Media and culture 11th edition pdf

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MEDIA & CULTURE Mass Communication in a Digital Age
Eleventh Edition
Richard Campbell Miami University
Christopher R. Martin University of Northern Iowa
Bettina Fabos University of Northern Iowa
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Boston | New York
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“WE ARE NOT ALONE.” For my family—Reese, Chris, Caitlin, and Dianna
“YOU MAY SAY I’M A DREAMER, BUT I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE.”
For our daughters—Olivia and Sabine
For Bedford/St. Martin’s
Vice President, Editorial, Macmillan Learning Humanities: Edwin Hill Publisher for Communication: Erika Gutierrez Development Manager: Susan McLaughlin Developmental Editor: Kate George Senior Production Editor: Harold Chester Media Producer: Sarah O’Connor Senior Production Supervisor: Jennifer Wetzel Marketing Manager: Kayti Corfield Assistant Editor: Will Stonefield Editorial Assistant: Daniela Velez Copy Editor: Jamie Thaman Senior Photo Editor: Martha Friedman Photo Researcher: Sue McDermott Barlow Permissions Manager: Kalina Ingham Senior Art Director: Anna Palchik Text Design: Maureen McCutcheon Cover Design: John Callahan Cover Image: Paul McGee/Getty Images Composition: Cenveo Publisher Services Printing and Binding: LSC Communications
Copyright © 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014 by Bedford/St. Martin’s. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except
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as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
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For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116 (617-399-4000)
ISBN 978-1-3190-5851-7 (Paperback) ISBN 978-1-3190-6829-5 (Loose-leaf Edition)
Acknowledgments Text acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on page C-1, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page. Art acknowledgments and copyrights appear on the same page as the art selections they cover.
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About the Authors
RICHARD CAMPBELL, chair of the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University, is the author of “60 Minutes” and the News: A Mythology for Middle America (1991) and coauthor of Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (1994). Campbell has written for numerous publications, including Columbia Journalism Review, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Journal of Communication, and TV Quarterly. He also serves on the board of directors for Cincinnati Public Radio. He holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and has also taught at the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee, Mount Mary College, the University of Michigan, and Middle Tennessee State University.
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CHRISTOPHER R. MARTIN, professor of communication studies and digital journalism at the University of Northern Iowa, is the author of Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (2003). He has written articles and reviews on journalism, televised sports, the Internet, and labor for several publications, including Communication Research; Journal of Communication; Journal of Communication Inquiry; Labor Studies Journal; Culture, Sport, and Society; and Perspectives on Politics. He is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Communication Inquiry. Martin holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and has also taught at Miami University.
BETTINA FABOS, an award-winning video maker and former print reporter, is an associate professor of visual communication and interactive digital studies at the University of Northern Iowa. She is the author of Wrong Turn on the Information Superhighway: Education and the Commercialized Internet (2004). Her areas of expertise include critical media literacy and Internet commercialization, and her current work revolves around digital culture, digital visualization, and digital photo archiving. A recipient of both Fulbright and Spencer Fellowships, Fabos holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and has also taught at Miami University.
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Brief Contents
 1 Mass Communication: A Critical Approach 
PART 1: DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
 2 The Internet, Digital Media, and Media Convergence   3 Digital Gaming and the Media Playground 
PART 2: SOUNDS AND IMAGES
 4 Sound Recording and Popular Music   5 Popular Radio and the Origins of Broadcasting   6 Television and Cable: The Power of Visual Culture   7 Movies and the Impact of Images 
PART 3: WORDS AND PICTURES
 8 Newspapers: The Rise and Decline of Modern Journalism   9 Magazines in the Age of Specialization  10 Books and the Power of Print 
PART 4: THE BUSINESS OF MASS MEDIA
11 Advertising and Commercial Culture  12 Public Relations and Framing the Message 
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13 Media Economics and the Global Marketplace 
PART 5: DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA
14 The Culture of Journalism: Values, Ethics, and Democracy  15 Media Effects and Cultural Approaches to Research  16 Legal Controls and Freedom of Expression 
EXTENDED CASE STUDY: Analyzing the Coverage of the Volkswagen and Takata Crises 
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Preface
The digital future of mass media is here—we’re living it right now. E- books are outselling print books on Amazon, digital album sales and streaming songs dominate the music industry, and social networking sites like Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter reach hundreds of millions of users worldwide. As mass media converge, the newest devices multitask as e-readers, music players, Web browsers, TV and movie screens, gaming systems, and phones.
But while many of today’s students have integrated digital media into their daily lives, they may not understand how the media evolved to this point; how technology converges text, audio, and visual media; and what all these developments mean. This is why we believe the critical and cultural perspectives at the core of Media & Culture’s approach are more important than ever. Media & Culture pulls back the curtain to show students how the media really work—from the roots and economics of each media industry to the implications of today’s consolidated media ownership to how these industries have changed in our digital world. By looking at the full history of media through a critical lens, students will leave this course with a better understanding of the complex relationship between the mass media and our shared culture.
The eleventh edition of Media & Culture confronts the digital realities of how we consume media—and how students learn in today’s classroom. The book’s stunning new design, paired with updates to every chapter, keeps Media & Culture current and relevant, while new photos keep students interested and engaged. New chapter openers and chapter features bring the most current issues and developments right into your mass communication classroom. We are excited about the new interactive time line and media literacy exercises within LaunchPad for Media & Culture that will help bring the course to life for students in one of their favorite environments: the Internet. Throughout the book, “Elsewhere” pages cross-reference media stories and statistics, showing the Web-like connections between media industries and key issues. Part-opening infographics convey complex
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media relationships with eye-catching statistics and factoids about shifts in media consumption, ownership, and the most important and vital digital companies. “Digital Job Outlook” boxes offer perspectives from industry insiders on how media jobs actually work. And a thoroughly revised and updated Chapter 13, “Media Economics and the Global Marketplace,” addresses the new economic realities of the media world with more visuals and even greater digital savvy.
Media & Culture shares stories about the history of media, the digital revolution, and ongoing convergence—and the book itself practices convergence, too. The eleventh edition is available packaged with LaunchPad, combining print and digital media in an interactive e- book featuring video clips of media texts, links to streaming media, an insider’s look at the various media industries, the brand-new interactive time line, and media literacy exercises—along with quizzes, activities, and instructor resources.
Of course, Media & Culture retains its well-loved and teachable organization, which supports instructors in their quest to provide students with a clear understanding of the historical and cultural contexts for each media industry. Our signature five-step approach to studying the media has struck a chord with hundreds of instructors and thousands of students across the United States and North America. We continue to be enthusiastic about—and humbled by—the chance to work with the amazing community of teachers that has developed around Media & Culture. We hope the text enables students to become more knowledgeable media consumers and engaged, media-literate citizens who are ready to take a critical role in shaping our dynamic world.
The Eleventh Edition Keeps Media & Culture Current Media & Culture has taken the digital turn, and the eleventh edition continues to keep pace with the technological, economic, and social effects of today’s rapidly changing media landscape. Since the publication of the tenth edition, we’ve seen more changes than ever: revisions in net neutrality laws, shifts in viewing habits, Hollywood’s race struggles, and the media-saturated presidential race. The eleventh edition of Media & Culture covers all of this and more. It features the following:
New coverage of important developments in mass media. All of the chapters have been updated, with new information and analysis of the 2016 #OscarsSoWhite social media campaign, streaming music and its effects on the music industry, Spotlight’s
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portrayal of team investigative journalism, the 2016 presidential race, net neutrality laws, and more, along with fully updated charts, graphs, and statistics. An all-new Extended Case Study that examines corporate responsibility during a crisis. This case study takes students through recent stories of crises and scandals in the car industry, and how the car companies have (or have not) taken responsibility for their actions. Through the book’s trademark five-step critical process — description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement — this section has students examine their own relationships with both digital and traditional media while asking critical-thinking questions about the media world in which we live. New “Elsewhere” pages that cross-reference and converge related topics. As the mass media continue to converge, overlap, and influence one another, Media & Culture highlights those connections with new “Elsewhere” pages. Each of the book’s five parts includes a page telling students where to find related information in other sections of the book, connecting the inner workings of media industries like video games, music, and movies with concepts like media effects studies, monopolies, and government regulation. A sleek modern design that keeps students engaged with the great content provided in the text. Print and media that converge with LaunchPad. LaunchPad for Media & Culture merges and converges the book with the Web. A brand-new interactive time line helps students explore and understand the development of mass communication through the years. A variety of video clips for each chapter gets students to think critically about media texts. Clips of movies and TV shows, streaming links, and videos provide an insider’s look at the various media industries through the eyes of leading professionals, including Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Junot Díaz. These clips are showcased throughout the book and are easily accessible through LaunchPad, where accompanying questions make them perfect for media response papers and class discussions. For more ideas on how using LaunchPad can enhance your course, see the Instructor’s Resource Manual. For a complete list of available clips and access information, see the inside back cover of the book or visit
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macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
The Best and Broadest Introduction to the Mass Media
A critical approach to media literacy. Media & Culture introduces students to five stages of the critical-thinking and writing process—description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement. The text uses these stages as a lens for examining the historical context and current processes that shape mass media as part of our culture. This framework informs the writing throughout, including the “Media Literacy and the Critical Process” features in every chapter. New online interactive media literacy exercises will give students even more practice to develop their media literacy and critical-thinking skills. A cultural perspective. The text focuses on the vital relationship between mass media and our shared culture—how cultural trends influence the mass media and how specific historical developments, technical innovations, and key decision makers in the history of the media have affected the ways our democracy and society have evolved. Comprehensive coverage. The text supports the instructor in providing students with the nuts-and-bolts content they need to understand each media industry’s history, organizational structure, economic models, and market statistics. An exploration of media economics and democracy. Media & Culture spotlights the significance and impact of multinational media systems throughout the text. It also invites students to explore the implications of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and other deregulation resolutions. Additionally, each chapter ends with a discussion of the effects of particular mass media on the nature of democratic life. Compelling storytelling. Most mass media make use of storytelling to tap into our shared beliefs and values, and so does Media & Culture. Each chapter presents the events and issues surrounding media culture as intriguing and informative narratives rather than a series of unconnected facts and feats, mapping the accompanying—and often uneasy—changes in
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consumer culture and democratic society. The most accessible book available. Learning tools in every chapter help students find and remember the information they need to know. Bulleted lists at the beginning of every chapter give students a road map to key concepts, “Media Literacy and the Critical Process” boxes model the five-step process, and the Chapter Reviews help students study and review for quizzes and exams and set them up for success.
Student Resources For more information on student resources or to learn about package options, please visit the online catalog at macmillanlearning.com.
Your E-Book. Your Way. A variety of e-book formats are available for use on computers, tablets, and e-readers, featuring portability, customization options, and affordable prices. For more information, see macmillanlearning.com/ebooks.
Discover What LaunchPad Can Do for Your Course At Bedford/St. Martin’s, we are committed to providing online resources that meet the needs of instructors and students in powerful yet simple ways. We’ve taken what we’ve learned from both instructors and students to create a new generation of technology featuring LaunchPad. With its student-friendly approach, LaunchPad offers our trusted content—organized for easy assignability in a simple user interface. Access to LaunchPad can be packaged with Media & Culture at a significant discount or purchased separately.
Easy to Start Combining a curated collection of online resources —including Video Activities, LearningCurve, quizzes, and assignments—with e-book content, LaunchPad’s interactive units can be assigned as is or used as building blocks for your own learning units. Video Tools LaunchPad’s Video Tools provide an easy way for instructors and students to upload, embed, and collaborate on video assignments. This flexible functionality lets you use video however you want in a secure setting. Intuitive and Useful Analytics The gradebook quickly and easily allows you to gauge performance for your whole class, for
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individual students, and for individual assignments, making class prep time as well as time spent with students more productive. Fully Interactive E-Book The LaunchPad e-book for Media & Culture comes with powerful study tools, multimedia content, and easy customization tools for instructors. Students can search, highlight, and bookmark, making studying easier and more efficient.
To learn more about LaunchPad for Media & Culture or to purchase access, go to launchpadworks.com. If your book came packaged with an access card to LaunchPad, follow the card’s log-in instructions.
Media Career Guide: Preparing for Jobs in the 21st Century, Eleventh Edition Practical, student-friendly, and revised to address recent trends in the job market, this guide includes a comprehensive directory of media jobs, practical tips, and career guidance for students who are considering a major in the media industries. Media Career Guide can also be packaged at a significant discount with the print book.
Instructor Resources For more information or to order or download the instructor resources, please visit the online catalog at macmillanlearning.com.
Instructor’s Resource Manual Prepared by Bettina Fabos, University of Northern Iowa; Christopher R. Martin, University of Northern Iowa; Marilda Oviedo, University of Iowa; and Lewis Freeman, Fordham University
This downloadable manual improves on what has always been the best and most comprehensive instructor teaching tool available for introduction to mass communication courses. This extensive resource provides a range of teaching approaches, tips for facilitating in-class discussions, writing assignments, outlines, lecture topics, lecture spin- offs, critical-process exercises, classroom media resources, and an annotated list of more than two hundred video resources. The Instructor’s Resource Manual has been streamlined to make it even easier to use. And with this edition, your resource manual has gone interactive, with an assignable online media literacy activity. These activities, adapted from activities in the Instructor’s Resource Manual and built into each LaunchPad unit, provide students with extra practice as they develop their media literacy skills.
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Test Bank Prepared by Christopher R. Martin, University of Northern Iowa; Bettina Fabos, University of Northern Iowa; and Marilda Oviedo, University of Iowa
Available formatted for Windows and Macintosh, the Test Bank includes multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, and short and long essay questions for every chapter in Media & Culture.
Lecture Slides Downloadable lecture slide presentations to help guide your lecture are available for each chapter in Media & Culture.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We are very grateful to everyone at Bedford/St. Martin’s who supported this project through its many stages. We wish that every textbook author could have the kind of experience we had with these people: Chuck Christensen, Joan Feinberg, Denise Wydra, Erika Gutierrez, Erica Appel, Stacey Propps, Simon Glick, and Noel Hohnstine. Over the years, we have also collaborated with superb and supportive developmental editors: on the eleventh edition, Kate George. We particularly appreciate the tireless work of Harold Chester, senior production editor, who kept the book on schedule while making sure we got the details right, and Jennifer Wetzel, senior production supervisor. Thanks also to Susan McLaughlin, our wonderful development manager; Kayti Corfield and her fearless marketing team; and John Callahan for a fantastic cover design. We are especially grateful to our research assistant, Susan Coffin, who functioned as a one-person clipping service throughout the process. We are also grateful to Jimmie Reeves, our digital gaming expert, who contributed his great knowledge of this medium to the development of Chapter 3.
We also want to thank the many fine and thoughtful reviewers who contributed ideas to the eleventh edition of Media & Culture: Amelia Arsenault, Georgia State University; John Chapin, Pennsylvania State University; Juliet Dee, University of Delaware; Joshua Dickhaus, Bradley University; Chandler W. Harriss, University of Tennessee–Chattanooga; Ben Lohman, Orange Coast College; Valerie J. Whitney, Bethune-Cookman University.
For the tenth edition: Mariam Alkazemi, University of Florida; Ronald Becker, Miami University; Tanya Biami, Cochise College; Dave Bostwick, Baker University; David Bradford, Eastern Florida State College; Alexis Carreiro, Queens University of Charlotte; David Cassady, Pacific University; John Chalfa, Mercer University; Jon Conlogue, Westfield State University;
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Don Diefenbach, UNC Asheville; Larry Hartsfield, Fort Lewis College; Phelps Hawkins, Savannah State University; Deborah Lev, Centenary College; Thomas Lindlof, University of Kentucky; Steve Liu, University of Incarnate Word; Maureen Louis, Cazenovia College; Mary Lowney, American International College; Arnold Mackowiak, Eastern Michigan University; Bob Manis, College of Southern Nevada; Michael McCluskey, Ohio State University; Andrea McDonnell, Emmanuel College; Ryan Medders, California Lutheran University; Alicia Morris, Virginia State University; Lanie Steinwart, Valparaiso University; Stephen Swanson, McLennan Community College; Shauntae White, North Carolina Central University.
For the ninth edition: Glenda Alvarado, University of South Carolina; Lisa Burns, Quinnipiac University; Matthew Cecil, South Dakota University; John Dougan, Middle Tennessee State University; Lewis Freeman, Fordham University; K. Megan Hopper, Illinois State University; John Kerezy, Cuyahoga Community College; Marcia Ladendorff, University of North Florida; Julie Lellis, Elon University; Joy McDonald, Hampton University; Heather McIntosh, Boston College; Kenneth Nagelberg, Delaware State University; Eric Pierson, University of San Diego; Jennifer Tiernan, South Dakota State University; Erin Wilgenbusch, Iowa State University; Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, College of Staten Island.
For the eighth edition: Frank A. Aycock, Appalachian State University; Carrie Buchanan, John Carroll University; Lisa M. Burns, Quinnipiac University; Rich Cameron, Cerritos College; Katherine Foss, Middle Tennessee State University; Myleea D. Hill, Arkansas State University; Sarah Alford Hock, Santa Barbara City College; Sharon R. Hollenback, Syracuse University; Drew Jacobs, Camden County College; Susan Katz, University of Bridgeport; John Kerezy, Cuyahoga Community College; Les Kozaczek, Franklin Pierce University; Deborah L. Larson, Missouri State University; Susan Charles Lewis, Minnesota State University–Mankato; Rick B. Marks, College of Southern Nevada; Donna R. Munde, Mercer County Community College; Wendy Nelson, Palomar College; Charles B. Scholz, New Mexico State University; Don W. Stacks, University of Miami; Carl Sessions Stepp, University of Maryland; David Strukel, University of Toledo; Lisa Turowski, Towson University; Lisa M. Weidman, Linfield College.
For the seventh edition: Robert Blade, Florida Community College; Lisa Boragine, Cape Cod Community College; Joseph Clark, University of Toledo; Richard Craig, San Jose State University; Samuel Ebersole, Colorado State University–Pueblo; Brenda Edgerton-Webster, Mississippi State University; Tim Edwards, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Mara Einstein, Queens College; Lillie M. Fears, Arkansas State University; Connie Fletcher, Loyola University; Monica Flippin-Wynn, University of Oklahoma; Gil Fowler, Arkansas State University; Donald G. Godfrey, Arizona State University; Patricia Homes, University of Southwestern Louisiana; Daniel McDonald, Ohio State University; Connie McMahon, Barry University; Steve Miller,
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Rutgers University; Siho Nam, University of North Florida; David Nelson, University of Colorado–Colorado Springs; Zengjun Peng, St. Cloud State University; Deidre Pike, University of Nevada–Reno; Neil Ralston, Western Kentucky University; Mike Reed, Saddleback College; David Roberts, Missouri Valley College; Donna Simmons, California State University– Bakersfield; Marc Skinner, University of Idaho; Michael Stamm, University of Minnesota; Bob Trumpbour, Penn State University; Kristin Watson, Metro State University; Jim Weaver, Virginia Polytechnic and State University; David Whitt, Nebraska Wesleyan University.
For the sixth edition: Boyd Dallos, Lake Superior College; Roger George, Bellevue Community College; Osvaldo Hirschmann, Houston Community College; Ed Kanis, Butler University; Dean A. Kruckeberg, University of Northern Iowa; Larry Leslie, University of South Florida; Lori Liggett, Bowling Green State University; Steve Miller, Rutgers University; Robert Pondillo, Middle Tennessee State University; David Silver, University of San Francisco; Chris White, Sam Houston State University; Marvin Williams, Kingsborough Community College.
For the fifth edition: Russell Barclay, Quinnipiac University; Kathy Battles, University of Michigan; Kenton Bird, University of Idaho; Ed Bonza, Kennesaw State University; Larry L. Burris, Middle Tennessee State University; Ceilidh Charleson-Jennings, Collin County Community College; Raymond Eugene Costain, University of Central Florida; Richard Craig, San Jose State University; Dave Deeley, Truman State University; Janine Gerzanics, West Valley College; Beth Haller, Towson University; Donna Hemmila, Diablo Valley College; Sharon Hollenback, Syracuse University; Marshall D. Katzman, Bergen Community College; Kimberly Lauffer, Towson University; Steve Miller, Rutgers University; Stu Minnis, Virginia Wesleyan College; Frank G. Perez, University of Texas at El Paso; Dave Perlmutter, Louisiana State University–Baton Rouge; Karen Pitcher, University of Iowa; Ronald C. Roat, University of Southern Indiana; Marshel Rossow, Minnesota State University; Roger Saathoff, Texas Tech University; Matthew Smith, Wittenberg University; Marlane C. Steinwart, Valparaiso University.
For the fourth edition: Fay Y. Akindes, University of Wisconsin–Parkside; Robert Arnett, Mississippi State University; Charles Aust, Kennesaw State University; Russell Barclay, Quinnipiac University; Bryan Brown, Southwest Missouri State University; Peter W. Croisant, Geneva College; Mark Goodman, Mississippi State University; Donna Halper, Emerson College; Rebecca Self Hill, University of Colorado; John G. Hodgson, Oklahoma State University; Cynthia P. King, American University; Deborah L. Larson, Southwest Missouri State University; Charles Lewis, Minnesota State University–Mankato; Lila Lieberman, Rutgers University; Abbus Malek, Howard University; Anthony A. Olorunnisola, Pennsylvania State University; Norma Pecora, Ohio University–Athens; Elizabeth M. Perse, University of Delaware; Hoyt Purvis, University of Arkansas; Alison Rostankowski,
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University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Roger A. Soenksen, James Madison University; Hazel Warlaumont, California State University–Fullerton.
For the third edition: Gerald J. Baldasty, University of Washington; Steve M. Barkin, University of Maryland; Ernest L. Bereman, Truman State University; Daniel Bernadi, University of Arizona; Kimberly L. Bissell, Southern Illinois University; Audrey Boxmann, Merrimack College; Todd Chatman, University of Illinois; Ray Chavez, University of Colorado; Vic Costello, Gardner-Webb University; Paul D’Angelo, Villanova University; James Shanahan, Cornell University; Scott A. Webber, University of Colorado.
For the second edition: Susan B. Barnes, Fordham University; Margaret Bates, City College of New York; Steven Alan Carr, Indiana University/Purdue University–Fort Wayne; William G. Covington Jr., Bridgewater State College; Roger Desmond, University of Hartford; Jules d’Hemecourt, Louisiana State University; Cheryl Evans, Northwestern Oklahoma State University; Douglas Gomery, University of Maryland; Colin Gromatzky, New Mexico State University; John L. Hochheimer, Ithaca College; Sheena Malhotra, University of New Mexico; Sharon R. Mazzarella, Ithaca College; David Marc McCoy, Kent State University; Beverly Merrick, New Mexico State University; John Pantalone, University of Rhode Island; John Durham Peters, University of Iowa; Lisa Pieraccini, Oswego State College; Susana Powell, Borough of Manhattan Community College; Felicia Jones Ross, Ohio State University; Enid Sefcovic, Florida Atlantic University; Keith Semmel, Cumberland College; Augusta Simon, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Clifford E. Wexler, Columbia-Greene Community College.
For the first edition: Paul Ashdown, University of Tennessee; Terry Bales, Rancho Santiago College; Russell Barclay, Quinnipiac University; Thomas Beell, Iowa State University; Fred Blevens, Southwest Texas State University; Stuart Bullion, University of Maine; William G. Covington Jr., Bridgewater State College; Robert Daves, Minneapolis Star Tribune; Charles Davis, Georgia Southern University; Thomas Donahue, Virginia Commonwealth University; Ralph R. Donald, University of Tennessee–Martin; John P. Ferre, University of Louisville; Donald Fishman, Boston College; Elizabeth Atwood Gailey, University of Tennessee; Bob Gassaway, University of New Mexico; Anthony Giffard, University of Washington; Zhou He, San Jose State University; Barry Hollander, University of Georgia; Sharon Hollenbeck, Syracuse University; Anita Howard, Austin Community College; James Hoyt, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Joli Jensen, University of Tulsa; Frank Kaplan, University of Colorado; William Knowles, University of Montana; Michael Leslie, University of Florida; Janice Long, University of Cincinnati; Kathleen Maticheck, Normandale Community College; Maclyn McClary, Humboldt State University; Robert McGaughey, Murray State University; Joseph McKerns, Ohio State University; Debra Merskin, University of Oregon; David Morrissey, Colorado State University; Michael Murray,
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University of Missouri at St. Louis; Susan Dawson O’Brien, Rose State College; Patricia Bowie Orman, University of Southern Colorado; Jim Patton, University of Arizona; John Pauly, St. Louis University; Ted Pease, Utah State University; Janice Peck, University of Colorado; Tina Pieraccini, University of New Mexico; Peter Pringle, University of Tennessee; Sondra Rubenstein, Hofstra University; Jim St. Clair, Indiana University Southeast; Jim Seguin, Robert Morris College; Donald Shaw, University of North Carolina; Martin D. Sommernes, Northern Arizona State University; Linda Steiner, Rutgers University; Jill Diane Swensen, Ithaca College; Sharon Taylor, Delaware State University; Hazel Warlaumont, California State University–Fullerton; Richard Whitaker, Buffalo State College; Lynn Zoch, University of South Carolina.
Special thanks from Richard Campbell: I would also like to acknowledge the number of fine teachers at both the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and Northwestern University who helped shape the way I think about many of the issues raised in this book, and I am especially grateful to my former students at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Mount Mary College, the University of Michigan, and Middle Tennessee State University, and my current students at Miami University. Some of my students have contributed directly to this text, and thousands have endured my courses over the years— and made them better. My all-time favorite former students, Chris Martin and Bettina Fabos, are now essential coauthors, as well as the creators of our book’s Instructor’s Resource Manual and Test Bank. I am grateful for Chris and Bettina’s fine writing, research savvy, good stories, and tireless work amid their own teaching schedules and writing careers, all while raising two spirited daughters. I remain most grateful, though, to the people I most love: my grandson, Reese; my son, Chris; my daughter, Caitlin; and, most of all, my wife, Dianna, whose line editing, content ideas, daily conversations, shared interests, and ongoing support are the resources that make this project go better with each edition.
Special thanks from Christopher Martin and Bettina Fabos: We would also like to thank Richard Campbell, with whom it is always a delight working on this project. We also appreciate the great energy, creativity, and talent that everyone at Bedford/St. Martin’s brings to the book. From edition to edition, we also receive plenty of suggestions from Media & Culture users and reviewers and from our own journalism and media students. We would like to thank them for their input and for creating a community of sorts around the theme of critical perspectives on the media. Most of all, we’d like to thank our daughters, Olivia and Sabine, who bring us joy and laughter every day, as well as a sense of mission to better understand the world of media and culture in which they live.
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CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR BRIEF CONTENTS PREFACE
Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images
1 Mass Communication: A Critical Approach Culture and the Evolution of Mass Communication
Oral and Written Eras in Communication The Print Revolution The Electronic Era
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The Digital Era The Linear Model of Mass Communication A Cultural Model for Understanding Mass Communication
The Development of Media and Their Role in Our Society The Evolution of Media: From Emergence to Convergence Media Convergence Stories: The Foundation of Media The Power of Media Stories in Everyday Life
Agenda Setting and Gatekeeping
Surveying the Cultural Landscape Culture as a Skyscraper
EXAMINING ETHICS Covering War CASE STUDY Is Anchorman a Comedy or a Documentary?
Culture as a Map Cultural Values of the Modern Period Shifting Values in Postmodern Culture
Critiquing Media and Culture Media Literacy and the Critical Process
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Benefits of a Critical Perspective
CHAPTER REVIEW LaunchPad
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For videos, review quizzing, and more, visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
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PART 1: DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
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2 The Internet, Digital Media, and Media Convergence The Development of the Internet and the Web
The Birth of the Internet The Net Widens The Commercialization of the Internet
The Web Goes Social Types of Social Media
The Net (1995) Social Media and Democracy
EXAMINING ETHICS “Anonymous” Hacks Global Terrorism
Convergence and Mobile Media Media Converges on Our PCs and TVs Mobile Devices Propel Convergence The Impact of Media Convergence and Mobile Media The Next Era: The Semantic Web
The Economics and Issues of the Internet Ownership: Controlling the Internet Targeted Advertising and Data Mining
GLOBAL VILLAGE Designed in California, Assembled in China Security: The Challenge to Keep Personal Information Private
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Tracking and Recording Your Every Move Appropriateness: What Should Be Online? Access: The Fight to Prevent a Digital Divide Net Neutrality: Maintaining an Open Internet
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Net Neutrality Alternative Voices
The Internet and Democracy DIGITAL JOB OUTLOOK
CHAPTER REVIEW LaunchPad
Kyodo via AP Images
3 Digital Gaming and the Media Playground The Development of Digital Gaming
Mechanical Gaming The First Video Games Arcades and Classic Games Consoles and Advancing Graphics Gaming on PCs
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The Internet Transforms Gaming MMORPGs, Virtual Worlds, and Social Gaming Convergence: From Consoles to Mobile Gaming
The Media Playground Video Game Genres
CASE STUDY Finding Positive Effects in Digital Games Communities of Play: Inside the Game Communities of Play: Outside the Game
Trends and Issues in Digital Gaming Electronic Gaming and Media Culture
Video Games at the Movies Electronic Gaming and Advertising Addiction and Other Concerns
GLOBAL VILLAGE Global Controversy: The Gender Problem in Digital Games Regulating Gaming
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS First-Person Shooter Games: Misogyny as Entertainment? The Future of Gaming and Interactive Environments
The Business of Digital Gaming The Ownership and Organization of Digital Gaming The Structure of Digital Game Publishing Selling Digital Games Alternative Voices
Digital Gaming, Free Speech, and Democracy DIGITAL JOB OUTLOOK
CHAPTER REVIEW LaunchPad
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Jun Sato/Getty Images
PART 2: SOUNDS AND IMAGES
4 Sound Recording and Popular Music The Development of Sound Recording
From Cylinders to Disks: Sound Recording Becomes a Mass Medium From Phonographs to CDs: Analog Goes Digital Convergence: Sound Recording in the Internet Age
Recording Music Today The Rocky Relationship between Records and Radio
U.S. Popular Music and the Formation of Rock The Rise of Pop Music Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay Rock Muddies the Waters Battles in Rock and Roll
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A Changing Industry: Reformations in Popular Music The British Are Coming! Motor City Music: Detroit Gives America Soul Folk and Psychedelic Music Reflect the Times
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Music Preferences across Generations Punk, Grunge, and Indie Respond to Mainstream Rock Hip-Hop Redraws Musical Lines The Reemergence of Pop
The Business of Sound Recording Music Labels Influence the Industry Making, Selling, and Profiting from Music
GLOBAL VILLAGE Blank Space: What Kind of Genius Is Max Martin?
Alternative Strategies for Music Marketing CASE STUDY Psy and the Meaning of “Gangnam Style”
Alternative Voices Streaming Music Videos
Sound Recording, Free Expression, and Democracy DIGITAL JOB OUTLOOK
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Kevin Winter/Getty Images
5 Popular Radio and the Origins of Broadcasting Early Technology and the Development of Radio
Maxwell and Hertz Discover Radio Waves Marconi and the Inventors of Wireless Telegraphy Wireless Telephony: De Forest and Fessenden Regulating a New Medium
The Evolution of Radio Building the First Networks Sarnoff and NBC: Building the “Blue” and “Red” Networks Government Scrutiny Ends RCA-NBC Monopoly CBS and Paley: Challenging NBC Bringing Order to Chaos with the Radio Act of 1927 The Golden Age of Radio
Radio Reinvents Itself
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Transistors Make Radio Portable The FM Revolution and Edwin Armstrong The Rise of Format and Top 40 Radio Resisting the Top 40
The Sounds of Commercial Radio Format Specialization
CASE STUDY Host: The Origins of Talk Radio Nonprofit Radio and NPR
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Comparing Commercial and Noncommercial Radio New Radio Technologies Offer More Stations
Going Visual: Video, Radio, and the Web Radio and Convergence
GLOBAL VILLAGE Radio Goes Local, Global, and Local Again
Radio: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
The Economics of Broadcast Radio Local and National Advertising Manipulating Playlists with Payola Radio Ownership: From Diversity to Consolidation Alternative Voices
Radio and the Democracy of the Airwaves DIGITAL JOB OUTLOOK
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Ali Goldstein/© Comedy Central/Everett Collection
6 Television and Cable: The Power of Visual Culture The Origins and Development of Television
Early Innovations in TV Technology Electronic Technology: Zworykin and Farnsworth Controlling Content—TV Grows Up
The Development of Cable CATV—Community Antenna Television The Wires and Satellites behind Cable Television Cable Threatens Broadcasting Cable Services
CASE STUDY ESPN: Sports and Stories DBS: Cable without Wires
Technology and Convergence Change Viewing Habits Television Networks Evolve
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Home Video The Third Screen: TV Converges with the Internet Fourth Screens: Smartphones and Mobile Video
Major Programming Trends TV Entertainment: Our Comic Culture TV Entertainment: Our Dramatic Culture
Television Drama: Then and Now TV Information: Our Daily News Culture Reality TV and Other Enduring Genres Public Television Struggles to Find Its Place
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS TV and the State of Storytelling
Regulatory Challenges to Television and Cable Government Regulations Temporarily Restrict Network Control
What Makes Public Television Public? Balancing Cable’s Growth against Broadcasters’ Interests Franchising Frenzy The Telecommunications Act of 1996
The Economics and Ownership of Television and Cable Production Distribution Syndication Keeps Shows Going and Going … Measuring Television Viewing The Major Programming Corporations
TRACKING TECHNOLOGY Binging Gives TV Shows a Second Chance—and Viewers a Second Home Alternative Voices
Television, Cable, and Democracy DIGITAL JOB OUTLOOK
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CHAPTER REVIEW LaunchPad
© Lucasfilm Ltd./Everett Collection
7 Movies and the Impact of Images Early Technology and the Evolution of Movies
The Development of Film The Introduction of Narrative The Arrival of Nickelodeons
The Rise of the Hollywood Studio System Production Distribution Exhibition
The Studio System’s Golden Age Hollywood Narrative and the Silent Era The Introduction of Sound
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The Development of the Hollywood Style Breaking Barriers with 12 Years a Slave
Outside the Hollywood System CASE STUDY Breaking through Hollywood’s Race Barrier GLOBAL VILLAGE Beyond Hollywood: Asian Cinema
The Transformation of the Studio System The Hollywood Ten The Paramount Decision Moving to the Suburbs Television Changes Hollywood Hollywood Adapts to Home Entertainment
The Economics of the Movie Business Production, Distribution, and Exhibition Today The Major Studio Players
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS The Blockbuster Mentality Convergence: Movies Adjust to the Digital Turn Alternative Voices
Popular Movies and Democracy More Than a Movie: Social Issues and Film DIGITAL JOB OUTLOOK
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© Moviestore collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
PART 3: WORDS AND PICTURES
8 Newspapers: The Rise and Decline of Modern Journalism The Evolution of American Newspapers
Colonial Newspapers and the Partisan Press The Penny Press Era: Newspapers Become Mass Media The Age of Yellow Journalism: Sensationalism and Investigation
Competing Models of Modern Print Journalism “Objectivity” in Modern Journalism Interpretive Journalism Literary Forms of Journalism Contemporary Journalism in the TV and Internet Age
Newspapers and the Internet: Convergence
The Business and Ownership of Newspapers
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Consensus versus Conflict: Newspapers Play Different Roles MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Covering the News Media Business Newspapers Target Specific Readers Newspaper Operations
CASE STUDY Alternative Journalism: Dorothy Day and I. F. Stone Newspaper Ownership: Chains Lose Their Grip Joint Operating Agreements Combat Declining Competition
Challenges Facing Newspapers Today Readership Declines in the United States Going Local: How Small and Campus Papers Retain Readers
Community Voices: Weekly Newspapers Blogs Challenge Newspapers’ Authority Online Convergence: Newspapers Struggle in the Move to Digital New Models for Journalism Alternative Voices
Newspapers and Democracy DIGITAL JOB OUTLOOK
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Robert Caplin/The New York Times/Redux Pictures
9 Magazines in the Age of Specialization The Early History of Magazines
The First Magazines Magazines in Colonial America U.S. Magazines in the Nineteenth Century National, Women’s, and Illustrated Magazines
The Development of Modern American Magazines Social Reform and the Muckrakers The Rise of General-Interest Magazines
CASE STUDY The Evolution of Photojournalism The Fall of General-Interest Magazines Convergence: Magazines Confront the Digital Age
The Domination of Specialization Men’s and Women’s Magazines
Magazine Specialization Today
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TRACKING TECHNOLOGY Paper Still Dominates Magazines in the Digital Age Sports, Entertainment, and Leisure Magazines Magazines for the Ages Elite Magazines
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Uncovering American Beauty Minority-Targeted Magazines Supermarket Tabloids
The Organization and Economics of Magazines Narrowcasting in Magazines
Magazine Departments and Duties Major Magazine Chains Alternative Voices
Magazines in a Democratic Society DIGITAL JOB OUTLOOK
CHAPTER REVIEW LaunchPad
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Adam Bettcher/Getty Images
10 Books and the Power of Print The History of Books, from Papyrus to Paperbacks
The Development of Manuscript Culture The Innovations of Block Printing and Movable Type The Gutenberg Revolution: The Invention of the Printing Press The Birth of Publishing in the United States
Modern Publishing and the Book Industry The Formation of Publishing Houses Types of Books
CASE STUDY Comic Books: Alternative Themes, but Superheroes Prevail
Trends and Issues in Book Publishing Based On: Making Books into Movies
Influences of Television and Film Audio Books Convergence: Books in the Digital Age
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Books in the New Millennium Preserving and Digitizing Books Censorship and Banned Books
GLOBAL VILLAGE Buenos Aires, the World’s Bookstore Capital
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Banned Books and “Family Values”
The Organization and Ownership of the Book Industry Ownership Patterns The Structure of Book Publishing Selling Books: Brick-and-Mortar Stores, Clubs, and Mail Order Selling Books Online Alternative Voices
Books and the Future of Democracy DIGITAL JOB OUTLOOK
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Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for Hulu
PART 4: THE BUSINESS OF MASS MEDIA
11 Advertising and Commercial Culture Early Developments in American Advertising
The First Advertising Agencies Advertising in the 1800s Promoting Social Change and Dictating Values Early Ad Regulation
The Shape of U.S. Advertising Today The Influence of Visual Design Types of Advertising Agencies The Structure of Ad Agencies Trends in Online Advertising
Advertising in the Digital Age
Persuasive Techniques in Contemporary Advertising Conventional Persuasive Strategies The Association Principle
CASE STUDY Super Bowl, Supersized: $4.5 Billion in Ad Spending over 50 Years Advertising as Myth and Story Product Placement
EXAMINING ETHICS Do Alcohol Ads Encourage Binge Drinking?
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS The Branded You
Commercial Speech and Regulating Advertising
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Critical Issues in Advertising Advertising and Effects on Children GLOBAL VILLAGE Smoking Up the Global Market
Watching Over Advertising Alternative Voices
Advertising, Politics, and Democracy Advertising’s Role in Politics The Future of Advertising
DIGITAL JOB OUTLOOK
CHAPTER REVIEW LaunchPad
Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Parkwood Entertainment/Getty Images
12 Public Relations and Framing the Message Early Developments in Public Relations
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P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Big Business and Press Agents The Birth of Modern Public Relations
The Practice of Public Relations Approaches to Organized Public Relations Performing Public Relations
CASE STUDY The NFL’s Concussion Crisis EXAMINING ETHICS Public Relations and Bananas
Public Relations Adapts to the Internet Age Public Relations during a Crisis
Tensions between Public Relations and the Press Elements of Professional Friction
Give and Take: Public Relations and Journalism Shaping the Image of Public Relations Alternative Voices
Public Relations and Democracy MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
The Invisible Hand of PR DIGITAL JOB OUTLOOK
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Scott Carson/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
13 Media Economics and the Global Marketplace Analyzing the Media Economy
The Structure of the Media Industry The Business of Media Organizations
The Transition to an Information Economy From Regulation to Deregulation Media Powerhouses: Consolidation, Partnerships, and Mergers Business Tendencies in Media Industries Economics, Hegemony, and Storytelling
Specialization, Global Markets, and Convergence The Rise of Specialization and Synergy Disney: A Postmodern Media Conglomerate
Disney’s Global Brand Global Audiences Expand Media Markets
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The Internet and Convergence Change the Game CASE STUDY Blacks Own Just Ten U.S. Television Stations.
Here’s Why. MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Cultural Imperialism and Movies
Social Issues in Media Economics The Limits of Antitrust Laws
CASE STUDY From Fifty to a Few: The Most Dominant Media Corporations
The Impact of Media Ownership The Fallout from a Free Market Cultural Imperialism
The Media Marketplace and Democracy The Effects of Media Consolidation on Democracy The Media Reform Movement
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The Granger Collection
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PART 5: DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA
14 The Culture of Journalism: Values, Ethics, and Democracy Modern Journalism in the Information Age
What Is News? Values in American Journalism
CASE STUDY Bias in the News
Ethics and the News Media Ethical Predicaments Resolving Ethical Problems
Reporting Rituals and the Legacy of Print Journalism Focusing on the Present
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Telling Stories and Covering Disaster Relying on Experts Balancing Story Conflict Acting as Adversaries
Journalism in the Age of TV and the Internet Differences between Print, TV, and Internet News Pundits, “Talking Heads,” and Politics Convergence Enhances and Changes Journalism
The Contemporary Journalist: Pundit or Reporter? The Power of Visual Language
Fake News/Real News: A Fine Line
Alternative Models: Public Journalism and “Fake” News
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CASE STUDY A Lost Generation of Journalists? The Public Journalism Movement “Fake” News and Satiric Journalism
Democracy and Reimagining Journalism’s Role Social Responsibility Deliberative Democracy
EXAMINING ETHICS WikiLeaks, Secret Documents, and Good Journalism
CHAPTER REVIEW LaunchPad
Greg Gayne/TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved, Everett Collection
15 Media Effects and Cultural Approaches to Research Early Media Research Methods
Propaganda Analysis
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Public Opinion Research Social Psychology Studies Marketing Research
CASE STUDY The Effects of TV in a Post-TV World
Research on Media Effects Early Theories of Media Effects
Media Effects Research Conducting Media Effects Research
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Wedding Media and the Meaning of the Perfect Wedding Day Contemporary Media Effects Theories Evaluating Research on Media Effects
Cultural Approaches to Media Research Early Developments in Cultural Studies Research Conducting Cultural Studies Research
EXAMINING ETHICS Our Masculinity Problem Cultural Studies’ Theoretical Perspectives Evaluating Cultural Studies Research
Media Research and Democracy
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Alex Wong/Getty Images
16 Legal Controls and Freedom of Expression The Origins of Free Expression and a Free Press
Models of Expression The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution Censorship as Prior Restraint Unprotected Forms of Expression
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Who Knows the First Amendment?
CASE STUDY Is “Sexting” Pornography? First Amendment versus Sixth Amendment
Film and the First Amendment Social and Political Pressures on the Movies Self-Regulation in the Movie Industry The MPAA Ratings System
Expression in the Media: Print, Broadcast, and Online
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The FCC Regulates Broadcasting Dirty Words, Indecent Speech, and Hefty Fines Political Broadcasts and Equal Opportunity The Demise of the Fairness Doctrine
Bloggers and Legal Rights Communication Policy and the Internet
EXAMINING ETHICS A Generation of Copyright Criminals?
The First Amendment and Democracy
CHAPTER REVIEW LaunchPad
EXTENDED CASE STUDY Analyzing the Coverage of the Volkswagen and Takata Crises
Step 1: Description
Step 2: Analysis
Step 3: Interpretation
Step 4: Evaluation
Step 5: Engagement
NOTES GLOSSARY CREDITS INDEX
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1 Mass Communication A Critical Approach
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NEVER IN U.S. HISTORY has a national election been so shaped by such a wide swath of media forces— both new and old—from the wave of true and untrue social media stories to the tide of partisan Web sites like Breitbart News, whose publisher, Steve Bannon, served as chief executive for Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign. Trump, whose fame grew on the “old” medium of television as the host of the NBC reality program, The Apprentice, used his celebrity standing and late-night tweeting to generate enormous free media coverage, especially during the Republican primary, where his campaign spent virtually no money on expensive TV ads and easily defeated seventeen opponents.
CULTURE AND THE EVOLUTION OF MASS COMMUNICATION THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEDIA AND THEIR ROLE IN OUR SOCIETY SURVEYING THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE CRITIQUING MEDIA AND CULTURE
◄ The media were a huge part of the 2016 presidential election, from Donald Trump’s history as a reality TV star, to his late night Twitter rants, to his verbal and written brawls
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with news anchors such as Megyn Kelly and newspapers like the New York Times.
During the 2016 election, Donald Trump, who declared himself the champion of the “working man” and “the forgotten,” embodied all the narrative skills of a compelling TV character—to some symbolizing a con man who pulled off the biggest hoax since P.T. Barnum in the 19th century (see Ch. 12) and to others a shoot- from-the–hip gunslinger who would clean up the mess in Washington (or, as he phrased it, “drain the swamp”). He criticized other candidates for taking “special interest” money (including from him); he denigrated legal and illegal immigrants, promising to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico—and making Mexico pay for it; and he even survived the revelation of an old video on which he brags about how easy it is for a celebrity like him to harass women.
Then the billionaire businessman defied almost all the polling data and defeated Hillary Clinton. Like George W. Bush in 2000, Donald Trump won the Electoral College and the presidency, but lost the overall popular vote (by more than one million votes).
Throughout the national election, his shocking comments about opponents were recirculated in what seemed like a continuous loop—for free—by major news outlets and their Web sites, including ABC, CNN, CBS, Fox News, NBC, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. The Trump campaign did not even buy anti-Clinton ads until the final months of the election. Still, in the Age of the Internet, the fate of our national elections increasingly rests with social media- savvy young voters and a candidate’s ability to gain their support. In the 2016 election, only about half the eligible millennials, who were turned off in part by traditional news media downplaying complex policy issues, voted, while the 65+ voters, who millennials outnumber and who went for Trump, participated at over a 70 percent rate.1
New York Times media reporter Jim Rutenberg says the real challenge going forward in the merged old-new media world will be the submersion of traditional fact-based journalism in this tide of opinion blogs, a wave he calls “fake news,”
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often rerouted by partisans to much larger audiences through Facebook and Twitter. As the legacy print media continue to seek new business models in a world where Google and Facebook command almost two-thirds of all digital ad revenue, newspapers struggle mightily even though their combined online and print readerships are larger than ever (with many readers not paying for the online stories that are simply aggregated on social media, which rake in the ad dollars). So, as we enter this time of Trump, we need more reporters, not fewer, especially to counter what some have called a “post-fact” or “post-truth” world, where someone’s unsupported opinion about climate change or immigrant crime rates outweighs documented evidence and scientific verification. As Washington Post editor Martin Baron notes: “If you have a society where people can’t agree on basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?”2
In an actual functioning democracy, we depend on news media to provide information to help us make decisions about who will lead us and what we can do to help make society work better. Despite their limitations, news media continue to serve as our watchdogs over politicians, government, and business, and we need to be vigilant, serving as watchdogs over media. We can achieve this by pointing a critical lens back at the media and by describing, analyzing, and interpreting news stories, reality TV shows, and political ads, arriving at informed judgments, based on evidence, about the media’s performance. This textbook offers a map to help us become more media literate, critiquing the media—not as detached cynics or rabid partisans—but as informed citizens with a stake in the outcome.
SO WHAT EXACTLY ARE THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF NEWSPAPERS AND MEDIA IN GENERAL? In an age of economic and social upheaval, how do we demand the highest standards from our media to describe and analyze such complex events and issues? At their best, in all their various forms—from mainstream newspapers and radio talk shows to blogs—the media try to help us understand the events that affect us. But at their worst, the media’s appetite for telling and selling stories leads them not only to document tragedy but also to misrepresent or exploit it. Many viewers and critics disapprove of how media, particularly TV and the Internet, hurtle from one event to another, often dwelling on trivial, celebrity-driven content.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
In this book, we examine the history and business of mass media and discuss
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http://macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
the media as a central force in shaping our culture and our democracy. We start by examining key concepts and introducing the critical process for investigating media industries and issues. In later chapters, we probe the history and structure of media’s major institutions. In the process, we will develop an informed and critical view of the influence these institutions have had on national and global life. The goal is to become media literate—to become critical consumers of mass media institutions and engaged participants who accept part of the responsibility for the shape and direction of media culture. In this chapter, we will:
Address key ideas, including communication, culture, mass media, and mass communication Investigate important periods in communication history: the oral, written, print, electronic, and digital eras Examine the development of a mass medium from emergence to convergence Learn about how convergence has changed our relationship to media Look at the central role of storytelling in media and culture Discuss the skyscraper and map models for organizing and categorizing culture Trace important cultural values in both modern and postmodern societies Study media literacy and the five stages of the critical process: description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement
As you read through this chapter, think about your early experiences with the media. Identify a favorite media product from your childhood—a song, book, TV show, or movie. Why was it so important to you? How much of an impact did your early taste in media have on your identity? How has your taste shifted over time? What do your current media preferences indicate about your identity now? Do your current tastes reveal anything about you? For more questions to help you think about the role of media in your life, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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CULTURE AND THE EVOLUTION OF MASS COMMUNICATION
One way to understand the impact of the media on our lives is to explore the cultural context in which the media operate. Often, culture is narrowly associated with art, the unique forms of creative expression that give pleasure and set standards about what is true, good, and beautiful. Culture, however, can be viewed more broadly as the ways in which people live and represent themselves at particular historical times. This idea of culture encompasses fashion, sports, literature, architecture, education, religion, and science, as well as mass media. Although we can study discrete cultural products, such as novels or songs from various historical periods, culture itself is always changing. It includes a society’s art, beliefs, customs, games, technologies, traditions, and institutions. It also encompasses a society’s modes of communication: the creation and use of symbol systems that convey information and meaning (e.g., languages, Morse code, motion pictures, and one-zero binary computer codes).
communication the process of creating symbol systems that convey information and meaning (e.g., language, Morse code, film, and computer codes).
