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Celebrity influence : politics, persuasion, and issue-based advocacy
\"Bono. Angelina Jolie. Ben Affleck. George Clooney. All of these celebrities, and many others in this century and the last, have endorsed politicians and policies. In Celebrity Power, Mark Harvey takes a close look at the question of what roles celebrities play in politics, focusing primarily on issue-based advocacy to determine if they make a difference and, if so, why. He concludes that celebrities do, in fact, often influence public opinion and that their power is based on their ability to draw attention to specific issues and to persuade people to agree with them or, at the least, to think about issues.\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Oprah
“Today on Oprah,” intoned the TV announcer, and all over America viewers tuned in to learn, empathize, and celebrate. In this book, Kathryn Lofton investigates the Oprah phenomenon and finds in Winfrey’s empire—Harpo Productions, O Magazine, and her new television network—an uncanny reflection of religion in modern society. Lofton shows that when Oprah liked, needed, or believed something, she offered her audience nothing less than spiritual revolution, reinforced by practices that fuse consumer behavior, celebrity ambition, and religious idiom. In short, Oprah Winfrey is a media messiah for a secular age. Lofton’s unique approach also situates the Oprah enterprise culturally, illuminating how Winfrey reflects and continues historical patterns of American religions.
eBook
Celebrity and Power
Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, celebrities represent not only the embodiment of success, but also the ultimate construction of false value.Celebrity and Powerquestions the impulse to become embroiled with the construction and collapse of the famous, exploring the concept of thenew public intimacy: a product of social media in which celebrities from Lady Gaga to Barack Obama are expected to continuously campaign for audiences in new ways. In a new Introduction for this edition, P. David Marshall investigates the viewing public's desire to associate with celebrity and addresses the explosion of instant access to celebrity culture, bringing famous people and their admirers closer than ever before.
eBook
A short history of celebrity
Love it or hate it, celebrity is one of the dominant features of modern life--and one of the least understood. Fred Inglis sets out to correct this problem in this entertaining and enlightening social history of modern celebrity, from eighteenth-century London to today's Hollywood. Vividly written and brimming with fascinating stories of figures whose lives mark important moments in the history of celebrity, this book explains how fame has changed over the past two-and-a-half centuries.
Starting with the first modern celebrities in mid-eighteenth-century London, including Samuel Johnson and the Prince Regent, the book traces the changing nature of celebrity and celebrities through the age of the Romantic hero, the European fin de siècle, and the Gilded Age in New York and Chicago. In the twentieth century, the book covers the Jazz Age, the rise of political celebrities such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, and the democratization of celebrity in the postwar decades, as actors, rock stars, and sports heroes became the leading celebrities.
Arguing that celebrity is a mirror reflecting some of the worst as well as some of the best aspects of modern history itself, Inglis considers how the lives of the rich and famous provide not only entertainment but also social cohesion and, like morality plays, examples of what--and what not--to do.
This book will interest anyone who is curious about the history that lies behind one of the great preoccupations of our lives.
eBook
Television airings of U.S. federal COVID-19 public service announcements in 2020 were associated with market-level political orientation, not COVID-19 rates
Televised public service announcements were one of the ways that the U.S. federal government distributed health information about the COVID-19 pandemic to Americans in 2020. However, little is known about the reach of these campaigns or the populations who might have been exposed to the information these ads conveyed. We conducted a descriptive analysis of federally-affiliated public service announcement airings to assess where they were aired and the market-level social and demographic characteristics associated with the airings. We found no correspondence between airings and COVID-19 incidence rates from March to December 2020, but we found a positive association between airings and the Democratic vote share of the market, adjusting for other market demographic characteristics. Our results suggest that PSAs may have contributed to divergent exposure to health information among the U.S. public during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Journal Article
The Hollywood Connection
The Hollywood Connection: The Influence of Fictional Media and Celebrity Politics on American Public Opinion is one of the first edited volumes offered in the political science discipline on the effects of fictional media and celebrity on public opinion, and synthesizes many niche areas of research into single text.
eBook
Rock star : the making of musical icons from Elvis to Springsteen
The nature and meaning of rock stardom—celebrities who embody the most important social and cultural conflicts of their era.
