Todd Alan Gitlin was born on January 6, 1943, in Manhattan and grew up in a liberal Jewish household in the Bronx. His father, Max Gitlin, taught high school history. His mother, Dorothy ( Siegel) Gitlin, taught typing and stenography.

After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1959 at 16 as class valedictorian, he studied mathematics at Harvard. Before he graduated in 1963, he met Tom Hayden and other leaders of what was then a tiny organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Within a year he had succeeded Hayden as president of SDS. He served in 1963 and 1964. Among his activities in the 1960s New Left were trying to integrate a whites-only amusement park in Baltimore (for which he was arrested) and organizing a sit-in in New York to protest the Chase Manhattan Bank's loans to apartheid South Africa.

At the same time, Gitlin enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan, where he graduated with a master's degree in political science in 1966.

After two more years as what he called a "freelance agitator," he moved to California. He wrote for , a short-lived underground weekly; lectured at San José State University; and joined a men's consciousness-raising group.

He didn't plan for a career, he told in 1988, because "I thought the movement was going to be my life." Eventually, he pursued a doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, saying it would give him the freedom to write, especially about the media.

"I wanted a certificate and a location which would permit me to write as much about whatever interested me, in the ways that interested me, as possible," Gitlin said. "In a specialized world, writing about media and popular culture gave me a way of slicing into a whole tangle of political, social, cultural and intellectual questions."

He would go on to regard much of the establishment news media as tools of the profit-driven corporate state it covered, the goal of both being to perpetuate the status quo.

His dissertation at Berkeley turned into a book, , published in 1980 and revised in 2003. In it, he traced the media's symbiotic role in political movements, SDS in particular.

After earning his doctorate in 1977, he taught sociology at Berkeley and was director of the university's mass communications program until 1995. His well-received (1983, revised in 1994), for which he interviewed 200 people in the television industry, showed how advertisers and network executives colluded to set the cultural agenda.

His best-known book was (1987), a firsthand account, part history and part autobiography, of the rise and fall of the left during that decade of upheaval. The leftists who held sway, he said in the book, were never prepared to govern. "Often," he wrote, "I'm glad we're in no position to take power: If we did, the only honorable sequel would be abdication."

As time went on, he continued to write from a progressive perspective but became increasingly critical of his own cohort. In (1995), he said the left had become distracted by identity politics, multiculturalism and political correctness when it should have been focused on issues like economic justice.

"While the right has been busy taking the White House, the left has been marching on the English department," he wrote. Kirkus Reviews said the book made for "provocative and convincing reading that will doubtless earn Gitlin demerits from the P.C. orthodox." Meanwhile his critics said that his politics had turned to mush, that he offered no new ideas and that his writing had devolved into score-settling.

Over the 1990s Gitlin also became an increasingly vocal critic of pro-Palestinian activists, writing in support of Israel and against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the 2000s and 2010s.

Moving east in 1995, Gitlin taught at New York University until 2002, when he joined the faculty at Columbia, where he was a professor of journalism and sociology and chairman of the doctoral program in communications.

Gitlin wrote nearly 20 books over the course of his life. Most were on socio-political themes, but he also wrote four novels, many published and unpublished poems, and an unproduced screenplay.

His first two marriages, in 1964 to co-author and collaborator Nanci Hollander and in 1976 to Carol Wolman, ended in divorce. From about 1982 to 1992 he was in a romantic partnership with the historian Ruth Rosen. In 1995 he married Laurel Ann Cook, who worked in public relations at Doubleday.

Gitlin died on February 5, 2022.