In the 1960s, millions of young people in the United States sought to create a counterculture committed to communitarianism, peace, sexual liberation, and racial equality. This counterculture, according to literary critic Theodore Roszak, embraced alienated youths who were attracted to Eastern mysticism and rejected the ideological dogmatism of Marxists, the opportunistic reformism of liberals, and the profit-driven pragmatism of conservatives. At its core, the counterculture stood outside society, resistant to the entreaties of the White House, Kremlin, and Madison Avenue. Rock music bound together, even as it propagated, the counterculture. Several scholars have examined the part rock music played in defining the 1960s counterculture.  Less understood is the role other cultural media, particularly television, had in shaping, as well as portraying to youths and the larger society, the counterculture.

As historian William O'Neill observed, the post-World War II advance of television and the refinement of high-fidelity phonographs, stereos, and FM radio popularized rock while transforming the middle-class home into an entertainment center. By the late 1960s, 95 percent of American households had at least one television set. To sociologists S. Robert and Linda Lichter and Stanley Rothman, television stood "at the end of a long chain of popularization that begins with the creation of ideas and issues in universities, think tanks, 'public interest groups. . . . The most simplified version [of ideas and issues] reaches the mass public in TV movies, 'realist' dramatic series, and socially conscious sitcoms." Television, in media critic Kathryn Montgomery's words, was the "central story teller” for American culture.

Beyond storyteller, television, communications scholar Hal Himmelstein contended, served as "one of our society's principal repositories of ideology" because of its ability to unify and transmit ideas, fashions, music, and acceptable social images. The principal ideology driving television from its inception and through the 1960s was one that media specialist Ella Taylor has called "liberal conservative." By that, she meant an ideology that endorsed the often conflicting ideas of modernity, progress, traditionalism, honesty, and free enterprise. Television projects the paradox implicit in such values: The American middle class supports progress and capitalism but fears change that will erode its social status.  Subsequently, the federal government enters the picture, ensuring that social change does not politically threaten the middle class.

Television is an important part of the process of change, but it also serves as a reinforcer of the status quo. Further, network television is not democratic in practice; the people (viewers) do not necessarily decide what is to be programmed. Advertisers and the government that controls broadcast licensing through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC exercise more power over programming than the consumer public. The FCC and major industries highly dependent on television advertising (e.g.. Proctor &
Gamble) encourage the networks to avoid controversy that could divide the audience and reduce the number of potential viewers
--consumers. Since five companies alone in 1967 spent in excess of $473 million on television advertising, it is not surprising that high ratings among affluent demographic groups dictate network programming.

Despite government, business, and television network cooperation that might seem to produce a situation of cultural hegemony, historian Jackson Lears and sociologist Todd Gitlin remind us that while the dominant culture subordinates those outside the accepted circle, the process also relies to a certain degree on a free flow of ideas among various groups. The "Establishment" allows for the existence of countercultures hostile to the status quo.  When those countercultures gain partial acceptance in society, they are incorporated into the liberal-conservative capitalist framework. This is a process of legitimization rather than manipulation. It is also a process of marginalization that must trivialize the opposition before inviting it to join the Establishment.

Given the considerations above, we pose the following two questions: How did the television networks and their mass media empires display the social phenomenon of the 1960s counterculture?  Since most in the broadcast medium rejected radical politics and were much older than their targeted viewers, how did the networks give visual credibility to a counterculture that at its core seemed anti-capitalist? What this article will illustrate through selective content analysis of television in the 1960s and early 1970s is that the dominant society legitimized the countercultural ideas of youths in a free flow process involving networks and college-educated rebels. As a consequence, the Lichters and Rothman argued, the mass media popularized the idea of a generation gap, depicting it as a phenomenon of ideological polarization. Television proved unable or unwilling to confront the issues of social class and radicalism, however. The style of television programming presented to America's youths changed to meet particular market demands —incorporating into plot lines rebellious youths, liberated women, blacks, and gays—but the substance remained true to its Establishment origins.

Americans watched nearly six hours of television daily by 1969, spending more of their leisure time viewing network programs than in reading newspapers and attending church and athletic events.  Further, television, which in the 1950s had generally claimed viewers of modest status and education, attracted a larger middle-class, college-educated audience with more disposable income to spend on the products advertised in primetime. ABC, CBS, and NBC vied for larger shares of advertising revenue that increased 300 percent from 1961 to 1976. In 1970, thanks to commercial sponsors, the networks boasted a broadcast income of 1453.8 million. Not content with acquiring wealth merely through advertising, the networks built communications empires that included movie and musical recording companies. The networks were no less tied to the Pentagon: NBC, through its parent company the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), was involved in defense contracting, while CBS president Frank Stanton served as chair of the Rand Corporation, a military think tank

In the 1950s, CBS and NBC dominated network television, controlling the nation's most lucrative markets. Unable to compete, the Dumont network collapsed in 1955 and ABC appeared to be in serious trouble. But then, ABC signed a contract with Walt Disney Productions to broadcast children-oriented shows, including the immensely popular Mickey Mouse Club. As a consequence, ABC’s advertising revenue improved and, as Gitlin notes, the network remained highly sensitive to the youth market. ABC's financial resurrection anticipated a future in which more programming would be designed for younger middle-class viewers whose rising weekly allowances far outpaced the rate of inflation. Indeed, the changing demographics of the television audience in the 1960s pointed to the expansion of the youth market. By 1969, the majority of television's primetime audience .was between the ages of 18 and 49, with teenagers being the most constant viewers.

