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Strange Bedfellows
It is no coincidence that presidential candidates have been making it a point to add the late-night comedy circuit to the campaign trail in recent years. In 2004, when John Kerry decided it was time to do his first national television interview, he did not choose CBS's60 Minutes, ABC'sNightline,orNBC Nightly News. Kerry picked Comedy Central'sThe Daily Show. When George W. Bush was lagging in the polls, his appearance on theDavid Letterman Showgave him a measurable boost. Candidates for the 2008 presidential election began their late-night bookings almost as soon as they launched their campaigns.
How can this be? The reason is that polls have been consistently finding that a significant number of Americans-and an even larger proportion of those under the age of thirty-get at least some of their \"news\" about politics and national affairs from comedy shows. While this trend toward what some have called \"infotainment\" seems to herald the descent of our national discourse-the triumph of entertainment over substance-the reality, according to Russell L. Peterson, is more complex. He explains that this programming is more than a mere replacement for traditional news outlets; it plays its own role in shaping public perception of government and the political process.
From Johnny Carson to Jon Stewart, from Chevy Chase's spoofing of President Ford onSaturday Night Liveto Stephen Colbert's roasting of President Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner,Strange Bedfellowsexplores what Americans have found so funny about our political institutions and the people who inhabit them, and asks what this says about the health of our democracy. Comparing the mainstream network hosts-Jay, Dave, Conan, and Johnny before them-who have always strived to be \"equal opportunity offenders\" to the newer, edgier crop of comedians on cable networks, Peterson shows how each brand of satire plays off a different level of Americans' frustrations with politics.
eBook
Equal Time
Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement explores the crucial role of network television in reconfiguring new attitudes in race relations during the civil rights movement. Due to widespread coverage, the civil rights revolution quickly became the United States' first televised major domestic news story. This important medium unmistakably influenced the ongoing movement for African American empowerment, desegregation, and equality. Aniko Bodroghkozy brings to the foreground network news treatment of now-famous civil rights events including the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign, integration riots at the University of Mississippi, and the March on Washington, including Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. She reveals how TV executives worked through the ethical dilemmas they faced, how reporters and camera operators dealt with very real dangers of reporting events, how reports were constructed and aired to support integration, and how interviews were selected to project an image of a South ready for change. Television networks also looked to the entertainment industry to address the question of race relations, as prime-time comedies and dramas could no longer ignore the changes in American life. Bodroghkozy examines the most high-profile and controversial television series of the era to feature African American actors-- East Side/West Side, Julia, and Good Times --to reveal how entertainment programmers sought to represent a rapidly shifting consensus on what blackness and whiteness meant and how they now fit together.
eBook
Conservative Bias
Before Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, there was Jesse Helms. From in front of a camera at WRAL-TV, Helms forged a new brand of southern conservatism long before he was a senator from North Carolina. As executive vice president of the station, Helms delivered commentaries on the evening news and directed the news and entertainment programming. He pioneered the attack on the liberal media, and his editorials were some of the first shots fired in the culture wars, criticizing the influence of \"immoral entertainment.\" Through the emerging power of the household television Helms established a blueprint and laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement.
Bryan Thrift mines over 2,700 WRAL-TV \"Viewpoint\" editorials broadcast between 1960 and 1972 to offer not only a portrait of a skilled rhetorician and wordsmith but also a lens on the way the various, and at times competing, elements of modern American conservatism cohered into an ideology couched in the language of anti-elitism and \"traditional values.\" Decades prior to the invention of the blog, Helms corresponded with his viewers to select, refine, and sharpen his political message until he had reworked southern traditionalism into a national conservative movement. The realignment of southern Democrats into the Republican Party was not easy or inevitable, and by examining Helms's oft-forgotten journalism career, Thrift shows how delicately and deliberately this transition had to be cultivated.
eBook
Soft news goes to war
The American public has consistently declared itself less concerned with foreign affairs in the post-Cold War era, even after 9/11, than at any time since World War II. How can it be, then, that public attentiveness to U.S. foreign policy crises has increased? This book represents the first systematic attempt to explain this apparent paradox. Matthew Baum argues that the answer lies in changes to television's presentation of political information. In so doing he develops a compelling \"byproduct\" theory of information consumption. The information revolution has fundamentally changed the way the mass media, especially television, covers foreign policy. Traditional news has been repackaged into numerous entertainment-oriented news programs and talk shows. By transforming political issues involving scandal or violence (especially attacks against America) into entertainment, the \"soft news\" media have actually captured more viewers who will now follow news about foreign crises, due to its entertainment value, even if they remain uninterested in foreign policy.
Baum rigorously tests his theory through content analyses of traditional and soft news media coverage of various post-WWII U.S. foreign crises and statistical analyses of public opinion surveys. The results hold key implications for the future of American politics and foreign policy. For instance, watching soft news reinforces isolationism among many inattentive Americans. Scholars, political analysts, and even politicians have tended to ignore the soft news media and politically disengaged citizens. But, as this well-written book cogently demonstrates, soft news viewers represent a largely untapped reservoir of unusually persuadable voters.
eBook
\Muy buenas noches\ : Mexico, television, and the Cold War
By the end of the twentieth century, Mexican multimedia conglomerate Televisa stood as one of the most powerful media companies in the world. Most scholars have concluded that the company's success was owed in large part to its executives who walked in lockstep with the government and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which ruled for seventy-one years. At the same time, government decisions regulating communications infrastructure aided the development of the television industry. In one of the first books to be published in English on Mexican television, Celeste González de Bustamante argues that despite the cozy relationship between media moguls and the PRI, these connections should not be viewed as static and without friction.
Through an examination of early television news programs, this book reveals the tensions that existed between what the PRI and government officials wanted to be reported and what was actually reported and how. Further, despite the increasing influence of television on society, viewers did not always accept or agree with what they saw on the air. Television news programming played an integral role in creating a sense of lo mexicano (that which is Mexican) at a time of tremendous political, social, and cultural change. At its core the book grapples with questions about the limits of cultural hegemony at the height of the PRI and the cold war.
eBook