Culture is made up of both the products that a society fashions and, perhaps more important, the processes that forge those products and reflect a culture’s diverse values. Thus culture may be defined as the symbols of expression that individuals, groups, and societies use to make sense of daily life and to articulate their values. According to this definition, when we listen to music, read a book, watch television, or scan the Internet, we are usually not asking “Is this art?” but are instead trying to identify or connect with something or someone. In other words, we are assigning meaning to the song, book, TV program, or Web site. Culture, therefore, is a process that delivers the values of a society through products or other meaning-making forms. For example, the American ideal of “rugged individualism”— depicting heroic characters overcoming villains or corruption, for instance—has been portrayed on television for decades through a tradition of detective stories like HBO’s True Detective and crime procedurals like CBS’s NCIS.
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culture the symbols of expression that individuals, groups, and societies use to make sense of daily life and to articulate their values; a process that delivers the values of a society through products or other meaning-making forms.
Culture links individuals to their society by providing both shared and contested values, and the mass media help circulate those values. The mass media are the cultural industries—the channels of communication—that produce and distribute songs, novels, TV shows, newspapers, movies, video games, Internet services, and other cultural products to large numbers of people. The historical development of media and communication can be traced through several overlapping phases or eras in which newer forms of technology disrupted and modified older forms—a process that many critics and media professionals began calling convergence with the arrival of the Internet.
mass media the cultural industries—the channels of communication— that produce and distribute songs, novels, news, movies, online computer services, and other cultural products to a large number of people.
These eras, which all still operate to some degree, are oral, written, print, electronic, and digital. The first two eras refer to the communication of tribal or feudal communities and agricultural economies. The last three phases feature the development of mass communication: the process of designing cultural messages and stories and delivering them to large and diverse audiences through media channels as old and distinctive as the printed book and as new and converged as the Internet. Hastened by the growth of industry and modern technology, mass communication accompanied the shift of rural populations to urban settings and the rise of a consumer culture.
mass communication the process of designing and delivering cultural messages and stories to diverse audiences through media channels as old as the book and as new as the Internet.
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Oral and Written Eras in Communication In most early societies, information and knowledge first circulated slowly through oral traditions passed on by poets, teachers, and tribal storytellers. As alphabets and the written word emerged, however, a manuscript—or written—culture began to develop and eventually overshadowed oral communication. Documented and transcribed by philosophers, monks, and stenographers, the manuscript culture served the ruling classes. Working people were generally illiterate, and the economic and educational gap between rulers and the ruled was vast. These eras of oral and written communication developed slowly over many centuries. Although exact time frames are disputed, historians generally consider these eras as part of Western civilization’s premodern period, spanning the epoch from roughly 1000 BCE to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
Early tensions between oral and written communication played out among ancient Greek philosophers and writers. Many philosophers who believed in the superiority of the oral tradition feared that the written word would threaten public discussion. In fact, Plato sought to banish poets, whom he saw as purveyors of ideas less rigorous than those generated in oral, face-to-face, question-and-answer discussions. These debates foreshadowed similar discussions in our time in which we ask whether TV news, Twitter, or online comment sections cheapen public discussion and discourage face-to-face communication.
The Print Revolution While paper and block printing developed in China around 100 CE and 1045, respectively, what we recognize as modern printing did not emerge until the middle of the fifteenth century. At that time in Germany, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable metallic type and the printing press ushered in the modern print era. Printing presses and publications spread rapidly across Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Early on, the size and expense of books limited their audience to the wealthy and powerful, but as printers reduced the size and cost of books, they became available and affordable to more people. Books eventually became the first mass-marketed products in history because of the way the printing press combined three necessary elements.
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EARLY BOOKS Before the invention of the printing press, books were copied by hand in a labor- intensive process. This beautifully illuminated page is from an Italian Bible made in the early fourteenth century. Bibliotetheque Nationale, Paris/Scala–Art Resource, NY
First, machine duplication replaced the tedious system in which scribes hand- copied texts. Second, duplication could occur rapidly, so large quantities of the same book could be reproduced easily. Third, the faster production of multiple copies brought down the cost of each unit, which made books more affordable to less-affluent people.
Since mass-produced printed materials could spread information and ideas faster and farther than ever before, writers could use print to disseminate views counter to traditional civic doctrine and religious authority—views that paved the way for major social and cultural changes, such as the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern nationalism, as people began to think of themselves as part of a country whose interests were broader than local or regional concerns. While oral and written societies had favored decentralized local governments, the print era supported the ascent of more centralized nation-states.
Eventually, machine production became an essential factor in the mass production of other goods, which led to the Industrial Revolution, modern capitalism, and the consumer culture of the twentieth century. With the revolution in industry came the rise of the middle class and an elite business class of owners
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and managers who acquired the kind of influence formerly held only by nobility or clergy. Print media became key tools that commercial and political leaders used to distribute information and maintain social order.
As with the Internet today, however, it was difficult for a single business or political leader, certainly in a democratic society, to gain exclusive control over printing technology (although many leaders have tried). Instead, the mass publication of pamphlets, magazines, and books in the United States helped democratize knowledge, and literacy rates rose among the working and middle classes. Industrialization required a more educated workforce, but printed literature and textbooks also encouraged compulsory education, thus promoting literacy and extending learning beyond the world of wealthy upper-class citizens.
Just as the printing press fostered nationalism, it also nourished the ideal of individualism. People came to rely less on their local community and their commercial, religious, and political leaders for guidance. By challenging insulated tribal life and rituals, the printing press “fostered the modern idea of individuality,” disrupting “the medieval sense of community and integration.”3 By the mid- nineteenth century, the ideal of individualism affirmed the rise of commerce and increased resistance to government interference in the affairs of self-reliant entrepreneurs. The democratic impulse of individualism became a fundamental value in American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Electronic Era In Europe and the United States, the impact of industry’s rise was enormous: Factories replaced farms as the main centers of work and production. During the 1880s, roughly 80 percent of Americans lived on farms and in small towns; by the 1920s and 1930s, most had moved to urban areas, where new industries and economic opportunities beckoned. The city had overtaken the country as the focal point of national life.
The gradual transformation from an industrial, print-based society to one grounded in the Information Age began with the development of the telegraph in the 1840s. Featuring dot-dash electronic signals, the telegraph made four key contributions to communication. First, it separated communication from transportation, making media messages instantaneous—unencumbered by stagecoaches, ships, or the pony express.4 Second, the telegraph, in combination with the rise of mass-marketed newspapers, transformed “information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought or sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”5 By the time of the Civil War, news had become a valuable product. Third, the telegraph made it easier for military, business, and political leaders to coordinate commercial and military operations, especially after the installation of the transatlantic cable in the late 1860s. Fourth, the telegraph led to future technological developments, such as wireless telegraphy (later named radio), the fax machine, and the cell phone, which ironically resulted in the telegraph’s demise: In 2006, Western Union telegraph offices sent their final messages.
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The rise of film at the turn of the twentieth century and the development of radio in the 1920s were early signals, but the electronic phase of the Information Age really boomed in the 1950s and 1960s with the arrival of television and its dramatic impact on daily life. Then, with the coming of ever more communication gadgetry—personal computers, cable TV, DVDs, DVRs, direct broadcast satellites, cell phones, and smartphones—the Information Age passed into its digital phase, where old and new media began to converge, thus dramatically changing our relationship to media and culture.
The Digital Era In digital communication, images, texts, and sounds are converted (encoded) into electronic signals (represented as varied combinations of binary numbers—ones and zeros) that are then reassembled (decoded) as a precise reproduction of, say, a TV picture, a magazine article, a song, or a telephone voice. On the Internet, various images, texts, and sounds are all digitally reproduced and transmitted globally.
digital communication images, texts, and sounds that use pulses of electric current or flashes of laser light and are converted (or encoded) into electronic signals represented as varied combinations of binary numbers (ones and zeros); these signals are then reassembled (decoded) as a precise reproduction of a TV picture, a magazine article, or a telephone voice.
New technologies, particularly cable television and the Internet, developed so quickly that traditional leaders in communication lost some of their control over information. For example, starting with the 1992 presidential campaign, the network news shows (ABC, CBS, and NBC) began to lose their audiences to cable channels and partisan radio talk shows. By the 2012 national elections, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites had become key players in news and politics, especially as information resources for younger generations who had grown up in an online and digital world.
Moreover, e-mail—a digital reinvention of oral culture—has assumed some of the functions of the postal service and is outpacing attempts to control communications beyond national borders. Furthermore, many repressive and totalitarian regimes have had trouble controlling messages sent out over the borderless Internet, as opposed to hard copy “snail mail.”
Oral culture has been further reinvented by the emergence of social media— such as Twitter and, in particular, Facebook, which now has nearly one billion
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users worldwide. Social media allow people from all over the world to have ongoing online conversations, share stories and interests, and generate their own media content. This turn to digital media forms has fundamentally disrupted traditional media business models, the ways we engage with and consume media products, and the ways we organize our daily lives around various media choices.
The Linear Model of Mass Communication The digital era also brought about a shift in the models that media researchers have used over the years to explain how media messages and meanings are constructed and communicated in everyday life. One older and outdated explanation of how media operate viewed mass communication as a linear process of producing and delivering messages to large audiences. According to this model, senders (authors, producers, and organizations) transmitted messages (programs, texts, images, sounds, and ads) through a mass media channel (newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, or the Internet) to large groups of receivers (readers, viewers, and consumers). In the process, gatekeepers (news editors, executive producers, and other media managers) functioned as message filters. Media gatekeepers made decisions about what messages actually got produced for particular receivers. The process also allowed for feedback, in which citizens and consumers, if they chose, returned messages to senders or gatekeepers through phone calls, e-mail, Web postings, talk shows, or letters to the editor.
But the problem with the linear model was that in reality, media messages— especially in the digital era—do not usually move smoothly from a sender at point A to a receiver at point Z. Words and images are more likely to spill into one another, crisscrossing in the daily media deluge of ads, TV shows, news reports, social media, smartphone apps, and everyday conversation. Media messages and stories are encoded and sent in written and visual forms, but senders often have very little control over how their intended messages are decoded or whether the messages are ignored or misread by readers and viewers.
A Cultural Model for Understanding Mass Communication A more contemporary approach to understanding media is through a cultural model. This concept recognizes that individuals bring diverse meanings to messages, given factors and differences such as gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, and occupation. In this more complex model of mass communication, audiences actively affirm, interpret, refashion, or reject the messages and stories that flow through various media channels. For example, when Donald Trump referred to other candidates as “losers” during the 2016 election, his supporters saw such language as strong leadership— “telling it like it is”—but his critics viewed this kind of name-calling as uncivil and unpresidential.
While the linear model may have shown how a message gets from a sender to a
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receiver, the cultural model suggests the complexity of this process and the lack of control that “senders” (such as media executives, moviemakers, writers, news editors, and ad agencies) often have over how audiences receive messages and interpret their intended meanings. Sometimes, producers of media messages seem to be the active creators of communication while audiences are merely passive receptacles. But as the Trump example illustrates, consumers shape media messages to fit or support their own values and viewpoints. This phenomenon is known as selective exposure: People typically seek messages and produce meanings that correspond to their own cultural beliefs, values, and interests. For example, studies have shown that people with political leanings toward the left or the right tend to seek out blogs or news outlets that reinforce their preexisting views.
selective exposure the phenomenon whereby audiences seek messages and meanings that correspond to their preexisting beliefs and values.
In addition, a cultural approach to media focuses us on how meaning is produced rather than on how messages are transmitted. Under this model, a key point is understanding that meaning emerges at the tangled intersection of (1) the creator’s vision, usually conveyed in story form; (2) the industry’s control of production and distribution processes, or the telling and selling of stories; and (3) audiences’ fragmented responses—that is, why we choose and enjoy particular stories (and not others), how we use and consume various media, and how we impose our own varied meanings on the array of media available.
The rise of the Internet and social media has also complicated the communication and meaning-making process. While there are still “senders” and “receivers,” the borderless, decentralized, and democratic nature of the Internet means that anyone can become a sender of media messages—whether it’s by uploading a video mash-up to YouTube or by writing a blog post. The Internet has also largely eliminated the many gatekeepers. Although some governments try to control Internet servers, and some Web sites have restrictions on what can and cannot be posted, for the most part, the Internet allows senders to transmit content without obtaining approval—or editing—from a gatekeeper. For example, some authors who are unable to find a traditional book publisher for their work turn to self-publishing on the Internet. And musicians who don’t have deals with major record labels can promote, circulate, and sell their music online.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEDIA AND THEIR ROLE IN OUR SOCIETY
The mass media today constitute a wide variety of industries and merchandise. The word media is, after all, a Latin plural form of the singular noun medium, meaning an intervening substance through which something is conveyed or transmitted. Television, newspapers, music, movies, magazines, books, billboards, radio, broadcast satellites, and the Internet are all part of the media, and they are all quite capable of either producing worthy products or pandering to society’s worst desires, prejudices, and stereotypes. Let’s begin by looking at how mass media develop, and then at how they work and are interpreted in society and by individuals.
The Evolution of Media: From Emergence to Convergence The development of most mass media is initiated not only by the diligence of inventors, such as Thomas Edison (see Chapters 4 and 7), but also by social, cultural, political, and economic circumstances. For instance, both telegraph and radio evolved as newly industrialized nations sought to expand their military and economic control and to transmit information more rapidly. The Internet is a contemporary response to new concerns: transporting messages and sharing information more rapidly for an increasingly mobile and interconnected global population.
Media innovations typically go through four stages. First is the emergence, or novelty, stage, in which inventors and technicians try to solve a particular problem, such as making pictures move, transmitting messages from ship to shore, or sending mail electronically. Second is the entrepreneurial stage, in which inventors and investors determine a practical and marketable use for the new device. For example, the Internet had its roots in the ideas of military leaders, who wanted a communication system that was decentralized and distributed widely enough to survive nuclear war or natural disasters.
The third phase in a medium’s development involves a breakthrough to the mass medium stage. At this point, businesses figure out how to market the new device or medium as a consumer product. Although the Pentagon and government researchers helped develop early prototypes for the Internet, commercial interests and individual entrepreneurs extended the Internet’s global reach and business potential.
Finally, the fourth and newest phase in a medium’s evolution is the convergence stage. This is the stage in which older media are reconfigured in various forms into newer media. However, this does not necessarily mean that
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these older forms cease to exist. For example, you can still get the New York Times in print, but it’s also now accessible on laptops and smartphones. During this stage, we see the merging of many different media forms onto online platforms, but we also see the fragmenting of large audiences into smaller niche markets. With new technologies allowing access to more media options than ever, mass audiences are morphing into audience subsets that consume and chase particular products, lifestyles, politics, hobbies, and forms of entertainment.
Media Convergence Developments in the electronic and digital eras enabled and ushered in this latest stage in the development of media—convergence—a term that media critics and analysts use when describing all the changes that have occurred over the past decade, and are still occurring, in media content and within media companies. The term actually has two meanings—one referring to technology and one to business —and describes changes that have a great impact on how media companies are charting a course for the future.
convergence thefirst definition involves the technological merging of media content across various platforms (see also cross platform). The second definition describes a business model that consolidates various media holdings under one corporate umbrella.
The Dual Meanings of Media Convergence The first meaning of media convergence involves the technological merging of content across different media channels—the magazine articles, radio programs, songs, TV shows, video games, and movies now available on the Internet through laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
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MEDIA CONVERGENCE In the 1950s, television sets—like radios in the 1930s and 1940s—were often encased in decorative wood and sold as stylish furniture that occupied a central place in many American homes. Today, using our computers, we can listen to a radio talk show, watch a movie, or download a favorite song—usually on the go— as older media forms now converge online. Culver Pictures/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY Blend Images/Getty Images
Such technical convergence is not entirely new. For example, in the late 1920s, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company and introduced machines that could play both radio and recorded music, helping radio survive the eventual emergence of television with more music-based content. However, contemporary media convergence is much broader than the simple merging of older and newer forms. In fact, the eras of communication are themselves reinvented in this “age of convergence.” Oral communication, for example, finds itself reconfigured, in part, in e-mail and social media. And print communication is re-formed in the thousands of news-papers now available online. Also, keep in mind the wonderful ironies of media convergence: The first major
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digital retailer, Amazon, made its name by selling the world’s oldest mass medium —the book—on the world’s newest mass medium—the Internet.
A second meaning of media convergence—sometimes called cross platform by media marketers— describes a business model that involves consolidating various media holdings, such as cable connections, phone services, television transmissions, and Internet access, under one corporate umbrella. The goal is not necessarily to offer consumers more choice in their media options but to better manage resources and maximize profits. For example, a company that owns TV stations, radio outlets, and newspapers in multiple markets—as well as in the same cities—can deploy a reporter or producer to create three or four versions of the same story for various media outlets. So rather than having each radio station, TV station, newspaper, and online news site generate diverse and independent stories about an important issue or a significant event, a media corporation employing the convergence model can use fewer employees to generate multiple versions of the same story.
cross platform a particular business model that involves a consolidation of various media holdings—such as cable connection, phone service, television transmission, and Internet access—under one corporate umbrella (also known as convergence).
Media Businesses in a Converged World The ramifications of media convergence are best revealed in the business strategies of digital age companies like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and especially Google— the most profitable company of the digital era so far (see Chapter 2). Google is the Internet’s main organizer because it finds both “new” and “old” media content— like videos and newspapers—and aggregates that content for vast numbers of online consumers. Although Google does own YouTube, the company does not produce traditional media content, but functions instead as a delivery or distribution site. Most consumers who find a news story or magazine article through a Google search pay nothing to the original media content provider or to Google. Instead, as the “middleman,” or distributor, Google makes most of its money by selling ads that accompany search results. But not all ads are created equal; as writer and journalism critic James Fallows points out, much of the company’s money comes from shopping-related searches, rather than from the information searches it is best known for. In fact, Fallows writes that Google, which has certainly done its part in contributing to the decline of newspapers, still has a large stake in seeing newspapers succeed online.6 Over the last few years, Google has undertaken a number of experiments to help older news media make
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the transition into the converged world. Google executives believe that since they aren’t in the content creation business, they are still dependent on news organizations to produce the quality information and news stories that healthy democracies need—and that Google can deliver.
Today’s converged media world has broken down the old definitions of distinct media forms like newspapers and television—both now available online and across multiple platforms. And it favors players like Google, whose business model works in a world where customers expect to get their media in multiple places—and often for free. But the challenge ahead in the new, converged world is to resolve who will pay for quality content and how that system will emerge. In the upcoming industry chapters, we take a closer look at how media convergence is affecting each industry in terms of both content production and business strategies.
Media Convergence and Cultural Change The Internet and social media have led to significant changes in the ways we consume and engage with media culture. In the pre-Internet days (say, back in the late 1980s), most people would watch popular TV shows like Dallas, Cheers, or Roseanne at the time they originally aired. Such scheduling provided common media experiences at specific times within our culture. While we still watch TV shows, we are increasingly likely to do so at our own convenience through Web sites like Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix or through DVR/On-Demand options. We are also increasingly making our media choices on the basis of Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter recommendations from friends. Or we upload our own media—from photos of last night’s party to homemade videos of our lives, pets, and hobbies—to share with friends instead of watching traditional network programs. While these options allow us to connect with friends or family and give us more choices, they also break down old rituals like a family’s gathering one evening a week to watch the comedy lineup on ABC or NBC. Instead, most media experiences find us chasing our individual interests online and on our smartphones. However, the upside in the digital age is that today, many families gather on weekends or during holidays to binge-watch TV series they’ve missed during the week.
The ability to access many different forms of media in one place is also changing the ways we engage with and consume media. In the past, we read newspapers in print, watched TV on our television sets, and played video games on a console. Today, we are able to do all these things on a computer, tablet, or smartphone, making it easy—and very tempting—to multitask. Media multitasking has led to growing media consumption, particularly for young people. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study found that today’s youth packed ten hours and forty-five minutes’ worth of media content into the seven and a half hours they spent daily consuming media.7 But while we might be consuming more media, are we really engaging with our friends when we communicate with them by texting or posting on Facebook or Twitter? Some critics and educators feel that media multitasking means that we are more distracted, that we engage less with each type of media we consume, and that we often pay much closer attention to the media
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device in our hand than to the person standing next to us. However, media multitasking could have other effects. In the past, we would
wait until the end of a TV program, if not until the next day, to discuss it with our friends. Now, with the proliferation of social media, we can discuss that program with our friends—and with strangers—as we watch the show. Many TV shows now gauge their popularity with audiences by how many people are “live- tweeting” them and by how many related trending topics they have on Twitter. This type of participation could indicate that audiences are in fact engaging more with the media they consume, even though they are multitasking. Some media critics even posit that having more choice actually makes us more engaged media consumers, because we have to actively choose the media we want to consume from the growing list of options.
Stories: The Foundation of Media The stories that circulate in the media can shape a society’s perceptions and attitudes. During the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance, courageous professional journalists covered armed conflicts, telling stories that helped the public comprehend the magnitude and tragedy of such events. In the 1950s and 1960s, network television news stories on the Civil Rights movement led to crucial legislation that transformed the way many white people viewed the grievances and aspirations of African Americans. In the late 1990s, news and tabloid magazine stories about the President Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair sparked heated debates over private codes of behavior and public abuses of authority. In each of these instances, the stories told through a variety of media outlets played a key role in changing individual awareness, cultural attitudes, and public perception.
While we continue to look to the media for narratives today, the kinds of stories we seek and tell are changing in the digital era. During Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s and 1940s, as many as ninety million people each week went to the movies on Saturday. In the 1980s, during TV’s Network Era, most of us sat down at night to watch the professionally produced evening news or the scripted sitcoms and dramas written by paid writers and performed by seasoned actors. But in the digital age, many of the performances are enacted by “ordinary” people. The stories we watch on YouTube and read on blog sites are mostly produced by amateurs. Audiences are fascinated by stories of couples finding love, relationships gone bad, and backstabbing friends on shows like The Bachelor or Real Housewives of New York City. Other reality shows—like Pawn Stars or Say Yes to the Dress—give us glimpses into the lives and careers of everyday people, while amateurs entertain us on singing, dancing, and cooking shows like The Voice, So You Think You Can Dance, and Top Chef. While these shows are all professionally produced, the performers are almost all ordinary people (or celebrities and professionals performing alongside amateurs). This is part of the appeal of reality TV—relating to the characters or comparing our lives with theirs, because they seem just like us. Part of the appeal too is feeling superior to characters who often
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make bad decisions that we can judge or laugh about. Online, many of us are entertaining each other with videos of our pets,
Facebook posts about our achievements or relationship issues, photos of a good meal, or tweets about last night’s presidential debate. This cultural blending of old and new ways of telling stories—told by both professionals and amateurs—is just another form of convergence that has disrupted and altered the media landscape in the digital era. More than ever, ordinary citizens are able to participate in, and have an effect on, the stories being told in the media. Our varied media institutions and outlets are basically in the narrative—or storytelling—business. Media stories put events in context, helping us to better understand both our daily lives and the larger world. As psychologist Jerome Bruner argues, we are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell the stories we have inside us.8 The common denominator, in fact, between our entertainment and information cultures is the narrative. It is the media’s main cultural currency—whether it’s Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, a post on a gossip blog, a Fox News “exclusive,” a New York Times article, a tweet about a bad breakfast, or a funny TV commercial. The point is that the popular narratives of our culture are complex and varied. Narratives are, in the end, the dominant way we make sense and meaning of our experiences. As writer Joan Didion once put it, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”9
narrative the structure underlying most media products, it includes two components: the story (what happens to whom) and the discourse (how the story is told).
The Power of Media Stories in Everyday Life The earliest debates, at least in Western society, about the impact of cultural narratives on daily life date back to the ancient Greeks. Socrates, himself accused of corrupting young minds, worried that children exposed to popular art forms and stories “without distinction” would “take into their souls teachings that are wholly opposite to those we wish them to be possessed of when they are grown up.”10 He believed art should uplift us from the ordinary routines of our lives. The playwright Euripides, however, believed that art should imitate life, that characters should be “real,” and that artistic works should reflect the actual world—even when that reality is sordid.
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Vietnam War Protests On October 21, 1967, a crowd of 100,000 protesters marched on the Pentagon demanding the end of the Vietnam War. Sadly, violence erupted when some protesters clashed with the U.S. Marshals protecting the Pentagon. However, this iconic image from the same protest appeared in the Washington Post the next day and went on to become a symbol for the peaceful ideals behind the protests. When has an image in the media made an event “real” to you? Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos
In The Republic, Plato developed the classical view of art: It should aim to instruct and uplift. He worried that some staged performances glorified evil and that common folk watching might not be able to distinguish between art and reality. Aristotle, Plato’s student, occupied a middle ground in these debates, arguing that art and stories should provide insight into the human condition but should entertain as well.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Jacquelyn S. Wong/ViewFinder Exis, LLC
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http://macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Agenda Setting and Gatekeeping Experts discuss how the media exert influence over public discourse.
Discussion: How might the rise of the Internet cancel out or reduce the agenda- setting effect in media?
The cultural concerns of classical philosophers are still with us. In the early 1900s, for example, newly arrived immigrants to the United States who spoke little English gravitated toward cultural events (such as boxing, vaudeville, and the emerging medium of silent film) whose enjoyment did not depend solely on understanding English. Consequently, these popular events occasionally became a flash point for some groups, including the Daughters of the American Revolution, local politicians, religious leaders, and police vice squads, who not only resented the commercial success of immigrant culture but also feared that these “low” cultural forms would undermine what they saw as traditional American values and interests.
In the United States in the 1950s, the phenomenal popularity of Elvis Presley set the stage for many of today’s debates over hip-hop lyrics and television’s influence, especially on young people. In 1956 and 1957, Presley made three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show. The public outcry against Presley’s “lascivious” hip movements was so great that by the third show the camera operators were instructed to shoot the singer only from the waist up. In some communities, objections to Presley and rock and roll were motivated by class bias and racism. Many white adults believed that this “poor white trash” singer from Mississippi was spreading rhythm and blues, a “dangerous” form of black popular culture.
Today, with the reach of print, electronic, and digital communications and the amount of time people spend consuming them (see Figure 1.1), mass media play an even more controversial role in society. Many people are critical of the quality of much contemporary culture and are concerned about the overwhelming amount of information now available. Many see popular media culture as unacceptably commercial and sensationalistic. Children, who watch nearly forty thousand TV commercials each year, are particularly vulnerable to marketers selling junk food, toys, and “cool” clothing.
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FIGURE 1.1 DAILY MEDIA CONSUMPTION BY PLATFORM, 2015 Data from: “Average time Spent with major media per day in the United States as of October 2015 (in minutes),” http://www.statista.com/statistics/276683/media- use-in-the-us/.
Yet how much the media shape society—and how much they simply respond to existing cultural issues—is still unknown. Although some media depictions may worsen social problems, research has seldom demonstrated that the media directly cause our society’s major afflictions. For instance, when a middle-school student shoots a fellow student over designer clothing, should society blame the ad that glamorized clothes and the TV network or Web site that carried the ad? Or are parents, teachers, and religious leaders failing to instill strong moral values? Are economic and social issues involving gun legislation, consumerism, and income disparity at work as well? Even if the clothing manufacturer bears responsibility as a corporate citizen, did the ad alone bring about the tragedy, or is the ad symptomatic of a larger problem?
With American mass media industries earning more than $200 billion annually, the economic and societal stakes are high. Large portions of media resources now go toward studying audiences, capturing their attention through stories, and taking in their consumer dollars. To increase their revenues, media outlets try to influence everything from how people shop to how they vote. Like the air we breathe, the commercially based culture that mass media help create surrounds us. Its impact, like the air, is often taken for granted. But to monitor that culture’s “air quality”— to become media literate—we must attend more thoughtfully to a vast array of media stories that are too often taken for granted. (For further discussion, see “Examining Ethics: Covering War” on pages 16–17.)
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http://www.statista.com/statistics/276683/media-use-in-the-us/
SURVEYING THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE
Some cultural phenomena gain wide popular appeal, and others do not. Some appeal to certain age groups or social classes. Some, such as rock and roll, jazz, and dance music, are popular worldwide; other cultural forms, such as Tejano, salsa, and Cajun music, are popular primarily in certain regions or ethnic communities. Certain aspects of culture are considered elite in one place (e.g., opera in the United States) and popular in another (e.g., opera in Italy). Though categories may change over time and from one society to another, two metaphors offer contrasting views about the way culture operates in our daily lives: culture as a hierarchy, represented by a skyscraper model, and culture as a process, represented by a map model.
Culture as a Skyscraper Throughout much of the twentieth-century, critics and audiences generally perceived culture as a hierarchy, with supposedly superior products at the top and inferior ones at the bottom. This can be imagined, in some respects, as a modern skyscraper. In this model, the top floors of the building house high culture, such as ballet, the symphony, art museums, and classic literature. The bottom floors— and even the basement—house popular or low culture, including such icons as reality television, teen pop music, TV wrestling shows, and violent video games (see Figure 1.2 on page 18). High culture, identified with “good taste” and higher education, and supported by wealthy patrons and corporate donors, is associated with “fine art,” which is available primarily in libraries, theaters, and museums. In contrast, low or popular culture is aligned with the “questionable” tastes of the masses, who enjoy the commercial “junk” circulated by the mass media. Whether or not we agree with this cultural skyscraper model, the high–low hierarchy often determines or limits the ways we view and discuss culture today.11 Using this model, critics have developed at least five areas of concern about so-called low culture: the depreciation of fine art, the exploitation of high culture, the disposability of popular culture, the decline of high culture, and the deadening of our cultural taste buds.
high culture a symbolic expression that has come to mean “good taste”; often supported by wealthy patrons and corporate donors, it is associated with fine art (such as ballet, the symphony, painting, and classical literature), which is available primarily in theaters or museums.
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B
low culture a symbolic expression supposedly aligned with the questionable tastes of the “masses,” who enjoy the commercial “junk” circulated by the mass media, such as reality television, teen pop music, TV wrestling shows, talk radio, comic books, and monster truck pulls.
EXAMINING ETHICS
Covering War
y 2016, the United States still had nearly ten thousand troops in Afghanistan—fighting a war that was in its fifteenth year (the
longest war in U.S. history)—but news coverage of Middle East war efforts had declined dramatically. This was partly due to news organizations’ losing interest in events when they drag on and become “old news.” The news media are biased in favor of timeliness and “current events.” But war reporting also declined because of the financial crisis—more than twenty thousand reporters lost their jobs or took buyouts between 2009 and 2013 as papers cut staffs to save money. In fact, most news organizations stopped sending reporters to cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, depending instead on wire service reporters, foreign correspondents from other countries, or major news organizations like the New York Times or CNN for their coverage. These major organizations did cover the rise of stateless terrorist organizations like ISIS—and their use of social media for propaganda and recruitment. Despite the decrease in coverage of Afghanistan, the news media continue to confront ethical challenges about the best way to cover the wars, including reporting on the deaths of soldiers;
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documenting drug abuse or the high suicide rate among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans; dealing with First Amendment and national security issues; and self-censoring what audiences view, read, or hear.
When President Obama took office in 2009, he suspended the previous Bush administration ban on media coverage of soldiers’ coffins returning to U.S. soil from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. First Amendment advocates praised Obama’s decision, although after a flurry of news coverage of these arrivals in April 2009, media outlets grew less interested as the wars dragged on. Later, though, the Obama administration upset some of the same First Amendment supporters when it withheld more prisoner and detainee abuse photos from earlier in the wars, citing concerns for the safety of current U.S. troops and fears of further inflaming anti-American opinion. Both issues—one opening up news access and one closing it down—suggest the difficult and often tense relationship between presidential administrations and the news media.
In May 2011, these issues surfaced again when U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, long credited with perpetrating the 9/11 tragedy. As details of the SEAL operation began to emerge, the Obama administration weighed the appropriateness of releasing photos of bin Laden’s body and video of his burial at sea. While some news organizations and First Amendment advocates demanded the release of the photos, the Obama administration ultimately decided against it, saying that the government did not want to spur any further terrorist actions against the United States and its allies.
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IMAGES OF WAR The photos and images that news outlets choose to show greatly influence their audience members’ opinions. In each of the photos below, what message about war is being portrayed? How much freedom do you think news outlets should have in showing potentially controversial scenes from war? AFP/Getty Images Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
How much freedom should the news media have to cover a war? Back in 2006, President George W. Bush criticized the news media for not showing enough “good news” about U.S. efforts to bring democracy to Iraq. Bush’s remarks raised ethical questions about the complex relationship between the government and the news media during times of war: How much freedom should the news media have to cover a war? How much control, if any, should the military have over reporting a war? Are there topics that should not be covered?
These kinds of questions have also created ethical quagmires for local TV stations that cover war and its effects on communities where soldiers have been called to duty and then injured or killed. In one extreme case, the nation’s largest TV station owner—Sinclair Broadcast Group—would not air the ABC News program Nightline in 2004 because it devoted an episode to reading the names of all U.S. soldiers killed in the Iraq War up to that time. Here is an excerpt from a New York Times account of that event:
Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest owners of local television stations, will preempt tonight’s edition of the ABC News program
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“Nightline,” saying the program’s plan to have Ted Koppel [who then anchored the program] read aloud the names of every member of the armed forces killed in action in Iraq was motivated by an antiwar agenda and threatened to undermine American efforts there.
The decision means viewers in eight cities, including St. Louis and Columbus, Ohio, will not see “Nightline.” ABC News disputed that the program carried a political message, calling it “an expression of respect which simply seeks to honor those who have laid down their lives for their country.”
But Mark Hyman, the vice president of corporate relations for Sinclair, who is also a conservative commentator on the company’s newscasts, said tonight’s edition of “Nightline” is biased journalism. “Mr. Koppel’s reading of the fallen will have no proportionality,” he said in a telephone interview, pointing out that the program will ignore other aspects of the war effort.
Mr. Koppel and the producers of “Nightline” said earlier this week that they had no political motivation behind the decision to devote an entire show, expanded to 40 minutes, to reading the names and displaying the photos of those killed. They said they only intended to honor the dead and document what Mr. Koppel called “the human cost” of the war.1
Given such a case, how might a local TV news director today—under pressure from the station’s manager or owner—formulate guidelines to help negotiate such ethical territory? While most TV news divisions have ethical codes to guide journalists’ behavior in certain situations, could ordinary citizens help shape ethical discussions and decisions? Following is a general plan for dealing with an array of ethical dilemmas that media practitioners face and for finding ways in which nonjournalists might participate in this decision-making process.
Arriving at ethical decisions is a particular kind of criticism involving several steps. These include (1) laying out the case; (2) pinpointing the key issues; (3) identifying the parties involved, their intents, and their potentially competing values; (4) studying ethical models and theories; (5) presenting strategies and options; and (6) formulating a decision or policy.2
As a test case, let’s look at how local TV news directors might establish ethical guidelines for war-related events. By following the six steps above, our goal is to make some ethical decisions and to lay the groundwork for policies that address TV images or photographs—for example, those of protesters, supporters, memorials, or funerals—used in war coverage. (See Chapter 14 for details on confronting ethical problems.)
Examining Ethics Activity
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As a class or in smaller groups, design policies that address one or more of the issues raised here. Start by researching the topic; find as much information as possible. For example, you can research guidelines that local stations already use by contacting local news directors and TV journalists.
Do the local stations have guidelines? If so, are they adequate? Are there certain types of images they will not show? If the Obama administration had released photographic evidence of bin Laden’s death, would a local station have shown it? Finally, if time allows, send the policies you designed to various TV news directors or station managers; ask for their evaluations, and ask whether they would consider implementing the policies.
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FIGURE 1.2 CULTURE AS A SKYSCRAPER
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Culture is diverse and difficult to categorize. Yet throughout the twentieth century, we tended to think of culture not as a social process but as a set of products sorted into high, low, or middle positions on a cultural skyscraper. Look at this highly arbitrary arrangement and see if you agree or disagree. Write in some of your own examples. Why do we categorize or classify culture in this way? Who controls this process? Is control of making cultural categories important? Why or why not?
An Inability to Appreciate Fine Art Some critics claim that popular culture, in the form of contemporary movies, television, and music, distracts students from serious literature and philosophy, thus stunting their imagination and undermining their ability to recognize great art.12 This critical view pits popular culture against high art, discounting a person’s ability to value Bach and the Beatles or Shakespeare and The Simpsons concurrently. The assumption is that because popular forms of culture are made for profit, they cannot be experienced as valuable artistic experiences in the same way as more elite art forms, such as classical ballet, Italian opera, modern sculpture, or Renaissance painting—even though many of what we regard as elite art forms today were once supported and even commissioned by wealthy patrons.
A Tendency to Exploit High Culture Another concern is that popular culture exploits classic works of literature and art. A good example may be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s dark Gothic novel Frankenstein, written in 1818 and ultimately transformed into multiple popular forms. Today, the tale is best remembered by virtue of two movies, a 1931 film version starring Boris Karloff as the towering and tragic monster, and the 1974 Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein, alongside offshoots like the sitcom The Munsters, action movies like I, Frankenstein, or even the sugar cereal Franken Berry. Shelley’s powerful themes about abusing science and judging people on the basis of appearances are often lost or trivialized in favor of a simplistic horror story, a comedy spoof, or a form of junk food.
A Throwaway Ethic Unlike an Italian opera or a Shakespearean tragedy, many elements of popular culture have a short life span; a hit song, for example, might top the charts for a few weeks at a time. Although endurance does not necessarily denote quality, many critics think that so-called better or higher forms of culture have more staying power. In this argument, lower or popular forms of culture are unstable and fleeting; they follow rather than lead public taste.
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Exploiting High Culture Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, might not recognize our popular culture mutations of her Gothic classic. First published in 1818, the novel has inspired numerous interpretations, everything from the scary—Boris Karloff in the classic 1931 movie—to the silly—the Mel Brooks spoof Young Frankenstein . In 1972, the General Mills Corporation introduced “Franken Berry” cereal as part of its monster-themed breakfast cereal line. Today, the Franken Berry brand has expanded to other product lines, including Fruit Roll-Ups. Can you think of another example of a story that has developed and changed over time and through various media transformations? Photofest 20th Century Fox/Photofest Richard Levine/Alamy
CASE STUDY
Is Anchorman a Comedy or a Documentary?
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O ne fascinating media phenomenon of the first decades of the twenty-first century is that fictional storytelling has changed dramatically over this time while TV news stories, especially local TV news,
have hardly changed at all.
Why is this?
They are both media products that depend on storytelling to draw audiences and make money. But while complex and controversial TV narratives like HBO’s Game of Thrones and True Detective, Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, FX’s Fargo and The Americans, AMC’s Better Call Saul, Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, and Fox’s Empire were not possible in the 1960s, when just three networks—careful not to offend or challenge viewers—dominated, the lead crime story on most local TV newscasts around the country looks pretty much like it did decades earlier. In the film Anchorman 2, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay follow up their satire of small-minded local news anchors in the 1970s with a story about the birth of pandering twenty-four-hour news coverage in the 1980s. The film points out that nonfictional storytelling on tele-vision remains locked in narrative patterns from the 1960s and 1970s—making Ferrell’s newscaster comedies, at times, seem more like documentaries.
The reason for the lack of advances in news narratives is itself a story— one that’s about money, and which stories sell and why.
American filmmakers from D. W. Griffith and Orson Welles to Steven Spielberg and Wes Anderson have understood the allure of narrative. But narrative is such a large category— encompassing everything from poetry and novels to movies and TV shows to TV newscasts and political ads—that it demands subdivisions. So over time we developed the idea of genre as a way to differentiate the vast array of stories. In Poetics, Aristotle first talked about generic categories in his analysis of poetry, which he divided into three basic types: “Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre.” Fast-forwarding to more contemporary takes on popular genres, literary scholar John Cawelti, in his book Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, identified five popular literary formulas: adventure, romance, mystery, melodrama, and “alien beings or states.”1
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Photo by Gemma LaMana/©Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection
In fact, most local and national TV news stories function as a kind of melodrama as defined by Cawelti and others. In the melodrama, “the city” is often the setting—as it is in most TV newscasts—and has degenerated into a corrupt and mysterious place, full of crime and mayhem. Historically, heroes of fictional melodramas are small-town sheriffs and big-city cops who must rise above the corruption to impose their individual moral values to defeat various forms of evil. In today’s popular culture, cities like Los Angeles and New York are portrayed as places that conceal evil terrorist cells, corrupt cops, maniacal corporate bosses, and other assorted “bad guys,” until the strong cops or triumphant lawyers conquer evil and restore order through the convictions of their strong individual characters. Variations on these melodramatic themes can be found as the major organizing structure in everything from cop shows like NCIS to newsmagazines like 60 Minutes or cable TV shows like Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. Even the 2015 stories about Brian Williams, who lost his real NBC anchor job by exaggerating his news exploits, play as a melodrama in the news. This is not surprising given that individualism is probably our most persistent American value and that the melodrama generally celebrates the rugged tenacity and moral virtue of tough-minded heroes and condemns characters who fail to meet their standards—whether they are gunfighters, cops, reporters, news anchors, or even presidential candidates.
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© NBC/Photofest
The appropriation of these narratives by news shows has been satirized by the likes of Anchorman; Saturday Night Live; Comedy Central’s Daily Show and Nightly Show; and John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, on HBO. These satires often critique the way news producers repeat stale formulas rather than invent dynamic new story forms for new generations of viewers. As much as the world has changed since the 1970s (when SNL’s “Weekend Update” debuted), local TV news story formulas have gone virtually unaltered. Modern newscasts still limit reporters’ stories to two minutes or less and promote stylish male– female anchor teams, a sports “guy,” and a certified meteorologist as personalities, usually leading with a dramatic local crime story and teasing viewers to stay tuned for possible weather disasters.
By indulging these formulas, TV news continues to address viewers not primarily as citizens and members of communities but as news consumers who build the TV ratings that determine the ad rates for local stations and the national networks. In The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel argue that “journalists must make the significant interesting and relevant.”2 Too often, however, on cable, the Internet, and local news, we are awash in news stories that try to make something significant out of the obviously trivial, voyeuristic, or narrowly relevant—like stories about troubled celebrities, attention- seeking politicians, or decontextualized stock-market numbers.
In fictional TV, however, storytelling has evolved over time, becoming increasingly dynamic and complex with shows like Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Good Wife, Fargo, Homeland, and Girls. In Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues that in contrast to popular 1970s programs like Dallas or Dynasty, the best TV stories today layer “each scene with a thick network of affiliations. You have to focus to
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follow the plot, and in focusing you’re exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads.”3 Johnson says that younger audiences today —brought up in an era of the Internet and complicated interactive visual games—bring high expectations to other kinds of popular culture as well, including television. “The mind,” he writes, “likes to be challenged; there’s real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system.”4 This evolution of fictional storytelling has not yet happened with its nonfictional counterparts; TV news remains entrenched in old formulas and time constraints. The reasons for this, of course, are money and competition. Whereas national networks today have begun to adjust their programming decisions to better compete against cable services like AMC and HBO and new story “content” providers like Netflix and Amazon, local TV news still competes against just three or four other news stations and just one (if any) local newspaper. Even with diminished viewership (most local TV stations have lost half their audience over the past two decades), local TV news still draws enough viewers in a fragmented media landscape to attract top ad dollars.
But those viewership levels continue to decline as older audiences give way to new generations more likely to comb social media networks for news and information. Perhaps younger audiences crave news stories that match the more complicated storytelling that surrounds them in everything from TV dramas to interactive video games to their own conversations. Viewers raised on the irony of Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, The Daily Show, Inside Amy Schumer, and Broad City are not buying—and not watching—news stories that seem as if they still belong to their grand-parents’ generation.
A Diminished Audience for High Culture Some observers also warn that popular culture has inundated the cultural environment, driving out higher forms of culture and cheapening public life.13 This concern is supported by data showing that TV sets are in use in the average American home for nearly eight hours a day, exposing adults and children each year to thousands of hours of trivial TV commercials, violent crime dramas, and superficial reality programs. According to one story critics tell, the prevalence of so many popular media products prevents the public from experiencing genuine art —though this view fails to note the number of choices and options now available to media consumers.
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Dulling Our Cultural Taste Buds Another cautionary story suggests that popular culture, especially its more visual forms (such as TV advertising and YouTube videos), undermines democratic ideals and reasoned argument. According to this view, popular media may inhibit not only rational thought but also social progress by transforming audiences into cultural dupes lured by the promise of products. Seductive advertising images showcasing the buffed and airbrushed bodies of professional models, for example, frequently contradict the actual lives of people who cannot hope to achieve a particular “look” or lifestyle and who may not have the means to obtain high-end cosmetics, clothing, or cars. In this environment, art and commerce have become blurred, restricting the audience’s ability to make cultural and economic distinctions. Sometimes called the “Big Mac” theory, this view suggests that people are so addicted to mass-produced media menus that they lose their discriminating taste for finer fare and, much worse, their ability to see and challenge social inequities.
Culture as a Map While the skyscraper model is one way to view culture, another way to view it is as a map. Here, culture is an ongoing and complicated process—rather than a high– low vertical hierarchy—that allows us to better account for our diverse and individual tastes. In the map model, we judge forms of culture as good or bad based on a combination of personal taste and the aesthetic judgments a society makes at particular historical times. Because such tastes and evaluations are “all over the map,” a cultural map suggests that we can pursue many connections across various media choices and can appreciate a range of cultural experiences without simply ranking them from high to low.
Our attraction to and choice of cultural phenomena—such as the stories we read in books or watch at the movies—represent how we make our lives meaningful. Culture offers plenty of places to go that are conventional, familiar, and comforting. Yet at the same time, our culture’s narrative storehouse contains other stories that tend toward the innovative, unfamiliar, and challenging. Most forms of culture, however, demonstrate multiple tendencies. We may use online social networks because they are both comforting (an easy way to keep up with friends) and innovative (new tools or apps that engage us). The map offered here (see Figure 1.3 on page 24) is based on a subway grid. Each station represents tendencies or elements related to why a person may be attracted to different cultural products. Also, more popular culture forms congregate in more congested areas of the map, while less popular cultural forms are outliers. Such a large, multidirectional, antihierarchical map may be a more flexible, multidimensional, and inclusive way of imagining how culture actually works.
The Comfort of Familiar Stories
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The appeal of culture is often its familiar stories, pulling audiences toward the security of repetition and common landmarks on the cultural map. Consider, for instance, early television’s Lassie series, about the adventures of a collie named Lassie and her owner, young Timmy. Of the more than five hundred episodes, many have a familiar and repetitive plotline: Timmy, who arguably possessed the poorest sense of direction and suffered more concussions than any TV character in history, gets lost or knocked unconscious. After finding Timmy and licking his face, Lassie goes for help and saves the day. Adult critics might mock this melodramatic formula, but many children found comfort in the predictability of the story. This quality is also evident when children ask their parents to read Goodnight Moon or Where the Wild Things Are night after night.
THE POPULAR HUNGER GAMES book series, which has also become a blockbuster film franchise, mixes elements that have, in the past, been considered “low” culture (young-adult stories, science fiction) with the “high” culture of literature and satire. It also doubles as a cautionary story about media used to transform and suppress its audience: In the books and films, the media, controlled by a totalitarian government, broadcast a brutal fight to the death between child “tributes,” fascinating the population while attempting to quash any hope of revolution. © Lionsgate/Photofest
Innovation and the Attraction of “What’s New” Like children, adults also seek comfort, often returning to an old Beatles or Guns N’ Roses song, a William Butler Yeats or an Emily Dickinson poem, or a TV rerun
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of Seinfeld or Andy Griffith. But we also like cultural adventure. We may turn from a familiar film on cable’s AMC to discover a new movie from Iran or India on the Sundance Channel. We seek new stories and new places to go—those aspects of culture that demonstrate originality and complexity. For instance, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) created language anew and challenged readers, as the novel’s poetic first sentence illustrates: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” A revolutionary work, crammed with historical names and topical references to events, myths, songs, jokes, and daily conversation, Joyce’s novel remains a challenge to understand and decode. His work demonstrated that part of what culture provides is the impulse to explore new places, to strike out in new directions, searching for something different that may contribute to growth and change.
A Wide Range of Messages We know that people have complex cultural tastes, needs, and interests based on different backgrounds and dispositions. It is not surprising, then, that our cultural treasures, from blues music and opera to comic books and classical literature, contain a variety of messages. Just as Shakespeare’s plays—popular entertainments in his day—were packed with both obscure and popular references, TV episodes of The Simpsons have included allusions to the Beatles, Kafka, Tennessee Williams, Apple, Star Trek, The X-Files, Freud, Psycho, and Citizen Kane. In other words, as part of an ongoing process, cultural products and their meanings are “all over the map,” spreading out in diverse directions.