While the networks were discovering the potential of the youth market in the mid-1950s, another facet of the entertainment industry was coming to appreciate the profits to be made. Rock, fusing rhythm and blues, folk, country, and big band sounds, emerged as the fashionable music of middle-class baby boomers. While at its more gritty, black-inspired edges, rock seemed to present dangerous messages of rebellion and easy sex to middle-class white youths, by the latter part of the 1950s mass marketers, had cleaned up rock's image, the best example being Elvis Presley. Even though Presley suggestively gyrated his hips on The Ed Sullivan Show (CBS, 1948-1971), this patriotic boy next door performed his compulsory military service without complaint.  Initially a medium dominated by small, independent labels, the major recording companies—largely subsidiaries of television networks and Hollywood movie studios—bought out the minors and came to dominate a youth music scene that was still a small part of the music industry. The American debut of the Beatles and other British Invasion bands in 1964 rejuvenated rock, making it a profitable part of the music entertainment industry. By 1973, one-third of CBS's profits came from its rock record labels.

The wedding of the television and rock music industries seemed ordained. Both marketed highly mercurial products subject to quick success or failure and were dependent upon advertising agencies and public relations firms to promote their services. Television had a more solid economic foundation than the rock music industry because the former possessed direct ties to corporations seeking advertising air time and limited viewer choices to the three surviving networks. The recording labels, in contrast, confronted great difficulties because any given album or single had thousands of competitors and dealt with distribution and radio programming problems.  In 1969, 74 percent of the singles and 61 percent of the albums released failed to recover their production costs.

For recording companies to succeed, musical groups had to be displayed to the public as commodities. Claims that rock stars resisted the demands of the market and proved unsuitable for network television were, according to music critic Simon Frith, absurd. Rock relied upon the manipulation of the consumer. As sociologist Paul Hirsch argued, before products leach the consumer they undergo a "preselection" process to determine if they will sell well on the market. In the musical entertainment industry the preselection process is reliant upon the favorable review of "autonomous gatekeepers," generally radio disc jockeys and rock magazine critics. Thus, Hirsch concluded, "The diffusion of particular fads and fashions is either blocked or facilitated at this strategic checkpoint." All records have already been preselected as either innovative or imitative of a trend. The same process is true for television  entertainment, with newspaper critics as the gatekeepers.

Preselection occurs in nearly all industries with products to market. But with television and popular music, particularly since they were bound by interlocking corporate ties, the potential to create a product digestible on both media was difficult for mass marketers to ignore. Middle-aged corporate executives recognized by 1965 that 41 percent of the American population was under the age of
20, watched a great amount of television, had the means to consume conspicuously, and enjoyed rock music. Network executives wished to target this audience.

Seeking to tap into the vast youth audience, NBC launched The Monkees in 1966, a show that imitated the antics of the Beatles' 1964 movie A Hard Day's Night. The film artist Behind A Hard Day’s Night, Richard Lester, interspersed the movie with the Beatles' music, stimulating their subsequent record safes. NBC’s plan was no less ambitious. Owning the Colgems label, NBCs recording companies had captured little of the youth market. To rectify that, NBC brought in Don Kirshner, who had worked with such saccharine performers as Bobby Darin and Neil Sedeka. Kirshner wrote The Monkees' songs and hired the actors to portray the fictitious band members. Although Kirshner hired the actors for their photogenic, as opposed to musical, attributes. The Monkees became a popular series and their songs sold well on the Colgems label.

The Monkees remained true to Lester's formula, conveying to parents images of fun-loving, nonthreatening, albeit immature, youths. In The Monkees’ world from 1966 to 1968, no one talked about Chairman Mao, and "Lucy in the Sky With Diamomds" was nowhere to be seen. While devoid of political content, the series went to great lengths to demonstrate its hipness.  In one episode, everyone in the nation, including President Lyndon Johnson, became a readily manipulated zombie. The Monkees discovered that people descended into mindlessness after watching television. On the television screen was an image of an all-seeing eye; NBC's jibe of CBS, the geriatric network that did not know how to package youthful alienation as a nonthreatening product.

In another episode, the show opened with underground rock musician Frank Zappa and Monkees leader Mike Nesmith arguing about the artistic merits of their music. Nesmith, assuming the persona of Zappa, characterized The Monkees' music and television series as commercialized and politically shallow. Zappa, playing Nesmith, retorted that at least radio stations would play The Monkees' music. This exchange was not so intellectually pure as it might have initially appeared. In 1968, Zappa and the Mothers of Invention released an album on the Verve label, a division of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MOM), which featured the clean-cut, caricatured musical group Ruben and the Jets. On the record jacket cover, the lead guitar player queried, "Is this the Mothers of Invention recording under a different name in a last ditch attempt to get their cruddy music on the radio?" Trying to make money by gaming notoriety in failing to make money was an inspired mass marketing technique.

The Mothers of Invention were by no means unique. In 1968, Janis Joplin of Big Brother and the Holding Company distributed through Columbia Records (CBS) a much-hyped, mass media-designated countercultural album, Cheap Thrills. Underground coolies' artist Robert Crumb, creator of "Fritz the Cat," a dope-smoking feline, illustrated the Cheap Thrills cover. To the dismay of a reporter for the radical newspaper Rat, Joplin stated that she granted interviews only to mainstream, large circulation magazines such as Time and Newsweek whose coverage would boost her record sales.

