer was shattered by the murder of Dr. King and the widespread riots that ensued. Then Bobby Kennedy was shot.

Too much pain had been inflicted on America, right in her own living room, right at dinner time with the family. The sight of Chicago policemen beating and kicking people was too, too much, and America kicked back at the courier of the sight--the news people.

It is unlikely that the police and the networks' views of why TV was abused after Chicago will soon be reconciled. As unlikely as it is that newsmen and policemen will reach an understanding on the rules of TV journalism. Until they do, relations between the two will remain less than congenial.

Shad Northshield undoubtedly feels vindicated in his judgment of what to cover and how to cover it in Chicago, now that the Walker Report on convention violence is public knowledge. Not that he really ever felt his decisions needed vindicating. And he seems confident that his newsmen will again worm their way into the hearts of NBC viewers once the news they must report becomes less noxious again. The only question is--will it