FIGURE 1.3 CULTURE AS A MAP In this map model, culture is not ranked as high or low. Instead, the model shows
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culture as spreading out in several directions across a variety of dimensions. For example, some cultural forms can be familiar, innovative, and challenging, like the Harry Potter books and movies. This model accounts for the complexity of individual tastes and experiences. The map model also suggests that culture is a process by which we produce meaning—that is, make our lives meaningful—as well as a complex collection of intersecting media products and texts. The map shown is just one interpretation of culture. What cultural products would you include in your own model? What dimensions and intersections would you identify with, and why?
Challenging the Nostalgia for a Better Past Some critics of popular culture assert—often without presenting supportive evidence—that society was better off before the latest developments in mass media. These critics resist the idea of reimagining an established cultural hierarchy as a multidirectional map. The nostalgia for some imagined “better past” has often operated as a device for condemning new cultural phenomena. This impulse to criticize something that is new is often driven by fear of change, or of cultural differences, or by political differences. Back in the nineteenth century, in fact, a number of intellectuals and politicians worried that rising literacy rates among the working class would create havoc: How would the aristocracy and intellectuals maintain their authority and status if everyone could read? A recent example includes the fear that some politicians, religious leaders, and citizens have expressed about the legalization of same-sex marriage, claiming that it violates older religious tenets or the sanctity of past traditions.
Cultural Values of the Modern Period To understand how the mass media have come to occupy their current cultural position, we need to trace significant changes in cultural values from the modern period until today. In general, U.S. historians and literary scholars think of the modern period as beginning with the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and extending until about the mid-twentieth century. Although there are many ways to define what it means to be “modern,” we will focus on four major features or values that resonate best with changes across media and culture: efficiency, individualism, rationalism, and progress.
modern the term describinga historical era spanning the time from the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the present; its social values include celebrating the individual, believing in rational order,
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working efficiently, and rejecting tradition.
Modernization involved captains of industry using new technology to create efficient manufacturing centers, produce inexpensive products to make everyday life better, and make commerce more profitable. Printing presses and assembly lines made major contributions in this transformation, and then modern advertising spread the word to American consumers. In terms of culture, the modern mantra has been “form follows function.” For example, the growing populations of big cities placed a premium on space, creating a new form of building that fulfilled that functional demand by building upward. Modern skyscrapers made of glass, steel, and concrete replaced the supposedly wasteful decorative and ornate styles of premodern Gothic cathedrals. This new value was echoed in journalism, where a front-page style rejected decorative and ornate adjectives and adverbs for “just the facts.”
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES is a famous “mash-up”—a new creative work made by mixing together disparate cultural pieces. In this case, the classic novel by Jane Austen is reimagined as taking place among zombies and ninjas, mixing elements of English literature and horror and action films. Usually intended as satire, such mash-ups allow us to enjoy an array of cultural elements in a single work and are a direct contradiction to the cultural hierarchy model. A feature-film version of Zombies was released in 2016. Courtesy of Quirk Books (EA)
Cultural responses to and critiques of modern efficiency often manifested themselves in the mass media. For example, in Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley created a fictional world in which he cautioned readers that the efficiencies of modern science and technology posed a threat to individual dignity. Charlie
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Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936), set in a futuristic manufacturing plant, also told the story of the dehumanizing impact of modernization and machinery. Writers and artists, in their criticisms of the modern world, have often pointed to technology’s ability to alienate people from one another, capitalism’s tendency to foster greed, and government’s inclination to create bureaucracies whose inefficiency oppresses rather than helps people.
While the values of the pre-modern period (before the Industrial Revolution) were guided by a strong belief in a natural or divine order, modernization elevated individual self-expression to a more central position. Modern print media allowed ordinary readers to engage with new ideas beyond what their religious leaders and local politicians communicated to them. Modern individualism and the Industrial Revolution also triggered new forms of hierarchy in which certain individuals and groups achieved higher standing in the social order.
To be modern also meant valuing the ability of logical and scientific minds to solve problems by working in organized groups and expert teams. Progressive thinkers maintained that the printing press, the telegraph, and the railroad, in combination with a scientific attitude, would foster a new type of informed society. At the core of this society, the printed mass media—particularly newspapers— would educate the citizenry, helping to build and maintain an organized social framework.14
The idea of a well-informed rational society emerged out of the Progressive Era—a period of political and social reform that lasted roughly from the 1890s to the 1920s. On both local and national levels, Progressive Era reformers championed social movements that led to constitutional amendments for both Prohibition and women’s suffrage, political reforms that led to the secret ballot during elections, and economic reforms that ushered in the federal income tax to try to foster a more equitable society. Muckrakers—journalists who exposed corruption, waste, and scandal in business and politics—represented media’s significant contribution to this era (see Chapter 9).
Progressive Era a period of political and social reform that lasted from the 1890s to the 1920s.
Influenced by the Progressive movement, the notion of being modern in the twentieth century meant throwing off the chains of the past, breaking with tradition, and embracing progress. For example, twentieth-century journalists, in their quest for modern efficiency, focused on “the now” and the reporting of timely, new events. Newly standardized forms of front-page journalism that championed “just the facts” helped reporters efficiently meet tight deadlines. But modern newspapers often failed to take a historical perspective or to analyze
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sufficiently the ideas and interests underlying these events.
Shifting Values in Postmodern Culture For many people, the changes occurring in the postmodern period—from roughly the mid-twentieth century to today—are identified by a confusing array of examples: music videos, remote controls, Nike ads, shopping malls, fax machines, e-mail, video games, blogs, USA Today, YouTube, iPads, hip-hop, and reality TV (see Table 1.1 on page 26). Some critics argue that postmodern culture represents a way of seeing—a new condition, or even a malady, of the human spirit. Although there are many ways to define the postmodern, this textbook focuses on four major characteristics or values that resonate best with changes across media and culture: populism, diversity, nostalgia, and paradox.
postmodern the term describinga contemporary historical era spanning the 1960s to the present; its social values include opposing hierarchy, diversifying and recycling culture, questioning scientific reasoning, and embracing paradox.
As a political idea, populism tries to appeal to ordinary people by highlighting or even creating an argument or conflict between “the people” and “the elite.” In virtually every presidential campaign, populist politicians often tell stories and run ads that criticize big corporations and wealthy donors. Meant to resonate with middle-class values and regional ties, campaign narratives generally pit southern or midwestern small-town “family values” against the supposedly coarser, even corrupt, urban lifestyles associated with big cities like Washington or Los Angeles.
TABLE 1.1 TRENDS ACROSS HISTORICAL PERIODS
Trend Premodern (pre-1800s)
Modern Industrial Revolution (1800s– 1950s)
Postmodern (1950s–present)
Work hierarchies
peasants/merchants/rulers
factory workers/managers/national CEOs
temp workers/global CEOs
Major work sites
field/farm factory/office office/home/“virtual” or mobile office
Communication reach
local national global
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Communication transmission
oral/manuscript print/electronic electronic/digital
Communication channels
storytellers/elders/town criers
books/newspapers/magazines/radio
television/cable/Internet/multimedia
Communication at home
quill pen typewriter/office computer
personal computer/laptop/smartphone/social networks
Key social values
belief in natural or divine order
individualism/rationalism/efficiency/antitradition
antihierarchy/skepticism (about science, business, government, etc.)/diversity/multiculturalism/irony & paradox
Journalism oral & print- based/partisan/controlled by political parties
print-based/“objective”/efficient/timely/controlled by publishing families
TV- & Internet-based/opinionated/conversational/controlled by global entertainment conglomerates
In postmodern culture, populism manifests itself in many ways. For example, artists and performers, like Chuck Berry in “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956) or Queen in “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975), intentionally blur the border between high and low culture. In the visual arts, following Andy Warhol’s 1960s pop art style, advertisers borrow from both fine art and street art, while artists appropriate styles from commerce and popular art.
Other forms of postmodern style blur modern distinctions not only between art and commerce but also between fact and fiction. For example, television programs —such as MTV’s The Real World and Teen Mom—blur boundaries between the staged and the real, mixing serious themes and personal challenges with comedic interludes and romantic entanglements. Fake news programs, like HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, combine real, insightful news stories with biting satires of traditional broadcast and cable news programs.
Closely associated with populism, another value (or vice) of the postmodern period is the emphasis on diversity and fragmentation, including the wild juxtaposition of old and new cultural styles. Part of this stylistic diversity involves borrowing and transforming earlier ideas from the modern period. In music, hip- hop deejays and performers sample old R&B, soul, and rock classics, both reinventing old songs and creating something new. Critics of postmodern style contend that such borrowing devalues originality, emphasizing surface over depth and recycled ideas over new ones.
Another tendency of postmodern culture involves rejecting rational thought as “the answer” to every social problem, reveling instead in nostalgia for the premodern values of small communities, traditional religion, and even mystical experience. Rather than seeing science purely as enlightened thinking or rational deduction that relies on evidence, some artists, critics, and politicians criticize modern values for laying the groundwork for dehumanizing technological advances and bureaucratic problems. For example, in the renewed debates over evolution, one cultural narrative that plays out often pits scientific evidence against
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religious belief and literal interpretations of the Bible. And in popular culture, many TV programs—such as The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, and Fringe—emerged to offer mystical and supernatural responses to the “evils” of our daily world and the limits of science and the purely rational.
Lastly, the fourth aspect of our postmodern time is the willingness to accept paradox. While modern culture emphasized breaking with the past in the name of progress, postmodern culture stresses integrating—or converging—retro beliefs and contemporary culture. So at the same time that we seem nostalgic for the past, we embrace new technologies with a vengeance. For example, fundamentalist religious movements that promote seemingly outdated traditions (e.g., rejecting women’s rights to own property or seek higher education) still embrace the Internet and modern technology as recruiting tools or as channels for spreading messages. Culturally conservative politicians, who seem most comfortable with the values of the 1950s nuclear family, welcome talk shows, Twitter, Facebook, and Internet and social media ad campaigns as venues to advance their messages and causes.
FILMS OFTEN REFLECT THE KEY SOCIAL VALUES of an era—as represented by the modern and postmodern movies pictured. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936, left) satirized modern industry and the dehumanizing impact of a futuristic factory on its overwhelmed workers. Similarly, the science-fiction TV series Black Mirror (2011–present, right) takes a dark and satirical look at
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technology’s impact on today’s society. In an interview with the Guardian, series creator Charlie Brooker explains how the series relates to our world: “Like an addict, I check my Twitter timeline the moment I wake up. If technology is a drug —and it does feel like a drug—then what, precisely, are the side-effects? This area —between delight and discomfort—is where Black Mirror is set.” Chaplin/Zuma Press Liam Daniels/© Channel 4/Everett Collection
Although, as modernists warned, new technologies can isolate people or encourage them to chase their personal agendas (e.g., a student following her individual interests online), new technologies can also draw people together to advance causes; to solve community problems; or to discuss politics on radio talk shows, blog sites, or smartphones. Our lives today are full of such incongruities.
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CRITIQUING MEDIA AND CULTURE
In contemporary life, cultural boundaries are being tested; the arbitrary lines between information and entertainment have become blurred. Consumers now read newspapers on their smartphones. Media corporations do business across vast geographic boundaries. We are witnessing media convergence, in which everything from magazines to movies is channeled onto screens through the Internet, TV, and smartphones.
Considering the diversity of mass media, to paint them all with the same broad brush would be inaccurate and unfair. Yet that is often what we seem to do, which may in fact reflect the distrust many of us have of prominent social institutions, from local governments to daily newspapers. While revelations about phone hacking and government surveillance make this distrust understandable, it’s ultimately more useful to replace cynicism with genuine criticism. To deal with these shifts in how we experience media and culture, as well as their impact, we need to develop a profound understanding of the media, focused on what they offer or produce and what they downplay or ignore.
Media Literacy and the Critical Process Developing media literacy—that is, attaining an understanding of mass media and how they construct meaning—requires following a critical process that takes us through the steps of description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement (see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process” on pages 28–29). We will be aided in our critical process by keeping an open mind, trying to understand the specific cultural forms we are critiquing, and acknowledging the complexity of contemporary culture.
media literacy an understanding of the mass communication process through the development of critical-thinking tools— description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, engagement —that enable a person to become more engaged as a citizen and more discerning as a consumer of mass media products.
critical process the process whereby a media-literate person or student studying mass communication forms and practices employs the techniques of description, analysis, interpretation,
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evaluation, and engagement.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
It is easy to form a cynical view about the stream of TV advertising, reality programs, video games, celebrities, gossip blogs, tweets, and news tabloids that floods the cultural landscape. But cynicism is no substitute for criticism. To become literate about media involves striking a balance between taking a critical position (developing knowledgeable interpretations and judgments) and becoming tolerant of diverse forms of expression (appreciating the distinctive variety of cultural products and processes).
A cynical view usually involves some form of intolerance and either too little or too much information. For example, after enduring the glut of news coverage and political advertising devoted to the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, we might easily become cynical about our political system. However, information in the form of “factual” news bits and knowledge about a complex social process such as a national election are not the same thing. The critical process stresses the subtle distinctions between amassing information and becoming media literate.
1 DESCRIPTION
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If we decide to focus on how well the news media serve democracy, we might critique the fairness of several programs or individual stories from, say, 60 Minutes or the New York Times. We start by describing the programs or articles, accounting for their reporting strategies, and noting those featured as interview subjects. We might further identify central characters, conflicts, topics, and themes. From the notes taken at this stage, we can begin comparing what we have found to other stories on similar topics. We can also document what we think is missing from these news narratives—the questions, viewpoints, and persons that were not included—and other ways to tell the story.
2 ANALYSIS In the second stage of the critical process, we isolate patterns that call for closer attention. At this point, we decide how to focus the critique. Because 60 Minutes has produced thousands of hours of programs in its nearly fifty- year history, our critique might spotlight just a few key patterns. For example, many of the program’s reports are organized like detective stories, reporters are almost always visually represented at a medium distance, and interview subjects are generally shot in tight close-ups. In studying the New York Times, in contrast, we might limit our analysis to social or political events in certain countries that get covered more often than events in other areas of the world. Or we could focus on recurring topics chosen for front- page treatment, or the number of quotes from male and female experts.
3 INTERPRETATION In the interpretation stage, we try to determine the meanings of the patterns we have analyzed. The most difficult stage in criticism, interpretation demands an answer to the “So what?” question. For instance, the greater visual space granted to 60 Minutes reporters—compared with the close-up shots used for interview subjects—might mean that the reporters appear to be in control. They are given more visual space in which to operate, whereas interview subjects have little room to maneuver within the visual frame. As a result, the subjects often look guilty and the reporters look heroic—or, at least, in charge. Likewise, if we look again at the New York Times, its attention to particular countries could mean that the paper tends to cover nations in which the United States has more vital political or economic interests, even though the Times might claim to be neutral and evenhanded in its reporting of news from around the world.
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Developing a media-literate critical perspective involves mastering five overlapping stages that build on one another:
Description: paying close attention, taking notes, and researching the subject under study Analysis: discovering and focusing on significant patterns that emerge from the description stage Interpretation: asking and answering “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about one’s findings Evaluation: arriving at a judgment about whether something is good, bad, or mediocre, which involves subordinating one’s personal taste to the critical “bigger picture” resulting from the first three stages Engagement: taking some action that connects our critical perspective with our role as citizens and watchdogs to question our media institutions, adding our own voice to the process of shaping the cultural environment
description the first step in the critical process, it involves paying close attention, taking notes, and researching the cultural product to be studied.
analysis the second step in the critical process, it involves discovering significant patterns that emerge from the description stage.
interpretation the third step in the critical process, it asks and answers the “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about one’s findings.
evaluation the fourth step in the critical process, it involves arriving at a judgment about whether a cultural product is good, bad, or mediocre; this requires subordinating one’s personal taste to the critical assessment resulting from the first three stages
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(description, analysis, and interpretation).
engagement the fifth step in the critical process, it involves actively working to create a media world that best serves democracy.
Let’s look at each of these stages in greater detail.
4 EVALUATION The fourth stage of the critical process focuses on making an informed judgment. Building on description, analysis, and interpretation, we are better able to evaluate the fairness of a group of 60 Minutes or New York Times reports. At this stage, we can grasp the strengths and weaknesses of the news media under study and make critical judgments measured against our own frames of reference—what we like and dislike, as well as what seems good or bad or missing, in the stories and coverage we analyzed.
This fourth stage differentiates the reviewer (or previewer) from the critic. Most newspaper reviews, for example, are limited by daily time or space constraints. Although these reviews may give us key information about particular programs, they often begin and end with personal judgments —“This is a quality show” or “That was a piece of trash”—that should be saved for this fourth stage in the critical process. Regrettably, many reviews do not reflect such a process; they do not move much beyond the writer’s own frame of reference or personal taste.
5 ENGAGEMENT To be fully media literate, we must actively work to create a media world that helps serve democracy. Thus, we have added a fifth stage in the critical process—engagement. In our 60 Minutes and New York Times examples, engagement might involve something as simple as writing a formal letter or an e-mail to these media outlets to offer a critical take on the news narratives we are studying.
But engagement can also mean participating in Web discussions; contacting various media producers or governmental bodies like the Federal Communications Commission with critiques and ideas; organizing or participating in public media literacy forums; or learning to construct different types of media narratives ourselves—whether print, audio, video, or online—to participate directly in the creation of mainstream or alternative
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media. Producing actual work for media outlets might involve writing news stories for a local newspaper (and its Web site), producing a radio program or podcast on a controversial or significant community issue, or constructing a Web site that critiques various news media. The key to this stage is to challenge our civic imaginations, to refuse to sit back and cynically complain about the media without taking some action that lends our own voices and critiques to the process.
Just as communication cannot always be reduced to the old linear sender- message-receiver model, many forms of media and culture are not easily represented by the high–low model. We should, perhaps, strip culture of such adjectives as high, low, popular, and mass, which can artificially force media into predetermined categories. We might instead look at a wide range of issues generated by culture, from the role of storytelling in the media to the global influences of media industries on the consumer marketplace. We should also be moving toward a critical perspective that takes into account the intricacies of the cultural landscape. A fair critique of any cultural form, regardless of its social or artistic reputation, requires a working knowledge of the particular book, program, or music under scrutiny. For example, to understand W. E. B. Du Bois’s essays, critics immerse themselves in his work and in the historical context in which he wrote. Similarly, if we want to develop a meaningful critique of TV’s Empire or a gossip magazine’s obsession with Justin Bieber, it is essential to understand the contemporary context in which these cultural phenomena are produced.
To begin this process of critical assessment, we must imagine culture as richer and more complicated than the high–low model allows. We must also assume a critical stance that enables us to get outside our own preferences. We may like or dislike hip-hop, R&B, pop, or country, but if we want to criticize these musical genres intelligently, we should understand what the various types of music have to say and why their messages appeal to particular audiences that may be different from us. The same approach applies to other cultural forms. If we critique a newspaper article, we must account for the language that is chosen and what it means; if we analyze a film or TV program, we need to “rewind,” or slow down the images, in order to understand how they make sense and create meaning.
Benefits of a Critical Perspective Developing an informed critical perspective and becoming media literate allow us to participate in a debate about media culture as a force for both democracy and consumerism. On the one hand, the media can be a catalyst for democracy and social progress. Consider the role of television in spotlighting racism and injustice in the 1960s; the use of video technology to reveal oppressive conditions in China and Eastern Europe or to document crimes by urban police departments; and the role of blogs and Twitter in debunking bogus claims or protesting fraudulent
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elections. The media have also helped to renew interest in diverse cultures around the world and other emerging democracies.
On the other hand, competing against these democratic tendencies is a powerful commercial culture that reinforces a world economic order controlled by relatively few multinational corporations. For instance, when Poland threw off the shackles of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, one of the first things its new leadership did was buy and dub the American soap operas Santa Barbara and Dynasty. For some, these shows were a relief from sober Soviet political propaganda, but others worried that Poles might inherit another kind of indoctrination—one starring American consumer culture and dominated by large international media companies.
This example illustrates that contemporary culture cannot easily be characterized as one thing or another. Binary terms such as liberal and conservative or high and low have less meaning in an environment where so many boundaries have been blurred, so many media forms have converged, and so many diverse styles and cultures coexist. Modern distinctions between print and electronic culture have begun to break down largely because of the increasing number of individuals who have come of age in what is a melting pot of print, electronic, and digital culture.15 Either/or models of culture, such as the high–low approach, are giving way to more inclusive and varied ideas, like the map model for culture discussed earlier.
What are the social implications of the new, blended, and merging cultural phenomena? How do we deal with the fact that public debate and news about everyday life now seem to come more from Facebook, Twitter, John Oliver, SNL, and bloggers than from the Wall Street Journal, the NBC Nightly News, and Time magazine?16 Clearly, such changes challenge us to reassess and rebuild the standards by which we judge our culture. The search for answers lies in recognizing the links between cultural expression and daily life. The search also involves monitoring how well the mass media serve democracy, not just by providing us with consumer culture but by encouraging us to help improve political, social, and economic practices. A healthy democracy requires the active involvement of everyone. Part of this involvement means watching over the role and impact of the mass media, a job that belongs to every one of us—not just the paid media critics and watchdog organizations.
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1 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
In telling the story of mass media, several plotlines and major themes recur and help provide the big picture—the larger context for understanding the links between forms of mass media and popular culture. Under each thread that follows, we pose a set of questions that we will investigate together to help you explore media and culture:
Developmental stages of mass media. How did the media evolve, from their origins in ancient oral traditions to their incarnation on the Internet today? What discoveries, inventions, and social circumstances drove the development of different media? What roles do new technologies play in changing contemporary media and culture? The commercial nature of mass media. What role do media ownership and government regulation play in the presentation of commercial media products and serious journalism? How do the desire for profit and other business demands affect and change the media landscape? What role should government oversight play? What role do we play as ordinary viewers, readers, students, critics, and citizens? The converged nature of media. How has convergence changed the experience of media from the print to the digital era? What are the significant differences between reading a printed newspaper and reading the news online? What changes have to be made in the media business to help older forms of media, like newspapers, transition to an online world? The role that media play in a democracy. How are policy decisions and government actions affected by the news media and other mass media? How do individuals find room in the media terrain to express alternative (nonmainstream) points of view? How do grassroots movements create media to influence and express political ideas?
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Mass media, cultural expression, and storytelling. What are the advantages and pitfalls of the media’s appetite for telling and selling stories? As we reach the point where almost all media exist on the Internet in some form, how have our culture and our daily lives been affected? Critical analysis of the mass media. How can we use the critical process to understand, critique, and influence the media? How important is it to be media literate in today’s world? At the end of each chapter, we will examine the historical contexts and current processes that shape media products. By becoming more critical consumers and more engaged citizens, we will be in a better position to influence the relationships among mass media, democratic participation, and the complex cultural landscape that we all inhabit.
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
communication, 5 culture, 5 mass media, 6 mass communication, 6 digital communication, 8 selective exposure, 9 convergence, 10 cross platform, 11 narrative, 13 high culture, 15 low culture, 15 modern period, 24 Progressive Era, 25 postmodern period, 25 media literacy, 27 critical process, 27
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description, 28 analysis, 28 interpretation, 28 evaluation, 29 engagement, 29
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
Culture and the Evolution of Mass Communication 1. Define culture, mass communication, and mass media, and
explain their interrelationships. 2. What key technological breakthroughs accompanied the
transition to the print and electronic eras? Why were these changes significant?
3. Explain the limitations of the old linear model of mass communication.
The Development of Media and Their Role in Our Society 4. Describe the development of a mass medium from emergence to
convergence. 5. In looking at the history of popular culture, explain why newer
and emerging forms of media seem to threaten status quo values. Surveying the Cultural Landscape
6. Describe the skyscraper model of culture. What are its strengths and limitations?
7. Describe the map model of culture. What are its strengths and limitations?
8. What are the chief differences between modern and postmodern values?
Critiquing Media and Culture 9. What are the five steps in the critical process? Which of these is
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the most difficult, and why? 10. What is the difference between cynicism and criticism? 11. Why is the critical process important?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. Drawing on your experience, list the kinds of media stories you like and dislike. You might think mostly of movies and TV shows, but remember that news, sports, political ads, and product ads are also usually structured as stories. Conversations on Facebook can also be considered narratives. What kinds of stories do you like and dislike on Facebook, and why?
2. Cite some examples in which the media have been accused of unfairness. Draw on comments from parents, teachers, religious leaders, friends, news media, and so on. Discuss whether these criticisms have been justified.
3. Pick an example of a popular media product that you think is harmful to children. How would you make your concerns known? Should the product be removed from circulation? Why or why not? If you think the product should be banned, how would you do so?
4. Make a critical case either defending or condemning Comedy Central’s South Park, a TV or radio talk show, a hip-hop group, a soap opera, or TV news coverage of the ongoing wars in the Middle East. Use the five-step critical process to develop your position.
5. Although in some ways postmodern forms of communication, such as e-mail, MTV, smartphones, and Twitter, have helped citizens participate in global life, in what ways might these forms harm more traditional or native cultures?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter. VIDEO: THE MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY This video traces the
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history of the media’s role in democracy, from newspapers and television to the Internet.
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PART 1 Digital Media and Convergence
Think about the media technologies in your life when you were growing up. How did you watch TV shows, listen to music, or communicate with friends? And how have those technologies changed since then?
Ever-increasing download speeds and more portable devices have fundamentally changed the ways in which we access and consume media. As you can see on the infographic on the opposite page, media didn’t always develop this quickly; an early medium like radio could take decades to fully emerge, while today a Web site or an app can reach similar audience thresholds in a matter of years or even days. With these changes, the history of mass media has moved from emergence to convergence. While electronic media have been around for a long time, it was the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium that allowed an array of media to converge in one space and be easily shared, leading us to the digital turn. The shift will continue to shape our media consumption for years to come.
The digital turn has made us more fragmented—but also more connected. Facebook and Twitter have made it easier to tell friends—and strangers— what we’re watching, reading, and listening to. Mass media are more integrated into our lives than ever before.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture to explore an interactive timeline of the history of mass communication, practice your media literacy skills, test your knowledge of the concepts in the textbook with LearningCurve, explore and discuss current trends in mass communication with Video Activities and Video Tools, and more.
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2 The Internet, Digital Media, and Media Convergence
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vita khorzhevska/Shutterstock
DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
FOR AT LEAST some of us, the social mediated version of ourselves becomes the predominant way we experience the world. As Time magazine has noted, “Experiences don’t feel fully real” until we have “tweeted them or tumbled them or YouTubed them— and the world has congratulated you for doing so.”1 Social media is all about us—we are simultaneously the creators and the subjects. But the flip side of promoting our own experiences on social media as the most awesome happenings ever (and too bad you aren’t here) is the social anxiety associated with reading about other people’s experiences and realizing that you are not actually there.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNET AND THE WEB THE WEB GOES SOCIAL CONVERGENCE AND MOBILE MEDIA THE ECONOMICS AND ISSUES OF THE INTERNET THE INTERNET AND DEMOCRACY
◄ FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is the anxiety that something exciting may be happening while
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you’re off doing something else. The uninterrupted Internet connection we get from smartphones allows us to be in constant contact with friends through social media. But at what cost?
The problem is called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), and it has been defined as “the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you’re missing out—that your peers are doing, in the know about or in possession of more or something better than you.”2 There are plenty of platforms for posting about ourselves and anxiously creeping on others—Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, and Vine are just a few of the sites that can feed our FOMO problem.
The fear of missing out has been around long before social media was invented. Bragging, photos, postcards, and those holiday letters have usually put the most positive spin on people’s lives. But social media and mobile technology make being exposed to the interactions you missed a 24/7 phenomenon. There is potentially always something better you could have/should have been doing, right?
With FOMO, there is a “desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing,” so the person suffering from the anxiety continues to be tethered to social media, tracking “friends” and sacrificing time that might be spent having in- person, unmediated experiences.3 All of this time on social media may not make us happy. For example, a study by University of Michigan researchers found that the use of Facebook (the most popular social media site) makes college students feel worse about themselves. The two-week study found that the more the students used Facebook, the more two components of well-being declined: how people feel moment-to-moment, and how satisfied they are with their lives—regardless of how many Facebook “friends” they had in their network.4
Studies about happiness routinely conclude that the best path to subjective well- being (i.e., happiness) and life satisfaction is having a community of close personal relationships. Social psychologists Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener acknowledge that the high use of mobile phones, text messaging, and social media is evidence that people want to connect. But they also explain that “we don’t just need relationships: we need close ones.” They conclude, “The close relationships that produce the most happiness are those characterized by mutual understanding, caring, and validation of the other person as worthwhile.”5 Thus, frequent contact isn’t enough to produce the kinds of relationships that produce the most happiness.
Ironically, there has never been a medium better than the Internet and its social
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media platforms to bring people together. How many people do you know who met online and went on to have successful friendships or romantic relationships? How often have social media connections enhanced close relationships for you? Still, according to Diener and Biswas-Diener, maintaining close relationships may require a “vacation” from social media from time to time, experiencing something together with a friend or friends. Of course (and we hate to say it), you will still need to text, message, e-mail, or call to arrange that date.
THE INTERNET—the vast network of telephone and cable lines, wireless connections, and satellite systems designed to link and carry digital information worldwide—was initially described as an information superhighway. This description implied that the goal of the Internet was to build a new media network —a new superhighway—to replace traditional media (e.g., books, newspapers, television, and radio)—the old highway system. In many ways, that description has turned out to be true. The Internet has expanded dramatically from its initial establishment in the 1960s to an enormous media powerhouse that encompasses— but has not replaced—all other media today.
Internet the vast network of telephone and cable lines, wireless connections, and satellite systems designed to link and carry computer information worldwide.
YOUTUBE remains the most popular Web site for watching videos online. Full of amateur and home videos, the site also partners with mainstream television and movie companies to provide professional content. Some videos blur the lines between amateur and professional content. For example, one famous YouTube video about honey badgers (pictured) combines preexisting National Geographic footage with
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commentary by an enthusiastic amateur narrator. The video, which was uploaded in January 2011, has garnered over 78 million views. vita khorzhevska/Shutterstock
In this chapter, we examine the many dimensions of the Internet, digital media, and convergence. We will:
Review the birth of the Internet and the development of the Web Provide an overview of the key features of the Internet, including e- mail, instant messaging, search engines, and social media Discuss the convergence of the Internet with mobile media, such as smartphones and tablets, and how the Internet has changed our relationship with media Examine the economics of the Internet, including the control of Internet content, ownership issues, and the five leading Internet companies Investigate the critical issues of the Internet, such as targeted advertising, free speech, security, net neutrality, and access
As you read through this chapter, think back to your first experiences with the Internet. What was your first encounter like? What were some of the things you remember using the Internet for then? How did it compare with your first encounters with other mass media? How has the Internet changed since your first experiences with it? For more questions to help you think through the role of the Internet in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNET AND THE WEB
From its humble origins as a military communications network in the 1960s, the Internet became increasingly interactive by the 1990s, allowing immediate two- way communication and one-to-many communication. By 2000, the Internet was a multimedia source for both information and entertainment as it quickly became an integral part of our daily lives. For example, in 2000, about 50 percent of American adults were connected to the Internet; by 2015, about 89 percent of American adults used the Internet.6
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
The Birth of the Internet The Internet originated as a military-government project, with computer time- sharing as one of its goals. In the 1960s, computers were relatively new, and there were only a few of the expensive, room-sized mainframe computers across the country for researchers to use. The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) developed a solution to enable researchers to share computer processing time starting in the late 1960s. This original Internet—called ARPAnet and nicknamed the Net—enabled military and academic researchers to communicate on a distributed network system (see Figure 2.1). First, ARPA created a wired network system in which users from multiple locations could log into a computer whenever they needed it. Second, to prevent logjams in data communication, the network used a system called packet switching, which broke down messages into smaller pieces to more easily route them through the multiple paths on the network before reassembling them on the other end.
ARPAnet the original Internet, designed by the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
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FIGURE 2.1 DISTRIBUTED NETWORKS In a centralized network (a), all the paths lead to a single nerve center. Decentralized networks (b) contain several main nerve centers. In a distributed network (c), which resembles a net, there are no nerve centers; if any connection is severed, information can be immediately rerouted and delivered to its destination. But is there a downside to distributed networks when it comes to the circulation of network viruses? Data from: Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
Ironically, one of the most hierarchically structured and centrally organized institutions in our culture—the national defense industry—created the Internet, possibly the least hierarchical and most decentralized social network ever conceived. Each computer hub in the Internet has similar status and power, so nobody can own the system outright, and nobody has the power to kick others off the network. There isn’t even a master power switch, so authority figures cannot shut off the Internet— although as we will discuss later, some nations and corporations have attempted to restrict access for political or commercial benefit.
To enable military personnel and researchers involved in the development of ARPAnet to better communicate with one another from separate locations, an essential innovation during the development stage of the Internet was e-mail. It was invented in 1971 by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson, who developed software to send electronic mail messages to any computer on ARPAnet. He decided to use the @ symbol to signify the location of the computer user, thus establishing the “login name @host computer” convention for e-mail addresses.
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e-mail electronic mail messages sent over the Internet; developed by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1971.
At this point in the development stage, the Internet was primarily a tool for universities, government research labs, and corporations involved in computer software and other high-tech products to exchange e-mail and to post information. As the use of the Internet continued to proliferate, the entrepreneurial stage quickly came about.
The Net Widens From the early 1970s until the late 1980s, a number of factors (both technological and historical) brought the Net to the entrepreneurial stage, in which it became a marketable medium. The first signal of the Net’s marketability came in 1971 with the introduction of microprocessors, miniature circuits that process and store electronic signals. This innovation facilitated the integration of thousands of transistors and related circuitry into thin strands of silicon along which binary codes traveled. Using microprocessors, manufacturers were eventually able to introduce the first personal computers (PCs), which were smaller, cheaper, and more powerful than the bulky computer systems of the 1960s. With personal computers now readily available, a second opportunity for marketing the Net came in 1986, when the National Science Foundation developed a high-speed communications network (NSFNET) designed to link university research computer centers around the country and also encourage private investment in the Net. This innovation led to a dramatic increase in Internet use and further opened the door to the widespread commercial possibilities of the Internet.
microprocessors miniature circuits that process and store electronic signals, integrating thousands of electronic components into thin strands of silicon, along which binary codes travel.
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COMMODORE 64 This advertisement for the Commodore 64, one of the first home PCs, touts the features of the computer. Although it was heralded in its time, today’s PCs far exceed its abilities. Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives
In the mid-1980s, fiber-optic cable became the standard for transmitting communication data speedily. This development of thinner, faster cables made the commercial use of computers even more viable than before. With this increased speed, few limits exist with regard to the amount of information that digital technology can transport.
fiber-optic cable thin glass bundles of fiber capable of transmitting along cable wires thousands of messages converted to shooting pulses of light; these bundles of fiber can carry broadcast channels, telephone signals, and a variety of digital codes.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the ARPAnet military venture officially ended. By that time, a growing community of researchers, computer programmers, amateur hackers, and commercial interests had already tapped into the Net, creating tens of thousands of points on the network and the initial audience for its emergence as a mass medium.
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The Commercialization of the Internet The introduction of the World Wide Web and the first Web browsers, Mosaic and Netscape, in the 1990s helped transform the Internet into a mass medium. Soon after these developments, the Internet quickly became commercialized, leading to battles between corporations vying to attract the most users, and others who wished to preserve the original public, nonprofit nature of the Net.
The World Begins to Browse Prior to the 1990s, most of the Internet’s traffic was for e-mail, file transfers, and remote access of computer databases. The World Wide Web (or the Web) changed all that. Developed in the late 1980s by software engineer Tim Berners- Lee at the CERN particle physics lab in Switzerland to help scientists better collaborate, the Web was initially a text data-linking system that allowed computer-accessed information to associate with, or link to, other information no matter where it was on the Internet. Known as hypertext, this data-linking feature of the Web was a breakthrough for those attempting to use the Internet. HTML (hypertext markup language), the written code that creates Web pages and links, is a language that all computers can read, so computers with different operating systems, such as Windows or Macintosh, can communicate easily. The Web and HTML allow information to be organized in an easy-to-use nonlinear manner, making way for the next step in using the Internet.
World Wide Web (WWW) a data-linking system for organizing and standardizing information on the Internet; the WWW enables computer- accessed information to associate with—or link to—other information, no matter where it is on the Internet.
HTML (hypertext markup language) the written code that creates Web pages and links; a language all computers can read.
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WEB BROWSERS The GUI (graphical user interface) of the World Wide Web changed overnight with the release of Mosaic in 1993. As the first popular Web browser, Mosaic unleashed the multimedia potential of the Internet. Mosaic was the inspiration for the commercial browser Netscape, which was released in 1994. Courtesy of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
The release of Web browsers—the software packages that help users navigate the Web—brought the Web to mass audiences. In 1993, computer programmers led by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign released Mosaic, the first window-based browser to load text and graphics together in a magazine-like layout, with attractive fonts and easy-to-use back, forward, home, and bookmark buttons at the top. In 1994, Andreessen joined investors in California’s Silicon Valley to introduce a commercial browser, Netscape. These breakthroughs helped universities and businesses, and later home users, get connected.
browsers information-search services, such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome, that offer detailed organizational maps to the Internet.
As the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, many thought that the key to commercial success on the Net would be through a Web browser. In 1995, Microsoft released its own Web browser, Internet Explorer, which overtook Netscape as the most popular Web browser. Today, Internet Explorer has been replaced by Microsoft’s Edge, and Chrome and Firefox are the top browsers.
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Users Link in through Telephone and Cable Wires In the first decades of the Internet, most people connected to “cyberspace” through telephone wires. AOL (formerly America Online) began connecting millions of home users in 1985 to its proprietary Web system through dial-up access, and quickly became the United States’ top Internet service provider (ISP). AOL’s success was so great that by 2001, the Internet start-up bought the world’s largest media company, Time Warner—a deal that shocked the industry and signaled the Internet’s economic significance as a vehicle for media content. As broadband connections, which can quickly download multimedia content, became more available (about 81 percent of all American households had such connections by 2015), users moved away from the slower telephone dial-up service to high-speed service from cable, telephone, or satellite companies.7 By 2007, both AT&T (offering DSL and cable broadband) and Comcast (cable broadband) surpassed AOL in numbers of customers. Today, other major ISPs include Verizon, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and Charter. These are accompanied by hundreds of local services, many offered by regional telephone and cable companies that compete to provide consumers with access to the Internet.
Internet service provider (ISP) a company that provides Internet access to homes and businesses for a fee.
broadband data transmission over a fiber-optic cable—a signaling method that handles a wide range of frequencies.
People Embrace Digital Communication In digital communication, an image, a text, or a sound is converted into electronic signals represented as a series of binary numbers—ones and zeros—which are then reassembled as a precise reproduction of an image, a text, or a sound. Digital signals operate as pieces, or bits (from BInary digiTS), of information representing two values, such as yes/no, on/off, or 0/1. Used in various combinations, these digital codes can duplicate, store, and play back the most complex kinds of media content.
digital communication images, texts, and sounds that use pulses of electric current or flashes of laser light and are converted (or encoded) into
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electronic signals represented as varied combinations of binary numbers (ones and zeros); these signals are then reassembled (decoded) as a precise reproduction of a TV picture, a magazine article, or a telephone voice.
E-mail was one of the earliest services of the Internet, and people typically used the e-mail services connected to their ISPs before major Web corporations such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (Hotmail) began to offer free Web-based e- mail accounts to draw users to their sites; each now has millions of users. Today, all the top e-mail services also include advertisements in their users’ e-mail messages, one of the costs of the “free” e-mail accounts. Google’s Gmail goes one step further by scanning messages to dynamically match a relevant ad to the text each time an e-mail message is opened. Such targeted advertising has become a hallmark feature of the Internet.
SNAPCHAT allows users to send one another photos, videos, and/or text that will disappear
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after a certain amount of time. Like a lot of popular apps, the program gained a large following from a young audience and expanded out from there. Hundreds of millions of photos are sent through the application every day.
Although e-mail remains a standard for business-related text communications in the digital era, it has been surpassed in popularity by instant messaging (IM), which enables typed conversations in real time. Instant messages are less formal and more conversational; in fact, the style sparked a number of now-common abbreviations, including OMG, LOL, and LMAO. Major IM services include Google Chat, Facebook Chat, Microsoft’s Skype, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo!’s Messenger, and Apple’s iChat. IM has evolved and expanded with mobile texting, embracing smartphone apps like Snapchat, a photo messaging service that thrives on the cultural popularity of sending “selfies” and captions to friends. The images erase themselves in one to ten seconds, depending on the user’s settings. In 2014 (after reportedly offering $3 billion to buy Snapchat in a failed deal the year before), Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp, a cross- platform IM service that now has more than one billion users worldwide.
instant messaging a Web feature that enables users to chat with friends in real time via pop-up windows assigned to each conversation.
Search Engines Organize the Web As the number of Web sites on the Internet quickly expanded, companies seized the opportunity to provide ways to navigate this vast amount of information by providing directories and search engines. One of the more popular search engines, Yahoo!, began as a directory. In 1994, Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo created a Web page to organize their favorite Web sites, first into categories, then into more and more subcategories as the Web grew. At that point, the entire World Wide Web was almost manageable, with only about twenty-two thousand Web sites. (By 2014, Google announced it had indexed more than sixty trillion Web pages, up from one billion in 2000.)
Eventually, though, having employees catalog individual Web sites became impractical. Search engines offer a more automated route to finding content by allowing users to enter key words or queries to locate related Web pages. Search engines are built on mathematic algorithms. Google, released in 1998, became a major success because it introduced a new algorithm that mathematically ranked a page’s “popularity” on the basis of how many other pages linked to it. Google later moved to maintain its search dominance with its Google Voice Search and Google Goggles apps, which allow smartphone users to conduct searches by voicing search
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terms or by taking a photo. By 2015, Google’s global market share accounted for more than 70 percent of searches, while Microsoft’s Bing claimed 9.8 percent, Yahoo! reached 9.6 percent, and China’s Baidu claimed 7.5 percent.8
search engines sites or applications that offer a more automated route to finding content by allowing users to enter key words or queries to locate related Web pages.
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THE WEB GOES SOCIAL
Aided by faster microprocessors, high-speed broadband networks, and a proliferation of digital content, the Internet has become more than just an information source in its third decade as a mass medium. The third generation of the Internet is a much more robust and social environment, having moved toward being a fully interactive medium with user-created content like blogs, Tumblrs, YouTube videos, Flickr photostreams, social networking, and other collaborative sites. It’s the users who ultimately rule here, sharing the words, sounds, images, and creatively edited music remixes and mash-up videos that make these Web communities worth visiting.
Social media are digital media platforms that engage users to create content, add comments, and interact with others. Social media have become a new distribution system for media as well, challenging the one-to-many model of traditional mass media with the many-to-many model of social media.
social media digital applications that allow people worldwide to have conversations, share common interests, and generate their own media content online.
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The Net (1995) Sandra Bullock communicates using her computer in this clip from the 1995 thriller.
Discussion: How does this 1995 movie portray online communication? What does it get right, and what seems silly now?
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Types of Social Media In less than a decade, a number of different types of social media have evolved, with multiple platforms for the creation of user-generated content. European researchers Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein identify six categories of social media on the Internet: blogs, collaborative projects, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds.9
Blogs Years before there were status updates or Facebook, blogs enabled people to easily post their ideas to a Web site. Popularized with the release of Blogger (now owned by Google) in 1999, blogs contain articles or posts in chronological, journal-like form, often with reader comments and links to other sites. Blogs can be personal or corporate multimedia sites, sometimes with photos, graphics, podcasts, and video. Some blogs have developed into popular news and culture sites, such as the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable, Gawker, HotAir, ThinkProgress, and TPM Muckraker.
blogs sites that contain articles in reverse chronological journal- like form, often with reader comments and links to other articles on the Web (from the term Weblog).
Blogs have become part of the information and opinion culture of the Web, giving regular people and citizen reporters a forum for their ideas and views, and providing a place for even professional journalists to informally share ideas before a more formal news story gets published. Some of the leading platforms for blogging include Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Weebly, and Wix. But by 2016, the most popular form of blogging was microblogging, with about 320 million active users on Twitter, sending out 500 million tweets (a short message with a 140- character limit) per day.10 In 2013, Twitter introduced an app called Vine that enabled users to post short video clips. A few months later, Facebook’s Instagram responded with its own video-sharing service.
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VINE, a short video-sharing service founded in 2012, was acquired by Twitter later that year, and officially launched in 2013. The most popular Vine stars have millions of followers, and some of them can make a living through product placements in their six-second videos.
Collaborative Projects Another Internet development involves collaborative projects in which users build something together, often using wiki (which means “quick” in Hawaiian) technology. Wiki Web sites enable anyone to edit and contribute to them. The whistle-blower site WikiLeaks gained notoriety for its release of thousands of United States diplomatic cables and other sensitive documents beginning in 2010 (see page 476 in Chapter 14). But the most notable wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia launched in 2001 that is constantly updated and revised by interested volunteers. All previous page versions of Wikipedia are stored, allowing users to see how each individual topic developed. The English version of Wikipedia is the largest, containing more than five million articles, but Wikipedias are also being developed in 289 other languages.
wiki Web sites Web sites that are capable of being edited by any user; the most famous is Wikipedia.
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Businesses and other organizations have developed social media platforms for specific collaborative projects. Tools like Trello and Google Drive provide social media interfaces for organizing project and event-planning schedules, messages, to-do lists, and workflows. Kickstarter is a popular fund-raising tool for creative projects like books, recordings, and films. InnoCentive is a crowdsourcing community that offers award payments for people who can solve business and scientific problems. And Change.org has become an effective petition project to push for social change. For example, Chris Izanskey began a campaign to petition the governor of Missouri to grant clemency to his father, a prison inmate for twenty years on nonviolent, marijuana-only offenses, with no possibility of parole. Nearly 400,000 people signed the Change.org petition, and Chris’s father walked free in 2015.
KICKSTARTER has funded 100,000 creative projects since its launch in 2009. According to Kickstarter’s data, 10.2 million people have pledged more than $2.2 billion for the projects. Some notable successes include the Oculus Rift (9,522 backers pledging $2.4 million), a virtual reality gaming headset bought in 2014 by Facebook for $2 billion; Helix (1,069 backers pledging $2.2 million), a folding bike; student-built classrooms made from shipping containers (242 backers pledging $16,567); and the movie Blue Ruin (438 backers pledging $37,828), which won an award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Content Communities Content communities are the best examples of the many-to-many ethic of social media. Content communities exist for the sharing of all types of content, from text (FanFiction.net) to photos (Flickr, Photobucket) and videos (YouTube, Vimeo). YouTube, created in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006, is the most well-known content community, with hundreds of millions of users around the world uploading and watching amateur and professional videos. YouTube gave
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rise to the viral video—a video that becomes popular by millions sharing it through social media platforms. The most popular video of all time—Psy’s 2012 music video “Gangnam Style”—has more than 2.5 billion views. In 2015, YouTube reported that three hundred hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute, and it has more than one billion unique users each month.
content communities online communities that exist for the sharing of all types of content, from text to photos and videos.
Social Networking Sites Perhaps the most visible examples of social media are social networking sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Orkut, LinkedIn, and Google+. On these sites, users can create content, share ideas, and interact with friends and colleagues.
social networking sites sites on which users can create content, share ideas, and interact with friends.
Facebook is the most popular social media site on the Internet. Started at Harvard in 2004 as an online substitute to the printed facebooks the school created for incoming first-year students, Facebook was instantly a hit and soon eclipsed Myspace as the leading social media destination. The site enables users to construct personal profiles, upload photos, share music lists, play games, and post messages to connect with old friends and meet new ones. Originally, access was restricted to college students, but in 2006 the site expanded to include anyone. Soon after, Facebook grew at an astonishing rate, and by 2016 it had 1.6 billion active users and was available in more than seventy languages.
Virtual Game Worlds and Virtual Social Worlds Virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds invite users to role-play in rich 3-D environments, in real time, with players throughout the world. In virtual game worlds (also known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online, players can customize their online identity, or avatar, and work with others through the game’s challenges. Community forums for members extend discussion and shared play
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outside the game. Virtual social worlds, like Second Life, enable players to take their avatars through simulated environments and even make transactions with virtual money. (See Chapter 3 for a closer look at virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds.)
Social Media and Democracy In just a decade, social media have changed the way we consume, relate to, and even produce media and the way we communicate with others. We can share our thoughts and opinions, write or update an encyclopedic entry, start a petition or fund-raising campaign, post a video, and create and explore virtual worlds. But social media have also proven to be an effective tool for democracy and for undermining repressive regimes that thrive on serving up propaganda and hiding their atrocities from view.
The wave of protests in more than a dozen Arab nations in North Africa and the Middle East that began in late 2010 resulted in four rulers’ being forced from power by mid-2012. The Arab Spring began in Tunisia, with a twenty-six-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, who had his vegetable cart confiscated by police. Humiliated when he tried to get it back, he set himself on fire. While there had been protests before in Tunisia, the stories were never communicated widely. This time, protesters posted videos on Facebook, and satellite news networks spread the story with reports based on those videos. The protests spread across Tunisia, and in January 2011, Tunisia’s dictator of nearly twenty-four years fled the country.
