Capturing Detroit through an Underground Lens: Issues of the Sixties Inside Pages of the Detroit Fifth Estate, 1965-1970

Abstract

This thesis examines instances where traditioal publications depicted Detroit's Fifth Estate (FE) as a paper paper committed to promoting cultural indulgences in vogue during the 1960s as opposed to a tabloid dedicated to antiwar and civil rights causes. Time, a magazine that specializes in styling media images in its reporting and crafty enough in its coverage of current events that some critics believe the periodical had a role with shaping events that led to the Vietnam War, made use of stereotypes in a July 1966 article that purported to expose FE and four other papers with similar content to the nation. The article represented FE, its editor, and their readers as LSD enthusiasts. However, the facts suggest that of all publications of the era, the greatest LSD aficionado of the time is Time and Life magazine. According to Columbia Journalism Review, the Luce magazines, more than any other, provided more LSD coverage than the other publications servicing the country. Considering its volume of readership, significantly larger than FE, people learned about LSD in Time and Life rather than from a struggling, obscure underground newspaper. Nevertheless, by typecasting FE, its personnel, and its readership as drug fiends, Time, the Detroit Free Press,and the Detroit News could disparage the newspaper and discredit its dissenting content while projecting upon the underground its own guilt for using alcohol and nicotine products to subsidize the news they peddled to the American public. At the same time, traditional mass media’s disparagement of FE created hostility for its staff, the personnel becoming newsmakers while reporting the “news.” As a bystander to the movement, that is as a kid having observed andinteracted with people associated with this underground newspaper, my personal experience with them suggested these individuals were not the way mainstream media portrayed them in their content. I knew them as something other than a bunch of hippies getting high. They were very political, interested in being part of activist organizations changing the United States. Therefore, as news subjects engaged in different affiliations that comprised “the movement,” FE and its workforce were more than reporters; they also were witnesses providing testimony for “the newspaper of record in a movement people didn’t even know exited” (Ovshinsky 2008).