Similarly concerned with the bottom line, the Beatles allowed their clean-cut image to be used from 1965 to 1968 for a syndicated Saturday morning cartoon. The cartoon Beatles, like their Monkees counterparts, were good guys fighting against encroaching evil, which in society's eyes might have been rock groups like the Beatles. Cartoon Beatles and their heirs, such as The Jackson Five animated series (ABC, 1971-1973), portrayed respectable youths. One day they would be ready, the shows indicated, to assume the responsibility of running the office and the nation.  Indeed, The Partridge Family (ABC, 1970-1974), a primetime series based upon the exploits of a countercultural family of rockers, the Cowsills, featured a hip singer who was also a caring mother and champion of traditional values so far as drugs, sex, and patriotism were concerned. The Partridge Family, unlike the Cowsills, would have never recorded the music for the Broadway show Hair, a countercultuial celebration of dope, sex, Black Power, and draft resistance.

One of the chief purposes of Saturday morning animated countercultural-oriented shows such as The Beatles was to introduce new toys, foods, and drinks to a prepubescent audience that generally could not distinguish between the real and the imaginary. The formula for these cartoons was based upon the time-honored plot of good versus evil, with an added generational component: The heroes were young and the villains old. In The Herculoids (CBS, 1967-1969), the inhabitants of a Utopian planet were protected by intelligent animals who embraced such countercultural beliefs as cooperation, peace, and love.  Hanna-Barbara, the producers of The Herculoids, created another animated show called Birdman (NBC, 1967-1968), whose hero received supernatural powers from an ancient Eastern god so that he could spread the light of justice.

Exploiting the rock genre was the chosen method by which cartoons depicted the youth culture. Thus, many animated characters in the late 1960s became rock stare cloaked in full countercultural regalia. The Hardy Boys (ABC, 1969-1971) were rock and roll super sleuths on a world tour, entertaining youths and tracking  down  evil-doers.  Even scary characters could be made acceptable to young viewers by adding the rock sound. Frankenstein, Jr., and the Impossibles (CBS, 1966-1968) featured a pleasant, 30-foot tall robot  who joined  forces with several teenage rock and roll detectives.  The Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp Show (ABC, 1970-1972), playing off the popularity of the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes, presented a group of rocking monkeys called the Evolution Revolution.  Such shows legitimized the music of youth and made it as safe as the muzak that accompanied the commercials.

Even though the animated Beatles had to be dropped in 1968 when the group's acid-tinged image no longer fit their wholesome cartoon series, this show spurred an animated imitator, The Beagles (CBS, 1966-1967), which featured two rock singing puppies. The die had been cast; the networks found that musical stars could sell a great deal of cereal and toys in the Saturday morning slot. Emboldened by his success with The Monkees, Don Kirshner in 1968 created another musical group, this time in in cartoon form. The Archies (CBS, 1968-1977).  Based on the comic book adventures of several small-town teenagers. The Archies became a musical force, with chart-topping singles and a fast-selling cardboard and wax coated record available on the back of selected cereal boxes. These records could be played a few times on the stereo before wearing out, requiring another trip to the store.  The Archies inspired other cartoon rockers, notably the leggy, leopard-skin clad Josie and the Pussycats (CBS, 1970-1972), and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids (NBC, 1973-1974). In 1972, ABC began using the rock sound to teach children math, grammar, and history on its informational three-minute clips, Schoolhouse Rock.

In primetime television, rock music became a symbol of the youth culture as well as a way to capture two audiences, teenagers and their parents. On shows such as American Bandstand (ABC, 1957-1990), Hullabaloo (NBC, 1965-1966), and Shindig (ABC, 1964 -1966), youths viewed the latest dances and fashions. Meanwhile, their parents were reassured by the innocent, highspirited performers on the screen that rock music would not turn their children into delinquents. Television series with rock formats sought to bridge the alleged generation gap, informing their white, middle-class audience that every era had its Flaming Youth, from Rudy Vallee to Frank Sinatra. If nothing else, Dad could at least enjoy watching the Hullabaloo girl who danced Go-Go in an iron cage while Mom waited for NBC’s The Andy Williams Show to see the Osmonds (MGM). A family of Mormon rockers, the Osmoads did not consume coffee, let alone mescaline.

Dick Clark's American Bandstand featured the best of wholesome rock entertainment. A former recipient of payola, dark had since become a paragon of virtue. He did not permit wild dancing on American Bandstand, nor were groups allowed to perform material that challenged his vision of rock as a fun, adolescent, safe brand of music. In 1968, dark introduced a more hip version of American Bandstand to Saturday afternoon audiences. Hosted by Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders (Columbia Records), Happening '68 featured star performers, interviews with rock celebrities, and band contests. However, in its two-year run on ABC, Happening '6S did not sanction groups to sing popular, controversial songs.

The situation was no different on Hullabaloo when NBC forbade guest star Barry McGuire to perform his hit antiwar anthem "Eve of Destruction." Ed Sullivan, who had introduced the Beatles to a national viewing audience in 1964, compelled the Rolling Stones to remove the sexual connotations from the lyrics of their song "Let's Spend the Night Together." Such censorship was the norm, though most rock entertainers did not object, believing in profit, not principle. Eric Burdon and Eric Clapton, desirous of projecting a clean-cut image to corporate America, insisted in early interviews that most rockers—certainly those recording for the Columbia label—did not smoke marijuana. Jann Wenner's rock magazine, Rolling Stone, followed the lead of the television networks by marketing the counterculture as hip and consumable. By showcasing interviews with rock's musical heroes, and thereby capturing the attention of young consumers, Wenner knew that youth-oriented advertisers would flock to Rolling Stone.