EXAMINING ETHICS
“Anonymous” Hacks Global Terrorism
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S ince its earliest days, the Internet has been a medium for both good and
evil. Among the most evil uses of the Internet are those emerging from the widely condemned terrorism group ISIS, which since 2014 has used the Internet to recruit naïve new members from
around the world and to post videos of its massacres and gruesome beheadings of Westerners and other captives.
Given that, it was easy to cheer for Anonymous in 2015, when the loosely organized global hacktivist collective known for its politically and socially motivated Internet vigilantism decided to hack ISIS. The group vowed to avenge the January 2015 ISIS-supported attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo newspaper office in Paris and a Paris kosher supermarket, which killed seventeen people in all. In videos posted to YouTube (featuring a red outline of a digital character in a Guy Fawkes mask speaking in a robotic voice), Anonymous explained its goals for its #OpISIS campaign:
We are Muslims, Christians, Jews. We are hackers, crackers, hactivists, phishers, agents, spies, or just the guy from next door…. We come from all races, countries, religions, and ethnicities. United by one, divided by zero. We are Anonymous. Remember: The terrorists who are calling themselves Islamic State—ISIS—are not Muslims. ISIS, we will hunt you, take down your sites, accounts, emails, and expose you. From now on, no safe place for you online. You will be treated like the virus and we are the cure. We own the Internet…. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.1
Although some argued that Anonymous shouldn’t involve itself in anti- terrorism issues, a writer in the usually staid Foreign Policy magazine argued that the U.S. government should encourage Anonymous to go after ISIS: “If the United States is struggling to counter the Islamic State’s dispersed, rapidly regenerative online presence, why not turn to groups native to this digital habitat? Why not embrace the efforts of third-party hackers like Anonymous to dismantle the Islamic State—and even give them the resources to do so?”2 The U.S. government didn’t embrace Anonymous (not that we know of, at least). But within a few months of its campaign, Anonymous reported “233 websites attacked. 85 websites destroyed. 25,000 Twitter accounts terminated.”3
Anonymous first attracted major public attention in 2008. The issue was a video featuring a fervent Tom Cruise—meant for internal promotional use within the Church of Scientology—that had been leaked to the Web site Gawker. When the church tried to suppress the video footage on grounds of copyright, Anonymous went to work. It launched a DDoS,
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or Distributed Denial of Service, attack (flooding a server or network with external requests so that it becomes overloaded and slows down or crashes) on the church’s Web sites, bombarded the church headquarters with prank phone calls and faxes, and “doxed” the church by publishing sensitive internal documents.
If you haven’t seen Anonymous, you have probably seen the chosen “face” of Anonymous—a Guy Fawkes mask, portraying the most renowned member of the 1605 anarchist plot to assassinate King James I of England. The mask has been a part of Guy Fawkes Day commemorations in England for centuries but was made even more popular by the 2006 film V for Vendetta, based on the graphic novel series of the same name. Today, the mask has become a widespread international symbol for groups protesting financial institutions and politicians. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
United by its libertarian distrust of government, its commitment to a free and open Internet, its opposition to child pornography, and its distaste for corporate conglomerates, Anonymous has targeted organizations as diverse as the Indian government and the agricultural conglomerate Monsanto. While Anonymous agrees on an agenda and coordinates the campaign, the individual hackers all act independently of the group, without expecting recognition.
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USA Network’s TV series Mr. Robot centers on Elliot Alderson, an underground hacktivist and cyber-vigilante who works to topple the banking corporation known as E Corp. Virginia Sherwood/© USA Network/Everett Collection
As with the #OpISIS campaign, it can often be easy to find the good in the activities of hacktivists. For example, Anonymous reportedly hacked the computer network of Tunisian tyrant Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali; his downfall in 2011 was the first victory of the Arab Spring movement. In 2011, Anonymous also hacked the Web site of the Westboro Baptist Church, known for spreading its extremist antigay rhetoric, picketing funerals of soldiers, and desecrating American flags.
Hacktivism has captured the popular imagination, with hackers exhibiting almost superpower abilities with code. The USA cable network series Mr. Robot (starring Christian Slater and Rami Malek) depicts good-guy hackers taking down violent drug dealers and child pornographers. But the show dials back the superhero powers, illustrating that hackers aren’t always perfect in their skills or able to knock down security firewalls in mere seconds. With the help of a script consultant who worked in the FBI’s cybersecurity unit, Mr. Robot shows hackers working in Linux (the operating system of choice for hackers) with real code on the computer screens, and having to solve the difficult problems confronted by hackers. The effect is so real that a member of Anonymous said the show “is the most accurate portrayal of security and hacking culture ever to grace the screen.”4
In a world of large, impersonal governments and organizations, hackers level the playing field for ordinary people, responding quickly in ways much more powerful than traditional forms of protest, like writing a letter or publicly demonstrating in front of headquarters or embassies.
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Hacktivism can be seen as an update of the long tradition of peaceful protests. But sometimes it is harder to tell whether Anonymous is virtuous or not. Because the members of Anonymous are indeed anonymous, there aren’t any checks or balances on those who “dox” a corporate site, revealing documents carrying personal credit card or social security numbers and making regular citizens vulnerable to identity theft and fraud, as some hackers have done. For example, prosecutions in 2012 took down at least six international members of Anonymous when one hacker, known online as Sabu, turned out to be a government informant. One of the hackers arrested in Chicago was charged with stealing credit card data and using it to make more than $700,000 in charges.5 Just a few “bad apples” can undermine the self- managed integrity of groups like Anonymous.
The very existence of Anonymous is a sign that many of our battles are now in the digital domain. We fight for equal access and free speech on the Internet; we are in a perpetual struggle with corporations and other institutions over the privacy of our digital information; and, although our government prosecutes hackers for computer crimes, governments themselves are increasingly using hacking to fight one another. In the case of the Internet and ISIS, perhaps the U.S. government (although it might be loathe to admit it) secretly appreciates the work Anonymous does.
Even in the United States, social media have helped call attention to issues that might not have received any media attention otherwise. In 2011 and 2012, protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York and at hundreds of sites across the country took to Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and Facebook to point out the inequalities of the economy and the income disparity between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the population—the 99 percent. The physical occupations didn’t last, but the movement changed the discourse in the United States about economic inequality.11
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NEW PROTEST LANGUAGE It has become more and more commonplace to see protest signs with Twitter hashtags, URLs, information about Facebook groups, and other social media references. AFP/Getty Images
The flexible and decentralized nature of the Internet and social media is in large part what makes them such powerful tools for subverting control. In China, the Communist Party has tightly controlled mass communication for decades. As more and more Chinese citizens take to the Internet, an estimated thirty thousand government censors monitor or even block Web pages, blogs, chat rooms, and e- mails. Social media sites have frequently been blocked, and Google moved its Chinese search engine (Google.cn) to Hong Kong after the Chinese government repeatedly censored it. And for those who persist in practicing “subversive” free speech, there can be severe penalties: Paris-based Reporters without Borders reports that forty-nine Chinese journalists and eighty-four netizens were in prison in 2015 for writing articles and blogs that criticized the government.12 Still, Chinese dissenters bravely play cat-and-mouse with Chinese censors, using free services like Hushmail, Freegate, and Ultrasurf (the latter two produced by Chinese immigrants in the United States) to break through the Chinese government’s blockade. (For more on using the Internet for political and social statements, see “Examining Ethics: ‘Anonymous’ Hacks Global Terrorism” on pages 46–47.)
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CONVERGENCE AND MOBILE MEDIA
The innovation of digital communication enables all media content to be created in the same basic way, which makes media convergence, the technological merging of content in different mass media, possible.
In recent years, the Internet has really become the hub for convergence, a place where music, television shows, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, books, games, and movies are created, distributed, and presented. Although convergence initially happened on desktop computers, the popularity of notebook computers and then the introduction of smartphones and tablets have hastened the pace of media convergence and made the idea of accessing any media content, anywhere, a reality.
Media Converges on Our PCs and TVs First there was the telephone, invented in the 1870s. Then came radio in the 1920s, TV in the 1950s, and eventually the personal computer in the 1970s. Each device had its own unique and distinct function. Aside from a few exceptions, like the clock radio, that was how electronic devices worked.
The rise of the personal computer industry in the mid-1970s first opened the possibility for un-precedented technological convergence. However, PC-based convergence didn’t truly materialize until a few decades later, when broadband Internet connections improved the multimedia capabilities of computers.
By the early 2000s, computers connected to the Internet allowed an array of digital media to converge in one space and be easily shared. A user can now access television shows, movies, music, books, games, newspapers, magazines, and lots of other Web content on a computer. Other devices, like iPods, quickly capitalized on the Internet’s ability to distribute such content and were adapted to play and exhibit multiple media content forms.
Media are also converging on our television sets, as the electronics industry manufactures Internet-ready TVs. Video game consoles like the Xbox, Wii, and PS4, and set-top devices like Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV, offer additional entertainment content access via their Internet connections. In the early years of the Web, people would choose only one gateway to the Internet and media content, usually a computer or a television. Today, however, wireless networks and the recent technological developments in various media devices mean that consumers regularly use more than one avenue to access all types of media content.
Mobile Devices Propel Convergence Mobile telephones have been around for decades (like the giant “brick” mobile
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phones of the 1970s and 1980s), but the smartphones of the twenty-first century are substantially different creatures. Introduced in 2002, the BlackBerry was the first popular Internet-capable smartphone in the United States. Users’ ability to check their e-mail messages at any time created addictive e-mail behavior and earned the phones their “Crackberry” nickname. Convergence on mobile phones took another big leap in 2007 with Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, which combined qualities of its iPod digital music player and telephone and Internet service, all accessed through a sleek touchscreen. The next year, Apple opened its App Store, featuring free and low-cost software applications for the iPhone (and the iPod Touch and, later, the iPad) created by third-party developers, vastly increasing the utility of the iPhone. By 2015, there were about 1.4 million apps available to do thousands of things on Apple devices—from playing interactive games to finding locations with a GPS or using the iPhone like a carpenter’s level.
SMARTWATCHES have been a part of pulp- and science-fiction tales since the thirties, and real-life versions were developed in the seventies and eighties before electronics companies shifted their attention to laptops and cell phones. Many top digital conglomerates have begun developing smartwatches; Apple debuted its Apple watch in 2015. John MacDougall/Getty Images
In 2008, the first smartphone to run on Google’s competing Android platform was released. By 2016, Android phones (sold by companies such as Samsung, HTC, LG, and Motorola, and supported by the Google Play app market and the Amazon Appstore) held 53.3 percent of the smartphone market share in the United States, while Apple’s iPhone had a 42.9 percent share; Microsoft and BlackBerry smartphones constituted the remainder of the market.13 The precipitous drop of the BlackBerry’s market standing in just ten years (the company was late to add touchscreens and apps to its phones) illustrates the tumultuous competition in mobile devices. It also illustrates how apps and the ability to consume all types of media content on the go have surpassed voice call quality to become the most important feature to consumers purchasing a phone today.
In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad, a tablet computer suitable for reading
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magazines, newspapers, and books; watching video; and using visual applications. The tablets became Apple’s fastest-growing product line, selling at a rate of twenty-five million a year. Apple added cameras, faster graphics, and a thinner design to subsequent generations of the iPad, as companies like Samsung (Galaxy), Amazon (Kindle Fire), Microsoft (Surface), and Google (Nexus) rolled out competing tablets.
The Impact of Media Convergence and Mobile Media Convergence of media content and technology has forever changed our relationship with media. Today, media consumption is mobile and flexible; we don’t have to miss out on media content just because we weren’t home in time to catch a show, didn’t find the book at the bookstore, or forgot to buy the newspaper yesterday. Increasingly, we demand access to media when we want it, where we want it, and in multiple formats. In order to satisfy those demands and to stay relevant in such a converged world, traditional media companies have had to dramatically change their approach to media content and their business models.
Our Changing Relationship with the Media The merging of all media onto one device, such as a tablet or smartphone, blurs the distinctions of what used to be separate media. For example, USA Today (a newspaper) and CBS News (network television news) used to deliver the news in completely different formats, but today their Web forms look quite similar, with listings of headlines, rankings of the most popular stories, local weather forecasts, photo galleries, and video. New forms of media are challenging old categories. Is listening to an hour-long archived episode of public radio’s This American Life on a smartphone more like experiencing a radio program or more like experiencing an audio book?
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IN NOVEMBER 2015, the city of Brussels, Belgium, went under government lockdown as authorities hunted for suspected terrorists. The Brussels Federal Police created the Twitter hashtag #BrusselsLockdown—but they probably didn’t expect that citizens would use the hashtag to tweet photos of cats. Tweets like the one shown above went viral as Brussels residents maintained their sense of humor during the crisis.
Not only are the formats morphing, but we can now also experience the media in more than one manner, simultaneously. Fans of television shows like The Voice, Empire, and Top Chef, or viewers of live events like NFL football, often multitask, reading live blogs during broadcasts or sharing their own commentary with friends on Facebook and Twitter. For those who miss the initial broadcasts, converged media offer a second life for media content through deep archive access and repurposed content on other platforms. For example, cable shows like Game of Thrones and Fargo have found audiences beyond their initial broadcasts through their DVD collections and online video services like Amazon Instant Video and Apple’s iTunes. In fact, some fans even prefer to watch these more complex shows this way, enjoying the ability to rewind an episode in order to catch a missed detail, as well as the ability to binge-watch several episodes back-to-back. This has also led to the resurrection and continuation of many TV shows that would have stayed canceled in the past—for example Arrested Development’s Netflix season.
Our Changing Relationship with the Internet Mobile devices and social media have altered our relationship with the Internet. Two trends are noteworthy: (1) Apple now makes more than six times as much money selling iPhones, iPads, and accessories as it does selling computers, and (2) the number of Facebook users (1.6 billion in 2016) keeps increasing. The significance of these two trends is that through Apple devices and Facebook, we now inhabit a different kind of Internet—what some call a closed Internet, or a
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walled garden.14 In a world where the small screens of smartphones are becoming the preferred
medium for linking to the Internet, we typically don’t get the full, open Internet, one represented by the vast searches brought to us by Google. Instead we get a more managed Internet, brought to us by apps or platforms that carry out specific functions via the Internet. Are you looking for a nearby restaurant? Don’t search on the Internet—use this app especially designed for that purpose. And the distributors of these apps act as gatekeepers. Apple has more than 1.5 million apps in its App Store, and Apple approves every one of them. The competing Android app store on Google Play has a similar number of apps, but Google exercises less control over approval of apps than Apple does.
Facebook offers a similar walled garden experience. Facebook began as a highly managed environment, only allowing those with .edu e-mail addresses. Although all are now invited to join Facebook, the interface and the user experience on the site are still highly managed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his staff. For example, Facebook has installed measures to stop search engines from indexing users’ photos, Wall posts, videos, and other data. The effect of both Apple’s devices and the Facebook interface is a clean, orderly, easy- to-use environment but one in which we are “tethered” to the Apple App Store or to Facebook.15
The open Internet—best represented by Google (but not its Google+ social networking service, which is more confining, like Facebook) and a Web browser— promised to put the entire World Wide Web at our fingertips. On the one hand, the appeal of the Internet is its openness, its free-for-all nature. But of course the trade- off is that the open Internet can be chaotic and unruly; however, apps and other walled garden services have streamlined the cacophony of the Internet considerably.
The Changing Economics of Media and the Internet The digital turn in the mass media has profoundly changed the economics of the Internet. Since the advent of Napster in 1999, which brought (illegal) file-sharing to the music industry, each media industry has struggled to rethink how to distribute its content for the digital age. The content itself is still important— people still want quality news, television, movies, music, and games—but they want it in digital formats and for mobile devices.
Apple’s response to Napster established the new media economics. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs struck a deal with the music industry. Apple would provide a new market for music on the iTunes store, selling digital music customers could play on their iPods (and later on their iPhones and iPads). In return, Apple got a 30 percent cut of the revenue for all music sales on iTunes, simply for being the “pipes” that delivered the music. As music stores went out of business all across America, Apple sold billions of songs and hundreds of millions of iPods, all without requiring a large chain of retail stores.
Amazon started as a more traditional online retailer, taking orders online and
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delivering merchandise from its warehouses. As books took the turn into the digital era, Amazon created its own device, the Kindle, and followed Apple’s model. Amazon started selling e-books, taking its cut for delivering the content. Along the way, Amazon and Apple (and Google through its Android apps) have become leading media companies. They don’t make the content (although Amazon is now publishing books, too, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013), but they are among the top digital distributors of books, newspapers, magazines, music, television, movies, and games.
The Next Era: The Semantic Web Many Internet visionaries talk about the next generation of the Internet as the Semantic Web, a term that gained prominence after hypertext inventor Tim Berners-Lee and two coauthors published an influential article in a 2001 issue of Scientific American.16 If “semantics” is the study of meanings, then the Semantic Web is about creating a more meaningful—or more organized—Web. To do that, the future promises a layered, connected database of information that software agents will sift through and process automatically for us. Whereas the search engines of today generate relevant Web pages for us to read, the software of the Semantic Web will make our lives even easier as it places the basic information of the Web into meaningful categories—family, friends, calendars, mutual interests, location—and makes significant connections for us.
THE SPIKE JONZE FILM HER (2013), set in the near future, explores the relationship between a human and an operating system. The voice-based operating system brings to mind Apple’s Siri, which moves users toward a deeper, more personally relevant Web. Google Now and Microsoft Cortana are similar voice-activated personal digital assistants for mobile devices. © Warner Bros. Pictures/Everett Collection
The best example of the Semantic Web is Apple’s voice recognition assistant
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Siri, first shipped with its iPhone 4S in 2011. Siri uses conversational voice recognition to answer questions, find locations, and interact with various iPhone functionalities, such as the calendar, reminders, the weather app, the music player, the Web browser, and the maps function. Some of its searches get directed to Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that provides direct answers to questions, rather than the list of links traditionally given as search results. Other Siri searches draw on the databases of external services, such as Yelp for restaurant locations and reviews, and StubHub for ticket information. Another example of the Semantic Web is the Samsung refrigerator that takes a photo of the interior every time the door closes. The owner may be away at the supermarket but can call up a photo of the interior to be reminded of what should be on the shopping list. The refrigerator can also be used to order groceries, with a built-in touchscreen and Wi- Fi connection.17
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THE ECONOMICS AND ISSUES OF THE INTERNET
One of the unique things about the Internet is that no one owns it. But that hasn’t stopped some corporations from trying to control it. Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which overhauled the nation’s communications regulations, most regional and long-distance phone companies and cable operators have competed against one another to provide connections to the Internet. However, there is more to controlling the Internet than being the service provider for it. Companies have realized the potential of dominating the Internet business through search engines, software, social networking, and providing access to content, all in order to sell the essential devices that display the content, or to amass users who become an audience for advertising.
Telecommunications Act of 1996 the sweeping update of telecommunications law that led to a wave of media consolidation.
Ownership and control of the Internet are connected to three Internet issues that command much public attention: the security of personal and private information, the appropriateness of online materials, and the accessibility and openness of the Internet. Important questions have been raised: Should personal or sensitive government information be private, or should the Internet be an enormous public record? Should the Internet be a completely open forum, or should certain types of communications be limited or prohibited? Should all people have equal access to the Internet, or should it be available only to those who can afford it? For each of these issues, there have been heated debates but no easy resolutions.
Ownership: Controlling the Internet By the end of the 1990s, four companies—AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google— had emerged as the leading forces on the Internet, each with a different business angle. AOL attempted to dominate the Internet as the top ISP, connecting millions of home users to its proprietary Web system through dial-up access. Yahoo!’s method was to make itself an all-purpose entry point—or portal—to the Internet. Computer software behemoth Microsoft’s approach began by integrating its Windows software with its Internet Explorer Web browser, drawing users to its MSN.com site and other Microsoft applications. Finally, Google made its play to seize the Internet with a more elegant, robust search engine to help users find Web sites.
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portal an entry point to the Internet, such as a search engine.
Since the end of the 1990s, the Internet’s digital turn toward convergence has changed the Internet and the fortunes of its original leading companies. AOL’s technological shortcomings in broadband contributed to its devaluation and eventual spin-off from Time Warner in 2009. Yahoo! was eclipsed by Google in the search engine business. In today’s converged world, in which mobile access to digital content prevails, Microsoft and Google still remain powerful. Those two, along with Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, constitute the leading companies of digital media’s rapidly changing world. Of the five, all but Facebook also operate proprietary cloud services and encourage their customers to store all their files in their “walled garden” for easy access across all devices. This ultimately builds brand loyalty and generates customer fees for file storage.18
Microsoft Microsoft, the oldest of the dominant digital firms (established by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975), is an enormously wealthy software company that struggled for years to develop an Internet strategy. As its software business declined, its flourishing digital game business (Xbox) helped it to continue to innovate and find a different path to a future in digital media. The company finally found moderate success on the Internet with its search engine Bing in 2009. With the 2012 release of the Windows Phone 8 mobile operating system and the Surface tablet, Microsoft made headway in the mobile media business. In 2014, Microsoft brought its venerable office software to mobile devices, with Office for iPad and Office Mobile for iPhones and Android phones, all of which work with OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud service.
Google Google, established in 1998, had instant success with its algorithmic search engine and now controls over 70 percent of the search market, generating billions of dollars of revenue yearly through the pay-per-click advertisements that accompany key-word searches. Google has also branched out into a number of other Internet offerings, including Google Shopping, Google Maps, Gmail, Blogger, the Chrome browser, YouTube, and the television-assisting Chromecast device. Google has also challenged Microsoft’s Office programs with Google Apps, a cloud-based bundle of word-processing, spreadsheet, calendar, IM, and e-mail software. Google competes against Apple’s iTunes with Google Play, an online media store, and challenges Facebook with the social networking tool Google+.
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AFTER YEARS IN THE RETAIL BUSINESS, Amazon has been experimenting with content creation, commissioning groups of series, making the pilots available on its Amazon Prime streaming service, and taking both viewer and critical feedback into account when deciding which pilot episodes to expand into series. Transparent, about a family adjusting to a parent’s coming out as transgendered, became a hit for Amazon in 2014. Its first season received eleven Emmy nominations and a second season premiered in 2015, with another order for a third season already placed. Amazon is continuing to develop more shows, recruiting high-profile filmmakers like Woody Allen (Blue Jasmine) and David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express). © Amazon Studios/Photofest
As the Internet goes wireless, Google has acquired other companies in its quest to replicate its online success in the wireless world. Beginning in 2005, Google bought the Android operating system (now the leading mobile phone platform and also a tablet computer platform) and mobile phone ad placement company AdMob. Google’s biggest challenge is the “closed Web”: companies like Facebook and Apple that steer users to online experiences that are walled off from search engines and threaten Google’s reign as the Internet’s biggest advertising conglomerate.
Apple Apple, Inc., was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 as a home computer company and is today the most valuable company in the world.19 Apple was only moderately successful until 2001, when Jobs, having been forced out of the company for a decade, returned. Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes in 2003, two innovations that led the company to become the No. 1 music retailer in the United States. Then in 2007, Jobs introduced the iPhone, transforming the mobile phone industry. The company further redefined portable computing with the iPad in 2010.
With the iPhone and iPad now at the core of Apple’s business, the company expanded to include providing content—music, television shows, movies, games, newspapers, magazines—to sell its media devices. The next wave of Apple’s innovations was the iCloud, a new storage and syncing service that enables users to
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access media content anywhere (with a wireless connection) on its mobile devices. The iCloud also helps ensure that customers purchase their media content through Apple’s iTunes store, further tethering users to its media systems. (For more on Apple devices and how they are made, see “Global Village: Designed in California, Assembled in China” on pages 56–57.)
Amazon Amazon started its business in 1995 in Seattle, selling the world’s oldest mass medium (books) online. Amazon has since developed into the world’s largest e- commerce store, selling not only books but also electronics, garden tools, clothing, appliances, and toys. Yet by 2007, with the introduction of its Kindle e-reader, Amazon was following Apple’s model of using content to sell devices. The Kindle became the first widely successful e-reader, and by 2010, e-books were outselling hardcovers and paperbacks at Amazon. In 2011, in response to Apple’s iPad, Amazon released its own color touchscreen tablet, the Kindle Fire, giving Amazon a device that can play all the media—including music, TV, movies, and games—it sells online and in its Appstore. Like Apple, Amazon has a Cloud Player for making media content portable and offers an additional 5 gigabytes of free Cloud Drive space to all users, to use however they like. Amazon is now also competing with television, cable networks, and Netflix by producing Amazon Original television series for its streaming service and even branching into feature films.
Facebook Facebook’s immense, socially dynamic audience (about two-thirds of the U.S. population and around 1.6 billion users across the globe) is its biggest resource. Like Google, it has become a data processor as much as a social media service, collecting every tidbit of information about its users—what we “like,” where we live, what we read, and what we want—and selling this information to advertisers. Because Facebook users reveal so much about themselves in their profiles and the messages they share with others, Facebook can offer advertisers exceptionally tailored ads: A user who recently got engaged gets ads like “Impress Your Valentine,” “Vacation in Hawaii,” and “Are You Pregnant?” while a teenage girl sees ads for prom dresses, sweet-sixteen party venues, and “Chat with Other Teens” Web sites.
As a young company, Facebook has suffered growing pains while trying to balance its corporate interests (capitalizing on its millions of users) with its users’ interest in controlling the privacy of their own information. In 2012, Facebook had the third-largest public offering in U.S. history, behind General Motors and Visa, with the company valued at $104 billion. Facebook’s valuation is a reflection of investors’ hopes of what the company can do with more than one billion users rather than evidence of the company’s financial success so far. In recent years, Facebook has focused on moving its main interface from the computer screen to mobile phones. Its purchase of Instagram, the photo-sharing app, in 2012 for $1
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billion was part of that strategy. Facebook’s approach appears to be successful: “Americans spend about one-fifth of their time on mobile phones checking Facebook,” the New York Times reported.20 Facebook continues to make investments to expand beyond its core service, with purchases in 2014 of WhatsApp, an instant messaging service, and Oculus VR, a virtual reality technology company.
Targeted Advertising and Data Mining In the early years of the Web, advertising took the form of traditional display ads placed on pages. The display ads were no more effective than newspaper or magazine advertisements, and because they reached small, general audiences, they weren’t very profitable. But in the late 1990s, Web advertising began to shift to search engines. Paid links appeared as “sponsored links” at the top, bottom, and side of a search engine result list and even, depending on the search engine, within the “objective” result list itself. Every time a user clicks on a sponsored link, the advertiser pays the search engine for the click-through. For online shopping, having paid placement in searches can be a good thing. But search engines’ doubling as ad brokers may undermine the utility of search engines as neutral locators of Web sites (see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Tracking and Recording Your Every Move” on page 59).
Advertising has since spread to other parts of the Internet, including social networking sites, e-mail, and mobile apps. For advertisers—who for years struggled with how to measure people’s attention to ads—these activities make advertising easy to track, effective in reaching the desired niche audience, and relatively inexpensive, because ads get wasted less often on the uninterested. For example, Yahoo! gleans information from search terms; Google scans the contents of Gmail messages; and Facebook uses profile information, status updates, and “likes” to deliver individualized, real-time ads to users’ screens. The rise in smartphone use has contributed to extraordinary growth in mobile advertising, which jumped from $3.4 billion in 2012 to $12.5 billion in 2014, accounting for 25 percent of the $49.5 billion in total Internet advertising that year.21
Gathering users’ location and purchasing habits has been a boon for advertising, but these data-collecting systems also function as consumer surveillance and data mining operations. The practice of data mining also raises issues of Internet security and privacy. Millions of people, despite knowing that transmitting personal information online can make them vulnerable to online fraud, have embraced the ease of e-commerce: the buying and selling of products and services on the Internet. What many people don’t know is that their personal information may be used without their knowledge for commercial purposes, such as targeted advertising. For example, in 2011, the Federal Trade Commission charged Facebook with a list of eight violations in which Facebook told consumers their information would be private but made it public to advertisers and third-party applications. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the company had made “a
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bunch of mistakes” and settled with the FTC by fixing the problems and agreeing to submit to privacy audits for twenty years.22
e-commerce electronic commerce, or commercial activity, on the Web.
data mining the unethical gathering of data by online purveyors of content and merchandise.
One common method that commercial interests use to track the browsing habits of computer users is cookies, or information profiles that are automatically collected and transferred between computer servers whenever users access Web sites.23 The legitimate purpose of a cookie is to verify that a user has been cleared for access to a particular Web site, such as a library database that is open only to university faculty and students. However, cookies can also be used to create marketing profiles of Web users to target them for advertising. Many Web sites require the user to accept cookies in order to gain access to the site.
cookies information profiles about a user that are usually automatically accepted by a Web browser and stored on the user’s own computer hard drive.
GLOBAL VILLAGE
Designed in California,
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Assembled in China
here is a now-famous story involving the release of the iPhone in 2007. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was carrying the prototype in his pocket about one month prior to its release and discovered that his keys, also in his pocket, were scratching the plastic screen.
Known as a stickler for design perfection, Jobs reportedly gathered his fellow executives in a room and told them (angrily), “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”1 This demand would have implications for a factory complex in China, called Foxconn, where iPhones are assembled. When the order trickled down to a Foxconn foreman, he woke up eight thousand workers in the middle of the night, gave them a biscuit and a cup of tea, and then started them on twelve- hour shifts fitting glass screens into the iPhone frames. Within four days, Foxconn workers were churning out ten thousand iPhones daily.
On its sleek packaging, Apple proudly proclaims that its products are “Designed by Apple in California,” a slogan that evokes beaches, sunshine, and Silicon Valley—where the best and brightest in American engineering ingenuity reside. The products also say, usually in a less visible location, “Assembled in China,” which suggests little, except that the components of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Apple computer were put together in a factory in the world’s most populous country.
It wasn’t until 2012 that most Apple customers learned that China’s Foxconn was the company where their devices are assembled. Investigative reports by the New York Times revealed a company with ongoing problems with labor conditions and worker safety, including fatal explosions and a spate of worker suicides.2 (Foxconn responded in part by erecting nets around its buildings to prevent fatal jumps.)
Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., with headquarters in Taiwan) is China’s largest and most prominent private employer, with 1.2 million employees—more than any American company except Walmart. Foxconn assembles an incredible 40 percent of the world’s electronics and earns more revenue than ten of its competitors combined.3 And Foxconn is not just Apple’s favorite place to outsource production; nearly every global electronics company is connected to the manufacturing giant: Amazon (Kindle), Microsoft (Xbox), Sony (PlayStation), Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola, and Toshiba all feed their products to the vast Foxconn factory network.
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Behind this manufacturing might is a network of factories now legendary for its enormity. Foxconn’s largest factory compound is in Shenzhen. Dubbed “Factory City,” it employs roughly 300,000 people —all squeezed into one square mile, many of whom live in the dormitories (dorms sleep seven to a room) on the Foxconn campus.4 Workers, many of whom come from rural areas in China, often start a shift at 4 A.M. and work until late at night, performing monotonous, routinized work—for example, filing the aluminum shavings from iPad casings six thousand times a day. Thousands of these full-time workers are under the age of eighteen.
Guang Niu/Getty Images
Conditions at Foxconn might, in some ways, be better than the conditions in the poverty-stricken small villages from which most of its workers come. But the low pay, long hours, dangerous work conditions, and suicide nets are likely not what the young workers had hoped for when they left their families behind.
In light of the news reports about the problems at Foxconn, Apple joined the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an international nonprofit that monitors labor conditions. The FLA inspected factories and surveyed more than thirty-five thousand Foxconn workers. Its 2012 study verified a range of serious issues. Workers regularly labored more than sixty hours per week, with some employees working more than seven days in a row. Other workers weren’t compensated for overtime. More than 43 percent of the workers reported they had witnessed or experienced an accident, and 64 percent of the employees surveyed said that the compensation does not meet their basic needs. In addition, the FLA found the labor union at Foxconn an unsatisfactory channel for
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addressing worker concerns, as representatives from management dominated the union’s membership.5
In 2014, Apple reported that its supplier responsibility program had resulted in improved labor conditions at supplier factories. But Apple might not have taken any steps had it not been for the New York Times investigative reports and the intense public scrutiny that followed. What is our role as consumers in ensuring that Apple and other companies are ethical and transparent in the treatment of the workers who make our electronic devices?
REMARKETING is one common method of targeted advertising. This method involves the use of cookies to identify which products and services a person has viewed online—and then show ads for those same products to the same person later. Put simply, remarketing entices users with the products that they are already most likely to buy.
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Even more unethical and intrusive is spyware, information-gathering software that is often secretly bundled with free downloaded software. Spyware can be used to send pop-up ads to users’ computer screens, to enable unauthorized parties to collect personal or account information of users, or even to plant a malicious click- fraud program on a computer, which generates phony clicks on Web ads that force an advertiser to pay for each click.
spyware software with secretive codes that enable commercial firms to “spy” on users and gain access to their computers.
In 1998, the FTC developed fair information practice principles for online privacy to address the unauthorized collection of personal data. These principles require Web sites to (1) disclose their data-collection practices, (2) give consumers the option to choose whether their data may be collected and to provide information on how that data is collected, (3) permit individuals access to their records to ensure data accuracy, and (4) secure personal data from unauthorized use. Unfortunately, the FTC has no power to enforce these principles, and most Web sites either do not enforce them or deceptively appear to enforce them when they in fact do not.24 As a result, consumer and privacy advocates are calling for stronger regulations, such as requiring Web sites to adopt opt-in or opt-out policies. Opt-in policies, favored by consumer and privacy advocates, require Web sites to obtain explicit permission from consumers before the sites can collect browsing history data. Opt-out policies, favored by data-mining corporations, allow for the automatic collection of browsing history data unless the consumer requests to “opt out” of the practice. In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission approved a report recommending that Congress adopt “Do Not Track” legislation to limit tracking of user information on Web sites and mobile devices and to enable users to easily opt out of data collection. Several Web browsers now offer “Do Not Track” options, while other Web tools, like Ghostery, detect Web tags, bugs, and other trackers, generating a list of all the sites following your moves.
opt-in or opt-out policies controversial Web site policies over personal data gathering: opt-in means Web sites must gain explicit permission from online consumers before the site can collect their personal data; opt-out means that Web sites can automatically collect personal data unless the consumer goes to the trouble of filling out a specific form to restrict the practice.
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Security: The Challenge to Keep Personal Information Private When you watch television, listen to the radio, read a book, or go to the movies, you do not need to provide personal information to others. However, when you use the Internet, whether you are signing up for an e-mail account, shopping online, or even just surfing the Web, you give away personal information—voluntarily or not. As a result, government surveillance, online fraud, and unethical data- gathering methods have become common, making the Internet a potentially treacherous place.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Tracking and Recording Your Every Move
Imagine if you went into a department store and someone followed you the whole time, noting every place you stopped to look at something and recording every item you purchased. Then imagine that the same person followed you the same way on every return visit. It’s likely that you would be outraged by such surveillance. Now imagine that the same thing happens when you search the Web—except in this case, it really happens.
1 DESCRIPTION Do an audit of your Web browser’s data collection—the cookie files deposited on your computer, and your recorded search histories. (For this critical process, use either Chrome or Firefox, the two most popular browsers.) On Google’s Chrome browser, go to Chrome at the left of the top menu, and select Preferences, Settings, Advanced Settings (at the bottom of the Settings page), Privacy, Content Settings, and then All Cookies and Site
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Data. You can then click on each individual cookie file (some Web sites establish multiple cookies on your computer) to discover when the cookie was set and when it is scheduled to expire. Chrome also saves your search history forever: Go to History in the top menu, then Show Full History. On Firefox, go to Firefox, Preferences, Privacy, and Remove Individual Cookies. Here, you can again click on each cookie and find when the cookie is set to expire. To see your browsing history in Firefox, go to History in the top menu, then Show All History. For either browser, try to count how many cookies are on your computer and determine how far back in time your browser history is recorded. Finally, delete all cookies and search history, and then start fresh with the browser and spend just five minutes browsing five different Web sites.
2 ANALYSIS From your five minutes of browsing five Web sites, look for patterns in the cookies you collected. How many were there? Which types of sites had multiple cookies? Sample ten to twenty cookies for a close-up look: What is the planned life span of the cookies? (That is, when are they set to expire?) What kinds of companies are the cookies from?
3 INTERPRETATION Why are our searches tracked with cookies and our search histories recorded? Is this done solely for the convenience of advertisers, marketers, and Google, which mine our search data for commercial purposes, or is there value to you in this? (Firefox is owned by a nonprofit, the Mozilla Foundation.)1
4 EVALUATION Web sites don’t tell you they are installing cookies on your computer. Cookies and search histories can be found and deleted, but do the browsers make this easy or difficult for you? Did you know this information was being collected? Should you have more say in the data being collected on your searches? Overall, should Web sites be more transparent and honest about what they do in placing cookies and their purpose? Should Web browsers be more transparent and honest about the cookies and histories they save and whether they are used for data mining?
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5 ENGAGEMENT What can you do to preserve your privacy? On a personal level, start by clearing out your cookies and search history after every session. On Firefox (under Privacy), you can check “Tell sites that I do not want to be tracked.” On Chrome, you can select Clear Browsing Data in the main menu. Alternatively, Chrome offers “incognito mode” for browsing, with the following warning: “You’ve gone incognito. Pages you view in incognito tabs won’t stick around in your browser’s history, cookie store, or search history after you’ve closed all of your incognito tabs. Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be kept. Going incognito doesn’t hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider, or the websites you visit.” For greater privacy, you can use the search engine DuckDuckGo (launched in 2008), which doesn’t track your searches or put them in a “filter bubble” (that is, it doesn’t filter search results based on what the search engine knows about your previous searches, which is what Google does). On a social level, you can file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. You can go to www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov, but be aware that even the FTC may use cookies to process your complaint.
Government Surveillance Since the inception of the Internet, government agencies worldwide have obtained communication logs, Web browser histories, and the online records of individual users who thought their online activities were private. In the United States, for example, the USA PATRIOT Act (which became law about a month after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and was renewed in 2006) grants sweeping powers to law-enforcement agencies to intercept individuals’ online communications, including e-mail and browsing records. The act was intended to allow the government to more easily uncover and track potential terrorists, but many now argue that it is too vaguely worded, allowing the government to unconstitutionally probe the personal records of citizens without probable cause and for reasons other than preventing terrorism. Moreover, searches of the Internet permit law- enforcement agencies to gather huge amounts of data, including the communications of people who are not the targets of an investigation. Documents leaked to the news media in 2013 by former CIA employee and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA has continued its domestic spying program, collecting bulk Internet and mobile phone data on millions of Americans for more than a decade.
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THIS NEW YORKER CARTOON illustrates an increasingly rare phenomenon. ©Roz Chast/The New Yorker Collection/www.cartoonbank.com
Online Fraud In addition to being an avenue for surveillance, the Internet is increasingly a conduit for online robbery and identity theft, the illegal obtaining of personal credit and identity information in order to fraudulently spend other people’s money. Computer hackers have the ability to infiltrate Internet databases (from banks to hospitals to even the Pentagon) to obtain personal information and to steal credit card numbers from online retailers. Identity theft victimizes hundreds of thousands of people a year, and clearing one’s name can take a very long time and cost a lot of money. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, about 7 percent of Americans were victims of identity theft in 2014, totaling about $15.4 billion in losses.25 One particularly costly form of Internet identity theft is known as phishing. This scam involves phony e-mail messages that appear to be from official Web sites—such as eBay, PayPal, or the user’s university or bank—asking customers to update their credit card numbers, account passwords, and other personal information.
phishing an Internet scam that begins with phony e-mail messages that appear to be from an official site and request that customers send their credit card numbers and other personal
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information to update their account.
Appropriateness: What Should Be Online? The question of what constitutes appropriate content has been part of the story of most mass media, from debates over the morality of lurid pulp-fiction books in the nineteenth century to arguments over the appropriateness of racist, sexist, and homophobic content in films and music. Although it is not the only material to come under intense scrutiny, most of the debate about appropriate media content, despite the medium, has centered on sexually explicit imagery.
As has always been the case, eliminating some forms of sexual content from books, films, television, and other media remains a top priority for many politicians and public interest groups. So it should not be surprising that public objection to indecent and obscene Internet content has led to various legislative efforts to tame the Web. Although the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 were both judged unconstitutional, the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 was passed and upheld in 2003. This act requires schools and libraries that receive federal funding for Internet access to use software that filters out any visual content deemed obscene, pornographic, or harmful to minors, unless disabled at the request of adult users. Regardless of new laws, pornography continues to flourish on commercial sites, individuals’ blogs, and social networking pages. As the American Library Association notes, there is “no filtering technology that will block out all illegal content, but allow access to constitutionally protected materials.”26
In addition to sexual content, Internet sites that carry potentially dangerous information (bomb-building instructions, hate speech) have also incited calls for Internet censorship, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and several tragic school shootings. Nevertheless, many people—fearing that government regulation of speech would inhibit freedom of expression in a democratic society—want the Web to be completely unregulated.
Access: The Fight to Prevent a Digital Divide A key economic issue related to the Internet is whether the cost of purchasing a personal computer and paying for Internet services will undermine equal access. Coined to echo the term economic divide (the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor), the term digital divide refers to the growing contrast between the “information haves”—those who can afford to purchase computers and pay for Internet services—and the “information have-nots”—those who may not be able to afford a computer or pay for Internet services.
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digital divide the socioeconomic disparity between those who do and those who do not have access to digital technology and media, such as the Internet.
About 89 percent of U.S. households are connected to the Internet, but there are big gaps in access to advanced broadband service. For example, while just 4 percent of urban Americans lack access to fixed broadband service (usually cable or DSL), 39 percent of rural Americans (23 million people) lack access to broadband service. The situation is even worse for Americans living on tribal lands in rural areas, where 68 percent (1.3 million people) lack broadband access.27 Although they are not a perfect substitute for a home broadband connection, smartphones are helping to narrow the digital divide. The mobile phone industry forecasts that smartphone use in the United States will increase from 58 percent in 2015 to about 77 percent in 2020, bringing a small-screen data connection to users.28
GOOGLE’S PROJECT LOON employs maneuverable high-altitude balloons that transmit wireless signals to Internet service providers across the globe. The project, which began in 2011, aims to provide Internet access to people in remote areas who would otherwise have no way of getting online. In its mission statement, Google cites the growing digital divide as its reason for launching the project: “Many of us think of the Internet as a
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global community. But two-thirds of the world’s population does not yet have Internet access.” CB2/ZOB/Newscom/WENN/New Zealand
Globally, though, the have-nots face an even greater obstacle to crossing the digital divide. Although the Web claims to be worldwide, the most economically powerful countries—the United States, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the United Kingdom—account for most of its international flavor. In nations such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Myanmar (Burma), the governments permit limited or no access to the Web. In other countries, an inadequate telecommunications infrastructure hampers access to the Internet. And in underdeveloped countries, phone lines and computers are almost nonexistent. For example, in Eritrea—an East African nation of about 6.5 million people, with poor public utilities and intermittent electrical service—about 67,000 people, or about 1 percent of the population, are Internet users.29 However, as mobile phones become more popular in the developing world, they can provide one remedy for the global digital divide.
Even as the Internet matures and becomes more accessible, wealthy users are still able to buy higher levels of privacy and faster speeds of Internet access than are other users. Whereas traditional media made the same information available to everyone who owned a radio or a TV set, the Internet creates economic tiers and classes of service. Policy groups, media critics, and concerned citizens continue to debate the implications of the digital divide, valuing the equal opportunity to acquire knowledge.
Net Neutrality: Maintaining an Open Internet For more than a decade, the debate over net neutrality has framed the shape of the Internet’s future. Net neutrality refers to the principle that every Web site and every user—whether a multinational corporation or you—has the right to the same Internet network speed and access. The idea of an open and neutral network has existed since the origins of the Internet, but there had never been a legal formal policy until 2015, when the Federal Communications Commission reclassified broadband Internet service and approved net neutrality rules. Still, the debate forges on.
net neutrality the principle that every Web site and every user—whether a multinational corporation or you—has the right to the same Internet network speed and access.
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Net Neutrality Experts discuss net neutrality and privatization of the Internet.
Discussion: Do you support net neutrality? Why or why not?
The dispute is dominated by some of the biggest communications corporations. These major telephone and cable companies—including Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Charter—control 98 percent of broadband access in the United States through DSL and cable modem service. They want to offer faster connections and priority to clients willing to pay higher rates, and provide preferential service for their own content or for content providers who make special deals with them—effectively eliminating net neutrality. For example, tiered Internet access might mean that these companies would charge customers more for data-heavy services like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and iTunes. These companies argue that the profits they could make from tiered Internet access would allow them to build expensive new networks, benefiting everyone.
But supporters of net neutrality—mostly bloggers, video gamers, educators, religious groups, unions, and small businesses—argue that the cable and telephone giants have incentive to rig their services and cause net congestion in order to force customers to pay a premium for higher-speed connections. They claim that an Internet without net neutrality would hurt small businesses, non-profits, and Internet innovators, who might be stuck in the “slow lane,” not being able to afford the same connection speeds that large corporations can afford. Large Internet corporations like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Skype, and Facebook also support net neutrality because their businesses depend on their millions of customers’ having equal access to the Web.
The FCC’s attempts to adopt net neutrality rules were twice rejected by federal courts, with the argument that because broadband Internet service had been defined by the FCC as an information service in 2002, rather than a telecommunications service (like telephones or cable TV service), the FCC did not have the authority to impose net neutrality regulations. This definition, however, reflected an older way of thinking about the Internet, which today consists of so much more than it did in its early days. The FCC finally made net neutrality stick in 2015, when it reclassified broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service and put net
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neutrality rules into place.30 The nonpartisan organization Free Press, one of the main advocacy groups for net neutrality, called it a “watershed victory” while nonetheless warning that big corporations will continue to fight the verdict.31
Alternative Voices Independent programmers continue to invent new ways to use the Internet and communicate over it. While some of their innovations have remained free of corporate control, others have been taken over by commercial interests. Despite commercial buyouts, however, the pioneering spirit of the Internet’s independent early days endures; the Internet continues to be a participatory medium in which anyone can be involved. Two of the most prominent areas in which alternative voices continue to flourish relate to open-source software and digital archiving.
Open-Source Software In the early days of computer code writing, amateur programmers were developing open-source software on the principle that it was a collective effort. Programmers openly shared program source codes and their ideas to upgrade and improve programs. Beginning in the 1970s, Microsoft put an end to much of this activity by transforming software development into a business in which programs were developed privately and users were required to pay for both the software and its periodic upgrades.
open-source software noncommercial software shared freely and developed collectively on the Internet.
However, programmers are still developing noncommercial, open-source software, if on a more limited scale. One open-source operating system, Linux, was established in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Since the establishment of Linux, professional computer programmers and hobbyists around the world have participated in improving it, creating a sophisticated software system that even Microsoft has acknowledged is a credible alternative to expensive commercial programs. Linux can operate across disparate platforms, and companies such as IBM, Dell, and Oracle, as well as other corporations and governmental organizations, have developed applications and systems that run on it. Still, the greatest impact of Linux is evident not on the desktop screens of everyday computer users but in the operation of behind-the-scenes computer servers.
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Digital Archiving Librarians have worked tirelessly to build nonprofit digital archives that exist outside of any commercial system in order to preserve libraries’ tradition of open access to information. One of the biggest and most impressive digital preservation initiatives is the Internet Archive, established in 1996. The Internet Archive aims to ensure that researchers, historians, scholars, and all citizens have universal access to human knowledge—that is, everything that’s digital: text, moving images, audio, software, and more than 466 billion archived Web pages reaching back to the earliest days of the Internet. The archive is growing at staggering rates as the general public and partners such as the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress upload cultural artifacts. For example, the Internet Archive stores more than 156,000 live music concerts, including performances by Jack Johnson, the Grateful Dead, and the Smashing Pumpkins.
Media activist David Bollier has likened open-access initiatives to an information “commons,” underscoring the idea that the public collectively owns (or should own) certain public resources, like airwaves, the Internet, and public spaces (such as parks). “Libraries are one of the few, if not the key, public institutions defending popular access and sharing of information as a right of all citizens, not just those who can afford access,” Bollier says.32
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THE INTERNET AND DEMOCRACY
Throughout the twentieth century, Americans closely examined emerging mass media for their potential contributions to democracy. Radio and television each developed with the promise of being media that could reach everyone, even poor or illiterate citizens. Despite continuing concerns over the digital divide, many have praised the Internet for its democratic possibilities. Some advocates even tout the Internet as the most democratic social network ever conceived.
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The biggest threat to the Internet’s democratic potential may well be its increasing commercialization. As happened with radio and television, the growth of commercial “channels” on the Internet has far outpaced the emergence of viable nonprofit channels, as fewer and fewer corporations have gained more and more control. The passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act cleared the way for cable TV systems, computer firms, and telephone companies to merge their interests and become even larger commercial powers. Although there was a great
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deal of buzz about lucrative Internet start-ups in the 1990s and 2000s, it has been large corporations—such as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook— that have weathered the low points of the dot-com economy and maintained a controlling hand. If the histories of other media are any predictor, it seems realistic to expect that the Internet’s potential for widespread use by all could be partially preempted by narrower commercial interests.
