Viewers Like You?: How Public TV Failed the PeopleColumbia University Press, 2002 - 288 Seiten How "public" is public television if only a small percentage of the American people tune in on a regular basis? When public television addresses "viewers like you," just who are you? Despite the current of frustration with commercial television that runs through American life, most TV viewers bypass the redemptive "oasis of the wasteland" represented by PBS and turn to the sitcoms, soap operas, music videos, game shows, weekly dramas, and popular news programs produced by the culture industries. Viewers Like You? traces the history of public broadcasting in the United States, questions its priorities, and argues that public TV's tendency to reject popular culture has undermined its capacity to serve the people it claims to represent. Drawing from archival research and cultural theory, the book shows that public television's perception of what the public needs is constrained by unquestioned cultural assumptions rooted in the politics of class, gender, and race. |
Inhalt
| 1 | |
| 23 | |
| 67 | |
TV Viewing as God Citizenship | 105 |
Something for Everyone | 141 |
Radicalizing Middle America | 175 |
Public Television Popularity and Cultural Justice | 217 |
NOTES | 229 |
INDEX | 265 |
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Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
Advocates American Black Journal Carnegie Commission channels citizens Civilisation claim College Park commercial broadcasters commercial television conservative consumer Corporation for Public critique cultural studies debate democratic discourse documentary Dream Machine Educational Broadcasting Educational Television elite enlightened entertainment episode films Ford Foundation Forsyte Saga funding grams high culture ideological intellectual John KTCA legitimated liberal mass audience mass culture Masterpiece Theatre middle-class Minow Museum of Television National Public Broadcasting networks Nixon noncommercial opinion leaders PBS collection political popular culture press clippings prime-time program files promised promoted protested public affairs Public Broadcasting Archive Public Broadcasting Service public television public television audience public television's Public TV racial reform Sesame Street sion soap opera social Society stations taste television culture television viewers tion Tony Bennett TV critic TV Guide TV problem U.S. public uplift upscale vast wasteland watch WNET York
Beliebte Passagen
Seite 230 - Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation.
Seite 121 - Bennett (1995: 27) traces similar proscriptions to the exclusion of codes of behaviour associated with fairs and other places of popular assembly: No swearing, no spitting, no brawling, no eating or drinking, no dirty footwear, no gambling: These rules which, with variations, characterized literary and debating societies, museums and coffee houses, also, as Stallybrass and White put it, 'formed part of an overall strategy of expulsion' which clears a space for polite, cosmopolitan discourses by the...
Seite 74 - This broader objective is critically important, even for those who have set themselves far loftier (and narrower) personal standards of excellence. We cannot have islands of excellence in a sea of slovenly indifference to standards. In an era when the masses of people were mute and powerless it may have been possible for a tiny minority to maintain high standards regardless of their surroundings. But today the masses of people are neither mute nor powerless. As consumers, as voters, as the source...
Seite 23 - The measures proposed above represent a minimum program. Walter Lippmann and others have recently argued for the establishment of a public network to be "run as a public service with its criterion not what will be most popular but what is good." Lippmann does not suppose that such a network would attract the largest mass audience. "But if it enlisted the great talents which are available in the industry, but are now throttled and frustrated, it might well attract an audience which made up in influence...
Seite 30 - The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile — in a word, natural — enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences
Seite 139 - The ultimate referent of mass society,' notes Aronowitz, 'is the historical moment when the masses make the (still) contested demand for the full privileges of citizenship, despite the fact that they are obliged to work at mundane tasks, are typically untrained for the specific functions of governance, and are ensconced in the routines of everyday life
Seite 27 - We have triumphantly invented, perfected, and distributed to the humblest cottage throughout the land one of the greatest technical marvels in history, television, and have used it for what? To bring Coney Island into every home. It is as though...
Seite 230 - Discourse is a language or system of representation that has developed socially in order to make and circulate a coherent set of meanings about an important topic area. These meanings serve the interests of that section of society within which the discourse originates and which works ideologically to naturalize those meanings into common sense.
Seite 250 - Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 16, 19.