As the decade of the 1960s advanced, more and more television series conveyed the message that contemporary youthful tastes, although different from the adult perception of what was good, were ultimately socially acceptable. In one episode of The Lucy Show (CBS, 1962-1968), for example, Lucille Ball, a 1930s-era radical in real life, assisted  a friend  whose son  had dropped out of society to hang with hippies on Sunset Strip. Lucy learned little in her initial investigation since few on the Strip would talk to her given her square attire. She then decided to go undercover, posing as a countercultural diva complete with Go-Go boots, black stretch pants, a swirling multi-colored turtleneck sweater, a fur vest, and sunglasses. Lucy subsequently won acceptance on the Strip, became a rock dance innovator, and found her friend's son. As it turned out, he was not a societal drop-out but rather an undercover police officer. Lucy's adventures explained to the television audience that the form of the youth culture—the clothes, hair, music, and the dancing— was all there was to a movement that lacked political substance. There were no student antiwar demonstrators, only immature youths in search of innocent entertainment.  Significantly, the policeman was not an enemy of the youth culture: His job was to protect the hippies from a few bad eggs.

Another CBS series, Gilligan's Island, on occasion from 1964 to 1967 abandoned its escapist format to deal with cultural trends. In one show, four members of a Fictional rock group, The Mosquitoes, played by Les Brown, Jr., and the Wellingtons, and decked out in mod clothing, sought refuge on what they thought was a deserted island. When the rockers encountered Gilligan, they refused to signal their ship to rescue them. It turned out that The Mosquitoes were tired and unable to write new songs; they did not want to return to civilization. Desperate, Gilligan decided that the only way to get the rockers to signal their ship was to compose new songs to inspire The Mosquitoes. Up to this point in the show, rock music was rarely heard on the castaways' radio, and the few times it had been played Gilligan gyrated wildly until whacked by the Skipper. Such immature behavior was expected on the part of Gilligan's fans, for actor Bob Denver had only recently been the lazy, albeit well scrubbed, Beatnik Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Cillis (CBS, 1959-1963).

Dressed in hippie costume, Gilligan. Skipper, Thurston Howell III, and the Professor put on a rock concert, shaking their heads, dancing jerkily, and singing nonsensically. The Mosquitoes were not impressed.  Then Ginger, Mrs. Howell, and Mary Ann, calling themselves The Honeybees, took to the stage. Hair properly styled and attired in Go-Go boots and miniskirts. The Honeybees gave a great performance. Indeed, they were so outstanding that The Mosquitoes signaled their ship and left the castaways behind. It seemed that the rockers feared competition from The Honeybees. Later the castaways heard The Honeybees' hit song on the radio as performed by The Mosquitoes.

Viewers could not separate The Honeybees from the authentic article, The Mosquitoes. Mary Ann, the plain Kansas farm girl, was still a latter-day Dorothy after The Honeybees' performance, but when she came on stage in her Go-Go boots and miniskirt, she embodied the counterculture. Even Mrs. Howell, the middle-aged wife of a Wall Street tycoon, is transformed before our eyes into a hip anti-Establishment youth. Ginger, the Hollywood movie star, saw The Honeybees as just another role. In general, they displayed a counterculture that was not about anti-Establishment rebellion but rather about style and business. While rockers like The Mosquitoes sang about overturning the status quo, this episode revealed that the young people who became hippies were just old-fashioned entrepreneurs.

If Gilligan's and Lucy's rare encounters with the counterculture gave viewers a distorted vision of social change, at least these series recognized that there was a world experiencing upheaval. The same may not be said of television's then favorite genre, the military theme show. In the 1965-1966 broadcast season, the networks offered eleven military-oriented shows, of which eight were comedies and three dramas. Seven of the programs were cast in the World War II era, whereas the remainder, service comedies such as Gomer Pyle, USMC (CBS), had contemporary, stateside settings.  There was not even the slightest hint during Gomer Pyle's run from 1964 to 1970 that Marine recruits were guaranteed combat assignments in Vietnam.

By 1967-1968, sensitive to the increasingly controversial nature of the Vietnam War, the networks reduced the number of military-oriented shows. All of these programs were either set stateside or in the World War II European theater of operations. Indeed, as soon as the Vietnam War escalated in early 1965, McHale's Navy (ABC, 1962-1966), a World War II comedy set in the South Pacific, mysteriously relocated to Italy. Apparently humorous Japanese soldiers bore too striking a resemblance to decidedly unfunny Viet Cong guerrillas. Whether in World War II or contemporary setting,  such  series ignored,  while insulating viewers from, the reality of the Vietnam War. Hogan's Heroes (CBS, 1965-1971) made it seem fun to be a prisoner in a Nazi POW camp, and the heroes of The Rat Patrol (ABC, 1966-1968) never died and had clear ideas as to why they fought. Even their German opponents were hip. Historian J. Fred MacDonald became convinced that "war stories and comedic encounters prolonged the inability of the American citizenry to confront the reality of war." Ultimately, the networks confronted the reality of war in their own way, broadcasting fewer military shows until by 1971 there were none.