However, defenders of the digital age argue that inexpensive digital production and social media distribution allow greater participation than does any traditional medium. In response to these new media forms, older media are using Internet technology to increase their access to and feedback from varied audiences. Skeptics raise doubts about the participatory nature of discussions on the Internet. For instance, they warn that Internet users may be communicating with people whose beliefs and values are similar to their own. Although it is important to be able to communicate across vast distances with people who have similar viewpoints, these kinds of discussions may not serve to extend the diversity and tolerance that are central to democratic ideals. There is also the threat that we may not be interacting with anyone at all. In the wide world of the Web, we are in a shared environment of billions of people. In the emerging ecosystem of apps, we live in an efficient but gated community, walled off from the rest of the Internet. However, we are still in the early years of the Internet. The democratic possibilities of the Internet’s future are endless.
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2 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the commercial nature of mass media. The Internet is no exception, as advertisers have capitalized on its ability to be customized. How might this affect other media industries?
People love the simplicity of Pinterest, the visual social media site where users “pin” images and videos to their “board,” creating a customized site that reflects their own personal style on topics like home décor, apparel, food, crafts, or travel. To sign up for an account, users provide their name, e-mail address, and gender (male or female). The final choice is already prechecked by Pinterest and says, “Let Pinterest personalize your experience based on other sites you visit.”
Pinterest is just one example of the mass customization the Internet offers— something no other mass medium has been able to provide. (When is the last time a television, radio, newspaper, or movie spoke directly to you, or let you be the content producer?) This is one of the Web’s greatest strengths—it can connect us to the world in a personally meaningful way. But a casualty of the Internet may be our shared common culture. A generation ago, students and coworkers across the country gathered on Friday mornings to discuss what happened the previous night on NBC’s “must-see” TV shows, like Roseanne, Seinfeld, Friends, and Will & Grace. Today it’s more likely that they watched vastly different media the night before. And if they did view the same thing—say, a funny YouTube video—it’s likely they all laughed alone, because they watched it individually, although they may have later shared it with their friends on a social media site.
We have become a society divided by the media, often split into our basic entity: the individual. One would think that advertisers dislike this, since it is easier to reach a mass audience by showing commercials during The Voice. But mass customization gives advertisers the kind of personal information they once only dreamed about: your e-mail address, hometown, zip code, and birthday, and a record of your interests—what Web pages you visit and what you buy online. If you have a Facebook profile or a Gmail account, they may know even more about you—what you did last night or what you are doing right now. What will advertisers have the best chance of selling to you with all this information? With the mass-customized Internet, you may have already told them.
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KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
Internet, 39 ARPAnet, 40 e-mail, 40 microprocessors, 40 fiber-optic cable, 41 World Wide Web, 41 HTML (hypertext markup language), 42 browsers, 42 Internet service provider (ISP), 42 broadband, 42 digital communication, 42 instant messaging, 43 search engines, 43 social media, 44 blogs, 44 wiki Web sites, 44 content communities, 45 social networking sites, 45 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 52 portal, 52 data mining, 55 e-commerce, 55 cookies, 55 spyware, 58 opt-in or opt-out policies, 58 phishing, 60 digital divide, 61 net neutrality, 62
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open-source software, 63
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
The Development of the Internet and the Web 1. When did the Internet reach the novelty (development),
entrepreneurial, and mass medium stages? 2. How did the Internet originate? What role did the government
play? 3. How does the World Wide Web work? What is its significance
in the development of the Internet? 4. Why did Google become such a force in Web searching?
The Web Goes Social 5. What are the six main types of social media? 6. What are the democratic possibilities of social media? How can
social media aid political repression? Convergence and Mobile Media
7. What conditions enabled media convergence? 8. What role do mobile devices play in media convergence, and
what significant mobile milestones can you think of? 9. How has convergence changed our relationship with media and
with the Internet? 10. What elements of today’s digital world are part of the Semantic
Web? The Economics and Issues of the Internet 11. Which of the five major digital companies are most aligned with
the “open Internet,” and which are most aligned with the “closed Internet”?
12. What is the role of data mining in the digital economy? What are the ethical concerns?
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13. What is the digital divide, and what is being done to close the gap?
14. Why is net neutrality such an important issue? 15. What are the major alternative voices on the Internet? The Internet and Democracy 16. How can the Internet make democracy work better? 17. What are the key challenges to making the Internet itself more
democratic?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. What possibilities for the Internet’s future are you most excited about? Why? What possibilities are most troubling? Why?
2. What advantages of media convergence enable all types of media content to be accessed on a single device?
3. Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” Which of the five major digital corporations (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook) seems to have the greatest tendency for evil? Which seems to do the most good? Why?
4. As we move from a print-oriented Industrial Age to a digitally based Information Age, how do you think individuals, communities, and nations have been affected positively? How have they been affected negatively?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter. VIDEO: USER-GENERATED CONTENT Editors, producers, and advertisers discuss the varieties of user-generated content and how it can contribute to the democratization of media.
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3 Digital Gaming and the Media Playground
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Kyodo via AP Images
AT LEAST SINCE the days of Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch master of photorealism painting in the seventeenth century, humans have sought to create real-
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looking visual experiences, that is, virtual reality (VR). Part of the technical challenge has been generating three-dimensional (3-D) images—something Vermeer couldn’t quite do with a two-dimensional painting. By the 1830s, inventors had developed stereoscopes, binocular devices with left-eye and right-eye views of the same image that, when combined by human vision, created the depth of a third dimension. From the mid- 1800s through the 1930s, viewing collections of stereo cards—of places like Egypt’s Sphinx, New York’s Flatiron Building, or Yosemite Valley—was a popular home entertainment. From the 1940s onward, plastic View-Master devices were popular toys for viewing a wheel of 3-D images of tourist attractions, television scenes, and cartoons.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITAL GAMING THE INTERNET TRANSFORMS GAMING THE MEDIA PLAYGROUND TRENDS AND ISSUES IN DIGITAL GAMING THE BUSINESS OF DIGITAL GAMING DIGITAL GAMING, FREE SPEECH, AND DEMOCRACY
◄ The immersive experience of virtual reality is one that inventors have been trying to capture for centuries. Sony has taken home video gaming to the next level with their PlayStation VR Headset, released in fall of 2016.
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Since that time, of course, there have been advances into 3-D film (first in the 1950s, with viewers wearing cardboard glasses with red and blue lenses, and now with more advanced digital 3-D, as seen in movies like Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and amusement park experiences (which often add motion effects).
Now we have 3-D television in addition to digital 3-D films. Still, the ultimate goal for enthusiasts of virtual reality has been to immerse themselves in a digital world. A recent breakthrough might finally accomplish this: the Oculus Rift.
In 2014, Facebook purchased a small virtual reality company called Oculus VR, which invented the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset. Oculus invites us to “Step into the Rift. The Rift is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. Whether you’re stepping into your favorite game, watching an immersive VR movie, jumping to a destination on the other side of the world, or just spending time with friends in VR, you’ll feel like you’re really there.”1 The device received rave reviews even before its release in 2016. TechRadar reported that when combining the Oculus headset with Oculus Touch handsets, “total immersion” was complete. “I was not only able to pick up objects, I could shoot guns, slingshots, punch objects, pull heads off robots, and light sparklers on fire with a lighter,”2 the reviewer wrote.
Thomas Samson/AFP/ Getty Images
But for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the bigger bet is that virtual reality will be the next generation of gaming style and then the leading interface for everything else in the media business; he describes Oculus as a potential platform for experiences like sporting events and virtual classrooms.3 Facebook envisions digital games as a way for virtual reality to enter every part of our lives. After all, why would we want to “share” our experiences via two-dimensional posts on Facebook when we can be there—virtually— on the Facebook of the future?
Still, the leading edge of virtual reality has always been entertainment. Competitors to the Oculus Rift include the Sony PlayStation VR, HTC Vive VR (to work with Steam games), and Samsung Gear VR. Another competitor takes users out of the
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house. The VOID, a virtual reality play park, plans to open in 2016 in a suburb of Salt Lake City, and then expand with a chain of locations (the company calls them Virtual Entertainment Centers) around the world.4 Players will wear an Oculus-like head-mounted virtual reality display, plus a VR vest and gloves with haptic feedback for tactile sensations. The environment is a VR game played out like laser tag in real space—a series of 60-by-60-foot rooms with digital overlays creating any number of scenes, such as a haunted castle, a futuristic battlefield, or a dinosaur safari. The haptic feedback in the vest means players can “feel” laser blasts, fire bursts, and creature attacks.
For those who find this new tech too complicated, another option combines the advancements of smartphones with the low tech of a craft project: Google Cardboard, which turns a smartphone into an old-fashioned stereoscope or View- Master through a cardboard viewer and accompanying app. Google says, “Google Cardboard brings immersive experiences to everyone in a simple and affordable way. Whether you fold your own or buy a Works with Google Cardboard certified viewer, you’re just one step away from experiencing virtual reality on your smartphone.”5
And here we are, once again, on the quest to experience virtual reality—holding our smartphone to our eyes with a cardboard viewer, at home with an advanced headset device, or in a virtual theme park, running through a completely digital world. We may have finally reached it.
ELECTRONIC GAMES OFFER PLAY, ENTERTAINMENT, AND SOCIAL INTERACTION. Like the Internet, they combine text, audio, and moving images. But they go even further by enabling players to interact with aspects of the medium in the context of the game—from deciding when an onscreen character jumps or punches to controlling the direction of the “story.” This interactive quality creates an experience so compelling that vibrant communities of fans have cropped up around the globe. And the games have powerfully shaped the everyday lives of millions of people. Indeed, for players around the world, digital gaming has become a social medium as compelling and distracting as other social media. The U.S. Supreme Court has even granted digital gaming First Amendment freedom of speech rights, ensuring its place as a mass medium.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
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In this chapter, we will take a look at the evolving mass medium of digital gaming and:
Examine the early history of electronic gaming, including its roots in penny arcades Trace the evolution of electronic gaming, from arcades and bars into living rooms and our hands Discuss gaming as a social medium that forms communities of play Analyze the economics of gaming, including the industry’s major players and various revenue streams Raise questions about the role of digital gaming in our democratic society
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITAL GAMING
When the Industrial Revolution swept Western civilization two centuries ago, the technological advances involved weren’t simply about mass production. They also promoted mass consumption and the emergence of leisure time—both of which created moneymaking opportunities for media makers. By the late nineteenth century, the availability of leisure time had sparked the creation of mechanical games like pinball. Technology continued to grow, and by the 1950s, computer science students in the United States had developed early versions of the video games we know today.
In their most basic form, digital games involve users in an interactive computerized environment where they strive to achieve a desired outcome. These days, most digital games go beyond a simple competition like the 1975 tennis-style game of Pong: They often entail sweeping narratives and offer imaginative and exciting adventures, sophisticated problem-solving opportunities, and multiple possible outcomes.
But the boundaries were not always so varied. Digital games evolved from their simplest forms in the arcade into four major formats: television, handheld devices, computers, and the Internet. As these formats evolved and graphics advanced, distinctive types of games emerged and became popular. Together, these varied formats constitute an industry that analysts predict will reach $107 billion in annual revenues worldwide by 2017—and one that has become a socially driven mass medium.6
Mechanical Gaming In the 1880s, the seeds of the modern entertainment industry were planted by a series of coin-operated contraptions devoted to cashing in on idleness. First appearing in train depots, hotel lobbies, bars, and restaurants, these leisure machines (also called “counter machines”) would find a permanent home in the first thoroughly modern indoor playground: the penny arcade.7
penny arcade the first thoroughly modern indoor playground, filled with coin-operated games.
Arcades were like nurseries for fledgling forms of amusement that would mature into mass entertainment industries during the twentieth century. For example, automated phonographs used in arcade machines evolved into the
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jukebox, while the kinetoscope (see Chapter 7) set the stage for the coming wonders of the movies. But the machines most relevant to today’s electronic gaming were more interactive and primitive than the phonograph and kinetoscope. Some were strength testers that dared young men to show off their muscles by punching a boxing bag or arm wrestling a robotlike Uncle Sam. Others required more refined skills and sustained play, such as those that simulated bowling, horse racing, and football.8
MODERN GAMING EVENTS and obsessions can be traced back to the emergence of penny arcades in the late nineteenth century. Today, pinball machines remain in many bars and arcades, and pinball expos are held all over the country. © D. Hurst/Alamy Stock Photo
Another arcade game, the bagatelle, spawned the pinball machine, the most prominent of the mechanical games. In pinball, players score points by manipulating the path of a metal ball on a playfield in a glass-covered case. In the 1930s and 1940s, players could control only the launch of the ball. For this reason, pinball was considered a sinister game of chance that, like the slot machine, fed the coffers of the gambling underworld. As a result, pinball was banned in most American cities, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.9 However,
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pinball gained mainstream acceptance and popularity after World War II with the addition of the flipper bumper, which enables players to careen the ball back up the play table. This innovation transformed pinball into a challenging game of skill, touch, and timing—all of which would become vital abilities for video game players years later.
pinball machine the most prominent mechanical game, in which players score points by manipulating the path of a metal ball on a playfield in a glass-covered case.
The First Video Games Not long after the growth of pinball, the first video game patent was issued on December 14, 1948, to Thomas T. Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann for what they described as a “Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device.” The invention would not make much of a splash in the history of digital gaming, but it did feature the key component of the first video games: the cathode ray tube (CRT). CRT-powered screens provided the images for analog television and for early computer displays, where the first video games appeared a few years later. One such game was Spacewars!, a two-person game released by computer science students at MIT in 1962.10 But because computers consisted of massive mainframes at the time, the games couldn’t be easily distributed.
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THE ODYSSEY2, a later model of the Odyssey console, was released in 1978 and featured a full keyboard that could be used for educational games. Image courtesy the Advertising Archives
However, more and more people owned televisions, and this development provided a platform for video games. The first home television game, called Odyssey, was developed by German immigrant and television engineer Ralph Baer. Released by Magnavox in 1972 and sold for a whopping $100, Odyssey used player controllers that moved dots of light around the screen in a twelve-game inventory of simple aiming and sports games.
In the next decade, a ripped-off version of one of the Odyssey games brought the delights of video gaming into modern arcades, establishments that gather together multiple coin-operated games. The same year that Magnavox released Odyssey, a young American computer engineer named Nolan Bushnell formed a video game development company, called Atari, with a friend. The enterprise’s first creation was Pong, a simple two-dimensional tennis-style game, with two vertical paddles that bounced a white dot back and forth. The game kept score on the screen and made blip noises when the ball hit the paddles or bounced off the sides of the court. Pong quickly became the first video game to become popular in arcades.
arcade an establishment that gathers together multiple coin-operated
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games.
In 1975, Atari began successfully marketing a home version of Pong through an exclusive deal with Sears. This arrangement established the home video game market. Just two years later, Bushnell started the Chuck E. Cheese pizza–arcade restaurant chain and sold Atari to Warner Communications for an astounding $28 million. Although Atari folded in 1984, plenty of companies—including Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft—followed its early lead, transforming the video game business into a full-fledged industry.
Arcades and Classic Games By the late 1970s and early 1980s, games like Asteroids, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong filled arcades and bars, competing directly with traditional pinball machines. In a way, arcades signaled electronic gaming’s potential as a social medium, because many games allowed players to play with or compete against each other, standing side by side. To be sure, arcade gaming has been superseded by the console and computer. But the industry still attracts fun-seekers to businesses like Dave and Buster’s, a gaming–restaurant chain operating in more than fifty locations, as well as to amusement parks, malls, and casinos.
To play the classic arcade games, as well as many of today’s popular console games, players use controllers to interact with graphical elements on a video screen. With a few notable exceptions (puzzle games like Tetris, for instance), these types of video games require players to identify with a position on the screen. After Pac-Man, the avatar (a graphic interactive “character” situated within the world of the game) became the most common figure of player control and position identification. In the United States, the most popular video games today assume a first-person perspective, in which the player “sees” the virtual environment through the eyes of an avatar.
avatar a graphic interactive “character” situated within the world of a game, such as World of Warcraft or Second Life.
Consoles and Advancing Graphics Today, many electronic games are played on home consoles, devices specifically used to play video games. These systems have become increasingly more powerful since the appearance of the early Atari consoles in the 1970s. One way of charting
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the evolution of consoles is to track the number of bits (binary digits) that they can process at one time. The bit rating of a console is a measure of its power at rendering computer graphics. The higher the bit rating, the more detailed and sophisticated the graphics. The Atari 2600, released in 1977, used an 8-bit processor, as did the wildly popular Nintendo Entertainment System, first released in Japan in 1983. Sega Genesis, the first 16-bit console, appeared in 1989. In 1992, 32-bit computers appeared on the market; the following year, 64 bits became the new standard. The 128-bit era dawned with the marketing of Sega Dreamcast in 1999. With the current generation of consoles, 256-bit processors are the standard.
consoles devices people use specifically to play video games.
POPULAR ARCADE GAMES in the 1970s and 1980s were simple two-dimensional games with straightforward goals, like driving a racecar, destroying asteroids, or gobbling up little dots. Today, most video games have more complex story lines based in fully fleshed-out worlds. © ArcadeImages/Alamy
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THE ATARI 2600 was followed by the Atari 400, Atari 800, and Atari 5200, but none matched the earlier success of the 2600 model. Photo by SSPL/Getty Images
But more detailed graphics have not always replaced simpler games. Nintendo, for example, offers many of its older, classic games for download onto its newest consoles even as updated versions are released, for the nostalgic gamers as well as new fans. Similarly, the Atari Flashback series has offered retro versions of the original consoles, with built-in classic Atari games from the 1970s and 1980s, like Space Invaders and Centipede. Perhaps the best example of enduring games is the Super Mario Bros. series. Created by Nintendo mainstay Shigeru Miyamoto in 1983, the original Mario Bros. game began in arcades. The 1985 sequel Super Mario Bros., developed for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, became the best-selling video game of all time (holding this title until 2009, when it was unseated by Nintendo’s Wii Sports). Graphical elements from the Mario Bros. games, like the “1UP” mushroom that gives players an extra life, remain instantly recognizable to gamers of all ages.
Through decades of ups and downs in the electronic gaming industry (Atari folded in 1984, and Sega no longer makes video consoles), three major home console makers now compete for gamers: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Nintendo has been making consoles since the 1980s; Sony and Microsoft came later, but both companies were already major media conglomerates and thus well positioned to support and promote their interests in the video game market.
Nintendo released a new kind of console, the Wii, in 2006. The device supported traditional video games like New Super Mario Bros. However, it was the first of the three major consoles to add a wireless motion-sensing controller, which took the often-sedentary nature out of gameplay. Games like Wii Sports require the user to mimic the full-body motion of bowling or playing tennis, while Wii Fit uses a wireless balance board for interactive yoga, strength, aerobic, and balance games.
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Although the Wii has lagged behind Xbox and PlayStation in establishing an online community, its controller enabled a host of games that appealed to broader audiences, and upon its release, it became the best-selling of the three major console systems. In 2012, Nintendo introduced the Wii U, which features the GamePad: a controller with an embedded touchscreen, on which games can be played without a television set (making it like a handheld video player).
Veteran electronics manufacturer Sony introduced the PlayStation series in 1994. Its current console, the PlayStation 4 (PS4, launched in 2013), boasts more than 150 million users on its free online PlayStation Network. Sony’s PlayStation Plus is a paid subscription service that adds additional features, such as game downloads, to the PlayStation Network. Sony introduced PlayStation VR, its virtual reality headset, in 2016.
Microsoft’s first foray into video game consoles was the Xbox, released in 2001; it was linked to the Xbox LIVE online service in 2002 and released as Xbox 360 in 2005. Xbox LIVE lets its 48 million subscribers play online and enables users to download new content directly to its console. In 2013, Microsoft released the Xbox One, with an upgraded Kinect (a motion-sensing controller first introduced in 2010), as an advanced gaming device and voice-controlled entertainment system. Since 2014, Sony’s PlayStation 4 has been the most popular of the new generation of consoles, more than doubling Xbox One and Wii U in sales.
THE ORIGINAL MARIO BROS. GAME made its arcade debut in 1983, but it was the 1985 home console sequel Super Mario Bros. that made the series a household name. Super Mario titles have been developed for the original Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, GameCube, Game Boy, Wii, and 3DS, for which Super Mario Bros. 3 was released in 2014. KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images
Each of the three major digital game consoles has its niche. Sony’s PlayStation is mostly about gaming, although like the other two consoles, it offers television entertainment features. Microsoft’s Xbox is also about gaming, but Microsoft wants its console to be the entertainment hub of the house. Wii features more
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devices and family-oriented games (the Super Mario Bros. are still an omnipresent franchise for Nintendo). All three of the consoles have motion-controlled sensors, online networks, and Internet entertainment links to services like Netflix and Hulu.
DOOM, an early first-person shooter game that influenced later hits like Halo, was first developed for home computers. The first game was released in 1993. It has spawned several sequels and a 2005 feature film. KRT/Newscom
Although the major consoles share some game content, not every popular game is multiplatform (that is, one that is released on all three platforms)—so game offerings become a major selling point for a particular system. For example, Destiny (by Activision Blizzard), Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (by Ubisoft), and Child of Light (by Ubisoft) come in versions for all three consoles (and personal computers running Microsoft Windows, too). But the console makers also create or license games just for their own platform: Forza Motorsport 6 and Halo 5: Guardians for the Xbox One, inFAMOUS Second Son for the PlayStation 4, and Mario Kart 8 for the Wii.
Gaming on PCs Like the early console games, very early home computer games often mimicked (and sometimes ripped off) popular arcade games, like Frogger, Centipede, Pac- Man, and Space Invaders. Computer-based gaming also featured certain genres not often seen on consoles, like digitized card and board games. The early days of the personal computer saw the creation of electronic versions of games like Solitaire,
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Hearts, Spades, and Chess, all simple games still popular today. But for a time in the late 1980s and much of the 1990s, personal computers held some clear advantages over console gaming. The versatility of keyboards, compared with the relatively simple early console controllers, allowed for ambitious puzzle-solving games like Myst. Moreover, faster processing speeds gave some computer games richer, more detailed three-dimensional (3-D) graphics. Many of the most popular early first-person shooter games, like Doom and Quake, were developed for home computers rather than consoles.
As consoles caught up with greater processing speeds and disc-based games in the late 1990s, elaborate personal computer games attracted less attention. But more recently, PC gaming has experienced a resurgence, due to the advent of free- to-play games (like Spelunky and League of Legends), subscription games (such as World of Warcraft and Diablo 3), social media games (such as Candy Crush Saga on Facebook), and the Steam PC game platform—all trends aided by the Internet. With powerful processors for handling rich graphics, and more stable Internet connectivity for downloading games or playing games via social media sites and other gaming sites, personal computers can adeptly handle a wide range of activities.
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THE INTERNET TRANSFORMS GAMING
With the introduction of the Sega Dreamcast in 1999, the first console to feature a built-in modem, gaming emerged as an online, multiplayer social activity. The Dreamcast didn’t last, but online connections are now a normal part of console video games, with Internet-connected players opposing one another in combat, working together against a common enemy, or teaming up to achieve a common goal (like sustaining a medieval community). Some of the biggest titles have been first-person shooter games like Counter-Strike, an online spin-off of the popular Half-Life console game. Each player views the game from the first-person perspective but also plays on a team as either a terrorist or a counterterrorist.
The Internet enabled the spread of video games to converged devices, like tablets and mobile phones, making games more portable and creating whole new segments in the gaming industry. The connectivity of the Internet also opened the door to social gaming, virtual worlds, and massively multiplayer online games.
MMORPGs, Virtual Worlds, and Social Gaming It is one of the longest acronyms in the world of gaming: massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These games are set in virtual worlds that require users to play through an avatar of their own design. The “massively multiplayer” aspect of MMORPGs indicates that electronic games—once designed for solo or small-group play—have expanded to reach large groups, like traditional mass media do.
massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs)
role-playing games set in virtual fantasy worlds that require users to play through an avatar.
The fantasy adventure game World of Warcraft is the most popular MMORPG, with about 5.5 million subscribers in 2016, down from a peak of 12 million in 2010. Users can select from twelve different “races” of avatars, including dwarves, gnomes, night elves, orcs, trolls, goblins, and humans, and form guilds or tribes with other players. Second Life, a 3-D social simulation set in real time, also features social interaction. Players build human avatars, then use real money to buy virtual land as well as virtual goods and services.
MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and simulations like Second Life are aimed at teenagers and adults. One of the most overlooked areas (at least by adults) in
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online gaming is the children’s market. Club Penguin, a moderated virtual world purchased by Disney, enables kids to play games and chat as colorful penguins. Disney later developed additional Club Penguin games for handheld players. Toy maker Ganz developed the online Webkinz game to revive its stuffed-animal sales. Each Webkinz stuffed animal comes with a code that lets players access the online game and care for the virtual version of their plush pets. In 2009, as Webkinz sales declined, Ganz started Webkinz Jr. to market bigger, more expensive plush animals to preschoolers. All these virtual worlds offer younger players their own age- appropriate environment to experiment with virtual socializing, but they have also attracted criticism for their messages of consumerism. In many of these games, children can buy items with virtual currency or acquire “bling” more quickly through a premium membership. The games also market merchandise to their young players.
WORLD OF WARCRAFT is among the highest-grossing video games of all time, having sold over 10 million copies since its release in 2004. Today the fantasy MMORPG still has a huge and thriving player community—in large part because developer Blizzard continually releases new content. The game has six expansions, the most recent of which was released in August 2016, allowing players to spend hundreds of hours leveling up their character and exploring the game world. © IanDagnall Computing/Alamy Stock Photo
Online fantasy sports games also reach a mass audience with a major social component. Players—real-life friends, virtual acquaintances, or a mix of both— assemble teams and use actual sports results to determine scores in their online games. But rather than experiencing the visceral thrills of, say, Madden NFL 15, fantasy football participants take a more detached, managerial perspective on the game—a departure from the classic video game experience. Fantasy sports’ managerial angle makes it even more fun to watch almost any televised game because players focus more on making strategic investments in individual performances scattered across the various professional teams than they do on
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rooting for local teams. In the process, players become statistically savvy aficionados of the game overall, rather than rabid fans of a particular team. In 2015, over 56 million people played fantasy sports in the United States and Canada; the Fantasy Sports Trade Association currently estimates a market size of more than $3.6 billion.11
online fantasy sports games in which players assemble teams and use actual sports results to determine scores in their online games. These games reach a mass audience, have a major social component, and take a managerial perspective on the game.
Convergence: From Consoles to Mobile Gaming Digital games made their initial appearance on computers and consoles and were very much wedded to those platforms. Today, though, games can be consumed the same way music and so many books, television shows, and films are consumed: just about anywhere and in a number of different ways. And video game consoles are increasingly part of the same technological convergence that gives devices like smartphones and tablets multiple functions.
Consoles Become Entertainment Centers Video game consoles, once used exclusively for games, now work as part computer, part cable box. They’ve become powerful entertainment centers, with multiple forms of media converging in a single device. For example, the Xbox One and PS4 can function as DVD and Blu-ray players and digital video recorders (with hard drives of up to 500 gigabytes) and offer access to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and video chat. PS4, Xbox, and Wii also all offer connections to stream programming from sources like Netflix and Hulu. Microsoft’s Xbox—which has Kinect’s voice recognition system, allowing viewers to communicate with the box —has been the most successful in becoming a converged device for home entertainment.
Portable Players and Mobile Gaming Simple handheld players made games portable long before the advent of Internet- connected touchscreen mobile devices. Nintendo popularized handheld digital games with the release of its Game Boy line of devices and sold nearly 120 million of them from 1989 to 2003 with games like Tetris, Metroid, and Pokémon Red/Blue.12 The early handhelds gave way to later generations of devices offering
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more advanced graphics and wireless capabilities. These include the top-selling Nintendo 3DS, released in 2011, and PlayStation Portable (PSP), released in 2005 and succeeded by the PlayStation Vita in 2012. Both brands are Wi-Fi capable, so players can interface with other users to play games or browse the Internet.
While portable players remain immensely popular (the Nintendo 3DS sold more than 158 million units through 2016), they face competition from the widespread use of smartphones and touchscreen tablets like iPads. These devices are not designed principally for gaming, but their capabilities have provided another option for casual gamers who may not have been interested in owning a handheld console. Manufacturers of these converged devices are catching on to their gaming potential: After years of relatively little interest in video games, Apple introduced Game Center in 2010. This social gaming network enables users to invite friends or find others for multiplayer gaming, track their scores, and view high scores on a leader board—which the 3DS and PSP do as well. With more than 700 million iPhones and 225 million iPads sold worldwide by 2015 (and millions more iPod Touch devices in circulation), plus more than 260,000 games (like Blek andMinecraft—Pocket Edition) available in its App Store, Apple is transforming the portable video game business with its devices, games, and distribution system.13
HANDHELD GAMING used to require a specific piece of hardware, like the classic Game Boy. But as technology has grown more sophisticated, handheld games can be played on smaller, more versatile devices, like smartphones and tablets, and some handheld gaming systems can provide more than just games. Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock
Google Play (formerly the Android Market) rivals Apple’s App Store in
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number of apps and provides a substantial platform for gaming on Android mobile phones and tablet devices like the Kindle, Galaxy, and Nexus. Microsoft got a later start with its Windows phones and Surface tablet, so its game offerings lag far behind those of the Android and Apple stores.
This portable and mobile gaming convergence is changing the way people look at digital games and their systems. The games themselves are no longer confined to arcades or home television sets, while the mobile media have gained power as entertainment tools, reaching a wider and more diverse audience. Thus gaming has become an everyday form of entertainment, rather than the niche pursuit of hard- core enthusiasts.
With its increased profile and flexibility across platforms, the gaming industry has achieved a mass medium status on a par with film or television. This rise in status has come with stiffer and more complex competition, not just within the gaming industry but across media. Rather than Sony competing with Nintendo, or TV networks competing among themselves for viewers, or new movies facing off at the box office, media must now compete against other media for an audience’s attention. Digital games have themselves become a major player in these competitions.
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THE MEDIA PLAYGROUND
To fully explore the larger media playground, we need to look beyond electronic gaming’s technical aspects and consider the human faces of gaming. The attractions of this interactive playground validate electronic gaming’s status as one of today’s most powerful social media. Electronic games occupy an enormous range of styles, from casual games like Tetris, Angry Birds, Bejeweled, and Fruit Ninja to full-blown, Hollywood-like immersive adventure games like Final Fantasy.14 No matter what the style, digital games are compelling entertainment and mass media because they pose challenges (mental and physical), allow us to engage in situations both realistic and fantastical, and allow us to socialize with others as we play with friends and form communities both inside and outside the games.
Video Game Genres Electronic games inhabit so many playing platforms and devices, and cover so many genres, that they are not easy to categorize. The game industry, as represented by the Entertainment Software Association, organizes games by gameplay—the way in which the rules structure how players interact with the game—rather than by any sort of visual or narrative style. There are many hybrid forms, but the major gameplay genres are discussed in the following sections. (See Figure 3.1 on page 79 for a breakdown of top video game genres.)
gameplay the way in which a game’s rules, rather than its graphics, sound, or narrative style, structure how players interact with it.
Action and Shooter Games Usually emphasizing combat-type situations, action games ask players to test their reflexes and to punch, slash, shoot, or throw as strategically and accurately as possible so as to make their way through a series of levels. Some action games feature hand-to-hand combat (Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom); others feature more sophisticated weaponry and obstacles, such as bladed spears against groups of enemy combatants (Hidden Blade, Bushido Blade). Shooter games offer a selection of guns and missiles for obliterating opponents.
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action games games emphasizing combat-type situations that ask players to test their reflexes and to punch, slash, shoot, or throw as accurately as possible so as to strategically make their way through a series of levels.
Most shooter games have a first-person shooter (FPS) perspective, which allows players to feel as though they are actually holding the weapon and to feel physically immersed in the drama. (See Table 3.1 for more on major video game conventions.) Doom, for example, released in 1993, was one of the first major FPS breakthroughs, requiring players to shoot their way through a military base on Mars’s moon, killing the demons from Hell first using increasingly elaborate weapons, from pistol to chainsaw to rocket launcher to the coveted “BFG 9000.” Halo, Microsoft’s impressive launch title for the Xbox in 2001, has become the top FPS game of all time. In the Halo series (the fifth sequel was released in 2015), players assume the identity of “Master Chief,” a super-soldier living in the twenty- sixth century and fighting aliens, with the ultimate goal of uncovering secrets about the ring-shaped world, Halo. The weapons allotted to Master Chief all require the player to think strategically about how and when to launch them.
first-person shooter (FPS) games that allow players to feel as if they are actually holding a weapon and to feel physically immersed in the drama.
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FIGURE 3.1 TOP VIDEO GAME GENRES BY UNITS SOLD, 2014 Data from: Entertainment Software Association, “Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry,” 2015. Note: Percentages were rounded.
Maze games like Pac-Man also fit into the “action” genre, involving maze navigation to avoid or chase adversaries. Finally, platform games gained notoriety through the very successful Super Mario Bros. series. Using quick reflexes and strategic time management, players move Mario and Luigi between various platform levels of the Mushroom Kingdom in order to rescue Princess Toadstool (later called Princess Peach). Action and shooter games are the best-selling game genres, accounting for nearly 50 percent of all game units sold.15
Adventure Games Developed in the 1970s, adventure games involve a type of gameplay that is in many ways the opposite of action games. Typically nonconfrontational in nature, adventure games such as Myst require players to interact with individual characters and the sometimes-hostile environment in order to solve puzzles. In the case of Myst (released in 1991), the player is “the Stranger” who travels to different worlds and finds clues to solve various puzzles that, if solved correctly, lead to the “deserted” island of Myst. The genre peaked in popularity in 1993 and has spawned derivative genres, such as action-adventure (Zelda, Metroid) and survival horror games (Resident Evil), which are inspired by horror fiction.
adventure games gamesrequiring players to interact with individual characters and a sometimes hostile environment in order to solve
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puzzles.
Role-Playing Games Role-playing games (RPGs) are typically set in a fantasy or sci-fi world in which each player (there can be multiple players in a game) chooses to play as a character that specializes in a particular skill set (such as magic spells or “finesse”). Players embark on a predetermined adventure and interact with the game’s other inhabitants and each other, making choices throughout the game that bring about various diverse outcomes. More complex role-playing games, like the Final Fantasy and Fallout series, involve branching plots and changing character destinies. MMORPGs are obviously a subgenre of this game category. Sandbox (or open-world) RPGs, such as the Grand Theft Auto series and Minecraft, tend to offer the greatest leeway in how players may roam through a game’s environment and create their own narratives. Other subgenres, such as MOBA games (multiplayer online battle arena games, which can combine RPG elements with real-time strategy; see page 83), make up some of the most successful digital games on the market.
role-playing games (RPGs) games that are typically set in a fantasy or sci-fi world in which each player (there can be multiple players in a game) chooses to play as a character that specializes in a particular skill set.
CASE STUDY
Finding Positive Effects in
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A
Digital Games
generation of headlines since the terrible shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 suggests that playing video games may be
linked to real-world violence:
“School Shooter Followed Video Game-Like ‘Script’”
—NBC News, 2005
“Did ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Turn an 8-Year-Old into a Killer?”
—MSNBC, 2013
“Sparks, Nev., School Shooter Watched Violent Video Games, Report Says”
— Los Angeles Times, 2014
“Mass Killers in US All Found to Be Addicted to Playing Violent Video Games”
— Christian Today, 2015
In fact, the American Psychology Association Task Force on Violent Media released a study in 2015 that reviewed research on violent video games published from 2005 to 2013. The conclusion, according to the task force chair, was that “the link between violence in video games and increased aggression in players is one of the most studied and best established in the field.”1
The report stopped short of a direct line between violent video game use and violent behavior, though. “No single risk factor consistently leads a person to act aggressively or violently,” said the report. “Rather, it is the accumulation of risk factors that tends to lead to aggressive or violent behavior. The research reviewed here demonstrates that violent video game use is one such risk factor.”2
Nevertheless, more than two hundred researchers signed a letter critical of the APA task force’s conclusion linking violent video
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games and aggression. “I fully acknowledge that exposure to repeated violence may have short-term effects—you would be a fool to deny that—but the long-term consequences of crime and actual violent behaviour, there is just no evidence linking violent video games with that,” said Dr. Mark Coulson, associate professor of psychology in Great Britain and one of the signatories to the letter. “If you play three hours of Call of Duty you might feel a little bit pumped, but you are not going to go out and mug someone.”3
Other researchers note that treating all digital games as a monolithic category overlooks the fact that “there are millions of video games, with vastly different themes and goals.”4 Dutch researchers Isabela Granic, Adam Lobel, and Rutger C. M. E. Engels illustrate the varying levels of complexity and social interactive of digital games in the figure on page 81. Moreover, digital gameplay can create a number of positive effects, as Granic, Lobel, and Engels summarized in a review article for American Psychologist. The positive effects can occur in four primary domains: cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social.5
Cognitive Benefits
“It turns out that playing these games promotes a wide range of cognitive skills. This is particularly true for shooter video games (often called ‘action’ games by researchers), many of which are violent in nature (e.g., Halo 4, Grand Theft Auto IV). Compared to control participants, those in the shooter video game condition show faster and more accurate attention allocation, higher spatial resolution in visual processing, and enhanced mental rotation abilities.” “New evidence is emerging that playing any kind of video game, regardless of whether or not it is violent, enhances children’s creative capacities.”
Motivational Benefits
“We propose that being immersed in these gaming environments teaches players an essential basic lesson: Persistence in the face of failure reaps valued
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rewards.” “Contrary to what we might expect, these experiences of failure do not lead to anger, frustration, or sadness, although players often do feel these negative emotions intermittently. Instead, or as well, players respond to failures with excitement, interest, and joy. When faced with failure, players are highly motivated to return to the task of winning, and they are ‘relentlessly optimistic’ about reaching their goals.”
CONCEPTUAL MAP OF THE MAIN GENRES OF VIDEO GAMES (WITH EXAMPLES) Organized According to Two Important Dimensions: Level of Complexity and the Extent of Social Interaction Required.
Emotional Benefits
“Gaming may be among the most efficient and effective means by which children and youth generate positive feelings. Several studies have shown a causal relation between playing preferred video games and improved mood or increases in positive emotion. For
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example, studies suggest that playing puzzle video games—games with minimal interfaces, short-term commitments, and a high degree of accessibility (e.g., Angry Birds, Bejeweled II)—can improve players’ moods, promote relaxation, and ward off anxiety.” “Game playing may promote the ability to flexibly and efficiently reappraise emotional experiences, teaching players the benefits of dealing with frustration and anxiety in adaptive ways.”
Social Benefits
“Contrary to stereotypes, the average gamer is not a socially isolated, inept nerd who spends most of his (or her) time alone loafing on the couch. Over 70% of gamers play their games with a friend, either cooperatively or competitively.” “Players who play violent games that encourage cooperative play are more likely to exhibit helpful gaming behaviors online and offline than those who play nonviolent games, and playing violent video games socially (in groups) reduces feelings of hostility compared with playing alone. Likewise, violent video games played cooperatively seem to decrease players’ access to aggressive cognitions.”
Granic, Lobel, and Engels note that the popular press and even many researchers often dichotomize games “into either ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘violent’ or ‘prosocial’” categories. In doing so, they overlook “the complex new playground of contemporary video games and the varied landscape of virtual interactions taking place in those games,”6 and are likely to miss considering digital games as potentially positive activities with psychological and social benefits.
TABLE 3.1 MAJOR VIDEO GAME CONVENTIONS
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This table breaks down six common elements of video game layout. Many of these elements have been in place since the earliest games and continue to be used today.
Convention Description Examples Visual Representation
Avatars Onscreen figures of player identification
Pac-Man, Mario from the Mario Bros. series, Sonic the Hedgehog, Link from Legend of Zelda
© Jamaway/Alamy
Bosses Powerful enemy characters that represent the final challenge in a stage or the entire game
Ganon from the Zelda series, Hitler in Castle Wolfenstein, Dr. Eggman from Sonic the Hedgehog, Mother Brain from Metroid
© Jamaway/Alamy
Vertical and Side Scrolling
As opposed to a fixed screen, scrolling that follows the action as it moves up, down, or sideways in what is called a “tracking shot” in the cinema
Platform games like Jump Bug, Donkey Kong, and Super Mario Bros.; also integrated into the design of Angry Birds
© Jamaway/Alamy
Isometric Perspective (or Three- Quarters Perspective)
An elevated and angled perspective that enhances the sense of three- dimensionality by allowing players to see the tops and sides of objects
Zaxxon, StarCraft, Civilization, and Populous
© ArcadeImages/Alamy
First-Person Perspective
Presents the gameplay through the eyes of your avatar
First-person shooter (FPS) games like Quake, Doom, Halo,
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and Call of Duty
KRT/Newscom
Third- Person Perspective (or Over-the- Shoulders Perspective)
Enables you to view your heroic avatar in action from an external viewpoint
Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed, and the default viewpoint in World of Warcraft
KRT/Newscom
Strategy and Simulation Games Strategy video games often involve military battles (real or imaginary) and focus on gameplay that requires careful thinking and skillful planning to achieve victory. Unlike FPS games, the perspective in strategy games is omniscient, with the player surveying the entire “world,” or playing field, and making strategic decisions—such as building bases, researching technologies, managing resources, and waging battles—that will make or break this world. No doubt the most popular real-time strategy (RTS) game is Blizzard’s StarCraft, which is played competitively throughout South Korea and televised to large audiences. To develop better strategic advantages, players download and memorize maps, study up on minute game details (such as race characteristics), and participate in StarCraft- centered advice boards. Like strategy games, simulation games involve managing resources and planning worlds, but these worlds are typically based in reality. A good example is SimCity, which asks players to build a city given real-world constraints, such as land-use zoning (commercial, industrial, residential), tax rates (to tax or not to tax), and transportation (buses, cars, trams). A player may also face unanticipated natural disasters, such as floods or tornadoes.
strategy games games in which perspective is omniscient and the player must survey the entire “world” or playing field and make strategic decisions.
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simulation games games that involve managing resources and planning worlds that are typically based in reality.
Casual Games This category of gaming, which encompasses everything from Minesweeper to Angry Birds to Stack, includes games that have very simple rules and are usually quick to play. The historical starting point of casual games was 1989, when the game Tetris came bundled with every new Game Boy (Nintendo). Tetris requires players to continuously (frantically, for some) rotate colored blocks and fit them into snug spaces before the screen fills up with badly stacked blocks. There is no story to Tetris, and no real challenge other than mastering the pattern of rotating and stacking, a process that gets progressively faster as the player achieves higher levels. For many people, the ceaseless puzzle is like a drug: Millions of people have purchased and played Tetris since its release. Today, Tetris has given way to Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga, and other such games that have exploded in popularity due in large part to the rise in mobile devices.
casual games games that have very simple rules and are usually quick to play, such as Tetris or Angry Birds.
Sports, Music, and Dance Games Sports-themed games have been a mainstay of the video game industry since Pong’s tennis-inspired beginnings. Today’s game technology—with infrared motion detectors, accelerometers (devices that measure proper acceleration), and tuning fork gyroscopes (devices that determine rotational motion)—allows players to control their avatar through physical movements, making the 3-D sports game experience even more realistic. Players in a soccer game, for example, might feel as though they are in the thick of things, kicking, dribbling, shooting, and even getting away with a foul if referees aren’t watching. In sports games, players engage in either competitive gameplay (player versus player) or cooperative gameplay (two or more teammates working together against the artificial intelligence, or AI, opponents within the game).
One of the most consistently best-selling sports games is Madden NFL, which is based on famed NFL football player and former coach John Madden. Among the game’s realistic features are character collisions, with varying speeds and trajectories that differ based on player control; sophisticated playbooks and player
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statistics; and voice commentary, which allows players to hear the game as if it were a real TV broadcast. With Xbox Kinect functionality, players can even select and alter screen actions with the power of their own voice (they are Madden, screaming from the sidelines).
Other experiential games tie into music and dance categories. Rock Band, developed by Harmonix Systems and published by Mad Catz, allows up to four players to simulate the popular rock band performances of sixty-five songs—from the Black Keys and Jack White to Heart and U2—as well as more than seventeen hundred additional downloadable songs for $1.99 apiece. The gameplay is derivative of Guitar Hero (vertical scrolling, colored music notes, and karaoke-like vocals), but the experience of Rock Band—with four players; a variety of venues, from clubs to concert halls; and screaming fans (who are also prone to boo)—is far more “real.” Dance-oriented video games, such as Dance Dance Revolution and Just Dance, use motion-detecting technology and challenge players to match their rhythm and dance moves to figures on the screen.
Communities of Play: Inside the Game Virtual communities often crop up around online video games and fantasy sports leagues. Indeed, players may get to know one another through games without ever meeting in person. They can interact in two basic types of groups. PUGs (short for “pick-up groups”) are temporary teams usually assembled by matchmaking programs integrated into the game. The members of a PUG may range from elite players to noobs (clueless beginners) and may be geographically and generationally diverse. PUGs are notorious for harboring ninjas and trolls—two universally despised player types (not to be confused with ninja or troll avatars). Ninjas are players who snatch loot out of turn and then leave the group; trolls are players who delight in intentionally spoiling the gaming experience for others.
PUGs in gaming, temporary teams usually assembled by matchmaking programs integrated into a game (short for “pick-up groups”).
noobs game players who are clueless beginners.
ninjas game players who snatch loot out of turn and then leave a pick-up group, or PUG.
trolls
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players who take pleasure in intentionally spoiling a gaming experience for others.
THE DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION SERIES has become a popular experiential game. The series—along with other rhythm- based games like Just Dance and Rock Band —has provided a new revenue stream for the music industry, which can license songs to use with the games. Bloomberg/Getty Images
Because of the frustration of dealing with noobs, ninjas, and trolls, most experienced players join organized groups called guilds or clans. These groups can be small and easygoing or large and demanding. Players communicate in two forms of in-game chat—voice and text. Xbox LIVE, for example, uses three types of voice chat that allow players to socialize and strategize, in groups or one-on- one, even as they are playing the game. Other in-game chat systems are text-based, with chat channels for trading in-game goods or coordinating missions within a guild. These methods of communicating with fellow players who may or may not know one another outside the game create a sense of community around gameplay. Some players have formed lasting friendships or romantic relationships through their video game habit. Avid gamers have even held in-game ceremonies, like weddings or funerals—sometimes for game-only characters, sometimes for real- life events.
guilds or clans
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in gaming, coordinated, organized teamlike groups that can be either small and easygoing or large and demanding.
Communities of Play: Outside the Game Communities also form outside games, through Web sites and even face-to-face gatherings dedicated to electronic gaming in its many forms. This phenomenon is similar to the formation of online and in-person groups to discuss other mass media, like movies, TV shows, or books. These communities extend beyond gameplay, enhancing the social experience gained through the games.
Collective Intelligence Mass media productions are almost always collaborative efforts, as is evident in the credits for movies, television shows, and music recordings. The same goes for digital games. But what is unusual about game developers and the game industry is their interest in listening to gamers and their communities in order to gather new ideas and constructive criticism and to gauge popularity. Gamers, too, collaborate with one another to share shortcuts and “cheats” to solving tasks and quests, and to create their own modifications to games. This sharing of knowledge and ideas is an excellent example of collective intelligence. French professor Pierre Lévy coined the term collective intelligence in 1997 to describe the Internet, “this new dimension of communication,” and its ability to “enable us to share our knowledge and acknowledge it to others.”16 In the world of gaming, where users are active participants (more than in any other medium), the collective intelligence of players informs the entire game environment.
collective intelligence thesharing of knowledge and ideas, particularly in the world of gaming.
For example, collective intelligence (and action) is necessary to work through levels of many games. In World of Warcraft, collective intelligence is highly recommended. Gamers share ideas through chats and wikis, and those looking for tips and cheats provided by fellow players need only Google what they want. The largest of the sites devoted to sharing collective intelligence is the World of Warcraft wiki (www.wowwiki.com). Similar user-generated sites are dedicated to a range of digital games, including Age of Conan, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, Mario, Metal Gear, Pokémon, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Spore.
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http://www.wowwiki.com
THE ELECTRONIC ENTERTAINMENT EXPO hosts an enormous variety of game developers and related companies (as well as performances from musicians such as Rita Ora, Drake, and deadmau5) at its annual gathering. Here, Microsoft shows off a specially prepared version of its popular Minecraft game designed for its augmented-reality HoloLens project. Damian Dovarganes/AP Images
The most advanced form of collective intelligence in gaming is modding, slang for “modifying game software or hardware.” In many mass communication industries, modifying hardware or content would land someone in a copyright lawsuit. In gaming, modding is often encouraged, as it is yet another way players become more deeply invested in a game, and it can improve the game for others. For example, Counter-Strike, a popular first-person shooter game, is a mod of Valve Corporation’s first-person shooter game Half-Life. The developers of Half- Life encouraged mods by including software development tools with it. Counter- Strike, in which counterterrorists fight terrorists, emerged as the most popular among many mods, and Valve formed a partnership with the game’s developers. Counter-Strike was released to retailers, eventually selling more copies than Half- Life. Today, many other games, such as The Elder Scrolls, have active modding communities.
modding the most advanced form of collective intelligence; slang for modifying game software or hardware.
Game Sites Game sites and blogs are among the most popular external communities for gamers. IGN (owned by Ziff Davis), GameSpot (CBS), GameTrailers (MTV Networks/Viacom), and Kotaku (Gawker Media) are four of the leading Web sites
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for gaming. GameSpot and IGN are apt examples of giant industry sites, each with sixteen to nineteen million unique, mostly male, eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old visitors per month—a desirable demographic to major media corporations. Penny Arcade is perhaps the best known of the independent community-building sites. The site started out as a Webcomic focused on video game culture. It has since expanded to include forums and a Web series called PA that documents behind- the-scenes work at Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade organizes a live festival to celebrate gamers and gamer culture called the Penny Arcade Expo, as well as a children’s charity called Child’s Play.