\"All stars are celebrities, but not all celebrities are stars, \" states David Shumway in the introduction to Rock Star, an informal history of rock stardom. This deceptively simple statement belies the complex definition and meaning of stardom and more specifically of rock icons. Shumway looks at the careers and cultural legacies of seven rock stars in the context of popular music and culture—Elvis Presley, James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen. Granted, there are many more names that fall into the rock icon category and that might rightfully appear on this list. Partly, that is the point: \"rock star\" is a familiar and desired category but also a contested one.
Shumway investigates the rock star as a particular kind of cultural construction, different from mere celebrity. After the golden age of moviemaking, media exposure allowed rock stars more political sway than Hollywood's studio stars, and rock stars gradually replaced movie stars as key cultural heroes. Because of changes in American society and the media industries, rock stars have become much more explicitly political figures than were the stars of Hollywood's studio era. Rock stars, moreover, are icons of change, though not always progressive, whose public personas read like texts produced collaboratively by the performers themselves, their managers, and record companies. These stars thrive in a variety of media, including recorded music, concert performance, dress, staging, cover art, films, television, video, print, and others.
Filled with memorable photographs, Rock Star will appeal to anyone interested in modern American popular culture or music history.
eBook
Sociology on Film
After World War II, Hollywood's \"social problem films\"-tackling topical issues that included racism, crime, mental illness, and drug abuse-were hits with critics and general moviegoers alike. In an era of film famed for its reliance on pop psychology, these movies were a form of popular sociology, bringing the academic discipline's concerns to a much broader audience.
Sociology on Filmexamines how the postwar \"problem film\" translated contemporary policy debates and intellectual discussions into cinematic form in order to become one of the preeminent genres of prestige drama. Chris Cagle chronicles how these movies were often politically fractious, the work of progressive directors and screenwriters who drew scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Yet he also proposes that the genre helped to construct an abstract discourse of \"society\" that served to unify a middlebrow American audience.
As he considers the many forms of print media that served to inspire social problem films, including journalism, realist novels, and sociological texts, Cagle also explores their distinctive cinematic aesthetics. Through a close analysis of films likeGentleman's Agreement,The Lost Weekend, andIntruder in the Dust, he presents a compelling case that the visual style of these films was intimately connected to their more expressly political and sociological aspirations.Sociology on Filmdemonstrates how the social problem picture both shaped and reflected the middle-class viewer's national self-image, making a lasting impact on Hollywood's aesthetic direction.
eBook
Kobe Bryant, Memento Mori: Death, Religion, Philosophy, Basketball
The memento mori is a profoundly important aspect of religious reflection on the fleeting nature of life and the need to prepare spiritually for the inevitability of death. This essay considers two recent examples--the deaths of a world-renowned athletic celebrity and an obscure academic philosopher--and explores the contrasting images of death and its meaning found in religious and secular philosophical understandings.
Journal Article
Gerald Ford, Saturday Night Live, and the development of the entertainer in chief
On April 17, 1976, President Gerald, Ford and his press secretary Ron Nessen appeared on the late-night television show Saturday Night Live (SNL) after much deliberation. Though reluctant to assume the position as entertainer in chief, Ford's appearance on SNL marked a distinctive shift in his communication strategy, as his campaign team attempted to restore the power of the Oval Office through performative politics. Though narratives of the development of the entertainer in chief have focused overwhelmingly on the celebrity presidency of John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, this article excavates the place of Richard Nixon and especially Gerald Ford in navigating a shifting media landscape with the tools of entertainment and transforming public perceptions of the presidency in the process.
Journal Article