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Todd Gitlin’s The Whole World is Watching is one of those fundamental texts of American sociology that has never been translated into French. The previously unpublished translation of the introduction to this work, which deals with the relationship between the Student for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the media in the 1960s, invites us to (re)discover this classic, originally published in 1980. The American sociologist, who took part in the movement he studies, provides an analysis of how the media covered this New Left movement in the 1960s, and questions what this media coverage did to the New Left and what the New Left did to it. In doing so, Todd Gitlin was one of the first media sociologists to adopt Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘frame’ applying it to journalistic practices in relation to news content.