The inability, or unwillingness, of the television networks (whether in their entertainment or news divisions) to deal with war in a realistic, critical fashion became more evident as the Vietnam conflict intensified. In 1966, historian Erik Bamouw noted, CBS declined to broadcast former Ambassador George Kennan's criticisms of the Vietnam War before Senator J. William Fulbright's Foreign Relations Committee. Instead, the network showed a rerun of Mr. Ed, a series detailing the adventures of a talking horse.  Three years later, CBS president Robert Wood informed folk singers Dick and Tommy Smothers of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour that the network would not be used "as a device to push for new standards." By that, Wood meant that he would censor the show, deleting references to war, radicalism, drugs, and sex. In 1969, under pressure from Democratic and Republican Congressmen, as well as advertisers, CBS canceled the high-rated show as it entered its third season. Even Smothers Brothers regular and comedian Pat Paulsen's gently mocking entrance into the 1968 presidential race was too subversive for CBS. The heir to The Smothers Brothers on CBS, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, which ailed from 1971 to 1974, starred an apolitical, modish dressed duo who had recorded pop-rock songs for ATCO, a division of Atlantic.

Beyond the ill-fated Smothers Brothers, there were in the mid-1960s a few television writers and producers who sought to inject social realism and Counter-Establishment values into their series. Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969), hoped to force his audience to confront the issues of war and racism ("Another Final Frontier"). No less politicized, Barney Rosenzweig, as line producer and script supervisor for Daniel Boom (ABC, 1964-1970), tried to depict the American Revolution as a colonial Vietnam War "with the colonials as the Vietcong and the English as the Americans." So too did television writer-producer Quinn Martin consider himself to be an "ultra-liberal" committed to infusing his shows with messages of social reform and justice.

From such examples, the Lichters and Rothman concluded that television from the 1960s onward became a promoter of a New Left, anti-Establishment ethos. The facts, however, tend to be more supportive of Gitlin's characterization of television as a purveyor (intentional or not) of pro-Establishment, liberal-conservative sentiments. Indeed, if Martin considered himself to be "left of center," and thought that the shows he produced presented anti-Establishment messages, then he would be hard-pressed to explain The FBI (ABC, 1965-1974). His FBI agents fought presumably Communist subversives and hunted down depraved hippies. As for Rosenzweig, while he sought to portray Daniel Boone as a Viet Cong guerrilla, there is no evidence that the public came to view actor Fess Parker as a Kentuckian Ho Chi Minh. Rosenzweig succeeded only in trivializing colonial history and contemporary politics.

The well-intentioned Roddenberry proved no more threatening to the Establishment, lamenting that NBC would not permit him to write allegorical dramas about the Vietnam War that he felt could have swayed more of the public to demand an immediate end to the conflict. His attempts at providing sympathetic portrayals of the counterculture were no more successful. In one celebrated episode, the crew of the USS Enterprise came across a group of youthful rebels who were seeking the planet Eden, a lost paradise. As it turned out, only the alienated Spock, a racially mixed Vulcan living among often prejudiced humans, could relate to the youths. The 23rd-century hippies wore miniskirts, Go-Go boots, and played psychedelic rock music.

Star Trek’s hippies were just as comically distorted as their counterparts on The Lucy Show and Gilligan's Island. Casting country and western singer Jerry Reed as a hippie rocker was no less ludicrous than putting middle-aged Natalie Schafer (Mrs. Howell) in beads. Unlike Schafer, Reed's countercultural persona had a dark side. Initially an engaging hippie, Reed's character betrayed Spock. In depicting that betrayal, Star Trek underscored the base nature of even the most sincere countercultural idealists.  A few years later, Frank Zappa captured the essence of Star Trek's contradictory, liberal-conservative messages, juxtaposing in song two of actor William Shatner's most frequently spoken Knes: "We come in peace. . . . Set phasers to kill."

Television programmers tended to lampoon the counterculture, eschewing the angst found in Star Trek, The FBI, and Dragnet (NBC). Dragnet, a grim-faced cops and robbers show, featured in its 1968-1970 run one typical episode in which hippie parents, who had decorated their house with antiwar posters, accidentally fed their daughter a lethal drug overdose. More common were fantasy series like Bewitched (ABC, 1964-1972). Toward the late 1960s, Bewitched featured episodes such as the one in which police officers arrested Samantha's cousin Serena at a "love-in." The love-in had no political or social overtones. What the audience viewed was a group of youths in "groovy" clothes who did not yet understand the world around them.

In another episode, the good witches on the show accidentally conjured up Benjamin Franklin. The colonial-era revolutionary, with his long hair and ideals of liberty, seemed to fit in very well with the youth culture. When Franklin delivered a soap box speech in the town park, the police imprisoned him for not having a speaking permit. Incensed with the limitations contemporary society placed upon free speech. Franklin warned Samantha that the preservation of liberty required eternal vigilance.  On the other hand, free speech was not an absolute right; those who practice it must do so responsibly or else forfeit legal protection. This formulation, though made by an actor portraying an 18th-century revolutionary clothed in "groovy threads," could have been made by conservative California governor and fellow Hollywood creation Ronald Reagan.

This shallow treatment of youthful protest could also be found on Green Acres (CBS, 1965-1971), a comedy set in rural America. What set Green Acres apart from Bewitched, Star Trek, and Dragnet was that its countercultural rebel was not a hip witch, space alien, or murderous dope fiend. No, Arnold Ziffel was a precocious piglet. In one episode, Amold Ziffel's elementary school teacher unfairly expelled him for disrupting class. His friends quickly organized a student strike,  sitting  down  outside  the school and shouting "Hitler!" at the county sheriff who bore a striking  resemblance  to  Birmingham, Alabama, police legend Bull Connor. Fortunately for Arnold, the school readmitted him when his painting,  "Nude at a Filling Station," won a prestigious prize. The countercultural rebel was also an antiwar stalwart. Learning that the financially strapped horse whose role he had assumed in a Hollywood movie production would be unable to send his son to Stanford—resulting in the colt losing his student Selective Service deferment—Arnold exclaimed, "He'll be drafted!" The activist piglet withdrew from the picture.

