The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

The television is a symbol for consumption of mass media. Scott-Heron represents television as a distraction from important political work and introspection. The television appears throughout the poem, starting in the first stanza when the speaker warns the implied reader, a complacent Black person, that real change cannot be achieved if the reader consumes television much in the same way a person consumes drugs. Numerous other references are to television programs that include an idealized picture of the American home and important relationships; these images center whiteness and present a sanitized, unrealistic portrait of the United States.

Television is also a medium that reproduces dangerous, stereotyped representations of Black America, a point Scott-Heron makes by including allusions to the 1968 riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the fourth stanza and more generic representation of police-involved shooting of Black people in the fifth stanza. Not only is television anaesthetizing: It presents Black death as entertainment. “The revolution will not be televised” (Line 5) because the medium is too static and too controlled by corporate and government interests to be a tool for true change.