Conventions In addition to online gaming communities, there are conventions and expos where video game enthusiasts can come together in person to test out new games and other new products, play old games in competition, and meet video game developers. One of the most significant is the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), which draws more than 45,000 industry professionals, investors, developers, and retailers to its annual meeting. E3 is the place where the biggest new game titles and products are unveiled, and it is covered by hundreds of journalists, televised on Spike TV, and streamed to mobile devices and Xbox consoles.
The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) is a convention created by gamers for gamers, held each year in Seattle and Boston. One of its main attractions is the Omegathon, a three-day elimination game tournament in which twenty randomly selected attendees compete in games across several genres, culminating in the championship match at the convention’s closing. Other conventions include the Tokyo Game Show, the world’s largest gaming convention, with more than 200,000 attendees annually.
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TRENDS AND ISSUES IN DIGITAL GAMING
The ever-growing relationship between video games and other media, such as books, movies, and television, leaves no doubt that digital gaming has a permanent place in our culture. Like other media, games are a venue for advertising. A virtual billboard in a video game is usually more than just a digital prop; as in some television shows and movies, it’s a paid placement. And like other media, games are a subject of social concern. Violent and misogynistic content has from time to time spurred calls for more regulation of electronic games. But as games permeate more aspects of culture and become increasingly available in nonstandard formats and genres, they may also become harder to define and, therefore, regulate.
Electronic Gaming and Media Culture Beyond the immediate industry, electronic games have had a pronounced effect on media culture. For example, fantasy league sports have spawned a number of draft specials on ESPN as well as a regular podcast, Fantasy Focus, on ESPN Radio. Fantasy football has even inspired an adult comedy called The League on the cable channel FXX. In the case of the Web site Twitch, streaming and archived video of digital games being played is the content. In just three years, the site became so popular that Amazon bought it for almost $1 billion to add to its collection of original video programming.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Video Games at the Movies Alice, the hero of the Resident Evil film series, fights zombies in this clip.
Discussion: In what ways does this clip replicate the experience of gameplay? In what ways is a film inherently different from a game?
Like television shows, books, and comics before them, electronic games have
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http://macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
inspired movies, such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), the Resident Evil series (2001–2017), and Warcraft (2016). For many Hollywood blockbusters today, a video game spin-off is a must-have item. Box-office hits like Brave (2012), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), Maleficent (2014), and Jurassic World (2015) all have companion video games for consoles, portable players, or mobile devices.
Books and electronic games have also had a long history of influencing each other. Japanese manga and anime (comic books and animation) have also inspired video games, such as Akira, Astro Boy, and Naruto. Batman: Arkham Asylum, a top video game title introduced in 2009, is based closely on the Batman comic-book stories, while The Witcher, an action role-playing game for PCs, is based on Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski’s saga. Perhaps the most unusual link between books and electronic games is the Marvel vs. Capcom series. In this series, characters from Marvel comic books (Captain America, Hulk, Spider-Man, Wolverine) battle characters from Capcom games like Street Fighter and Resident Evil (Akuma, Chun-Li, Ryu, Albert Wesker).
Electronic Gaming and Advertising Commercialism is as prevalent in video games as it is in most entertainment media. Advergames, like television’s infomercials or newspapers and magazines’ advertorials, are video games created for purely promotional purposes. The first notable advergame debuted in 1992, when Chester Cheetah, the official mascot for Cheetos snacks, starred in two video games for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo systems. More recent is the innovative interactive Web commercial “Magnum Pleasure Hunt,” for gourmet Magnum chocolate ice cream bars. In this platform game, the user manipulates the constantly jogging, barefoot “Magnum Girl” up and over the game’s Internet-based environments (such as Bing travel pages, YouTube videos, and luxury hotel Web sites). A player earns points by strategically timing Magnum Girl’s jumps so that she connects with—or consumes —the game’s many chocolate bonbons, and Magnum’s specialty chocolate bar is the final reward for Magnum Girl’s (and the player’s) hard work. In-game advertisements are more subtle; ads are integrated into the game as billboards, logos, or storefronts (e.g., a Farmers Insurance airship floating by in FarmVille or Dove soap spas appearing in The Sims Social), or advertised products appear as components of the game (e.g., in the game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, a large glowing billboard for Axe deodorant becomes an obstacle for the player to overcome).17
advergames video games created for purely promotional purposes.
in-game advertisements
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integrated, often subtle advertisements, such as billboards, logos, or storefronts in a game, that can be either static or dynamic.
HIGH-PROFILE MOVIES LIKE MINIONS (2015) inspire an increasing number of game tie-ins. In the past, these games would often trail their movie counterparts by months; for Minions, simpler mobile games were released concurrently with the movie. The process was reversed in 2016 with the release of a movie based on the Angry Birds mobile game. © Universal Pictures/Photofest
Some in-game advertisements are static, which means the ads are permanently placed in the game. Other in-game ads are dynamic, which means the ads are digitally networked and can be altered remotely, so agencies can tailor them according to release time, geographical location, or user preferences. A movie ad, for example, can have multiple configurations to reflect the movie’s release date and screening markets. Advertisers can also record data on users who come in contact with a dynamic ad, such as how long they look at it, from what angle, and how often, and can thus determine how to alter their ad campaigns in the future. The Xbox Kinect has taken dynamic advertising one step further with its newest consoles, enabling players to engage with the in-game ads using motion and voice control to learn more about a product. All in-game advertising is estimated to generate $7.2 billion in global revenue in 2016.18
Addiction and Other Concerns Though many people view gaming as a simple leisure activity, the electronic gaming industry has sparked controversy. Parents, politicians, the medical establishment, and media scholars have expressed concern about the addictive quality of video games, especially MMORPGs, and have raised the alarm about
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violent and misogynistic game content—standard fare for many of the most heavily played games.
Addiction No serious—and honest—gamer can deny the addictive qualities of electronic gaming. In a 2011 study of more than three thousand third through eighth graders from Singapore, one in ten were considered pathological gamers, meaning that their gaming addiction was jeopardizing multiple areas of their lives, including school, social and family relations, and psychological well-being. Indeed, the more the children were addicted, the more prone they were to depression, social phobias, and increased anxiety, which led to poorer grades in school. Singapore’s high percentage of pathological youth gamers is in line with numbers reported in other countries, including the United States, where studies found 8.5 percent of gamers to be addicted. In China, the number is 10.3 percent, and in Germany, 11.9 percent.19
Gender is a factor in game addiction: A 2013 study found that males are much more susceptible to game addiction. This makes sense, given that the most popular games—action and shooter games—are heavily geared toward males.20 These findings are also not entirely surprising, given that many electronic games are addictive not by accident but by design. Just as habit formation is a primary goal of virtually every commercial form of electronic media, from newspapers to television to radio, cultivating compulsiveness is the aim of most game designs. From recognizing high scores to incorporating various difficulty settings (encouraging players to try easy, medium, and hard versions) and levels that gradually increase in complexity, designers provide constant in-game incentives for obsessive play.
This is especially true of multiplayer online games—like Halo, Call of Duty, and World of Warcraft— that make money from long-term engagement by selling expansion packs or charging monthly subscription fees. These games have elaborate achievement systems with hard-to-resist rewards that include military ranks like “General” or fanciful titles like “King Slayer,” as well as special armor, weapons, and mounts (creatures your avatar can ride, including bears, wolves, or even dragons), all aimed at turning casual players into habitual ones.
This strategy of promoting habit formation may not differ from the cultivation of other media obsessions, like watching televised sporting events. Even so, real- life stories, such as that of the South Korean couple whose three-month-old daughter died of malnutrition while the negligent parents spent ten-hour overnight sessions in an Internet café raising a virtual daughter, bring up serious questions about video games and addiction.21 Meanwhile, industry executives and others cite the positive impact of digital games, such as the mental stimulation and educational benefits of games like SimCity, the health benefits of Wii Fit, and the socially rewarding benefits of playing games together as a family or with friends.
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Violence and Misogyny The Entertainment Software Association (ESA)—the main trade association of the gaming industry—likes to point out that nearly half of game players are women, that more than three-quarters of games sold are rated in the family- and teen- friendly categories, and that the average age of a game player is thirty-five. While these statements are true, they also mask a troubling aspect of some of game culture’s most popular games: their violent and sexist imagery.
GLOBAL VILLAGE
Global Controversy: The Gender Problem in Digital Games
nita Sarkeesian has a well-documented love of playing video games, from Mario Kart and Rock Band to Plants vs. Zombies
and Half-Life 2. But that hasn’t stopped her from becoming one of the most outspoken—and targeted—critics of how video games depict and treat women. In 2012, a successful Kick-starter campaign helped her launch her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games video series. As Sarkeesian explained, she was moved to examine video games because as a girl growing up and playing the games, she saw that so many of the troubling stereotypes about women were enmeshed in games and gaming culture.
“The games often reinforce a similar message, overwhelmingly casting men as heroes and relegating women to the roles of damsels, victims or hypersexualized playthings,” Sarkeesian said. “The notion that gaming was not for women rippled out into society, until we heard it not just from the games industry, but from our families, teachers and friends. As a consequence, I, like many women, had a complicated, love–hate
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relationship with gaming culture.”1
“Love–hate” is probably also a good way to describe the reaction to Sarkeesian’s critique of games. On the one hand, she has gained critical acclaim and visibility for her videos and writing, appearing in the New York Times, Businessweek, and Rolling Stone, as well as on The Colbert Report. On the other hand, since she began releasing her videos on digital games, she has been the target of a global campaign of incredibly graphic and violent threats of rape, torture, and murder on social media. This ongoing online harassment reached a new low in the fall of 2014, when another of her Feminist Frequency video releases coincided with what has become known as the #GamerGate controversy.
The story surrounding the event that ostensibly touched off the #GamerGate firestorm began when a computer programmer, Eron Gjoni, had a bad breakup with game designer Zoe Quinn. Gjoni then went online with their breakup in a 9,425-word blog post, claiming that Quinn had had an affair with a writer at Kotaku, an influential gamers’ Web site that features information about a variety of games. The post went viral (as Gjoni intended). Male gamers who believed Gjoni assumed that the affair had led to a favorable review of Quinn’s most recent game on Kotaku, pointing to this as indicative of a larger trend of shady journalistic ethics in the gaming press. They organized their criticisms under the hashtag #GamerGate. Very quickly, however, any supposed concerns over journalistic ethics were overshadowed by those focused on “slut-shaming” Quinn. As Boston magazine said, “Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend was obsessed with destroying her reputation— and thousands of online strangers were eager to help.”2 The misogynistic attacks by supporters of #GamerGate exploded into a global barrage of anonymous threats and attacks on a number of high- profile women in the gaming industry, including Sarkeesian, game developer Brianna Wu, and journalists Katherine Cross and Maddy
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Myers. A Reddit discussion board identified #GamerGate supporters in nearly every country around the world.3
It was at this point that Sarkeesian (and other critics) spoke up and pointed out that the deeply disturbing threats that female gamers and critics were experiencing proved her point about a deeper problem in the gaming culture, which in turn reflected broader cultural misogyny. In response to this criticism, many supporters of #GamerGate started behaving even worse.
Soon Sarkeesian and others weren’t just receiving anonymous and graphic threats in places like Twitter, disturbing enough on its own, but found themselves victims of doxing and swatting. To “dox” someone means to steal private or personal information (from addresses and personal phone numbers to social security and credit card information in some cases) and make it public. To “swat” someone means to call in an anonymous tip to a police department where a victim lives in an attempt to provoke a raid—particularly by an armed SWAT team—on the person’s home. In one such incident, approximately twenty Portland police officers were dispatched to the scene of a supposed armed hostage situation when the target of the hoax saw someone bragging about it on a message board and called the police before the situation could escalate.4 Quinn and Wu both had to flee their homes after being doxed and receiving threats that identified where they lived.
In another case, before a scheduled speech by Sarkeesian at Utah State University, an anonymous person threatened to carry out the biggest school shooting ever if the video game critic spoke. Sarkeesian canceled her speech after campus police said Utah’s gun laws prohibited them from turning away any audience member who showed up with a gun. Sarkeesian went into hiding for a time, afraid to return to her home because of the various threats. Her Wikipedia page has been vandalized several times with pornographic pictures, and her Feminist Frequency Web site has been the target of Denial of Service attacks.
But Sarkeesian is far from giving up. In an ironic twist, the hatred leveled at the critic has brought many supporters her way as well. For example, in the first quarter of 2014, her crowdfunded Feminist Frequency Web site received $1,500 in donations. In the last quarter of 2014 (after #GamerGate really started heating up), donors sent almost $400,000 to Feminist Frequency (which is now officially a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing commercial-free videos critiquing the portrayal of women in video games and mass media). Her Feminist Frequency Twitter followers had expanded to more than 600,0000 by 2016, while her Tropes vs. Women video series on YouTube has drawn
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millions of views.5
Because the gaming news media was largely ignoring the misogyny of #GamerGate, Sarkeesian, Wu, and others began to speak out to mainstream news organizations, and coverage spread to Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and elsewhere. With the #GamerGate controversy subject to greater international media scrutiny, the discussion began to change. “We finally shamed [the gaming news media] into finally addressing #GamerGate,” Wu said in a university speech. After being subjected to more than fifty death threats and constant bullying, and still feeling “damaged from this experience,” Wu perseveres. “We are making this better. We took #GamerGate and we turned it around in its tracks.”6
Most games involving combat, guns, and other weapons are intentionally violent, with representations of violence becoming all the more graphic as game visuals reach cinematic hyperrealism. The most violent video games, rated M for “Mature,” often belong to the first-person shooter, dark fantasy, or survival horror genres (or a combination of all three) and cast players in a variety of sinister roles —serial killers, mortal combat soldiers, chain-gun-wielding assassins, mutated guys out for revenge, not-quite-executed death-row inmates, and underworld criminals (to name a few)—in which they earn points by killing and maiming their foes through the most horrendous means possible. In this genre of games, violence is a celebration, as is clear from one Top 10 list featuring the most “delightfully violent video games of all time.”22
That some games can be violent and misogynistic is not a point of dispute. But the possible effects of such games have been debated for years, and video games have been accused of being a factor in violent episodes, such as the Columbine High School shootings in 1999. Earlier research linked playing violent video games to aggressive thoughts or hostility, but those effects don’t necessarily transfer to real-world environments. Instead, more recent studies suggest that the personality traits of certain types of players should be of greater concern than the violence of video games. For example, a study in the Review of General Psychology noted that individuals with a combination of “high neuroticism (e.g., easily upset, angry, depressed, emotional, etc.), low agreeableness (e.g., little concern for others, indifferent to others’ feelings, cold, etc.), and low conscientiousness (e.g., break rules, don’t keep promises, act without thinking, etc.)” are more susceptible to the negative outcomes measured in studies of violent video games.23 For the vast majority of players, the study concluded, violent video games have no adverse effects. (See “Case Study: Finding Positive Effects in Digital Games” on pages 80–81 for more about the relationship between violent
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video games and real-world violence.) There is less research on misogyny (hatred of women) in video games. One of
the most extreme game narratives is from Grand Theft Auto 3, in which male characters can pick up female prostitutes, pay money for sex, get an increase in player “health,” and then beat up or kill the hooker to get their money back. Although women are close to half of the digital game audience in the United States, it’s likely that many aren’t engaged by this story. The source of the problem may be the male insularity of the game development industry—for reasons that are unclear, few women are on the career path to be involved in game development. According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, “Women hold 56% of all professional occupations in the U.S. workforce, but only 25% of IT occupations.” And even as the digital game industry gets bigger, the impact of women gets smaller. “In 2009, just 18% of undergraduate Computing and Information Sciences degrees were awarded to women; in 1985, women earned 37% of these degrees.”24 (See “Global Village: Global Controversy: The Gender Problem in Digital Games” on pages 88–89 for more on violence and misogyny in video games.)
GAMES IN THE GRAND THEFT AUTO series typically receive a rating of “Mature,” indicating they should not be sold to players under seventeen. However, the ratings do not distinguish between overall game violence and misogynistic attitudes. David J. Green—Lifestyle/Alamy
Regulating Gaming For decades, concern about violence in video games has led to calls for regulation. Back in 1976, an arcade game called Death Race prompted the first public outcry over the violence of electronic gaming. The primitive graphics of the game depicted a blocky car running down stick-figure Gremlins that, if struck, turned
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into grave markers. Described as “sick and morbid” by the National Safety Council, Death Race inspired a 60 Minutes report on the potential psychological damage of playing video games. Over the next forty years, violent video games would prompt citizen groups and politicians to call for government regulation of electronic games’ content.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
First-Person Shooter Games: Misogyny as Entertainment?
Historical first-person shooter games are a significant subgenre of action games, the biggest-selling genre of the digital game industry. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (set in a fictional WWIII) made $775 million in its first five days. And with thirteen million units sold by 2012, Rockstar Games’ critically acclaimed Red Dead Redemption (RDR, set in the Wild West) was applauded for its realism and called a “tour de force” by the New York Times.1 But as these games proliferate through our culture, what are we learning as we are launched back and forth in time and into the worlds of these games?
1 Description Red Dead Redemption features John Madsen, a white outlaw turned federal agent, who journeys to the “uncivilized” West to capture or kill his old gang members. Within this game, gamers encounter breathtaking vistas and ghost towns with saloons, prostitutes, and gunslingers; large herds of cattle; and scenes of the Mexican Rebellion. Shootouts are common in towns and on the plains, and gamers earn points for killing animals and people. The New York Times review notes that “Red Dead Redemption is perhaps most distinguished by the brilliant voice acting and pungent, pitch-perfect writing we have come to expect from Rockstar.”2
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2 Analysis RDR may have “pitch-perfect writing,” but a certain tune emerges. For example, African Americans and Native Americans are absent from the story line (although they were clearly present in the West of 1911). The roles of women are limited: They are portrayed as untrustworthy and chronically nagging wives, prostitutes, or nuns—and they can be blithely killed in front of sheriffs and husbands without ramifications. One special mission is to hogtie a nun or prostitute and drop her onto tracks in front of an oncoming train. One gamer in his popular how-to demo on YouTube calls this mission “the coolest achievement I’ve ever seen in a game.”3
3 Interpretation RDR may give us a technologically rich immersion into the Wild West of 1911, but it relies on clichés to do so (macho white gunslinger as leading man, weak or contemptible women, vigilante justice). If the macho/misogynistic narrative possibilities and value system of RDR seem familiar, it’s because the game is based on Rockstar’s other video game hit, Grand Theft Auto (GTA), which lets players have sex with and then graphically kill hookers. GTA was heavily criticized for creating an “X-Rated wonderland” and was dubbed “Grand Theft Misogyny.”4 Indeed, Rockstar simply took the GTA engine and interface and overlaid new scenes, narratives, and characters, moving from the urban streets of Liberty City to American frontier towns.5
4 Evaluation The problem with Red Dead Redemption is its limited view of history, lack of imagination, and reliance on misogyny as entertainment. Since its gameplay is so similar to that of GTA, the specifics of time and place are beside the point—all that’s left is killing and hating women. Video games are fun, but what effect do they have on men’s attitudes toward women?
5 Engagement Talk to friends about games like GTA, RDR, and Rockstar’s latest, L.A. Noire. (Set in 1940s Los Angeles, it also contains scenes with nudity and
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graphic violence against women.) Comment on blog sites about the ways some games can provide a mask for misogyny, and write to Rockstar itself (www.rockstargames.com), demanding less demeaning narratives regarding women and ethnic minorities.
In 1993, after the violence of Mortal Kombat and Night Trap attracted the attention of religious and educational organizations, Senator Joe Lieberman conducted a hearing that proposed federal regulation of the gaming industry. Following a pattern established in the movie and music industries, the gaming industry implemented a self-regulation system enforced by an industry panel. The industry founded the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in 1994 to institute a labeling system designed to inform parents of sexual and violent content that might not be suitable for younger players. Publishers aren’t required to submit their games to the ESRB for a rating, but many retailers will only sell rated games, so gamemakers usually consent to the process. To get a rating, the game companies submit scripts that include any dialogue and music lyrics, and also fill out a questionnaire to describe the story and identify possibly offensive content.25 Currently the ESRB sorts games into six categories: EC (Early Childhood), E (Everyone), E 10+, T (Teens), M (17+), and AO (Adults Only 18+).
Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) a self-regulating organization that assigns ratings to games based on six categories: EC (Early Childhood), E (Everyone), E 10+, T (Teens), M 17+, and AO (Adults Only 18+).
In the most recent effort to regulate video games, California passed a law in 2005 to fine stores $1,000 for selling video games rated M or AO to minors. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law in a 7–2 decision, setting a difficult precedent for the establishment of other laws regulating electronic games.
The Future of Gaming and Interactive Environments Gaming technology of the future promises a more immersive and portable experience that will touch even more aspects of our lives. The Wii has been successful in harnessing more interactive technology to attract nongamers with its motion-controlled games. Nintendo’s latest Wii U system goes a step further—in one game, the controller serves as a shield to block virtual arrows shot by pirates
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on the TV screen. Microsoft’s motion-sensing Xbox Kinect has been a hit since its introduction in late 2010, and with Avatar Kinect, users can control their avatar’s motions as the Kinect senses even small physical gestures. In 2012, Sony released its SOEmote facial-tracking and voice-font software with its popular EverQuest II game, enabling players to give their facial expressions and voices to their avatars. Virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift further deepen the immersive play of games.
Video games in the future will also continue to move beyond just entertainment. The term gamification describes how interactive game experiences are being embedded to bring competition and rewards to everyday activities.26 Games are already used in workforce training, for social causes, in classrooms, and as part of multimedia journalism. For example, to accompany a news report about texting while driving, the New York Times developed an interactive game, Gauging Your Distraction, to demonstrate the consequences of distractions (such as cell phones) on driving ability. All these developments continue to make games a larger part of our media experiences.
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THE BUSINESS OF DIGITAL GAMING
Today, about 72 percent of households play computer or video games. The entire U.S. video game market, including portable and console hardware and accessories, adds up to about $20.8 billion annually, with global sales reaching $111 billion in 2015. Thanks largely to the introduction of the Wii and mobile games, today’s audience for games extends beyond the young-male gamer stereotype. According to the video and computer game industry’s main trade group, the Entertainment Software Association, the average game player is thirty-five years old and has been playing games for eighteen years. Women constitute 52 percent of game players. Gamers play across a range of platforms: 51 percent of U.S. households have a video console, 43 percent play games on smartphones, and 37 percent play on a dedicated handheld player. Gamers are social, too: 62 percent of them play games with others, either in person or online.27 These numbers speak to the economic health of the electronic gaming industry, which has proved recession-proof so far. Digital gaming companies can make money selling not just consoles and games but also online subscriptions, companion books, and movie rights.
The Ownership and Organization of Digital Gaming For years, the two major components of the gaming industry have been console makers and game publishers. The biggest blockbuster games are still produced and distributed by the leading game publishers, and many are designed to be played on the leading game consoles connected to big television sets. At the same time, the emergence of game platforms on mobile devices and on social networks has expanded the game market and brought new game publishers into the field.
Console Makers The video game console business is dominated by three major players: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. Nintendo got its start manufacturing Japanese playing cards in 1889. After seventy-seven years, the playing card business was becoming less profitable, and Nintendo began venturing into toy production in the 1960s— including eventually distributing Magnavox’s Odyssey console. Nintendo would release its own video game console three years later. In the early 1980s, Nintendo had two major marketing successes. First, the company developed and released the very successful platform game Donkey Kong (1981), in which players help Jumpman rescue Lady from the giant ape, Donkey Kong. Developed for multiple consoles, the video game was the Japanese company’s breakthrough into the U.S. console market. Second, Nintendo developed the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console, which reached U.S. markets in 1985 bundled with the Super Mario
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Bros. platform game. With this package, Nintendo set the standard for video game consoles, Mario and Luigi became household names, and Super Mario Bros. became the most successful video series for the next twenty-four years.
Sony, also headquartered in Japan, emerged after World War II as a manufacturer of tape recorders and radios (the name Sony is rooted in the Latin word sonus, meaning “sound”). Since then, Sony has been a major player in the consumer electronics industry, producing televisions, VCRs, computers, cameras, and, beginning in the mid-1990s, video game consoles. Its venture into video games came about because of a deal gone bad with Nintendo. Sony had been partnering with Nintendo to create an add-on device to Nintendo’s NES that would control music CDs (hence the name they proposed: “play station”). When the partnership fell through, Sony went into direct competition with Nintendo, launching in 1994 the impressive PlayStation console, which doubled the microprocessor size introduced by Sega (from 16 bits to 32 bits) and played both full-motion and 3-D video. Described in the New York Times as the “CD-based video game machine,” PlayStation was also capable of playing music CDs—a nice retort to Nintendo.28
Continuing the console battle, in 1996 Nintendo released Nintendo 64, a doubly powerful 64-bit microprocessor complete with even more realistic images and even clearer 3-D motion graphics. This launch created a buyers’ frenzy—for the Nintendo 64 as well as for the Super Mario 64 game cartridge that launched with the console, dubbed by critics “the best video game ever.”29 Meanwhile, other console makers—such as Sega, Atari, and SNK—were trying to compete, sometimes making incredible technological leaps, like Sega’s 128-bit Dreamcast, which came equipped with a built-in modem. Ultimately, these advancements were copied, and then overshadowed, by Nintendo and Sony products.
cartridge the early physical form of video games that were played on consoles manufactured by companies like Nintendo, Sega, and Atari.
The main rivalry between Nintendo and Sony was more or less resolved by 1997, with Nintendo claiming the market for children up to age fourteen and Sony’s PlayStation becoming the console of choice for serious young-adult gamers. By 1997, the newly broadened audience had created an impressive market for the video game industry worth $5.5 billion.30
And yet into this new world of serious gaming—so securely dominated by Sony PlayStation—came the computer software goliath Microsoft. The Xbox, which represented a $500 million commitment from Microsoft, had many firsts: the first console to feature a built-in hard disk drive; the first to be connected to an
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online service (Xbox LIVE); and the first to have Dolby Digital sound, for a cinematic sound experience. While Xbox could not offer the arsenal of games that PlayStation gamers had access to, the console did launch with one particular game, Halo. Game critics and players immediately recognized this sci-fi first-person shooter game—now a multibillion-dollar franchise—as Microsoft’s “killer app.”31
Today, Sony’s PlayStation 4 (2013), Microsoft’s Xbox One (2013), and Nintendo’s Wii U (2012) are the leading consoles, providing the most creative, interactive, hyperrealistic, and stimulating entertainments.
Game Publishers As the video game industry moves away from consoles and toward streaming services, PCs, smartphones, and tablets, game publishers have had to adapt to technological innovations and predict future media trends, all while still offering good gameplay and stories. In some cases, the game-console makers are also the game publishers (sometimes making the game proprietary, meaning it only plays on that company’s system). For example, Microsoft famously published its Halo game series to drive sales of the Xbox. Similarly, Sony publishes the Uncharted game series just for PlayStation, and Nintendo publishes The Legend of Zelda series solely for its gaming platforms.
More often, game publishers are independent companies, distributing games that play across multiple platforms. Sometimes the publishers are also the developers of the game—the people who write the actual code for the game. But publishers may also be just the distributors for the game developers (just as film studios may distribute the work of independent filmmakers). Two leading independent game publishing companies, Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts, have been particularly good at adaptation and innovation, producing the most imaginative and ambitious titles and selling the most games across multiple platforms.
Activision Blizzard was created through the merging of Activision and Vivendi’s Blizzard division in 2008. One half of the company—Activision—got its start in the 1970s as the first independent game developer and distributor, initially providing games for the Atari platform. Activision was unique in that it rewarded its developers with royalty payments and name credits on game box covers, something that hadn’t yet been considered by other game publishing companies, which kept their developers anonymous. As a result, top game designers and programmers migrated to Activision, and Activision began to produce a number of top-selling games, including the X-Men series (2000–), the Call of Duty series (2003–), and Guitar Hero (2006–2011).
Meanwhile, Blizzard Entertainment, established in 1991 as an independent game publisher, has three famous franchises in game publishing: Diablo (1996–), StarCraft (1998–), and World of Warcraft (2004–). known for its obsession with game quality, artistic achievement, and commitment to its fans, Blizzard has dominated in real-time strategy games and remains one of the most critically acclaimed game publishers in the world. As one company, Activision Blizzard has
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become a publishing giant in the industry and expanded its offerings by purchasing mobile and social gamemaker King (Candy Crush Saga) in 2016.
Electronic Arts (EA) got its name by recognizing that the video game is an art form and that software developers are indeed artists; the name Electronic Arts is also a tribute to the United Artists film studio, established in 1919 by three actors and one director—Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith—who broke away from the studio-dominated film industry (see pages 221–222). Operating under the same principle that Activision pioneered, EA was able to secure a stable of top talent and begin producing a promising lineup of titles: Archon, Pinball Construction Set, M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, The Bard’s Tale, Starflight, and Wasteland, and, perhaps most notably, John Madden Football (now known as Madden NFL)—first released in 1988 and then updated annually beginning in 1990, a practice which became the modus operandi for EA.
Like Activision Blizzard, EA has moved toward mobile and social gaming platforms. Electronic Arts acquired PopCap Games, the company that produces both Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies. The company has also sought to compete directly with Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft series by developing (through its Canadian subsidiary, BioWare) the lavish MMORPG game Star Wars: The Old Republic (2012)—the most expensive game made to date, with a price tag approaching $200 million.32
One of the newest major game publishers, Zynga, was established in 2007 and specializes in casual games. FarmVille, Draw Something Zynga Poker, and Empires & Allies are among its hits, though its Facebook successes have lost players to competing developers like Activision Blizzard subsidiary King (Candy Crush Saga, Bubble Witch Saga) and Wooga (Diamond Dash, Bubble Island). Zynga’s next step is developing games for mobile devices to decrease its reliance on Facebook.
The most well-known developer and publisher of games for mobile devices is Rovio, founded in Finland in 2003. In 2010, Rovio’s Angry Birds became an international phenomenon, as millions of players downloaded the game on touchscreen devices for the chance to slingshot-launch birds at pigs hiding in increasingly complex structures. By 2012 (as Rovio released Angry Birds Space), the downloads of all of the company’s Angry Birds titles reached a billion.33 Like Zynga, Rovio has moved to diversify, and it brought Angry Birds to Facebook in 2012. In 2016, Sony Animation produced a feature film based on the game.
Other top game publishers around the world include Square Enix (Deus Ex, Final Fantasy), Ubisoft (Assassin’s Creed, Rayman), Sega (Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Monkey Ball), and Bandai Namco (Dark Souls, Tekken).
The Structure of Digital Game Publishing AAA game titles (games that represent the current standard for technical excellence) can cost as much as a blockbuster film to make and promote. For example, Electronic Arts’ MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic took six years
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of production, with hundreds of programmers, writers, and artists working on the game, as well as an untold number of contract workers. Using recorded voice dialogue rather than text, Star Wars: The Old Republic has more voice acting than any previous game, online or off. To get the game ready for its global launch, EA assembled 1.6 million players to test an early version of the game.34 Development, licensing, manufacturing, and marketing constitute the major expenditures in game publishing (see Figure 3.2 on page 96).
Development The largest part of the development budget—the money spent designing, coding, scoring, and testing a game—goes to paying talent, digital artists, and game testers. Each new generation of gaming platforms doubles the number of people involved in designing, programming, and mixing digitized images and sounds.
development the process of designing, coding, scoring, and testing a game.
ANGRY BIRDS Rovio’s popular mobile video game, had over 2 billion downloads across all mobile platforms by 2014. With a mention on NBC’s 30 Rock, a tie-in with Twentieth Century Fox’s animated film Rio, and a New Yorker cartoon, these fearsome birds have permeated our media culture. A feature film followed in 2016. © Kim Warp/The New Yorker Collection/www.CartoonBank.com
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http://www.CartoonBank.com
Licensing Independent gamemakers must also deal with two types of licensing. First, they have to pay royalties to console manufacturers (Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo) for the right to distribute a game using their system. These royalties vary from $3 to $10 per unit sold. (Of course, if a console manufacturer such as Nintendo makes its own games exclusively for the Wii, then it doesn’t have to pay a console royalty to itself.) The other form of licensing involves intellectual properties—stories, characters, personalities, and music that require licensing agreements. In 2005, for instance, John Madden reportedly signed a $150 million deal with EA Sports that allowed the company to use his name and likeness for the next ten years.35
intellectual properties in gaming, the stories, characters, personalities, and music that require licensing agreements.
FIGURE 3.2 WHERE THE MONEY GOES ON A $60 VIDEO GAME Data from: Altered Gamer, March 30, 2012, www.alteredgamer.com/free-pcgaming/21118- why-are-video-games-so-expensive.
Marketing The marketing costs of launching an electronic game often equal or exceed the development costs. The successful launch of a game involves online promotions, banner ads, magazine print ads, in-store displays, and the most expensive of all: television advertising. In many ways, the marketing blitz associated with introducing a major new franchise title, including cinematic television trailers,
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https://www.alteredgamer.com/free-pcgaming/21118-why-are-video-games-so-expensive
resembles the promotional campaign surrounding the debut of a blockbuster movie. For example, Rockstar Games reportedly spent $150 million for the marketing of its 2013 blockbuster release, Grand Theft Auto V. In this case, the marketing budget eclipsed the $115 million development budget.36 Just as avid fans line up for the first showings of a new Star Wars or Avengers movie, devoted gamers mob participating retail outlets during the countdown to the midnight launch of a hotly anticipated new game.
Selling Digital Games Just as digital distribution has altered the relationship between other mass media and their audiences, it has transformed the selling of electronic games. Although the selling of $60 AAA console games at retail stores is an enduring model, many games are now free (with opportunities for hooked players to pay for additional play features), and digital stores are making access to games almost immediate.
Pay Models There are three main pay models in the electronic game industry: the boxed game/retail model, the subscription model, and free-to-play.
The boxed game/retail model is the most traditional and dates back to the days of cartridges on Atari, Sega, and Nintendo console systems. By the 1990s, games were being released on CD-ROMs, and later DVDs, to better handle the richer game files. Many boxed games are now sold with offers of additional downloadable content. For blockbuster console games, retail sales of boxed games still reign as the venue for a game premiere. As of 2013, the biggest game launch ever—in fact, the biggest launch of any media product ever—was the September 17, 2013, release of Grand Theft Auto V. The game, published by Rockstar Games, generated more than $1 billion in sales in just three days, more than any other previous game or movie release.37
Some of the most popular games are also sold via a subscription model, in which gamers pay a monthly fee to play. Notable subscription games include World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Subscriptions can generate enormous revenue for game publishers. At its height of popularity, World of Warcraft earned more than $1 billion a year for Activision Blizzard.38 Players first buy the game and then pay a subscription from $12.99 to $14.99 a month.
Free-to-play (sometimes called freemium) is the latest pay model and is common with casual and online games, like 100 Balls. Free-to-play games are offered online or as downloads for free to gain or retain a large audience. These games make money by selling extras, like power boosters (to aid in gameplay), or in-game subscriptions for upgraded play. In addition to free casual games (like Angry Birds Seasons, Clash of Clans, and Temple Run), popular MMORPG games like Sony Online Entertainment’s EverQuest and DC Universe Online offer free- to-play versions. Even World of Warcraft, the largest MMORPG, began offering free-to-play for up to twenty levels of the game in 2011 to lure in new players.
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BIG-BUDGET GAMES like Batman: Arkham Knight from Rocksteady Studios receive launches that rival major film events (like Captain America: Civil War) or book publications (like the Divergent series). In fact, the most popular games can match the grosses of the year’s biggest movies in a matter of days, thanks to sky-high demand and higher prices. Richard Levine/age fotostock
Video Game Stores Apart from buying boxed game titles at stores like Walmart, Best Buy, and Target, or online stores like Amazon, there is really only one major video game store chain devoted entirely to new and used video games: GameStop. The chain, which started in Dallas, Texas, in 1984 as Babbage’s, today operates more than seventy- one hundred company stores in fourteen countries.39 GameStop is currently trying to negotiate the shifting ground of the digital turn. Some of the chain’s digital survival strategies include selling customers access codes to digital game downloads in the stores, selling Android tablets and refurbished iPads, and investing in other digital gaming companies.
Digital Distribution With the advent and growing popularity of digital game distribution, game players don’t need to go to a big-box store or retail game shop to buy video games. All three major consoles are Wi-Fi capable, and each has its own digital store—Xbox Games Store, Wii Shop Channel, and PlayStation Store. Customers can purchase and download games, get extra downloadable content, and buy other media— including television shows and movies—as the consoles compete to be the sole entertainment center of people’s living rooms.
Although the three major console companies control digital downloads to their devices, several companies compete for the download market in PC games. The largest is Steam, with more than 125 million subscribers and about 75 percent of
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the PC game distribution market.40 Steam is owned by Valve Corporation, which used the digital store to help distribute its Counter-Strike game online beginning in 2003. Steam also carries more than 7,500 games from a wide range of game publishers. Other companies that sell digital game downloads for PCs include Amazon, GameStop, and Origin (owned by EA).
Of course, the most ubiquitous digital game distributors are Apple’s App Store and Google Play, where users can purchase games on mobile devices. Although Google’s Android system has surpassed the iPhone in market penetration, Apple customers are more likely to purchase apps, including games. This has drawn more independent developers to work in the Apple operating system.
Alternative Voices The advent of mobile gaming has provided a new entry point for independent game developers. As Canadian Business magazine noted, the cost of entry has decreased substantially. “The average cost of making a major console game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is about $20 million, but almost anyone can churn out a new game app for the iPhone. And independent developers need only pay Apple’s $99 fee for a developer’s account to get their creations to the market—no Best Buy or Walmart shelf space required.”41
But even so, time and money are still required to develop quality games. Many independent game developers and smaller game companies, shunned by big game publishers who are focused on the next big blockbuster games, are finding funding through Kickstarter, the crowdsource fund-raising social media Web site for creative projects. Video game developers make a brief pitch on Kickstarter and then request a modest amount—sometimes just a few thousand dollars—from supporters to get started. (The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset that Facebook bought for $2 billion got its start in a comparatively modest Kickstarter campaign, which raised more than $2.4 million, far exceeding its $250,000 goal.) A number of top games at Apple’s App Store—including Temple Run, Tiny Wings, and Jetpack Joyride—are great success stories, started by small independent developers. But the cautionary tale is that it takes incredible persistence against great odds to make a successful game. Rovio made fifty-one failed app games in six years and nearly folded before Angry Birds became a worldwide success in 2009.
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DIGITAL GAMING, FREE SPEECH, AND DEMOCRACY
In a landmark decision handed down in 2011 over a California law enforcing fines for renting or selling M-rated games to minors, the Supreme Court granted electronic games speech protections afforded by the First Amendment. According to the opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, video games communicate ideas worthy of such protection:
Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world)42
Scalia even mentions Mortal Kombat in footnote 4 of the decision:
Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones. Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy… . Even if we can see in them “nothing of any possible value to society … they are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature.”
With the Supreme Court decision, electronic games achieved the same First Amendment protection afforded to other mass media. However, as in the music, television, and film industries, First Amendment protections will not make the rating system for the gaming industry go away. Parents continue to have legitimate concerns about the games their children play. Game publishers and retailers understand it is still in their best interest to respect those concerns even though the ratings cannot be enforced by law.
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3 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of our favorite quotes that we like to use in our teaching is from writer Joan Didion, in her book The White Album. She wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Telling stories is one of the constants of cultural expression across the mass media. But with digital games, is it still a story—or, better yet, what is it that is being communicated—if we are crafting our own individual narrative as we play through a game?
Books, television, movies, newspapers, magazines, and even musical recordings tell us stories about the human experience. Digital games, especially ones in which we play as a character or an avatar, offer perhaps the most immersive storytelling experience of any medium.
Gamers have already shifted away from traditional media stories to those of video games. The Entertainment Software Association reported that gamers who played more video games than they had three years earlier were spending less time going to the movies (40 percent of respondents), watching TV (39 percent), and watching movies at home (47 percent).43 Clearly, video games are in competition with movies and television for consumers’ attention. But as we move from the kind of storytelling we experience as audience members of TV and movies to the storytelling we experience as players of games, what happens to the story? Is it still a mass mediated story, or is it something else?
Jon Spaihts, screenwriter of the science-fiction film Prometheus (2012), identified an essential difference between the stories and storytelling in games and in films. “The central character of a game is most often a cipher—an avatar into which the player projects himself or herself. The story has to have a looseness to accommodate the player’s choices,” Spaihts said. Conversely, “a filmmaker is trying to make you look at something a certain way—almost to force an experience on you,” he added.44 Thus the question of who is doing the storytelling—a producer/director or the game player—is a significant one.
Such was the case in the furor over Mass Effect 3 in 2012. After players spent from 120 to 150 hours advancing through the trilogy, in which they could make hundreds of choices in the sequence of events, the final act took that power away from them with a tightly scripted finish. The players complained loudly, and the cofounder of BioWare, the game’s developer, issued an apology. BioWare said that it would create a new ending with “a number of game content initiatives that will
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help answer the questions, providing more clarity for those seeking further closure to their journey.”45
Certainly the audience of a movie will have a range of interpretations of the movie’s story. But what of the stories we are telling ourselves as players of games like Mass Effect? Is such personally immersive storytelling better, worse, or just different? And who is doing the storytelling?
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
penny arcade, 71 pinball machine, 72 arcades, 73 avatar, 73 consoles, 73 massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), 76 online fantasy sports, 76 gameplay, 78 action games, 78 first-person shooter (FPS), 78 adventure games, 79 role-playing games (RPGs), 79 strategy games, 83 simulation games, 83 casual games, 83 PUGs, 84 noobs, 84 ninjas, 84 trolls, 84 guilds or clans, 84 collective intelligence, 84 modding, 85 advergames, 86
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in-game advertisements, 86 Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), 92 cartridge, 93 development, 95 intellectual properties, 95
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
The Development of Digital Gaming 1. What sparked the creation of mechanical games in both the
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries? 2. How are classic arcade games and the culture of the arcade
similar to today’s popular console games and gaming culture? 3. What advantages did personal computers have over video game
consoles in the late 1980s and much of the 1990s? The Internet Transforms Gaming
4. How are MMORPGs, virtual worlds, and online fantasy sports built around online social interaction?
5. How has digital convergence changed the function of gaming consoles?
The Media Playground 6. What are the main genres within digital gaming? 7. How do collective intelligence, gaming Web sites, and game
conventions enhance the social experience of gaming and make games different from other mass media?
Trends and Issues in Digital Gaming 8. How have digital games influenced media culture, and vice
versa? 9. In what ways has advertising become incorporated into
electronic games?
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10. To what extent are video game addiction and violent and misogynistic representations problems for the gaming industry?
The Business of Digital Gaming 11. What are the roles of two major components of the gaming
industry: console makers and game publishers? 12. How do game publishers develop, license, and market new
titles? 13. What are the three major pay models for selling video games
today? Digital Gaming, Free Speech, and Democracy 14. Why did the U.S. Supreme Court rule that games count as
speech? 15. Why does the game industry still rate digital games, even if it
isn’t required by law to do so?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. Do you have any strong memories from playing early video games? To what extent did these games define your childhood?
2. Have you ever been appalled at the level of violence, misogyny, or racism in a video game you played (or watched being played)? Discuss the game narrative and what made it problematic.
3. Most electronic games produced have a white, male, heterosexual point of view. Why is that? If you were a game developer, what kinds of game narratives would you like to see developed?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter.
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PART 2 Sounds and Images
The dominant media of the twentieth century were all about sounds and images: music, radio, television, and film. Each of these media industries was built around a handful of powerful groups that set the terms for creating and distributing this popular media content. The main story of these media industries was one of ever- improving technology.
Even today, music, radio, TV, and movies are still significant media in our lives. But convergence and the digital turn have changed the story of our sound and image media. We now live in a world where any and all media can be consumed via the Internet on laptops, tablets, smartphones, and video game consoles. As a result, we have seen the demise of record stores and video stores, local radio deejays, and the big network TV hit. Traditional media corporations are playing catch-up, devising new online services to bring their offerings to us while still making money.
The major media of the twentieth century are mostly still with us, but the twenty- first-century story of what form that content will take and how we will experience it is yet to be written.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture to explore an interactive timeline of the history of mass communication, practice your media literacy skills, test your knowledge of the concepts in the textbook with LearningCurve, explore and discuss current trends in mass communication with Video Activities and Video Tools, and more.
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4 Sound Recording and Popular Music
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Jun Sato/Getty Images
SOUNDS AND IMAGES
TWO MUSICAL ARTISTS , born just a year apart
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in the United Kingdom and the United States, have dominated the U.S. music industry for the past decade. They are among the top recording stars of their generation, and both have reshaped the industry by signing early in their careers with independent music labels. Whereas stars of an earlier generation might have signed big contracts with one of the major music corporations as soon as they had their first hit, Adele and Taylor Swift stayed with their independent labels and demonstrated that artists can create successful careers without the help of a major corporation.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOUND RECORDING U.S. POPULAR MUSIC AND THE FORMATION OF ROCK A CHANGING INDUSTRY: REFORMATIONS IN POPULAR MUSIC THE BUSINESS OF SOUND RECORDING SOUND RECORDING, FREE EXPRESSION, AND DEMOCRACY
◄ Taylor Swift is a global superstar who has never been afraid of doing things her own way. After moving from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania to Nashville, Tennessee at only fourteen years old, she launched a successful career without the influence of a major music corporation. The rest, as they say, is history.
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Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born in 1988 in North London, an only child raised by her mother. Adele’s biggest passion was singing, and she was admitted into the London-area BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology. After a friend posted Adele’s three-song demo from a class project to Myspace, the songs impressed executives from XL Recordings, a British independent label that is home to artists like Beck, Radiohead, M.I.A., Vampire Weekend, and FKA Twigs. They signed her to a recording contract at age eighteen, just four months after she graduated. Adele’s three albums have all been named after the age at which she did the main work of writing and recording: 19 (2008), 21 (2011), and 25 (2015).
Born in 1989, Taylor Swift was raised in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, with her family at age fourteen to pursue a career in country music. Major record companies were already interested in the young Taylor as a long-term development project, but Taylor was interested in getting her career started. After seeing her play at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe, veteran music executive Scott Borchetta signed Taylor to a contract in 2005 with Big Machine, an independent label he was starting that now includes Tim McGraw, Rascal Flatts, and Maddie & Tae. Her debut album Taylor Swift (2006) was released when she was sixteen, and it immediately became a country hit. Her next albums—Fearless (2008), Speak Now (2010), Red (2012), and 1989 (2014)—were even bigger, and moved her into a mainstream pop music career.
Between the two of them, Adele and Taylor Swift have dominated popular music as its best-selling singer-songwriters. With the exception of 2013, Adele or Taylor Swift had a Top 10 album every year from 2007 to 2016; sometimes it was both of them. Each of these artists has won armfuls of Grammy Awards as well.
Both Adele and Swift have become pioneers in how to be music stars in their own way, maintaining control over their music and their lives. For example, Swift used her power to advocate for fair compensation for artists. In 2014, she removed her music from the streaming site Spotify, becoming the biggest of many artists dissatisfied with the company’s low compensation for music creators.
Meanwhile, Adele has produced albums on her own schedule. After 21, Adele took a long hiatus, formed a serious relationship, and had a baby. Regarding the long- awaited release of her recording 25 in 2015, Adele posted a message on Facebook to her fans: “25 is about getting to know who I’ve become without realising. And
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I’m sorry it took so long, but you know, life happened.”1
The only peer to Adele and Taylor Swift in record sales is Rihanna, born in Barbados in 1988. Discovered by a vacationing American music producer, Rihanna signed with the Def Jam label (part of the Universal Music Group) in 2005, at age seventeen. At the time, Jay-Z was the president of the label. Jay-Z later established his own independent label, Roc Nation. In 2014, Rihanna left Def Jam to sign with Roc Nation, becoming yet another major recording artist to affiliate with an in dependent label.
The rise of independent labels is one of the most significant developments in the music industry in the past two decades. The old route to success for musical artists was highly dependent on signing with a major label, which handled all the promotion to sell records. Now, with so many distribution forms for music— traditional CDs and vinyl; digital downloads and streaming; social media; music licensed for use in advertising, television, and film; and (lest we forget) live, in- person concerts—there are multiple paths for talented artists to find an audience with an independent label or on their own.