Whereas Amold Ziffel was a symbol of rebellious youth, millionaire Bruce Wayne and his young ward Dick Grayson were hip upholders of law and order. Sensitive to the upsurge of the Black Power and feminist movements, the producers of Batman (ABC, 1966-1968) changed the casting of the Catwoman character: Black singer Eartha Kitt replaced white Yale undergraduate Julie Newmar. In 1967, the series added a new character, Batgirl. Batman, Robin, and Batgirl fought such villains as King Tut (Victor Buono). A mild-mannered archeologist, the Yale professor had, while speaking at a teach-in, fallen off the podium. Losing his memory, the professor assumed an evil alter ego. The heroes also contended with Louie the Lilac (Milton Berle) who had captured Princess Primrose, leader of the flower children. Louie the Lilac planned on brainwashing Primrose and then using her to lead Gotham City's youths into revolution. Police Chief O'Hara, a none-too-bright Irish cop, loathed Louie the Lilac and the flower children. But Batman, the patrician graduate of Yale, assured the flatfoot that the flower children were well-intentioned youths who wanted to create a better country.

Interestingly, Batman, Robin, and Batgirl taped a public service spot on behalf of civil rights protection for women. The scene was the office of Police Commissioner Gordon. A telephone call came in concerning super-villain activities in Gotham City. Batman and Robin began to leave, ordering Batgirl to stay behind since the situation out in the streets could be dangerous. Outraged, Batgirl rebuked the Dynamic Duo, pointing out that discrimination on account of sex was against the law. Given this merging of fantasy and politics, it is not too surprising that Eartha Kitt, on the basis of her acting and singing accomplishments, received an invitation from Lady Bird Johnson to attend a White House function.  To the chagrin of the First Lady, Catwoman garnered national news media coverage by denouncing the Vietnam War.

By the late 1960s, demographics, profits, and politics became ever more closely linked elements in decisions regarding network programming. In 1968, ABC executives commissioned sociologists at Columbia University to survey the viewing habits, consumption patterns, and ideological orientations of youth. Two years later, A. C. Nielson, the company that measured the size of the networks' audience for particular shows to determine the advertising rates companies were charged, adjusted its reporting system. To assist advertisers in better catering to the expanding youth market, A. C. Niebon divided its youth cohort into two groups: consumers 18 to 24 and 25 to 34 years of age. These two groups contained the highest proportions of potential or actual college-educated, upwardly mobile, affluent consumer in the country.

Network executives and mass marketers paid close attention to the 1969 Daniel Yankelovitch poll for Fortune magazine that showed American youths to be opposed to radical extremism and critical of the Establishment. Convinced that they were tuned into the mindset of youths, television programmers, according to Gitlin, as well as the Lichters and Rothman, entered a period of "social relevancy" or liberal "advocacy." To Gitlin this represented nothing new in the efforts of profit-motivated mass media executives to cash in on cultural change. The Lichters and Rothman marveled at the ability of the networks to criticize the Establishment without calling into question its moral legitimacy. As Gitlin's conservative counterparts observed, the new social-relevance programs provided "a social worker's vision of social problems; the solution is less authority and more humanity."

Given the vacuity of the late 1960s advocacy shows, it is not surprising that radical and conservative media critics had found common ground. ABC in 1969 offered The Bold Ones, an umbrella title for four rotating series: The New Doctors, The Lawyers, The Protectors, and The Senator.  In the first two shows, wise, older sages inspired, and sometimes clashed with, idealistic younger colleagues who identified with unpopular causes. Despite tensions between the older and younger generations, the former was willing to lend a hand to immature associates. Meanwhile, in The Protectors a white deputy police chief worked with a black activist district attorney. In spite of their different perceptions of law and order, the policeman and the attorney respected each other. Such series demonstrated that the generation gap was bridgeable and that blacks and whites could achieve social harmony, eschew violence, and prosper within the framework of reformist capitalism.

Even less thematically subtle, The Senator portrayed a liberal WASP politician in the mold of former Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton. The senator, when not arguing with his activist daughter, fought corrupt party bosses who were based on Chicago Mayor Rich- ard Daley and AFL-CIO President George Meany. In its premiere, The Senator featured a congressional investigation into the shooting deaths of college students at a campus antiwar protest by National Guardsmen. Coming to the airwaves barely seven months after the Kent State University confrontation, ABC offered its own conclusion about the shootings: Radical youths and right-wing adults had brought down tragedy upon the innocent. The truth behind what had happened at Kent State could only be discerned by liberals who were critical, though understanding, of youthful discontent. As  the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal observed. The Senator was "a demonstration of the extent to which deep and terrible human problems can be turned into nauseating and troth-distorting tripe by translation into Madison Avenue-ese."

ABC embraced such vacuous programming. In 1968, the network offered the notorious Mod Squad, which featured three rebellious youths who became police officers: an affluent WASP; a nonthreatening Hack ghetto activist; and a liberated, yet vulnerable, white female. Assigned as undercover officers, the gender- and racially balanced trio tracked down middle-aged criminals who preyed upon countercultural youths in Southern California. If the premise of law-and-order hippies was farfetched, The Mod Squad found an audience for five years. ABC's other youth-oriented programs could not make the same claim to longevity.

