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"Cosby, Bill"
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“The Destruction of a Legacy”: Agenda Setting and the Bill Cosby Sexual Assault Allegations
Utilizing agenda setting theory, this study investigates the Bill Cosby sexual assault allegation scandal and how the scandal is framed by the media. In order to examine if and how varied networks reported differently on the Cosby scandal, sixty articles from three, distinct networks (CNN, FOX News, E!) were analyzed and coded under seven different categories. Results demonstrate a significant difference among the analyzed networks and media frames most reported in the sample for this study. Although all networks address Cosby’s rise and fall of an American hero, agendas set and story frames presented varied. Specifically, CNN highlighted victims’/survivors’ powerful voice whereas E! and FOX News highlighted Cosby’s support from the black community, celebrities and co-stars. Additional results, discussion and future directions follow.
Journal Article
\There Is Nothing Funny in This World About Rioting in Harlem\: Reactions to Bill Cosby as Reflections on the State of the Black Freedom Struggle
Reactions to Bill Cosby's comedy and his political views show the way in which many have failed to clearly distinguish between these two strands of his connection to the freedom struggle. This has been complicated by Cosby's projection of some of his political ideals through his comedy while he chose to neglect others. The militant and radical words of Cosby in Playboy in 1969, his endorsement of civil rights causes, help for the under-privileged, and critique of systemic racism contrasted with the color-blind worldview projected by his comic creations. His more recent message of Black self-determination and community action that has links to conservative thought exists alongside repeats of The Cosby Show and the associated projection of a color-blind world symbolically led by Barack Obama. Such duality and visibility has so often made Cosby a reference point for the position of Blacks in America in the years since the civil rights movement.
Journal Article
Moving from Victims to Victors: African American Attitudes on the \Culture of Poverty\ and Black Blame
Bill Cosby's controversial remarks at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) 50th Anniversary Commemoration for Brown v. Board of Education questioned the \"culture of poverty\" among blacks. This paper explores blacks' support of major themes raised in Cosby's speech—improving blacks' parenting of youth, relying less on government to transcend poverty, being contentious of black behavior, and ending out-of-wedlock births among blacks. By analyzing data in an original, national web-based survey of black, Latino, and white public opinion, results indicate most blacks strongly subscribe to several of these themes and often subscribe to them more than non-blacks. Despite class implications for supporting these themes, class indicators do not predict such attitudes. Several themes cohere on one factor, suggesting tenets of black blame.
Journal Article
Laughing Mad
A rigorous analytic analysis,Laughing Madinterrogates notions of identity, within both the African American community and mainstream popular culture. Written in engaging and accessible prose, it is also a book that will travel from the seminar room, to the barbershop, to the kitchen table, allowing readers to experience the sketches, stand-up, and film comedies with all the laughter they deserve.
eBook
The Power of Representation
The media has generally depicted Black men negatively in television and film. Despite the nearly 30-year gap that exists between The Cosby Show and Black-ish, these family sitcoms counter the negative narratives and stereotypes of Black men historically presented in American media. The Cosby Show and Black-ish existed in different eras, still the global success of The Cosby Show made it possible for Black-ish to explore matters such as race and social injustices. Drawing on his own background as a millennial Black male, the author takes an autoethnographic approach to discuss the influence of The Cosby Show and Black-ish on one’s formulation of fatherhood identity.
Journal Article
From the Whisper Network to #MeToo—Framing Gender, Gossip and Sexual Harassment
There is a long-standing connection between gender and gossip in Western culture as the communication amongst women has been stigmatized as gossip. Long before #MeToo, women who had become victims of sexual abuse and who spoke out against sexual violence were pillorized through gossip and stigmatized as gossips in the public sphere. As a consequence, women have resorted to private forms of communication―so-called “whisper networks”―to warn each other about abuse and harassment. However, the #MeToo-movement has shifted this network from the private sector into that strange hybrid of private and public communication that is social media. The “mainstreaming” of feminist activism achieved through hashtag feminism has had repercussions for the representation of rape survivors and feminist activists in traditional, analog media. The particulars of these repercussions are what this essay seeks to analyze. The traditional public forum of the printed press started to represent these women as trustworthy witnesses―in a dramatic deviation from previous patterns of representation. While the connection between femininity and gossip thus seems to have been severed, this does not, however, mean that the representation of women in the media has been fundamentally altered. Through a semiotic analysis of the visual representations of women in print media around and after #MeToo, this essay will critically call into question the extent of the perceived paradigm shift in the context of #MeToo and the trial of Bill Cosby in 2017.
Journal Article
FIX IT BLACK JESUS: The Iconography of Christ in Good Times
Good Times is primarily remembered for the situation comedy that it became, rather than how the series began. As a part of what Means Coleman classifies as “The Lear Era: Social Relevancy and Ridiculed Black Subjectivity,” the series was the first sitcom in TV history to feature a loving, working-class, Black nuclear family—the Evanses—with a focus on recounting their racial and socioeconomic challenges and gains. While the representational treatment of the Evanses as a whole and full family by network television (CBS) was groundbreaking, Good Times, perhaps, still reinforced implicit schemas regarding Blackness as the Evanses were poor and lived in Chicago’s rough-and-tumble Cabrini Green Housing Projects. Further, as the series progressed, narrative attention focused on the character J.J., a ‘Jim Crow’ stereotype (i.e., eye-bulging, wide-smiling, hustler) whose emergence as the centerpiece of the series eventually prompted co-star, John Amos, to leave the once stereotype-busting show out of protest. Although Good Times ultimately fell into the stereotype trap, the first two seasons of the series worked effectively in representing Blackness as complex and worthy. This article focuses on “Thank You Black Jesus”, a season-one episode that centers on J.J.’s painting of Black Jesus, an artistic interpretation that is in line with the Bible’s description of Jesus. “Thank You Black Jesus” begs several important questions surrounding religious and secular symbols, the interpellation and hailing of Blackness, and faith or suspending one’s disbelief. In this article, we conduct a critical, cultural analysis to explore the meanings that are associated with symbols, Blackness, and faith. We also consider the staying power of the “Black Jesus” episode in contemporary popular culture, as witnessed in the form of memes, intertextual references to the episode in other media texts, and as elucidated by continued debates surrounding the race of Jesus and the ways to pursue an iconography of inclusiveness.
Journal Article