THE MEDIUM OF SOUND RECORDING has had an immense impact on our culture. The music that helps shape our identities and comforts us during the transition from childhood to adulthood resonates throughout our lives. Throughout its history, popular music has also been banned by parents, school officials, and even governments under the guise of protecting young people from corrupting influences. As far back as the late eighteenth century, authorities in Europe, thinking that it was immoral for young people to dance close together, outlawed waltz music as “savagery.” Popular music from the jazz age to today has also added its own chapters to the age-old musical battle between generations.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
In this chapter, we will place the impact of popular music in context and:
Investigate the origins of recording’s technological “hardware,” from Thomas Edison’s early phonograph to Emile Berliner’s invention of the flat disk record and the development of audiotape, compact discs, and MP3s
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Study radio’s early threat to sound recording and the subsequent alliance between the two media when television arrived in the 1950s Explore the impact of the Internet on music, including the effects of online piracy and how the industry is adapting to the new era of convergence with new models for distributing and promoting music, from downloads to streaming Examine the content and culture of the music industry, focusing on the predominant role of rock music and its extraordinary impact on mass media forms and a diverse array of cultures, both American and international Explore the economic and democratic issues facing the recording industry
As you consider these topics, think about your own relationship with popular music and sound recordings. Who was your first favorite group or singer? How old were you, and what was important to you about this music? How has the way you listen to music changed in the past five years? For more questions to help you think through the role of music in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOUND RECORDING
New mass media have often been defined in terms of the communication technologies that preceded them. For example, movies were initially called motion pictures, a term that derived from photography; radio was known as wireless telegraphy, referring to telegraphs; and television was often called picture radio. Likewise, sound recording instruments were initially described as talking machines and later as phonographs, indicating the existing innovations, the telephone and the telegraph. This early blending of technology foreshadowed our contemporary era, in which media as diverse as news-papers and movies converge on the Internet. Long before the Internet, however, the first major media convergence involved the relationship between the sound recording and radio industries.
From Cylinders to Disks: Sound Recording Becomes a Mass Medium In the 1850s, the French printer Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville conducted the first experiments with sound recording. Using a hog’s hair bristle as a needle, he tied one end to a thin membrane stretched over the narrow part of a funnel. When the inventor spoke into the funnel, the membrane vibrated and the free end of the bristle made grooves on a revolving cylinder coated with a thick liquid called lamp black. De Martinville noticed that different sounds made different trails in the lamp black, but he could not figure out how to play back the sound. However, his experiments did usher in the development stage of sound recording as a mass medium. In 2008, audio researchers using high-resolution scans of the recordings and a digital stylus were finally able to play back some of de Martinville’s recordings for the first time.2
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THOMAS EDISON In addition to inventing the phonograph, Edison (1847–1931) ran an industrial research lab that is credited with inventing the motion-picture camera, the first commercially successful lightbulb, and a system for distributing electricity. © Bettmann/Corbis
In 1877, Thomas Edison had success playing back sound. He recorded his own voice by using a needle to press his voice’s sound waves onto tinfoil wrapped around a metal cylinder about the size of a cardboard toilet-paper roll. After recording his voice, Edison played it back by repositioning the needle to retrace the grooves in the foil. The machine that played these cylinders became known as the phonograph, derived from the Greek terms for “sound” and “writing.”
Thomas Edison was more than an inventor—he was also able to envision the practical uses of his inventions and ways to market them. Moving sound recording into its entrepreneurial stage, Edison patented his phonograph in 1878 as a kind of answering machine. He thought the phonograph would be used as a “telephone repeater” that would “provide invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.”3 Edison’s phonograph patent was specifically for a device that recorded and played back foil cylinders. Because of this limitation, in 1886 Chichester Bell (cousin of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell) and Charles Sumner Tainter were able to further sound recording by patenting an improvement on the phonograph. Their sound recording device, known as the graphophone, played back more durable wax cylinders.4 Both Edison’s phonograph and Bell and Tainter’s graphophone had only marginal success as voice-recording office machines. Eventually, both sets of inventors began to produce cylinders with prerecorded music, which proved to be more popular but difficult to mass-produce and not very durable for repeated plays.
Using ideas from Edison, Bell, and Tainter, Emile Berliner, a German engineer who had immigrated to America, developed a better machine that played round, flat disks, or records. Made of zinc and coated with beeswax, these records played
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on a turntable, which Berliner called a gramophone and patented in 1887. Berliner also developed a technique that enabled him to mass-produce his round records, bringing sound recording into its mass medium stage. Previously, using Edison’s cylinder, performers had to play or sing into the speaker for each separate recording. Berliner’s technique featured a master recording from which copies could be easily duplicated in mass quantities. In addition, Berliner’s records could be stamped with labels, allowing the music to be differentiated by title, performer, and songwriter. This led to the development of a “star system,” wherein fans could identify and choose their favorite artists across many records.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, record-playing phonographs were widely available for home use. In 1906, the Victor Talking Machine Company placed the hardware, or “guts,” of the record player inside a piece of furniture. These early record players, known as Victrolas, were mechanical and had to be primed with a crank handle. As more homes were wired for electricity, electric record players, first available in 1925, gradually replaced Victrolas, and the gramophone soon became an essential appliance in most American homes.
The appeal of recorded music was limited at first because of sound quality. The original wax records were replaced by shellac discs, but these records were also very fragile and didn’t improve the sound quality much. By the 1930s, in part because of the advent of radio and in part because of the Great Depression, record and phonograph sales declined dramatically. However, in the early 1940s, shellac was needed for World War II munitions production, so the record industry turned to manufacturing polyvinyl plastic records instead. The vinyl recordings turned out to be more durable than shellac records and less noisy, paving the way for a renewed consumer desire to buy recorded music.
In 1948, CBS Records introduced the 331/3-rpm (revolutions per minute) long- playing record (LP), with about twenty minutes of music on each side, creating a market for multisong albums and classical music. This was an improvement over the three to four minutes of music contained on the existing 78-rpm records. The next year, RCA developed a competing 45-rpm record that featured a quarter-size hole (best for jukeboxes) and invigorated the sales of songs heard on jukeboxes throughout the country. Unfortunately, the two new record standards were not technically compatible, meaning the two types of records could not be played on each other’s machines. A five-year marketing battle ensued, similar to the Macintosh-versus-Windows conflict over computer-operating-system standards in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1953, CBS and RCA compromised. The LP became the standard for long-playing albums, the 45 became the standard for singles, and record players were designed to accommodate 45s, LPs, and, for a while, 78s.
From Phonographs to CDs: Analog Goes Digital The inventions of the phonograph and the record were the key sound recording advancements until the advent of magnetic audiotape and tape players in the 1940s. Magnetic tape sound recording was first developed as early as 1929 and
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further refined in the 1930s, but it didn’t catch on initially because the first machines were bulky reel-to-reel devices, the amount of tape required to make a recording was unwieldy, and the tape itself broke or became damaged easily. However, owing largely to improvements by German engineers who developed plastic magnetic tape during World War II, audiotape eventually found its place.
audiotape lightweight magnetized strands of ribbon that make possible sound editing and multiple-track mixing; instrumentals or vocals can be recorded at one location and later mixed onto a master recording in another studio.
Audiotape’s lightweight magnetized strands finally made possible sound editing and multiple-track mixing, in which instrumentals or vocals could be recorded at one location and later mixed onto a master recording in another studio. By the mid-1960s, engineers had placed miniaturized reel-to-reel audiotape inside small plastic cassettes and developed portable cassette players, permitting listeners to bring recorded music anywhere and creating a market for prerecorded cassettes. Audiotape also permitted “home dubbing”: Consumers could copy their favorite records onto tape or record songs from the radio.
FIGURE 4.1 THE EVOLUTION OF DIGITAL SOUND RECORDING SALES (REVENUE IN BILLIONS)
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Data from: Recording Industry Association of America, Annual Year-End Statistics. Figures are rounded. Note: The year 1999 is the year Napster arrived, and the peak year of industry revenue. In 2011, digital product revenue surpassed physical product revenue for the first time. Synchronization royalties are those from music being licensed for use in television, movies, and advertisements.
The advances in audiotape technology opened the door to the development of other technologies. Although it had been invented by engineer Alan Blumlein in 1931, stereo—which permitted the recording of two separate channels, or tracks, of sound—was finally able to be put to commercial use in 1958, after audiotape became more accessible. Recording-studio engineers, using audiotape, could now record many instrumental or vocal tracks, which they “mixed down” to two stereo tracks. When played back through two loudspeakers, stereo creates a more natural sound distribution. By 1971, stereo sound had been advanced into quadraphonic, or four-track, sound, but that never caught on commercially.
stereo the recording of two separate channels or tracks of sound.
The biggest recording advancement came in the 1970s, when electrical engineer Thomas Stockham made the first digital audio recordings on standard computer equipment. Although the digital recorder was invented in 1967, Stockham was the first to put it to practical use. In contrast to analog recording, which captures the fluctuations of sound waves and stores those signals in a record’s grooves or a tape’s continuous stream of magnetized particles, digital recording translates sound waves into binary on-off pulses and stores that information as numerical code. When a digital recording is played back, a microprocessor translates those numerical codes back into sounds and sends them to loudspeakers. By the late 1970s, Sony and Philips were jointly working on a way to design a digitally recorded disc and player to take advantage of this new technology, which could be produced at a lower cost than either vinyl records or audiocassettes. As a result of their efforts, digitally recorded compact discs (CDs) hit the market in 1983.
analog recording a recording that is made by capturing the fluctuations of the original sound waves and storing those signals on records or cassettes as a continuous stream of magnetism—analogous
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to the actual sound.
digital recording music recorded and played back by laser beam rather than by needle or magnetic tape.
compact discs (CDs) playback-only storage discs for music that incorporate pure and very precise digital techniques, thus eliminating noise during recording and editing sessions.
By 1987, CD sales were double the amount of LP record album sales. By 2000, CDs rendered records and audiocassettes nearly obsolete, except for deejays and record enthusiasts who continued to play and collect vinyl LPs. In an effort to create new product lines and maintain consumer sales, the music industry promoted two advanced digital disc formats in the late 1990s, which it hoped would eventually replace standard CDs. However, the introduction of these formats was ill-timed for the industry, because the biggest development in music formatting was already on the horizon—the MP3.
Convergence: Sound Recording in the Internet Age Music, perhaps more so than any other mass medium, is bound up in the social fabric of our lives. Ever since the introduction of the tape recorder and the heyday of homemade mixtapes, music has been something that we have shared eagerly with friends.
It is not surprising, then, that the Internet, a mass medium that links individuals and communities together like no other medium, became a hub for sharing music. In fact, the reason college student Shawn Fanning said he developed the groundbreaking file-sharing site Napster in 1999 was “to build communities around different types of music.”5 But this convergence with the Internet began to unravel the music industry in the 2000s. The changes in the music industry were set in motion about two decades ago, with the proliferation of Internet use and the development of a new digital file format.
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Recording Music Today Composer Scott Dugdale discusses technological innovations in music recording.
Discussion: What surprised you the most about the way the video showed a song being produced, and why?
MP3s and File-Sharing The MP3 file format, developed in 1992, enables digital recordings to be compressed into smaller, more manageable files. With the increasing popularity of the Internet in the mid-1990s, computer users began swapping MP3 music files online because they could be uploaded or downloaded in a fraction of the time it took to exchange noncompressed music files.
MP3 short for MPEG-1 Layer 3, an advanced type of audio compression that reduces file size, enabling audio to be easily distributed over the Internet and to be digitally transmitted in real time.
By 1999, the year Napster’s infamous free file-sharing service brought the MP3 format to popular attention, music files were widely available on the Internet —some for sale, some legally available for free downloading, and many for trading in possible violation of copyright laws. Despite the higher quality of industry- manufactured CDs, music fans enjoyed the convenience of downloading MP3 files. Losing countless music sales to illegal downloading, the music industry fought the proliferation of the MP3 format with an array of lawsuits (aimed at file-sharing companies and at individual downloaders), but the popularity of MP3s continued to increase.
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BEATS BY DR. DRE HEADPHONES are instantly recognizable due to their sleek look, bass-heavy sound, high price tag, and endorsement by rap icon Andre “Dr. Dre” Young. In August 2014, Apple acquired Beats Electronics for $3 billion.
In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the music industry and against Napster, declaring free music file-swapping illegal and in violation of music copyrights held by recording labels and artists. It was relatively easy for the music industry to shut down Napster (which later relaunched as a legal service) because it required users to log into a centralized system. However, the music industry’s elimination of file-sharing was not complete, as decentralized peer-to- peer (P2P) systems, such as Grokster, LimeWire, Morpheus, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule, and BitTorrent, once again enabled online free music file-sharing.
The recording industry fought back with thousands of lawsuits, many of them successful. By 2010, Grokster, eDonkey, Morpheus, and LimeWire had been shut down, while Kazaa settled a lawsuit with the music industry and became a legal service.6 By 2011, several major Internet service providers, including AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon, had agreed to help the music industry identify customers who may have been illegally downloading music and try to prevent them from doing so by sending them “copyright alert” warning letters, redirecting them to Web pages about digital piracy, and ultimately slowing download speeds or closing their broadband accounts.
As it cracked down on digital theft, the music industry—realizing that it would have to somehow adapt its business to the digital format—embraced services like iTunes (launched by Apple in 2003 to accompany the iPod), which has become the model for legal online distribution. In 2008, iTunes became the top music retailer in the United States. But by the time iTunes surpassed the twenty-five-billion-song milestone in 2013, global digital download sales fell for the first time.7 What happened? It was the arrival of the next big digital format.
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APPLE’S iTUNES STORE, which opened in 2003, is the biggest music retailer in the world. The iTunes Store offers streaming music services and has also expanded its market reach with the App Store—a space where users can buy and download mobile apps. Today, iTunes serves over 315 million mobile devices, including iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. Oleksiy Maksymenko Photography/Alamy Stock Photo
The Next Big Thing: Streaming Music If the history of recorded music tells us anything, it’s that over time tastes change and formats change. Today, streaming music is quickly becoming the format of choice. In the language of the music industry, we are shifting from ownership of music to access to music.8 The access model has been driven by the availability of streaming services such as the Sweden-based Spotify, which made its debut in the United States in 2011 and hit thirty million worldwide subscribers in 2015. Other services include Apple Music, Tidal (led by Jay-Z and a number of other leading artists), Rhapsody, Deezer (outside the United States), Google Play Music, Amazon Prime Music, and SoundCloud. With these services, listeners can pay a subscription fee (typically $5 to $10 per month)—or in some cases sign up for an ad-supported free account—and instantly play millions of songs on demand via the Internet. The streaming market also includes ad-supported streaming services, which initially specialized in video—such as YouTube and Vevo—and which have wide international use.
The key difference between streaming music (like Spotify) and streaming radio (like Pandora) is that streaming music enables the listener to select any song on demand. Streaming radio enables the listener to pick a style of music, but lacks the
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option of songs on demand. Yet the line is blurred, even by streaming services. For example, premium Spotify at $10 a month is ad-free and allows subscribers to access any song on demand and stream offline. However, the free version of Spotify is more like radio in that listeners don’t have complete control over song selection.
The Rocky Relationship between Records and Radio Some streaming services, like Pandora, closely resemble commercial radio; the recording industry and radio have always been closely linked. Although they work almost in unison now, in the beginning they had a tumultuous relationship. Radio’s very existence sparked the first battle. By 1915, the phonograph had become a popular form of entertainment. The recording industry sold thirty million records that year, and by the end of the decade, sales more than tripled each year. In 1924, though, record sales dropped to only half of what they had been the previous year. Why? Because radio had arrived as a competing mass medium, providing free entertainment over the airwaves, independent of the recording industry.
The battle heated up when, to the alarm of the recording industry, radio stations began broadcasting recorded music without compensating the music industry. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), founded in 1914 to collect copyright fees for music publishers and writers, charged that radio was contributing to plummeting sales of records and sheet music. By 1925, ASCAP established music rights fees for radio, charging stations between $250 and $2,500 a week to play recorded music—and causing many stations to leave the air.
But other stations countered by establishing their own live, in-house orchestras, disseminating “free” music to listeners. This time, the recording industry could do nothing, as original radio music did not infringe on any copyrights. Throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, record and phonograph sales continued to fall, although the recording industry got a small boost when Prohibition ended in 1933 and record- playing jukeboxes became the standard musical entertainment in neighborhood taverns.
The recording and radio industries only began to cooperate with each other after television became popular in the early 1950s. Television pilfered radio’s variety shows, crime dramas, and comedy programs, and, along with those formats, much of its advertising revenue and audience. Seeking to reinvent itself, radio turned to the recording industry, and this time both industries greatly benefited from radio’s new “hit songs” format. The alliance between the recording industry and radio was aided enormously by rock-and-roll music, which was just emerging in the 1950s. Rock created an enduring consumer youth market for sound recordings and provided much-needed new content for radio precisely when television made it seem like an obsolete medium.
After the digital turn, that mutually beneficial arrangement between the
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recording and radio industries began to fray. While Internet streaming radio stations were being required to pay royalties to music companies when they played their songs, radio stations still got to play music royalty-free over the air. In 2012, Clear Channel, the largest radio station chain in the United States and one of the largest music streaming companies, with more than fifteen hundred live stations on iHeartRadio, was the first company to strike a new deal with the recording industry and pay royalties for music played over the air. Since the first deal, other radio groups have begun to forge agreements with music labels, paying royalties for on- air play while getting reduced rates for streaming music.
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U.S. POPULAR MUSIC AND THE FORMATION OF ROCK
Popular music, or pop music, is music that appeals either to a wide cross section of the public or to sizable subdivisions within the larger public based on age, region, or ethnic background (e.g., teenagers, southerners, and Mexican Americans). U.S. pop music today encompasses styles as diverse as blues, country, Tejano, salsa, jazz, rock, reggae, punk, hip-hop, and dance. The word pop has also been used to distinguish popular music from classical music, which is written primarily for ballet, opera, ensemble, or symphony. As various subcultures have intersected, U.S. popular music has developed organically, constantly creating new forms and reinvigorating older musical styles.
pop music popular music that appeals either to a wide cross section of the public or to sizable subdivisions within the larger public based on age, region, or ethnic background; the word pop has also been used as a label to distinguish popular music from classical music.
SCOTT JOPLIN (1868–1917) published more than fifty compositions during his life, including “Maple Leaf Rag”—arguably his most famous piece. The Granger Collection
The Rise of Pop Music
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Although it is commonly assumed that pop music developed simultaneously with the phonograph and radio, it actually existed prior to these media. In the late nineteenth century, the sale of sheet music for piano and other instruments sprang from a section of Broadway in Manhattan known as Tin Pan Alley, a derisive term used to describe the sound of these quickly produced tunes, which supposedly resembled cheap pans clanging together. Tin Pan Alley’s tradition of song publishing began in the late 1880s with such music as the marches of John Philip Sousa and the ragtime piano pieces of Scott Joplin. It continued through the first half of the twentieth century with the show tunes and vocal ballads of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter, and into the 1950s and 1960s with such rock-and-roll writing teams as Jerry Leiber–Mike Stoller and Carole King–Gerry Goffin.
At the turn of the twentieth century, with the newfound ability of song publishers to mass- produce sheet music for a growing middle class, popular songs moved from being a novelty to being a major business enterprise. With the emergence of the phonograph, song publishers also discovered that recorded tunes boosted interest in and sales of sheet music. Thus, songwriting and Tin Pan Alley played a key role in transforming popular music into a mass medium.
As sheet music grew in popularity, jazz developed in New Orleans. An improvisational and mostly instrumental musical form, jazz absorbed and integrated a diverse body of musical styles, including African rhythms, blues, and gospel. Jazz influenced many bandleaders throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Groups led by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller were among the most popular of the “swing” jazz bands, whose rhythmic music also dominated radio, recordings, and dance halls in their day.
jazz an improvisational and mostly instrumental musical form that absorbs and integrates a diverse body of musical styles, including African rhythms, blues, big band, and gospel.
The first pop vocalists of the twentieth century were products of the vaudeville circuit, which radio, movies, and the Depression would bring to an end in the 1930s. In the 1920s, Eddie Cantor, Belle Baker, Sophie Tucker, and Al Jolson were all extremely popular. By the 1930s, Rudy Vallée and Bing Crosby had established themselves as the first “crooners,” or singers of pop standards. Bing Crosby also popularized Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” one of the most covered songs in recording history. (A song recorded or performed by another artist is known as cover music.) Meanwhile, the Andrews Sisters’ boogie-woogie style helped them
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sell more than sixty million records in the late 1930s and 1940s. In one of the first mutually beneficial alliances between sound recording and radio, many early pop vocalists had their own network of regional radio programs, which vastly increased their exposure.
cover music songs recorded or performed by musicians who did not originally write or perform the music; in the 1950s, some white producers and artists capitalized on popular songs by black artists by “covering” them.
Frank Sinatra arrived in the 1940s, and his romantic ballads foreshadowed the teen love songs of rock and roll’s early years. Nicknamed “the Voice” early in his career, Sinatra, like Crosby, parlayed his music and radio exposure into movie stardom. Helped by radio, pop vocalists like Sinatra were among the first vocalists to become popular with a large national teen audience.
Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay The cultural storm called rock and roll hit in the mid-1950s. As with the term jazz, rock and roll was a blues slang term for “sex,” lending it instant controversy. Early rock and roll was considered the first “integrationist music,” merging the black sounds of rhythm and blues, gospel, and Robert Johnson’s screeching blues guitar with the white influences of country, folk, and pop vocals.9 From a cultural perspective, only a few musical forms have ever sprung from such a diverse set of influences, and no new style of music has ever had such a widespread impact on so many different cultures as rock and roll. From an economic perspective, rock and roll was the first musical form to simultaneously transform the structure of sound recording and radio. Rock’s development set the stage for how music is produced, distributed, and performed today. Many social, cultural, economic, and political factors leading up to the 1950s contributed to the growth of rock and roll, including black migration, the growth of youth culture, and the beginnings of racial integration.
rock and roll music that merges the African American influences of urban blues, gospel, and R&B with the white influences of country, folk, and pop vocals.
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ROBERT JOHNSON (LEFT) (1911–1938), who ranks among the most influential and innovative American guitarists, played the Mississippi delta blues and was a major influence on early rock and rollers, especially the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. His intense slide- guitar and finger-style playing also inspired generations of blues artists, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bonnie Raitt, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. To get a sense of his style, visit the Internet Archive’s Robert Johnson collection: www.archive.org/details/RobertJohnsonMp3AudioSongs. Photo by Robert Johnson Estate/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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https://www.archive.org/details/RobertJohnsonMp3AudioSongs
BESSIE SMITH (1895–1937) is considered the best female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. Mentored by the famous Ma Rainey, Smith had many hits, including “Down Hearted Blues” and “Gulf Coast Blues.” She also appeared in the 1929 film St. Louis Blues. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The migration of southern blacks to northern cities in search of better jobs during the first half of the twentieth century helped spread different popular music styles. In particular, blues music, the foundation of rock and roll, came to the North. Influenced by African American spirituals, ballads, and work songs from the rural South, blues music was exemplified in the work of Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, Son House, Bessie Smith, Charley Patton, and others. The introduction in the 1930s of the electric guitar—a major contribution to rock music—gave southern blues its urban style, popularized in the work of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, B.B. King, and Buddy Guy.10
blues originally a kind of black folk music, this emerged as a distinct category of music in the early 1900s; it was influenced by African American spirituals, ballads, and work songs from the rural South, and by urban guitar and vocal solos from the 1930s and 1940s.
During this time, blues-based urban black music began to be marketed under the name rhythm and blues, or R&B. Featuring “huge rhythm units smashing away behind screaming blues singers,” R&B appealed to young listeners fascinated by the explicit (and forbidden) sexual lyrics in songs like “Annie Had a Baby,”
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“Sexy Ways,” and “Wild Wild Young Men.”11 Although it was banned on some stations, by 1953 R&B continued to gain airtime. In those days, black and white musical forms were segregated: Trade magazines tracked R&B record sales on “race” charts, which were kept separate from white record sales, tracked on “pop” charts.
rhythm and blues (R&B) music that merges urban blues with big-band sounds.
Perhaps the most significant factor in the growth of rock and roll was the beginning of the integration of white and black cultures. In addition to increased exposure of black literature, art, and music, several key historical events in the 1950s broke down the borders between black and white cultures. And with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, “separate but equal” laws, which had kept white and black schools, hotels, restaurants, rest rooms, and drinking fountains segregated for decades, were declared unconstitutional. A cultural reflection of the times, rock and roll would burst forth from the midst of the decade’s social and political tensions.
Rock Muddies the Waters In the 1950s, legal integration accompanied a cultural shift, and the music industry’s race and pop charts blurred. White deejay Alan Freed had been playing black music for his young audiences in Cleveland and New York since the early 1950s, and such white performers as Johnnie Ray and Bill Haley had crossed over to the race charts to score R&B hits. Meanwhile, black artists like Chuck Berry were performing country songs, and for a time Ray Charles even played in an otherwise all-white country band. Although continuing the work of breaking down racial borders was one of rock and roll’s most important contributions, the genre also blurred other long-standing distinctions between high and low culture, masculinity and femininity, the country and the city, the North and the South, and the sacred and the secular.
High and Low Culture In 1956, Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” merged rock and roll, considered low culture by many, with high culture, thus forever blurring the traditional boundary between these cultural forms with lyrics like “You know my temperature’s risin’/the jukebox is blowin’ a fuse …/Roll over Beethoven/and tell Tchaikovsky the news.” Although such early rock-and-roll lyrics seem tame by today’s standards, at the time they sounded like sacrilege. Rock and rollers also
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challenged music decorum and the rules governing how musicians should behave or misbehave: Berry’s “duck walk” across the stage, Elvis Presley’s pegged pants and gyrating hips, and Bo Diddley’s use of the guitar as a phallic symbol were an affront to the norms of well-behaved, culturally elite audiences.
ROCK-AND-ROLL PIONEER A major influence on early rock and roll, Chuck Berry, born in 1926, scored major hits between 1955 and 1958, writing “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Day,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and “Johnny B. Goode.” At the time, he was criticized by some black artists for sounding white, and his popularity among white teenagers was bemoaned by conservative critics. Today, young guitar players routinely imitate his style. © Bettmann/Corbis
Masculinity and Femininity Rock and roll was also the first popular music genre to overtly confuse issues of sexual identity and orientation. Although early rock and roll largely attracted males as performers, the most fascinating feature of Elvis Presley, according to the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, was his androgynous appearance.12 During this early period, though, the most sexually outrageous rock-and-roll performer was Little Richard (Penniman). Little Richard has said that given the reality of American racism, he blurred lines between masculinity and femininity because he feared the consequences of becoming a sex symbol for white girls: “I decided that my image should be crazy and way out so that adults would think I was harmless. I’d appear in one show dressed as the Queen of England and in the next as the pope.”13 Little
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Richard’s playful blurring of gender identity and sexual orientation paved the way for performers like David Bowie, Elton John, Boy George, Annie Lennox, Prince, Grace Jones, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga, and Adam Lambert.
The Country and the City Rock and roll also blurred geographic borders between country and city, between the white country & western music of Nashville and the black urban rhythms of Memphis. Early white rockers such as Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins combined country or hillbilly music, southern gospel, and Mississippi delta blues to create a sound called rockabilly. At the same time, an urban R&B influence on early rock came from Fats Domino (“Blueberry Hill”), Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton (“Hound Dog”), and Big Joe Turner (“Shake, Rattle, and Roll”). Soaring record sales and the crossover appeal of the music represented an enormous threat to long- standing racial and class boundaries. In 1956, the secretary of the North Alabama White Citizens Council bluntly spelled out the racism and white fear concerning the new blending of urban-black and rural-white culture: “Rock and roll is a means of pulling the white man down to the level of the Negro. It is part of a plot to undermine the morals of the youth of our nation.”14 These days, distinctions between traditionally rural music and urban music continue to blur, with older hybrids such as country rock (think of the Eagles) and newer forms like alternative country—performed by artists like Ryan Adams, Steve Earle, the Avett Brothers, and Kings of Leon.
rockabilly music that mixes bluegrass and country influences with those of black folk music and early amplified blues.
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ELVIS PRESLEY AND HIS LEGACY Elvis Presley remains the most popular solo artist of all time. From 1956 to 1962, he recorded seventeen No. 1 hits, from “Heartbreak Hotel” to “Good Luck Charm.” According to Little Richard, Presley’s main legacy was that he opened doors for many young performers and made black music popular in mainstream America. Presley’s influence continues to be felt today in the music of artists such as Bruno Mars. © Bettmann/Corbis Kevin Winter/Getty Images
The North and the South Not only did rock and roll muddy the urban and rural terrain, but it also combined northern and southern influences. In fact, with so much blues, R&B, and rock and
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roll rising from the South in the 1950s, this region regained some of its cultural flavor, which (along with a sizable portion of the population) had migrated to the North after the Civil War and during the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, musicians and audiences in the North had absorbed blues music as their own, eliminating the understanding of blues as a specifically southern style. Like the many white teens today who are fascinated by hip-hop, musicians such as Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly—all from the rural South—were fascinated with and influenced by the black urban styles they had heard on the radio or seen in nightclubs. These artists in turn brought southern culture to northern listeners.
But the key to record sales and the spread of rock and roll, according to famed record producer Sam Phillips of Sun Records, was to find a white man who sounded black. Phillips found that man in Elvis Presley. Commenting on Presley’s cultural importance, one critic wrote: “White rockabillies like Elvis took poor white southern mannerisms of speech and behavior deeper into mainstream culture than they had ever been taken.”15
The Sacred and the Secular Although many mainstream adults in the 1950s complained that rock and roll’s sexuality and questioning of moral norms constituted an offense against God, many early rock figures actually had close ties to religion, often transforming gospel tunes into rock and roll. Still, many people did not appreciate the blurring of boundaries between the sacred and the secular. In the late 1950s, public outrage over rock and roll was so great that even Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, both sons of southern preachers, became convinced that they were playing the “devil’s music.” By 1959, Little Richard had left rock and roll to become a minister. Lewis had to be coerced into recording “Great Balls of Fire,” a song by Otis Blackwell that turned an apocalyptic biblical phrase into a sexually charged teen love song. The boundaries between sacred and secular music have continued to blur in the years since, with some churches using rock and roll to appeal to youth, and some Christian-themed rock groups recording music as seemingly incongruous as heavy metal.
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IN 1955, LITTLE RICHARD (LEFT) wrote and recorded his first major hit record, “Tutti Frutti.” The next year, Pat Boone (right) recorded a cover of “Tutti Frutti” that surpassed the original in popularity, reaching No.12 on the Billboard Top 40 (while Little Richard’s original peaked at No.17). In a 1984 interview with the Washington Post, Little Richard argued that this difference reflected the racial attitudes of the time: “The white kids would have Pat Boone upon the dresser and me in the drawer ’cause they liked my
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version better, but the families didn’t want me because of the image that I was projecting.” Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Bettmann/Getty Images
Battles in Rock and Roll The blurring of racial lines and the breakdown of other conventional boundaries meant that performers and producers were forced to play a tricky game to get rock and roll accepted by the masses. Two prominent white disc jockeys used different methods. Cleveland deejay Alan Freed, credited with popularizing the term rock and roll, played original R&B recordings from the race charts and black versions of early rock and roll on his program. In contrast, Philadelphia deejay Dick Clark believed that making black music acceptable to white audiences required cover versions by white artists. By the mid-1950s, rock and roll was gaining acceptance with the masses, but rock-and-roll artists and promoters still faced further obstacles: Black artists found that their music was often undermined by white cover versions; the payola scandals portrayed rock and roll as a corrupt industry; and fears of rock and roll as a contributing factor in juvenile delinquency resulted in censorship.
White Cover Music Undermines Black Artists By the mid-1960s, black and white artists routinely recorded and performed one another’s original tunes. For example, established black R&B artist Otis Redding covered the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and Jimi Hendrix covered Bob Dylan’s “All along the Watchtower,” while just about every white rock-and-roll band, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, established its career by covering R&B classics.
Although today we take such rerecordings for granted, in the 1950s the covering of black artists’ songs by white musicians was almost always an attempt to capitalize on popular songs from the R&B “race” charts by transforming them into hits on the white pop charts. Often, not only would white producers give cowriting credit to white performers for the tunes they merely covered, but the producers would also buy the rights to potential hits from black songwriters, who seldom saw a penny in royalties or received songwriting credit.
During this period, black R&B artists, working for small record labels, saw many of their popular songs covered by white artists working for major labels. These cover records, boosted by better marketing and ties to white deejays, usually outsold the original black versions. For instance, the 1954 R&B song “Sh-Boom,” by the Chords on Atlantic’s Cat label, was immediately covered by a white group, the Crew Cuts, for the major Mercury label. Record sales declined for the Chords, although jukebox and R&B radio play remained strong for the original version. By 1955, R&B hits regularly crossed over to the pop charts, but inevitably the cover
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music versions were more successful. Pat Boone’s cover of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” went to No. 1 and stayed on the Top 40 pop chart for twenty weeks, whereas Domino’s original made it only to No. 10. Slowly, however, the cover situation changed. After watching Boone outsell his song “Tutti Frutti” in 1956, Little Richard wrote “Long Tall Sally,” which included lyrics written and delivered in such a way that he believed Boone would not be able to adequately replicate them. “Long Tall Sally” went to No. 6 for Little Richard and charted for twelve weeks; Boone’s version got to No. 8 and stayed there for nine weeks.
Overt racism lingered in the music business well into the 1960s. A turning point, however, came in 1962, the last year that Pat Boone, then aged twenty-eight, ever had a Top 40 rock-and-roll hit. That year, Ray Charles covered “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” a 1958 country song by the Grand Ole Opry’s Don Gibson. This marked the first time that a black artist, covering a white artist’s song, had notched a No. 1 pop hit. With Charles’s cover, the rock-and-roll merger between gospel and R&B, on one hand, and white country and pop, on the other, was complete. In fact, the relative acceptance of black crossover music provided a more favorable cultural context for the political activism that spurred important Civil Rights legislation in the mid-1960s.
Payola Scandals Tarnish Rock and Roll The payola scandals of the 1950s were another cloud over rock-and-roll music and its artists. In the music industry, payola is the practice of record promoters’ paying deejays or radio programmers to play particular songs. As recorded rock and roll became central to commercial radio’s success in the 1950s and the demand for airplay grew enormous, independent promoters hired by record labels used payola to pressure deejays into playing songs by the artists they represented.
Although payola was considered a form of bribery, no laws prohibited its practice. However, following closely on the heels of television’s quiz-show scandals (see Chapter 6), congressional hearings on radio payola began in December 1959. The hearings were partly a response to generally fraudulent business practices, but they were also an opportunity to blame deejays and radio for rock and roll’s supposedly negative impact on teens by portraying rock and roll (and its radio advocates) as a corrupt industry.
The payola scandals threatened, ended, or damaged the careers of a number of rock-and-roll deejays and undermined rock and roll’s credibility for a number of years. At the hearings in 1960, Alan Freed admitted to participating in payola, although he said he did not believe there was anything illegal about such deals, and his career soon ended. Dick Clark, then an influential deejay and the host of TV’s American Bandstand, would not admit to participating in payola. But the hearings committee chastised Clark and alleged that some of his complicated business deals were ethically questionable, a censure that hung over him for years. Congress eventually added a law concerning payola to the Federal Communications Act, prescribing a $10,000 fine and/or a year in jail for each violation (see Chapter 5).
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Fears of Corruption Lead to Censorship Since rock and roll’s inception, one of the uphill battles the genre faced was the perception that it was a cause of juvenile delinquency, which was statistically on the rise in the 1950s. Looking for an easy culprit rather than considering contributing factors such as neglect, the rising consumer culture, or the growing youth population, many assigned blame to rock and roll. The view that rock and roll corrupted youth was widely accepted by social authorities, and rock-and-roll music was often censored, eventually even by the industry itself.
By late 1959, many key figures in rock and roll had been tamed. Jerry Lee Lewis was exiled from the industry, labeled southern “white trash” for marrying his thirteen-year-old third cousin; Elvis Presley, having already been censored on television, was drafted into the army; Chuck Berry was run out of Mississippi and eventually jailed for gun possession and transporting a minor across state lines; and Little Richard felt forced to tone down his image and left rock and roll to sing gospel music. A tragic accident led to the final taming of rock and roll’s first front line. In February 1959, Buddy Holly (“Peggy Sue”), Ritchie Valens (“La Bamba”), and the Big Bopper (“Chantilly Lace”) all died in an Iowa plane crash—a tragedy mourned in Don McLean’s 1971 hit “American Pie” as “the day the music died.”
Although rock and roll did not die in the late 1950s, the U.S. recording industry decided that it needed a makeover. To protect the enormous profits the new music had been generating, record companies began to discipline some of rock and roll’s rebellious impulses. In the early 1960s, the industry introduced a new generation of clean-cut white singers, like Frankie Avalon, Connie Francis, Ricky Nelson, Lesley Gore, and Fabian. Rock and roll’s explosive violations of racial, class, and other boundaries were transformed into simpler generation-gap problems, and the music developed a milder reputation.
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A CHANGING INDUSTRY: REFORMATIONS IN POPULAR MUSIC
As the 1960s began, rock and roll was tamer and “safer,” as reflected in the surf and road music of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, but it was also beginning to branch out. For instance, the success of all-female groups, such as the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack”) and the Angels (“My Boyfriend’s Back”), challenged the male-dominated world of early rock and roll. In the 1960s and the following decades, popular music went through cultural reformations that significantly changed the industry, including the international appeal of the “British invasion”; the development of soul and Motown; the political impact of folk-rock; the experimentalism of psychedelic music; the rejection of music’s mainstream by punk, grunge, and indie rock movements; the reassertion of black urban style in hip-hop; and the transformation of music distribution, which resulted in an unprecedented market growth of music from independent labels.
The British Are Coming! The global trade of pop music is evident in the exchanges and melding of rhythms, beats, vocal styles, and musical instruments across cultures. The origin of this global impact can be traced to England in the late 1950s, when the young Rolling Stones listened to the blues of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and the young Beatles tried to imitate Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
Until 1964, rock-and-roll recordings had traveled on a one-way ticket to Europe. Even though American artists regularly reached the top of the charts overseas, no British performers had yet achieved the same in the States. This changed almost overnight. Following the Beatles’ journey to America in 1964, British bands as diverse as the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, the Zombies, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, the Who, the Yardbirds, Them, and the Troggs had hit the American Top 40 charts.
With the British invasion, “rock and roll” unofficially became “rock,” sending popular music and the industry in two directions. On the one hand, the Rolling Stones would influence generations of musicians emphasizing gritty, chord-driven, high-volume rock, including bands in the glam rock, hard rock, punk, heavy metal, and grunge genres. On the other hand, the Beatles would influence countless artists interested in a more accessible, melodic, and softer sound, in genres such as pop- rock, power-pop, new wave, and indie rock. The success of British groups helped change an industry arrangement in which most pop music was produced by songwriting teams hired by major labels and matched with selected performers. Even more important, the British invasion showed the recording industry how older American musical forms, especially blues and R&B, could be repackaged as rock and exported around the world.
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BRITISH ROCK GROUPS Ed Sullivan, who booked the Beatles several times on his TV variety show in 1964, helped promote their early success. Sullivan, though, reacted differently to the Rolling Stones, who were perceived as the “bad boys” of rock and roll in contrast to the “good” Beatles. The Stones performed black-influenced music without “whitening” the sound and exuded a palpable aura of sexuality, particularly frontman Mick Jagger. Although the Stones appeared on his program as early as 1964 and returned on several occasions, Sullivan remained wary and forced them to change the lyrics of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” for a 1967 broadcast. Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images Michael Putland/Getty Images
Motor City Music: Detroit Gives America Soul Ironically, the British invasion, which drew much of its inspiration from black
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influences, drew many white listeners away from a new generation of black performers. Gradually, however, throughout the 1960s, black singers like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Ike and Tina Turner, and Wilson Pickett found large and diverse audiences. Transforming the rhythms and melodies of older R&B, pop, and early rock and roll into what became labeled as soul, they countered the British invaders with powerful vocal performances. Mixing gospel and blues with emotion and lyrics drawn from the American black experience, soul contrasted sharply with the emphasis on loud, fast instrumentals and lighter lyrical concerns that characterized much of rock music.16
soul music that mixes gospel, blues, and urban and southern black styles with slower, more emotional, and melancholic lyrics.
The most prominent independent label that nourished soul and black popular music was Motown, started in 1959 by former Detroit autoworker and songwriter Berry Gordy with a $700 investment and named after Detroit’s “Motor City” nickname. Beginning with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Shop Around,” Motown enjoyed a long string of hit records that rivaled the pop success of British bands throughout the decade. Motown’s many successful artists included the Temptations (“My Girl”), Mary Wells (“My Guy”), the Four Tops (“I Can’t Help Myself”), Martha and the Vandellas (“Heat Wave”), Marvin Gaye (“I Heard It through the Grapevine”), and, in the early 1970s, the Jackson 5 (“ABC”). But the label’s most successful group was the Supremes, featuring Diana Ross, which scored twelve No. 1 singles between 1964 and 1969 (“Where Did Our Love Go,” “Stop! In the Name of Love”). The Motown groups had a more stylized, softer sound than the grittier southern soul (later known as funk) of Brown and Pickett.
Folk and Psychedelic Music Reflect the Times Popular music has always been a product of its time, so the social upheavals of the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and the Vietnam War naturally brought social concerns into the music of the 1960s and early 1970s. By the late 1960s, the Beatles had transformed themselves from a relatively lightweight pop band to one that spoke for the social and political concerns of their generation, and many other groups followed the same trajectory. (To explore how the times and personal taste influence music choices, see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Music Preferences across Generations” on page 122.)
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Folk Inspires Protest The musical genre that most clearly responded to the political happenings of the time was folk music, which had long been the sound of social activism. In its broadest sense, folk music in any culture refers to songs performed by untrained musicians and passed down mainly through oral traditions, from the banjo and fiddle tunes of Appalachia to the accordion-led zydeco of Louisiana and the folk- blues of the legendary Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter). During the 1930s, folk was defined by the music of Woody Guthrie (“This Land Is Your Land”), who not only brought folk to the city but also was extremely active in social reforms. Groups such as the Weavers, featuring labor activist and songwriter Pete Seeger, carried on Guthrie’s legacy and inspired a new generation of singer-songwriters, including Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Phil Ochs; and—perhaps the most influential—Bob Dylan. Significantly influenced by the blues, Dylan identified folk as “finger pointin’” music that addressed current social circumstances. At a key moment in popular music’s history, Dylan walked onstage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival fronting a full electric rock band. He was booed and cursed by traditional “folkies,” who saw amplified music as a sellout to the commercial recording industry. However, Dylan’s change inspired the formation of folk-rock artists like the Byrds, who had a No. 1 hit with a cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and led millions to protest during the turbulent 1960s.
folk music music performed by untrained musicians and passed down through oral traditions; it encompasses a wide range of music, from Appalachian fiddle tunes to the accordion-led zydeco of Louisiana.
folk-rock amplified folk music, often featuring politically overt lyrics; influenced by rock and roll.
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THE SUPREMES One of the most successful groups in rock-and-roll history, the Supremes started out as the Primettes in Detroit in 1959. They signed with Motown’s Tamla label in 1960 and changed their name in 1961. Between 1964 and 1969, they recorded twelve No. 1 hits, including “Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” “Come See about Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “I Hear a Symphony,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” and “Someday We’ll Be Together.” Lead singer Diana Ross (center) left the group in 1969 for a solo career. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. Archive Photos/Getty Images
Rock Turns Psychedelic Alcohol and drugs have long been associated with the private lives of blues, jazz, country, and rock musicians. These links, however, became much more public in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when authorities busted members of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. With the increasing role of drugs in youth culture and the availability of LSD (not illegal until the mid-1960s), more and more rock musicians experimented with and sang about drugs in what were frequently labeled rock’s psychedelic years. Many groups and performers of the psychedelic era (named for the mind-altering effects of LSD and other drugs), like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin), the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Doors, and the Grateful Dead, believed that artistic expression and responses to social problems could be enhanced through mind- altering drugs. But after a surge of optimism that culminated in the historic
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Woodstock concert in August 1969, the psychedelic movement was quickly overshadowed. In 1969, a similar concert at the Altamont racetrack in California started in chaos and ended in tragedy when one of the Hell’s Angels hired as a bodyguard for the show murdered a concertgoer. Around the same time, the shocking multiple murders committed by the Charles Manson “family” cast a negative light on hippies, drug use, and psychedelic culture. Then, in quick succession, a number of the psychedelic movement’s greatest stars died from drug overdoses, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison of the Doors.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Music Preferences across Generations
We make judgments about music all the time. Older generations don’t like some of the music younger people prefer, and young people often dismiss some of the music of previous generations. Even among our peers, we have different tastes in music and often reject certain kinds of music that have become too popular or that don’t conform to our own preferences. The following exercise aims to understand musical tastes beyond our own individual choices. Be sure to include yourself in this project.
1 DESCRIPTION Arrange to interview four to eight friends or relatives of different ages about their musical tastes and influences. Devise questions about what music they listen to and have listened to at different stages of their lives. What music do they buy or collect? What’s the first album (or single) they acquired? What’s the latest album? What stories or vivid memories do they relate to particular songs or artists? Collect demographic and consumer information: age, gender, occupation, educational background, place of birth, and current place of residence.
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2 ANALYSIS Chart and organize your results. Do you recognize any patterns emerging from the data or stories? What kinds of music did your interview subjects listen to when they were younger? What kinds of music do they listen to now? What formed/influenced their musical interests? If their musical interests changed, what happened? (If they stopped listening to music, note that and find out why.) Do they have any associations between music and their everyday lives? Are these music associations and lifetime interactions with songs and artists important to them?
3 INTERPRETATION Based on what you have discovered and the patterns you have charted, determine what the patterns mean. Does age, gender, geographic location, or education matter in musical tastes? Over time, are the changes in musical tastes and buying habits significant? Why or why not? What kind of music is most important to your subjects? Finally, and most important, why do you think their music preferences developed as they did?
4 EVALUATION Determine how your interview subjects came to like particular kinds of music. What constitutes “good” and “bad” music for them? Did their ideas change over time? How? Are they open- or closed-minded about music? How do they form judgments about music? What criteria did your interview subjects offer for making judgments about music? Do you think their criteria are a valid way to judge music?
5 ENGAGEMENT To expand on your findings, consider the connections of music across generations, geography, and genres. Take a musical artist you like and input the name at www.music-map.com. Use the output of related artists to discover new bands. Input favorite artists of the people you interviewed in Step 1, and share the results with them. Expand your musical tastes.
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https://www.music-map.com
Punk, Grunge, and Indie Respond to Mainstream Rock By the 1970s, rock music was increasingly viewed as just another part of mainstream consumer culture. With major music acts earning huge profits, rock soon became another product line for manufacturers and retailers to promote, package, and sell—primarily to middle-class white male teens. Some rock musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Elton John; glam artists like David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop; and soul artists like Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye continued to explore the social possibilities of rock or at least keep its legacy of outrageousness alive. But they had, for the most part, been replaced by “faceless” supergroups, like REO Speedwagon, Styx, Boston, and Kansas. By the late 1970s, rock could only seem to define itself by saying what it wasn’t; “Disco Sucks” became a standard rock slogan against the popular dance music of the era.
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BOB DYLAN Born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Minnesota, Bob Dylan took his stage name from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He led a folk music movement in the early 1960s with engaging, socially provocative lyrics. He was also an astute media critic, as is evident in the seminal documentary Don’t Look Back (1967). Andrew DeLory
Punk Revives Rock’s Rebelliousness Punk rock rose in the late 1970s to challenge the orthodoxy and commercialism of the record business. By this time, the glory days of rock’s competitive independent labels had ended, and rock music was controlled by just a half-dozen major companies. By avoiding rock’s consumer popularity, punk attempted to return to
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the basics of rock and roll: simple chord structures, catchy melodies, and politically or socially challenging lyrics.
punk rock rock music that challenges the orthodoxy and commercialism of the recording business; it is characterized by loud, unpolished qualities, a jackhammer beat, primal vocal screams, crude aggression, and defiant or comic lyrics.
The punk movement took root in the small dive bar CBGB in New York City around bands such as the Ramones, Blondie, and the Talking Heads. (The roots of punk essentially lay in four pre-punk groups from the late 1960s and early 1970s— the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, and the MC5—none of which experienced commercial success in their day.) Punk quickly spread to England, where a soaring unemployment rate and growing class inequality ensured the success of socially critical rock. Groups like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Buzzcocks, and Siouxsie and the Banshees sprang up and even scored Top 40 hits on the U.K. charts.
Punk was not a commercial success in the United States, where (not surprisingly) it was shunned by radio. However, punk’s contributions continue to be felt. Punk broke down the “boys’ club” mentality of rock, launching unapologetic and unadorned frontwomen like Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Debbie Harry, and Chrissie Hynde, and it introduced all-women bands (writing and performing their own music) like the Go-Go’s into the mainstream. It also reopened the door to rock experimentation at a time when the industry had turned music into a purely commercial enterprise. The influence of experimental, or post-punk, music is still felt today in alternative and indie bands such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, G.L.O.S.S., and Royal Headache.
Grunge and Indie Reinterpret Rock Taking the spirit of punk and updating it, the grunge scene represented a significant development in rock in the 1990s. Getting its name from its often- messy guitar sound and the anti-fashion torn jeans and flannel shirt appearance of its musicians and fans, grunge can trace its lineage back to 1980s bands like Sonic Youth, the Minutemen, and Hüsker Dü. In 1992, after years of limited commercial success, the younger cousin of punk finally broke into the American mainstream with the success of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the album Nevermind. Led by enigmatic singer Kurt Cobain—who committed suicide in 1994—Nirvana produced songs that one critic described as “stunning, concise bursts of melody and rage that occasionally spilled over into haunting, folk-styled acoustic ballad.”17
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Nirvana opened the floodgates to “alternative” bands, such as Green Day, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, the Breeders, Hole, and Nine Inch Nails.
grunge rock music that takes the spirit of punk and infuses it with more attention to melody.