The best of ABC's worst youth programs were The Young Lawyers and The Young Rebels, both introduced in 1970 and canceled in 1971. In The Young Lawyers a wise and understanding law school professor played mentor to three activist students: a Jewish idealist; a streetwise, yet vulnerable, black woman; and a racially sensitive WASP. Together, they operated a legal assistance clinic in the Boston ghetto, defending blacks against, invariably, white ethnic slumlords and brutal police officers.  Meanwhile The Young Rebels, which was set in the time of the American Revolution, had four young heroes: a liberated, yet vulnerable, WASP woman; the son of a liberal WASP politician; a WASP intellectual; and a former slave with the style of Black Panther Huey Newton but not his politics. The Young Rebels waged guerrilla war against middle-aged British soldiers and the "System." Interestingly, the show that followed this celebration of youthful rebellion and armed struggle on ABC's Sunday night schedule was The FBI.

Not wishing to surrender the youth market to ABC, CBS counterscheduled with its own hip shows, among them the short-lived Storefront Lawyers, which detailed the adventures of an activist WASP attorney who provided free legal assistance to minorities in the Los Angeles ghetto. On the rock entertainment front, CBS in 1968 hired a hippie, James Fouratt, to coordinate advertising for Columbia Records. Prior to Fouratt's elevation, CBS's label had come up with such counterculturally oriented advertising slogans as "The Man can't bust our music" and "Music is Love." Fouratt made sure that the underground newspapers received the bulk of Columbia Records' advertisements. Indeed, by 1969, journalist Abe Peck noted, the countercultural press survived only because of the advertising space CBS's and ABC's record labels purchased. Apprised of that fact by the FBI, CBS ordered Columbia Records to cease advertising in the underground newspapers, championing Rolling Stone magazine as a much more respectable youth organ.

James Fouratt was on the forefront of a new generation of advertising executives who, historian Stephen Fox reported, smoked marijuana and brought “hip capitalism” to the television networks. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the television audience would watch young black males with Bic ball point pens shouting a variation of the Black Panther exclamation, "Write-On!"; Chrysler trumpeted "The Dodge Rebellion." An Alberto VO5 shampoo commercial featured a young woman who had a peace symbol superimposed over her face. Even the military and the post office copied the style of the counterculture, with the former proclaiming  “A country needs love too,” and the latter issuing a "Love" stamp. Mary Wells, the 40 year-old creator of the "Love Power" advertising slogan that associated freedom with consumerism, epitomized the true spirit of capitalist rebellion.  Angered by the Surgeon General's ban on televised cigarette advertising Wells decried the prohibition as "un-American."

Adopting the form of the counterculture to sell consumer goods on television, even as the networks brought rock music and hippie characters into the primetime and Saturday morning schedules, seemed to be good business sense. Not surprisingly, therefore, by 1968 Establishment politicians packaged themselves as hip counterculturalists while devoting the bulk of their campaign moneys to television advertising and to well-staged network appearances.  In  1962, historian Daniel Boorstin had characterized rock concerts and political campaigns as pseudo-events. Six years later, rock and political pseudo-events had become interchangeable televised phenomenon. Thus folk singers Simon and Garfunkel, joined by actor Dustin Hoffman who had starred as the anti-Establishment hero in The Graduate, campaigned for reformist Democratic presidential primary candidate Eugene McCarthy. To counter McCarthy, hawkish Democratic rival Hubert Humphrey sought to shed some of his association with the Vietnam War, proclaiming himself to be the candidate of "The Politics of Joy." Humphrey tried out his new hippie look on numerous, hostile university campuses.

Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968 also tried to project a more hip image on television, producing a campaign film that showed his family in brightly colored clothes as they strolled barefoot along a beach. (Nixon, however, kept his dress shoes on.) More noteworthy, Nixon preempted commercial airtime on the Smothers Brothers show and made a guest appearance on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (NBC, 1968-1973). While the conservative presidential candidate uttered the immortal lines, "Sock it to me," the middle-aged hosts of Laugh-In wore peace symbols around their necks and cast members scurried about portraying drug-addled hippies. Paul Keyes, an originator of Laugh-In, was a Nixon campaign advisor, and five executives from the advertising firm of J.
Walter Thompson, including future Watergate veterans Dwight Chapin, H. R. Haldeman, and Ron Ziegler, worked for the Republican. Such men had handled the publicity for Disneyland, that great byproduct of The Mickey Mouse Club.

If the premise of Nixon as a regular, countercultural kind of guy was incredible, it seemed four years later to have inspired dovish Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. Beyond distributing political buttons that placed McGovern's image above that of a long-haired youth who was making the peace sign gesture, the rebel Democrat incorporated  "with-it"  advertising slogans into his public addresses. Indeed, in his speech accepting the Democratic party nomination, McGovern paraphrased the lines Mary Wells's agency had penned for the Alka-Seltzer television commercials, "I can't believe I won the whole thing." Conveniently forgotten, this hip, anti-Establishment candidate had, as a senator in 1964, voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that led to the American military escalation of the Vietnam War.

Even as Nixon's advertising agency defeated McGovern's, Rowan and Martin cracked jokes about National Guardsmen shooting college students, and The Archies grooved against evil, CBS purged its schedule of top-rated rural comedies and faltering social advocacy dramas. The problem with shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres, CBS executives concluded in 1971, was that they were popular with grade school-educated Americans over the age of 50, not prime consumers and utterly unattractive to most advertisers.  To enhance profits, CBS aimed to create new shows that would appeal to young, college-educated professionals who resided in large East or West Coast cities and Chicago.  Such viewers were too sophisticated to enjoy the mindless. Southern Beverly Hillbillies and far too contemptuous of the shallow, crusading Storefront Lawyers.

Into this programming revolution stepped CBS President Robert Wood. A conservative Republican, Wood had ordered the cancellation of The Smothers Brothers in 1969 after the hosts invited antiwar activist Benjamin Spock to appear as a guest star. Wood gained greater fame for championing seemingly daring shows, however, notably All in the Family (1971-1979) and M*A*S*H  (1972-1983). The hows Wood programmed featured antiwar, gay, and feminist characters. Moreover, the creators of these series, liberal activists Norman Lear and Larry Gelbart, worked closely with advocacy organizations such as the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

Although it may have seemed to be an ideological anomaly for a conservative to promote programs with leftist political agendas, closer examination reveals that it was not. CBS executives rightly concluded that feminists, gays, and civil rights and abortion rights supporters were overwhelmingly college-educated and upper middle class, precisely the network and advertisers' target market.  This sacrifice of ideological purity for profit was not very great in any event. The comedic style of All in the Family and M*A *S*H often overshadowed their political substance and their ambiguous characterizations fueled among the audience a variety of responses. Conservatives and liberals found characters to love and hate. Moreover, despite what television critics said about All in the Family being a breakthrough show, Lear's depiction of its working-class hero, Archie Bunker, represented no departure from the video past. Archie Bunker was, like his blue-collar television predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s, narrow-minded and a subject of ridicule; in other words, the vision most upper-middle-class professionals, whether NOW's Gloria Steinem, or the National Review's William F. Buckley, Jr., had of the so-called George Wallace constituency.

Television and the counterculture had seemingly merged by the end of the Vietnam War in 1973.  This union was not equal, however, as television promoted only the form, and not the substance, of the counterculture’s ideals.  Programming from this point forward would vacillate between social advocacy shows such as One Day at a rime (CBS, 1975-1984), with its divorced, working mother of two, and Happy Days (ABC, 1974-1984), with its romantic vision of youth in the 1950s and its escapist, problem-solving plot lines. Even hoods like Fonzie were nice. As America entered the 1980s, the vision television had promoted of the 1960s counterculture—the vision of immature youths waiting to assume their place in American society—was realized in television shows such as Kate and Allie (CBS, 1984-1988), Growing Pains (ABC, 1985-1992), and Cosby (NBC, 1984-992).

But was television's image of the counterculture, which has influenced the way many people view the 1960s, credible? Ask anyone born after 1964 about this era and you will likely hear how everybody was a hippie, protested social injustice and the Vietnam War, practiced free love, and smoked marijuana. This article brings into question television's portrait of the counterculture. At the same time, we present a youth market that seemingly accepted as true the symbols and ideas television had depicted as those of the counterculture. Ask any of the millions who purchased a Monkees or Archies album. To them that was the counterculture. The question then becomes: Which was the authentic counterculture?

Certainly there is much truth in the notion that the dominant culture accepted many of the mores and fashions of the counterculture in the late 1960s and 1970s. Did the counterculture seek this result, or was it simply a case of the dominant society legitimizing its opposition? Given the parameters of the 1960s and the influence of capitalism on the production of culture, this article details that there was an interchange between the Establishment and youths in which both sought to use television to present a "real" image of the counterculture. To the established television and record executives, this meant portraying harmless, free-spirited, and dedicated young people with sometimes justifiable gripes. To the youthful performers, writers, production people, and musicians, this meant getting more exposure and acceptance that they believed might change the way society operated. Even into the 1990s, many of these countercultural types are using capitalism to market causes. "Point-of-purchase politics" is the latest bend in marketing and advertising, where advertisements could pass for "protest signs." Targeting social consciousness with the consumption of, for example, ice cream, is an excellent way of detailing the companies' oppositional stance while competing within the established system. The question relating to the 1960s comes into play again: Which is the real company? Is the real corporation the one that seeks to profit by marketing its soial commitment? Or is the corporation championing social commitment and, only incidentally, marketing its product?

Scholars and media critics have a tendency to treat the Vietnam War era as a battle between two separate, distinguishable camps. On the one side stood the established order of liberal-conservative middle-class society, and on the other were the young people who challenged that order. But these groups were not Fixed; there was a free flow of ideas between both groups, whether they admitted it or not. Certainly youthful ideals changed American society, but the movement itself was not a unified entity with universal appeal. Rather, the youth culture was an organic one that adapted and grew. American society too was not composed of television's stereotypical racist hard-hats who were unable to accept new political ideas.

By the 1970s, many middle-class Americans had adopted some aspects of the youth culture, holding new attitudes toward sex, drugs, and politics, even as longer hair, rock music, and bell-bottom jeans became fashionable. Most people only embraced those aspects of the counterculture that they found useful, however, discarding troublesome, unprofitable political ideals. Mass media marketers attempted to project the youth culture in terms of its' fashions and music,  but did not accept many of its more radical political aims. American television in particular depicted a counterculture that was unified in its form, but had little in terms of intellectual content. But then again, the Silent Generation of consumers, their prepubescent offspring, and the collegiate boomers were not looking for a political revolution.  Fortunately for them, Dick Clark, CBS, and The Monkees were not providing that option.