In some critical circles, both punk and grunge are considered subcategories or fringe movements of indie rock. This vague label describes many types of less commercial rock music that appeals chiefly to college students and twentysomethings. Groups often associated with early indie rock include R.E.M., the Cure, and even U2. The mainstream attention they later received illustrates a key dilemma for successful indie acts: that their popularity results in commercial success, a situation that their music often criticizes. Still, independent acts like Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, and Belle and Sebastian have launched successful recording careers the old-school way, but with a twist: starting out on independent labels, playing small concerts, and growing popular quickly with indie music audiences through the immediate buzz of the Internet.
indie rock less commercial rock music, which appeals chiefly to college students and twentysomethings.
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HAIM All-female bands like Haim continue to take on the “boys’ club” mentality of rock and roll. This band of sisters formed in Los Angeles in 2007 and started performing at small venues before breaking into the mainstream. Their first album, Days Are Gone (2013), broke into the Top 10 in several countries and reached No.1 in the United Kingdom. Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images
Hip-Hop Redraws Musical Lines With the growing segregation of radio formats and the dominance of mainstream rock by white male performers, the place of black artists in the rock world diminished from the late 1970s onward. These trends, combined with the rise of “safe” dance disco by white bands (the Bee Gees), black artists (Donna Summer), and integrated groups (the Village People), created a space for a new sound to emerge: hip-hop, a term for the urban culture that includes rapping, cutting (or sampling) by deejays, breakdancing, street clothing, poetry slams, and graffiti art.
hip-hop music that combines spoken street dialect with cuts (or samples) from older records and bears the influences of social politics, male boasting, and comic lyrics carried forward from blues, R&B, soul, and rock and roll.
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In the same way that punk opposed commercial rock, hip-hop music stood in direct opposition to the polished, professional, and often less political world of soul. Its combination of social politics, swagger, and confrontational lyrics carried forward long-standing traditions in blues, R&B, soul, and rock and roll. Like punk and early rock and roll, hip-hop was driven by a democratic, nonprofessional spirit and was cheap to produce, requiring only a few mikes, speakers, amps, turntables, and vinyl records. Deejays, like the pioneering Jamaican émigré Clive Campbell (a.k.a. DJ Kool Herc), emerged first in New York, scratching and re-cueing old reggae, disco, soul, and rock albums. These deejays, or MCs (masters of ceremony), used humor, boasts, and trash talking to entertain and keep the peace at parties.
The music industry initially saw hip-hop as a novelty, despite the enormous success of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979 (which sampled the bass beat of a disco hit from the same year, Chic’s “Good Times”). Then, in 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released “The Message” and forever infused hip-hop with a political take on ghetto life, a tradition continued by artists like Public Enemy and Ice-T. By 1985, hip-hop had exploded as a popular genre with the commercial successes of groups like Run-DMC, the Fat Boys, and LL Cool J. That year, Run-DMC’s album Raising Hell became a major crossover hit, the first No. 1 hip-hop album on the popular charts (thanks in part to a collaboration with Aerosmith on a rap version of the group’s 1976 hit “Walk This Way”). But because most major labels and many black radio stations rejected the rawness of hip-hop, the music spawned hundreds of new independent labels. Although initially dominated by male performers, hip-hop was open to women, and some—Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah among them—quickly became major players. Soon, white groups like the Beastie Boys, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock were combining hip-hop and punk rock in a commercially successful way, while Eminem found enormous success emulating black rap artists.
On the one hand, the conversational style of rap makes it a forum in which performers can debate issues of gender, class, sexuality, violence, and drugs. On the other hand, hip-hop, like punk, has often drawn criticism for lyrics that degrade women, espouse homophobia, and applaud violence. Although hip-hop encompasses many different styles, including various Latin and Asian offshoots, its most controversial subgenre is probably gangster rap, which, in seeking to tell the truth about gang violence in American culture, has been accused of creating violence. Gangster rap drew national attention in 1996 with the shooting death of Tupac Shakur, who lived the violent life he rapped about on albums like Thug Life. Then, in 1997, Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls), whose followers were prominent suspects in Shakur’s death, was shot to death in Hollywood. The result was a change in the hip-hop industry. Most prominently, Sean “Diddy” Combs led Bad Boy Entertainment (former home of Notorious B.I.G.) away from gangster rap to a more danceable hip-hop that combined singingand rapping with musical elements of rock and soul. Today, hip-hop’s stars include artists such as Vince Staples, who revisits the gangster genre, and artists
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like Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Future, and Lizzo, who bring an old- school social consciousness to their performances.
gangster rap a style of rap music that depicts the hardships of urban life and sometimes glorifies the violent style of street gangs.
NIRVANA’S lead singer, Kurt Cobain, is pictured here during his brief career in the early 1990s. The release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in September 1991 bumped Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from the top of the charts and signaled a new direction in popular music. Other grunge bands soon followed Nirvana onto the charts, including Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, and Soundgarden. © Pycha/DAPR/Zuma Press
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ALESSIA CARA got her start on YouTube, uploading homemade covers of songs by artists like Amy Winehouse and the Neighborhood. Her videos amassed a devoted online following and attracted the attention of major record label Def Jam Recordings, with whom Cara signed a deal in 2015. That year Cara released her first original, officially licensed single, “Here,” which now has over eighty-nine million views on YouTube. Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
The Reemergence of Pop After waves of punk, grunge, alternative, and hip-hop; the decline of Top 40 radio; and the demise of MTV’s Total Request Live countdown show, it seemed as though pop music and the era of big pop stars were waning. But pop music has endured and even flourished in recent years, especially with the advent of iTunes. The era of digital downloads again made the single (as opposed to the album) the dominant unit of music. And the dominance of singles has aided the reemergence of pop, since songs with catchy hooks generate the most digital sales. The reemergence of pop was allied with the rise of electronic dance music (EDM), as deejays/remixers/producers like David Guetta, Skrillex, Calvin Harris, and Avicii collaborated with a number of other pop stars. Similarly, streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer have greatly expanded accessibility to music and new remixes. The digital formats in music have resulted in a leap in viability
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and market share for independent labels and have changed the cultural landscape of the music industry in the twenty-first century.
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THE BUSINESS OF SOUND RECORDING
For many in the recording industry, the relationship between music’s business and artistic elements is an uneasy one. The lyrics of hip-hop or punk rock, for example, often question the commercial value of popular music. But the line between commercial success and artistic expression is hazier than simply arguing that the business side is driven by commercialism and the artistic side is free of commercial concerns. The truth, in most cases, is that the business needs artists who are provocative, original, and appealing to the public, and the artists need the expertise of the industry’s marketers, promoters, and producers to hone their sound and reach the public. And both sides stand to make a lot of money from the relationship. But such factors as the enormity of the major labels and the complexities of making, selling, and profiting from music in an industry still adapting to the digital turn affect the economies of sound recording.
Music Labels Influence the Industry After several years of steady growth, revenues for the recording industry experienced significant losses beginning in 2000 as file-sharing began to undercut CD sales. In 2015, U.S. music sales were about $7 billion, down from a peak of $14.5 billion in 1999 but relatively stable since 2010 (file-sharing peaked in 2005, having since declined). The U.S. market accounts for about one-third of global sales, followed by Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada. Despite the losses, the U.S. and global music business still constitutes a powerful oligopoly: a business situation in which a few firms control most of an industry’s production and distribution resources. This global reach gives these firms enormous influence over what types of music gain worldwide distribution and popular acceptance.
oligopoly in media economics, an organizational structure in which a few firms control most of an industry’s production and distribution resources.
Fewer Major Labels and Falling Market Share From the 1950s through the 1980s, the music industry, though powerful, consisted of a large number of competing major labels, along with numerous independent labels. Over time, the major labels began swallowing up the independents and then
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buying one another. By 1998, only six major labels remained—Universal, Warner, Sony, BMG, EMI, and Polygram. After a series of acquisitions and mergers, by 2012 only Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group remained. Together, these companies control about 65 percent of the recording industry market in the United States (see Figure 4.2). Although their revenue has eroded over the past decade, the major music corporations still wield great power, with a number of music stars under contract and enormous back catalogs of recordings that continue to sell. Despite the oligopoly in the music industry, the biggest change has been the rise in market share for independent music labels.
FIGURE 4.2 U.S. MARKET SHARE OF THE MAJOR LABELS IN THE RECORDING INDUSTRY, 2015 Data from: Nielsen Music, 2016, and Billboard. Figures are rounded.
The Indies Grow with Digital Music The rise of rock and roll in the 1950s and early 1960s showcased a rich diversity of independent labels—including Sun, Stax, Chess, and Motown—all vying for a share of the new music. That tradition lives on today. In contrast to the three global players, some five thousand large and small independent production houses—or indies—record music that appears to be less commercial. Often struggling enterprises, indies require only a handful of people to operate them. For years, indies accounted for 10 to 15 percent of all music releases. But with the advent of downloads and streaming, the enormous diversity of independent-label music became much more accessible, and the market share of indies more than doubled in size. Indies often still depend on wholesale distributors to promote and sell their music, or enter into deals with one of the three majors to gain wider distribution for their artists (in the same way that independent filmmakers use major studios for film distribution). Independent labels have produced some of the best-selling artists of recent years; examples include Big Machine Records (Taylor Swift, Rascal
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Flatts), Dualtone Records (the Lumineers), XL Recordings (Adele, Vampire Weekend), and Cash Money Records (Drake, Nicki Minaj). (See “Alternative Voices” on page 133.)
indies independent music and film production houses that work outside industry oligopolies; they often produce less mainstream music and film.
Making, Selling, and Profiting from Music Like most mass media, the music business is divided into several areas, each working in a different capacity. In the music industry, those areas are making the music (signing, developing, and recording the artist), selling the music (selling, distributing, advertising, and promoting the music), and dividing the profits. All these areas are essential to the industry but have always played a part in the conflict between business concerns and artistic concerns.
Making the Music Labels are driven by A&R (artist & repertoire) agents, the talent scouts of the music business, who discover, develop, and sometimes manage artists. A&R executives seek out and listen to demonstration tapes, or demos, from new artists and decide whom to sign and which songs to record. Naturally, they look for artists with commercial potential.
A&R (artist & repertoire) agents talent scouts of the music business who discover, develop, and sometimes manage performers.
A typical recording session is a complex process that involves the artist, the producer, the session engineer, and audio technicians. In charge of the overall recording process, the producer handles most nontechnical elements of the session, including reserving studio space, hiring session musicians (if necessary), and making final decisions about the sound of the recording. The session engineer oversees the technical aspects of the recording session, everything from choosing recording equipment to managing the audio technicians. Most popular records are recorded part by part. Using separate microphones, the vocalists, guitarists,
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drummers, and other musical sections are digitally recorded onto separate audio tracks, which are edited and remixed during postproduction and ultimately mixed down to a two-track stereo master copy for reproduction to CD or online digital distribution.
GLOBAL VILLAGE
Blank Space: What Kind of Genius Is Max Martin? BY JOHN SEABROOK
mong the stranger aspects of recent pop music history is how so many of the biggest hits of the past twenty years—by the
Backstreet Boys, ’NSync, and Britney Spears to Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and the Weeknd—have been cowritten by a forty-four-year-old Swede. His real name is Karl Martin Sandberg, but you would know him as Max Martin, if you know of him at all, which, if he can help it, you won’t. He is music’s magic melody man, the master hooksmith responsible for twenty-one No. 1 Billboard hits—five fewer than John Lennon, and eleven behind Paul McCartney, on the all-time list. But, while Lennon and McCartney are universally acknowledged as geniuses, few outside the music business have heard of Max Martin.
Presumably this is because Martin writes all of his songs for other people to sing. The fame that Lennon and McCartney achieved by performing their work will never be his, which no doubt is fine with Martin. He still gets the publishing credit. He is the Cyrano de Bergerac of today’s pop landscape, the poet hiding under the balcony of popular song, whispering the tunes that have become career-making records, such as “… Baby One More Time,” for Britney Spears, “Since U Been
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Gone,” for Kelly Clarkson, and “I Kissed a Girl,” for Katy Perry. The songs he cowrote or coproduced for Taylor Swift, which include her past eight hits (three from Red and five from 1989), transformed her from a popular singer-songwriter into a stadium-filling global pop star. (The 1989 tour recently passed the $150 million mark.)
Martin has thrived in the ghostwriter’s milieu, where the trick is to remain as anonymous as possible, because the public likes to believe that pop artists write their own songs. That the Swede happens to bring to the table an exceptionally large dollop of Jantelagen, the Scandinavian disdain for individual celebrity, makes him especially well suited to his vocation.
And yet Martin is known to insist that the artists he works with sing his songs exactly the way he sings them on the demos. In a sense, Spears, Perry, and Swift are all singing covers of Max Martin recordings. They are also among the few people in the world who have actually heard the originals. Countless self-proclaimed performers on YouTube sing Max Martin songs, but there is not a single publicly available video or audio recording of Martin performing his own stuff. (In the course of researching my book The Song Machine, I got to hear an actual Max Martin demo, for “… Baby One More Time,” when a record man who had it on his phone played it for me. The Swede sounded exactly like Spears.) Martin’s demos are the missing originals of our musical age— the blank space at the center of the past two decades of pop music.
According to Marie Ledin, the managing director of the Polar Music Prize—Sweden’s musical Nobel—Swedish songwriters and producers were partly responsible for a quarter of all Billboard Top Ten hits in 2014, an astonishing accomplishment for a country of fewer than ten million people. Clearly, there is more at work here than individual genius. Apart from the country’s musical-education system, what qualities and characteristics make Swedes so good at producing pop songs?
Generally speaking, there is a flowing melodic element in Swedish folk songs and hymns (the national anthem, “Thou Ancient, Thou Free,” even sounds a bit like a pop song) that has rooted itself in the sensibility of many a musical Swede. More specifically, the relative computer literacy of the population, combined with the country’s excellent broadband infrastructure, has allowed Swedes to excel at making music on computers and collaborating with other composers over the Internet, which has become the standard method of pop songwriting today. Added to that is Sweden’s xenophilia—its love of other cultures, in particular Anglo-American cultures. In Sweden, American television
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isn’t translated into the local language, as it is in France and Italy, and the music you hear on the radio is more likely to be sung in English than in Swedish. More than 90 percent of Swedes speak English.
But, while knowing English is clearly an advantage to songwriters and producers seeking success in the United States and the U.K., a lack of facility with the finer points of the language is equally important. Swedish writers are not partial to wit, metaphor, or double entendre, songwriting staples from Tin Pan Alley through the Brill Building era.
While Sweden has a strong songwriting culture, it lacks an equally strong culture of performing.
MAX MARTIN, pictured at the 2015 Grammy Awards, has written nearly two dozen No. 1 songs for such performers as Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift. Michael Tran/FilmMagic/Getty Images
A nation of songwriters endowed with melodic gifts, meticulous about craft but reluctant to perform their own songs, is a potential gold mine
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for a nation of wannabe pop stars who don’t write their own material, which is often the case in the United States. By hooking up the two countries, musically speaking, Martin and his peers changed pop songwriting.
And yet for all his success and influence, there is something missing in Martin’s oeuvre when compared to that of the Beatles. It’s not the quality of the songs—history will judge whether they have what it takes to endure. It’s the absence of a broader political and cultural framework in which to place the songs. The story of the Beatles, from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Let It Be,” is a story of the sixties—politics, war, protest, drugs, free love, and how the songwriters responded to those forces. The hits are embedded within albums that offer rich, complex musical statements, and insights into the artists’ personal development and changes. What story does Martin’s string of No. 1s tell, from “… Baby One More Time” to “Can’t Feel My Face,” his most recent? What changes do they trace? The songs are all about the same thing, more or less, which is not the same thing at all. Source: Adapted from John Seabrook, “Blank Space: What Kind of Genius Is Max Martin?” New Yorker, September 30, 2015, www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/blank-space-what-kind-of- genius-is-max-martin.
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http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/blank-space-what-kind-of-genius-is-max-martin
INDIE LABELS are able to take chances on artists like Titus Andronicus, an ambitious punk band from New Jersey recently signed to Merge Records, an independent label based in North Carolina. The band released a double-album rock opera in 2015. Gary Wolstenholme/Redferns/Getty Images
Selling the Music Selling and distributing music is a tricky part of the business. For years, the primary sales outlets for music were direct-retail record stores (independents or chains) and general retail outlets like Walmart, Best Buy, and Target. Direct retailers could specialize in music, carefully monitoring new releases and keeping large, varied inventories. But as digital sales climbed, CD sales fell, forcing direct- retail record stores out of business and leaving general retail outlets to offer considerably less variety, stocking only top-selling CDs.
As recently as 2011, physical recordings (CDs and some vinyl) accounted for about 50 percent of U.S. music sales. But CD sales continue to decline and now constitute about 16 percent of the U.S. market. In some other Top 10 global music markets, such as Japan and Germany, CDs are still the top format, and the cultural shift from physical recordings to digital formats is just beginning. In the United
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States, vinyl album sales have rebounded over the past decade and now account for about 8 percent of industry revenues. Conversely, digital sales—which include digital downloads (like iTunes and Amazon), subscription streaming services (like Rhapsody and the paid version of Spotify), free streaming services (like the ad- supported Spotify, YouTube, and Vevo), streaming radio services (like Pandora and iHeartRadio), ringtones, and synchronization fees (payments for use of music in media like film, television, and advertising)—have grown to capture more than 75 percent of the U.S. market. About 40 percent of all music recordings purchased in the United States are permanent downloads, and iTunes is the leading retailer of downloads. Streaming services now account for about 32 percent of U.S. music industry revenues, with synchronization at 3 percent and ringtones at 1 percent of industry revenues.18
The international recording industry is a major proponent of music streaming services because they are a new revenue source. Although online piracy— unauthorized online file-sharing—still exists, the advent of advertising-supported music streaming services has satisfied consumer demand for free music and weakened interest in illegal file-swapping. There are now about 450 licensed online music services worldwide, with about 70 of those in the United States.
online piracy the illegal uploading, downloading, or streaming of copyrighted material, such as music or movies.
Dividing the Profits The digital upheaval in the music industry has shaken up the once-predictable sale of music through CDs. Now there are multiple digital venues for selling music and an equally high number of methods for dividing the profits. The digital download and streaming market has now surpassed physical sales, but the standard for measuring music sales still remains the album. Thus we will first look at the various costs and profits from a typical CD that retails at $17.98.
The wholesale price for that CD is about $12.50, leaving the remainder as retail profit. Discount retailers like Walmart and Best Buy sell closer to the wholesale price to lure customers to buy other things (even if they make less profit on the CD itself). The wholesale price represents the actual cost of producing and promoting the recording, plus the recording label’s profits. The record company reaps the highest revenue (close to $9.74 on a typical CD) but, along with the artist, bears the bulk of the expenses: manufacturing costs, packaging and CD design, advertising and promotion, and artists’ royalties (see Figure 4.3). The physical product of the CD itself costs less than a quarter to manufacture.
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FIGURE 4.3 WHERE THE MONEY GOES Data from: Steve Knopper, “The New Economics of the Music Industry,” Rolling Stone, October 25, 2011, www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-new-economics- of-the-music-industry-20111025; and Spotify, “Spotify Explained,” accessed June 7, 2014, www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/.
New artists usually negotiate a royalty rate of between 8 and 12 percent on the retail price of a CD, while more established performers might negotiate for 15 percent or higher. An artist who has negotiated a typical 11 percent royalty rate would earn about $1.93 per CD whose suggested retail price is $17.98. So a CD that “goes gold”—that is, sells 500,000 units—would net the artist around $965,000. But out of this amount, artists must repay the record company the money they have been advanced (from $100,000 to $500,000). And after band members, managers, and attorneys are paid with the remaining money, it’s quite possible that an artist will end up with almost nothing—even after a certified gold CD. The financial risk is much lower for the songwriter/publisher, who makes a standard mechanical royalty rate of about 9.1 cents per song, or $0.91 for a ten-song CD, without having to bear any production or promotional costs.
The profits are divided somewhat differently in digital download sales. A $1.29 iTunes download generates about $0.40 for Apple (it gets 30 percent of every song sale) and a standard $0.09 mechanical royalty for the song publisher and writer, leaving about $0.60 for the record company. Artists at a typical royalty rate of about 15 percent would get $0.20 from the song download. With no CD printing and packaging costs, record companies can retain more of the revenue on download sales. The music industry counts ten digital downloads as equal to one
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https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-new-economics-of-the-music-industry-20111025
album unit.
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Alternative Strategies for Music Marketing This video explores the strategies independent artists and marketers now employ to reach audiences.
Discussion: Even with the ability to bypass major record companies, many of the most popular artists still sign with those companies. Why do you think that is?
Another venue for digital music is streaming services like Spotify, Slacker, and Apple Music. Some leading artists initially held back their new releases from such services due to concerns that streaming would eat into their digital download and CD sales and that the compensation from streaming services wasn’t sufficient. Spotify reports that on average, each stream is worth about $0.007.28. Depending on the popularity of the song, that could add up to a little or a lot of money. For example, Spotify reports that, like Apple’s iTunes, it pays out about 70 percent of its revenue to music rights holders (divided between the label, performers, and songwriters) and retains about 30 percent for itself. Spotify provides examples of what typical payouts might be for a range of albums in a single month (see Figure 4.3). For contrast, contemporary cellist Zoë Keating, an independent recording artist, reports earning just $808 in the first half of 2013 from 201,412 Spotify streams of two of her older recordings.19 The music industry counts fifteen hundred digital streams as the equivalent of an album.
CASE STUDY 303
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S
Psy and the Meaning of “Gangnam Style” BY MICHAEL PARK
outh Korean musician Psy (a.k.a. Park Jae-Sang) became a pop- cultural sensation in the fall of 2012 with his viral Internet meme
“Gangnam Style.” The video has now generated over two and a half billion views, making it the most popular YouTube video ever. Within a few months of the video’s release, Psy was making appearances on national talk shows, such as The Today Show, Ellen, and Chelsea Lately, and even an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Never before had a Korean pop (“K-pop”) artist reached such epic crossover success, despite dozens of musical acts from Korea and Asia making the attempt.
Although Psy’s crossover appeal is largely unprecedented, his overwhelming popularity has many Koreans both gratified and puzzled.1 The K-pop music industry is primarily made up of young and attractive singers who often flaunt their sexuality. Psy, however, is a comedic performer who is significantly older (mid-thirties), portly, and without the leading-man looks that have come to dominate the K-pop scene. Without question, the “Gangnam Style” music video is visually seductive, with its colorful setups, its catchy melody, and Psy’s signature horse dance. As a seasoned comedic performer, Psy offers wacky juxtapositions, and the video has been the subject of exhaustive parody by mainstream and user-generated media. Unbeknownst to most viewers, the video and the song’s lyrics offer a subversive message: Psy’s scathing critique of materialism and conspicuous superficiality run amok in Korea’s trendiest district—“Gangnam” (“south of the river” in Korean).
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Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images
On one hand, it is possible to conclude that Psy’s crossover success represents greater social acceptance of Asian men who have historically been absent or marginalized in mainstream media representations. However, Psy and his physicality in the video also evoke one of the stereotyped roles that mainstream media has situated Asian men in: the emasculated and clownish Asian male. The celebratory reception of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” indicates that in order for Asian males to find popular appeal in the audiovisual realm, they too must negotiate with a “codified visual hierarchy” where consumers will only accept caricatured images of Asian men.
On The Ellen DeGeneres Show, it becomes clear that Psy’s value as a guest is centered on his comical dance; he is relegated to an object of humor who elicits laughs with his minstrel performance. Psy teaches Britney Spears and Ellen his horse dance before performing the song for the audience. Ellen fails to properly introduce Psy, and the audience and viewers learn nothing about him, nor are the song’s lyrics or subversive message inquired about. On Saturday Night Live, Psy’s comical horse dance and minstrelsy are further exploited in a sketch featuring host Seth MacFarlane. The point is clear: The comical dance moves and wacky visuals are consumed as silly entertainment and comic relief. Psy never speaks a word except for “Oppa Gangnam Style.” As in his debut on Ellen, Psy stands as a recognizable prop, eager to entertain with his comical physicality. On Chelsea Lately, Psy makes an appearance in a bit that has him galloping his signature horse dance while performing menial office tasks, such as stomping on cardboard boxes, dusting office portraits, and stapling papers. Throughout the skit, he never speaks; he never even blurts out “Gangnam Style” while performing his dance.
Psy’s “crossover success” into America’s mainstream cultural imaginary, coupled with the absence of prototypical male K-pop artists (e.g., Rain, Se7en, or Big Bang), who display high fashion and flaunt hypersexuality, bolsters the assertion that a codified visual hierarchy
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operates in the audiovisual space as well. While Psy’s popular appeal and celebrated reception in the American cultural imagination are unprecedented, his image and physicality are tightly aligned with popular constructions of Asian men that define Asian masculinity as synonymous with emasculation and comic relief. Source: Adapted from Michael Park, “Psy-zing Up the Mainstreaming of ‘Gangnam Style’: Embracing Asian Masculinity as Neo-minstrelsy?” an award- winning paper presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference, Montreal, Canada, August 2014.
Songs streamed on Internet radio, like Pandora, Slacker, or iHeartRadio, and satellite radio follow yet another formula for determining royalties. In 2003, the nonprofit group SoundExchange was established to collect royalties for Internet radio. SoundExchange charges fees of $0.0022 per stream for subscription (premium) services, and $0.0017 per stream for nonsubscription (free) services. Large Internet radio stations can pay up to 25 percent of their gross revenue (less for smaller Internet radio stations, and a small flat fee for streaming nonprofit stations). About 50 percent of the fees go to the music label, 45 percent go to the featured artists, and 5 percent go to nonfeatured artists. Through 2015, SoundExchange had paid out more than $3 billion in royalties.
Finally, video services like YouTube and Vevo have become sites to generate advertising revenue through music videos, which can attract tens of millions of views (see “Case Study: Psy and the Meaning of ‘Gangnam Style’” on page 132). Even popular amateur videos that use copyrighted music can create substantial revenue for music labels and artists. The 2009 amateur video “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” has about 92 million views. Instead of asking YouTube to remove the wedding video for its unauthorized use of Chris Brown’s song “Forever,” Sony used YouTube’s Content ID tool to monetize each play of the song in that video. At the rate of $1 per thousand video plays, it ultimately generated about $92,000 in revenue.
There aren’t standard formulas for sharing revenue from music videos, but there is movement in that direction. In 2012, Universal Music Group and the National Music Publishers’ Association agreed that music publishers would be paid 15 percent of advertising revenues generated by music videos licensed for use on YouTube and Vevo.
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KISHI BASHI is the stage name of singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Kaoru Ishibashi. A member of several indie bands—including Jupiter One and Of Montreal— Ishibashi has performed at major festivals, like SXSW and Austin City Limits. His original songs have been licensed in major commercials for Microsoft, Sony, and Smart Automobile. Scott Dudelson/Getty Images
Alternative Voices A vast network of independent (indie) labels, distributors, stores, publications, and Internet sites devoted to music outside the major label system has existed since the early days of rock and roll. The indie industry nonetheless continues to thrive, providing music fans access to all styles of music, including some of the world’s most respected artists.
Independent labels have become even more viable by using the Internet as a low-cost distribution and promotional outlet for downloads, streaming, and merchandise sales, as well as for fan discussion groups, regular e-mail updates of tour schedules, and promotion of new releases. Consequently, bands that in previous years would have signed to a major label have found another path to success in the independent music industry, with labels like Merge Records (Arcade
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Fire, She & Him, the Mountain Goats), Matador (Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Pavement), 4AD (the National, Bon Iver), and Epitaph (Bad Religion, Alkaline Trio, Frank Turner). Unlike artists on major labels who need to sell 500,000 copies or more in order to recoup expenses and make a profit, indie artists “can turn a profit after selling roughly 25,000 copies of an album.”20 Some musical artists also self-publish CDs and sell them at concerts or use popular online services like CD Baby, the largest online distributor of independent music, where artists can earn $6 to $12 per CD. One of the challenges of being an independent, unsigned artist is figuring out how to sell one’s music on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, and other digital music services. TuneCore, founded in 2006, is one of many companies (including CD Baby) that have emerged to fulfill that need. For about $100, the company will distribute recordings to online music services and then collect royalties for the artist (charging an additional 10 percent for recovered royalty fees).
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Streaming Music Videos On LaunchPad for Media & Culture, watch a clip of recent music videos from Katy Perry.
Discussion: Music videos get less TV exposure than they did in their heyday, but they can still be a crucial part of major artists’ careers. How do these videos help sell Perry’s music?
Some established rock acts, like Nine Inch Nails and Amanda Palmer, are taking another approach to their business model, shunning major labels and independents and using the Internet to directly reach their fans. By selling music online at their own Web sites or selling CDs at live concerts, music acts generally do better, cutting out the retailer and keeping more of the revenue themselves. Artists and bands can also build online communities around their Web sites, listing shows, news, tours, photos, and downloadable songs. Social networking sites are another place for fans and music artists to connect. Myspace was one of the first dominant sites, but as a place to discover new music, it has been eclipsed by both social music media sites, like the Hype Machine and SoundCloud, and video sites like YouTube and Vevo.
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SOUND RECORDING, FREE EXPRESSION, AND DEMOCRACY
From sound recording’s earliest stages as a mass medium, when the music industry began stamping out flat records, to the breakthrough of MP3s and Internet-based music services, fans have been sharing music and pushing culture in unpredictable directions. The battle over pop music’s controversial aspects speaks to the heart of democratic expression. Nevertheless, pop—like other art forms—also has a history of reproducing old stereotypes: limiting women’s access as performers, fostering racist or homophobic attitudes, and celebrating violence and misogyny.
Popular musical forms that test cultural boundaries face a dilemma: how to uphold a legacy of free expression while resisting giant companies bent on consolidating independents and maximizing profits. Since the 1950s, forms of rock music have been breaking boundaries, then becoming commercial, then reemerging as rebellious, and then repeating the pattern. The congressional payola hearings of 1959 and the Senate hearings of the mid-1980s, triggered by Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center (which led to music advisory labels), are just two of the many attempts to rein in popular music, whereas the infamous antics of performers from Elvis Presley onward, the blunt lyrics of artists from rock and roll and rap, and the independent paths of the many garage bands and cult bands of the early rock-and-roll era through the present are among those actions that pushed popular music’s boundaries.
Still, this dynamic between popular music’s clever innovations and capitalism’s voracious appetite is crucial to sound recording’s constant innovation and mass appeal. Ironically, successful commerce requires periodic infusions of the diverse sounds that come from ethnic communities, backyard garages, dance parties, and neighborhood clubs. No matter how it is produced and distributed, popular music endures because it speaks to both individual and universal themes, from a teenager’s first romantic adventure to a nation’s outrage over social injustice. Music often reflects the personal or political anxieties of a society. It also breaks down artificial or hurtful barriers better than many government programs do. Despite its tribulations, music at its best continues to champion a democratic spirit. Writer and free-speech advocate Nat Hentoff addressed this issue in the 1970s when he wrote, “Popular music always speaks, among other things, of dreams—which change with the times.”21 The recording industry continues to capitalize on and spread those dreams globally, but in each generation, musicians and their fans keep imagining new ones.
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4 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the developmental stages of mass media. But as new audio and sound recording technologies evolve, do they drive the kind of music we hear?
In the recent history of the music industry, it would seem as if technology has been the driving force behind the kind of music we hear. Case in point: The advent of the MP3 file as a new format in 1999 led to a new emphasis on single songs as the primary unit of music sales. In the past decade, we have come to live in a music business dominated by digital singles and streams.
What have we gained by this transition? Thankfully, there are fewer CD jewel boxes (which always shattered with the greatest of ease). And there is no requirement to buy the lackluster “filler” songs that often come with the price of an album, when all we want are the two or three hit songs. But what have we lost culturally in the transition away from albums?
First, there is no physical album art for digital singles (although department stores now sell frames to turn vintage 12-inch album covers into art). And second, we have lost the concept of an album as a thematic collection of music and a medium that provides a much broader canvas to a talented musical artist. Consider this: How would the Beatles’ The White Album have been created in a business dominated by singles? A look at Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums and Time magazine’s All-Time 100 Albums indicates the apex of album creativity in earlier decades, with selections such as Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced (1967), the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972), Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), and Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997). Has the movement away from albums changed possibilities for musical artists? That is, if an artist wants to be commercially successful, is there more pressure to generate just hit singles instead of larger bodies of work that constitute an album? Have the styles of artists like Kesha, Nicki Minaj, OneRepublic, and Lil Wayne been shaped by the predominance of the single?
Still, there is a clear case against technological determinism—the idea that
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technological innovations determine the direction of the culture. Back in the 1950s, the vinyl album caught on despite its newness—and despite the popularity of the 45-rpm single format, which competed with it at the same time. When the MP3 single format emerged in the late 1990s, the music industry had just rolled out two formats of advanced album discs that were technological improvements on the CD. Neither caught on. Of course, music fans may have been lured both by the ease of acquiring music digitally via the Internet and by the price—usually free (but illegal).
So, if it isn’t technological determinism, why doesn’t a strong digital album market coexist with the digital singles and streams of today? Can you think of any albums of the past few years that merit being listed among the greatest albums of all time?
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
audiotape, 109 stereo, 110 analog recording, 110 digital recording, 110 compact discs (CDs), 110 MP3, 110 pop music, 113 jazz, 113 cover music, 113 rock and roll, 113 blues, 114 rhythm and blues (R&B), 114 rockabilly, 115 soul, 120 folk music, 120 folk-rock, 121 punk rock, 123 grunge, 123
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indie rock, 123 hip-hop, 124 gangster rap, 125 oligopoly, 126 indies, 127 A&R (artist & repertoire) agents, 127 online piracy, 130
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
The Development of Sound Recording 1. The technological configuration of a particular medium
sometimes elevates it to mass market status. Why did Emile Berliner’s flat disk replace the wax cylinder, and why did this reconfiguration of records matter in the history of the mass media? Can you think of other mass media examples in which the size and shape of the technology have made a difference?
2. How did sound recording survive the advent of radio? 3. How did the music industry attempt to curb illegal downloading
and file-sharing? U.S. Popular Music and the Formation of Rock
4. How did rock and roll significantly influence two mass media industries?
5. Although many rock-and-roll lyrics from the 1950s are tame by today’s standards, this new musical development represented a threat to many parents and adults at that time. Why?
6. What moral and cultural boundaries were blurred by rock and roll in the 1950s?
7. Why did cover music figure so prominently in the development of rock and roll and the record industry in the 1950s?
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A Changing Industry: Reformations in Popular Music 8. Explain the British invasion. What was its impact on the
recording industry? 9. What were the major influences of folk music on the recording
industry? 10. Why did hip-hop and punk rock emerge as significant musical
forms in the late 1970s and 1980s? What do their developments have in common, and how are they different?
11. Why does pop music continue to remain powerful today? The Business of Sound Recording 12. What companies control the bulk of worldwide music production
and distribution? 13. Why have independent labels grown to have a significantly
larger market share in the 2010s? 14. Which major parties receive profits when a digital download,
music stream, or physical CD is sold? 15. How is a mechanical royalty different from a performance
royalty? Sound Recording, Free Expression, and Democracy 16. Why is it ironic that so many forms of alternative music become
commercially successful?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. If you ran a noncommercial campus radio station, what kind of music would you play, and why?
2. Think about the role of the 1960s drug culture in rock’s history. How are drugs and alcohol treated in contemporary and alternative forms of rock and hip-hop today?
3. Is it healthy for, or detrimental to, the music business that so much of the recording industry is controlled by just a few large international companies? Explain.
4. Do you think the Internet as a technology helps or hurts musical artists? Why do so many contemporary musical performers differ in their opinions about the Internet?
5. How has the Internet changed your musical tastes? Has it exposed
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you to more global music? Do you listen to a wider range of music because of the Internet?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter.
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5 Popular Radio And The Origins Of Broadcasting
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Kevin Winter/Getty Images
SOUNDS AND IMAGES
“YOU CAN’T STOP TECHNOLOGY , nor can you
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control it. The only winning strategy is to embrace it— and embrace it as early as you can.”1 So says Bob Pittman, the media executive who founded MTV in the 1980s and who became an executive at Clear Channel Communications, the largest radio corporation in the United States, in 2010. Long before Pittman was hired, a profit-minded Clear Channel embraced technology by making drastic cuts to news and programming staffs at its local radio stations across the country and simulcasting much of the same programming (including prerecorded announcers playing as if live) across multiple distant cities.
EARLY TECHNOLOGY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF RADIO THE EVOLUTION OF RADIO RADIO REINVENTS ITSELF THE SOUNDS OF COMMERCIAL RADIO THE ECONOMICS OF BROADCAST RADIO RADIO AND THE DEMOCRACY OF THE AIRWAVES
◄ iHeartRadio is bringing convergence to the world of radio through their app, which allows users to stream content from hundreds of radio stations on the web, mobile devices, and even some video game consoles.
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This is how Clear Channel became the poster child for the success—and the excess —of media consolidation following the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Not only a radio giant, the company has long been one of the biggest live-music-event promoters and outdoor billboard owners, among its other media and entertainment enterprises. But the technologies of station consolidation and automation were not entirely a winning strategy for Clear Channel. From its peak of owning more than 1,200 stations in 2005, it sold off hundreds of stations a decade later, settling at about 860 stations. During that time, it earned a reputation as the company that killed much of local radio news, stifled deejays’ individuality and passion for music, and lost sight of the public’s interest.
Under Pittman, part of embracing technology is the attempt to create a new reputation for Clear Channel. So in 2014, Clear Channel Communications became iHeartMedia, named to reflect the brand of its new streaming radio network, iHeartRadio. Although the majority of profits at iHeartMedia still comes from its AM and FM radio stations, iHeartMedia is banking on its twenty-one hundred live broadcast and digital-only radio streaming stations for the future.
Whereas Clear Channel was distant and corporate, iHeartMedia is throwing its promotional energy into a number of national music events, including the iHeartRadio Music Festival, the iHeartRadio Ultimate Pool Party, the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball Concert Tour, the iHeartRadio Country Festival, the iHeartRadio Ultimate Valentine’s Escape, and the iHeartRadio Fiesta Latina. True to its word, the company’s professed strategy is “delivering entertaining and informative content across multiple platforms, including broadcast, mobile and digital as well as events,” and then delivering its audiences to “advertisers, business partners, music labels and artists.”2
Is this the future of radio? Other radio corporations and stations around the world are also part of the trend toward streaming audio content (see “Global Village: Radio Goes Local, Global, and Local Again” on page 163). But does streaming mean that the radio industry is running itself out of the local radio business? Pittman doesn’t think so. “In the most simple terms, what we added were more radios. We’ve always had radios in the car, radios by the bed and radios at work, and now we also have what are new radios to the consumer—digital devices—at workstations and in everyone’s hands,” Pittman says. “More ways to listen to the radio means more occasions for our listeners to connect to our legendary brands and our one of a kind personalities—and it’s a very good thing for us, our listeners, our advertisers and the music industry.”3
EVEN WITH THE ARRIVAL OF television IN THE 1950s and the “corporatization” of broadcasting in the 1990s, the historical and contemporary roles played by radio have been immense. From the early days of network radio to the more customized, demographically segmented medium today, radio’s influence continues to reverberate throughout our society. Though television displaced radio as our most common media experience, radio specialized and adapted. The daily music and persistent talk that resonate from radios all over the world continue to
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play a key role in contemporary culture. In this chapter, we examine the scientific, cultural, political, and economic
factors surrounding radio’s development and perseverance. We will:
Explore the origins of broadcasting, from the early theories about radio waves to the critical formation of RCA as a national radio monopoly Probe the evolution of commercial radio, including the rise of NBC as the first network, the development of CBS, and the establishment of the first federal radio legislation Review the fascinating ways in which radio reinvented itself in the 1950s Examine television’s impact on radio programming, the invention of FM radio, radio’s convergence with sound recording, and the influence of various formats Investigate newer developments, like satellite and HD radio; radio’s convergence with the Internet; and radio’s hopes for greater convergence with the mobile phone industry Survey the economic health, increasing conglomeration, and cultural impact of commercial and noncommercial radio today, including the emergence of noncommercial low-power FM service
As you read through this chapter, think about your own relationship with radio. What are your earliest memories of radio listening? Do you remember a favorite song or station? How old were you when you started listening? Why did you listen? What types of radio stations are in your area today? How has the Internet made radio better? How has it made it worse? For more questions to help you think through the role of radio in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
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EARLY TECHNOLOGY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF RADIO
Radio did not emerge as a full-blown mass medium until the 1920s, though the technology that made radio possible had been evolving for years. The telegraph— the precursor of radio technology—was invented in the 1840s. American inventor Samuel Morse developed the first practical system, sending electrical impulses from a transmitter through a cable to a reception point. Using what became known as Morse code—a series of dots and dashes that stood for letters in the alphabet— telegraph operators transmitted news and messages simply by interrupting the electrical current along a wire cable. By 1844, Morse had set up the first telegraph line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. By 1861, telegraph lines ran coast to coast. By 1866, the first transatlantic cable, capable of transmitting about six words a minute, ran between Newfoundland and Ireland along the ocean floor.
telegraph invented in the 1840s, it sent electrical impulses through a cable from a transmitter to a reception point, transmitting Morse code.
Morse code a system of sending electrical impulses from a transmitter through a cable to a reception point; developed by the American inventor Samuel Morse.
Although it was a revolutionary technology, the telegraph had its limitations. For instance, while it dispatched complicated language codes, it was unable to transmit the human voice. Moreover, ships at sea still had no contact with the rest of the world. As a result, navies could not find out when wars had ceased on land and often continued fighting for months. Commercial shipping interests also lacked an efficient way to coordinate and relay information from land and between ships. What was needed was a telegraph without wires.
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A TELEGRAPH OPERATOR reads the perforated tape. Sending messages using Morse code across telegraph wires was the precursor to radio, which did not fully become a mass medium until the 1920s. SSPL/Getty Images
Maxwell and Hertz Discover Radio Waves The key development in wireless transmissions came from James Maxwell, a Scottish physicist who in the mid-1860s theorized the existence of electromagnetic waves: invisible electronic impulses similar to visible light. Maxwell’s equations showed that electricity, magnetism, light, and heat are part of the same electro-magnetic spectrum and that they radiate in space at the speed of light, about 186,000 miles per second (see Figure 5.1). Maxwell further theorized that a portion of these phenomena, later known as radio waves, could be harnessed so that signals could be sent from a transmission point to a reception point.
electromagnetic waves invisible electronic impulses similar to visible light; electricity, magnetism, light, broadcast signals, and heat are part of such waves, which radiate in space at the speed of light, about 186,000 miles per second.
radio waves a portion of the electromagnetic wave spectrum that was harnessed so that signals could be sent from a transmission point and obtained at a reception point.
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It was German physicist Heinrich Hertz, however, who in the 1880s proved Maxwell’s theories. Hertz created a crude device that permitted an electrical spark to leap across a small gap between two steel balls. As the electricity jumped the gap, it emitted waves; this was the first recorded transmission and reception of an electromagnetic wave. Hertz’s experiments significantly advanced the development of wireless communication.
Marconi and the Inventors of Wireless Telegraphy In 1894, Guglielmo Marconi—a twenty-year-old, self-educated Italian engineer— read Hertz’s work and understood that developing a way to send high-speed messages over great distances would transform communication, the military, and commercial shipping. Although revolutionary, the telephone and the telegraph were limited by their wires, so Marconi set about trying to make wireless technology practical. First, he attached Hertz’s spark-gap transmitter to a Morse telegraph key, which could send out dot-dash signals. The electrical impulses traveled into a Morse inker, the machine that telegraph operators used to record the dots and dashes onto narrow strips of paper. Second, Marconi discovered that grounding—connecting the transmitter and receiver to the earth—greatly increased the distance over which he could send signals.
In 1896, Marconi traveled to England, where he received a patent on wireless telegraphy, a form of voiceless point-to-point communication. In London, in 1897, he formed the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, later known as British Marconi, and began installing wireless technology on British naval and private commercial ships. In 1899, he opened a branch in the United States, establishing a company nicknamed American Marconi. That same year, he sent the first wireless Morse-code signal across the English Channel to France; and in 1901, he relayed the first wireless signal across the Atlantic Ocean. Although Marconi was a successful innovator and entrepreneur, he saw wireless telegraphy only as point-to- point communication, much like the telegraph and the telephone, not as a one-to- many mass medium. He also confined his applications to Morse-code messages for military and commercial ships, leaving others to explore the wireless transmission of voice and music.
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FIGURE 5.1 THE ELECTROMAGNETIC SPECTRUM Data from: NASA, http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/emspectrum.html.
History often cites Marconi as the “father of radio,” but another inventor unknown to him was making parallel discoveries about wireless telegraphy in Russia. Alexander Popov, a professor of physics in St. Petersburg, was also experimenting with sending wireless messages over distances. Popov announced to the Russian Physicist Society of St. Petersburg on May 7, 1895, that he had transmitted and received signals over a distance of six hundred yards.4 Yet Popov was an academic, not an entrepreneur, and after Marconi accomplished a similar feat that same summer, Marconi was the first to apply for and receive a patent.
wireless telegraphy the forerunner of radio, it is a form of voiceless point-to- point communication; it preceded the voice and sound transmissions of one-to-many mass communication that became known as broadcasting.
It is important to note that the work of Popov and Marconi was preceded by that of Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-Croatian inventor who immigrated to New York in 1884. Tesla, who also conceived the high-capacity alternating current systems that made worldwide electrification possible, invented a wireless system in 1892 and successfully demonstrated his device a year later.5 However, Tesla’s work was overshadowed by Marconi’s; Marconi used much of Tesla’s work in his own developments, and for years Tesla was not associated with the invention of radio. Tesla never received great financial benefits from his breakthroughs, but in 1943 (a few months after he died penniless in New York), the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Marconi’s wireless patent and deemed Tesla the inventor of radio.6
Wireless Telephony: De Forest and Fessenden In 1899, inventor Lee De Forest (who, in defiance of other inventors, liked to call himself the “father of radio”) wrote the first Ph.D. dissertation on wireless technology, building on others’ innovations. In 1901, De Forest challenged Marconi, who was covering New York’s International Yacht Races for the Associated Press, by signing up to report the races for a rival news service. The competing transmitters jammed each other’s signals so badly, however, that officials ended up relaying information on the races in the traditional way—with flags and hand signals. The event exemplified a problem that would persist
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http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/emspectrum.html
throughout radio’s early development: noise and interference from competition for the finite supply of radio frequencies.
In 1902, De Forest set up the Wireless Telephone Company to compete head- on with American Marconi, by then the leader in wireless communication. A major difference between Marconi and De Forest was the latter’s interest in wireless voice and music transmissions, later known as wireless telephony and, eventually, radio. Although sometimes an unscrupulous competitor (inventor Reginald Fessenden won a lawsuit against De Forest for using one of his patents without permission), De Forest went on to patent more than three hundred inventions.
wireless telephony early experiments in wireless voice and music transmissions, which later developed into modern radio.
De Forest’s biggest breakthrough was the development of the Audion, or triode, vacuum tube, which detected radio signals and then amplified them. De Forest’s improvements greatly increased listeners’ ability to hear dots and dashes and, later, speech and music on a receiver set. His modifications were essential to the development of voice transmission, long-distance radio, and television. In fact, the Audion vacuum tube, which powered radios until the arrival of transistors and solid-state circuits in the 1950s, is considered by many historians to be the beginning of modern electronics. But again, bitter competition taints De Forest’s legacy; although De Forest won a twenty-year court battle for the rights to the Audion patent, most engineers at the time agreed that Edwin Armstrong (who later developed FM radio) was the true inventor and disagreed with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1934 decision on the case that favored De Forest.7
The credit for the first voice broadcast belongs to Canadian engineer Reginald Fessenden, formerly a chief chemist for Thomas Edison. Fessenden went to work for the U.S. Navy and eventually for General Electric (GE), where he played a central role in improving wireless signals. Both the navy and GE were interested in the potential for voice transmissions. On Christmas Eve in 1906, after GE built Fessenden a powerful transmitter, he gave his first public demonstration, sending a voice through the airwaves from his station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. A radio historian describes what happened:
That night, ship operators and amateurs around Brant Rock heard the results: “someone speaking! … a woman’s voice rose in song…. Next someone was heard reading a poem.” Fessenden himself played “O Holy Night” on his violin. Though the fidelity was not all that it might be, listeners were captivated by the voices and notes they heard. No more would sounds be restricted to mere dots and dashes of the Morse code.8
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NIKOLA TESLA A double-exposed photograph combines the image of inventor Nikola Tesla reading a book in his Colorado Springs, Colorado, laboratory in 1899 with the image of his Tesla coil discharging several million volts. Bettmann/Corbis
Ship operators were astonished to hear voices rather than the familiar Morse code. (Some operators actually thought they were having a supernatural encounter.) This event showed that the wireless medium was moving from a point-to-point communication tool (wireless operator to wireless operator) toward a one-to-many communication tool. Broadcasting, once an agricultural term that referred to the process of casting seeds over a large area, would come to mean the transmission of radio waves (and, later, TV signals) to a broad public audience. Prior to radio broadcasting, wireless was considered a form of narrowcasting, or person-to- person communication, like the telegraph and the telephone.
broadcasting the transmission of radio waves or TV signals to a broad public audience.
narrowcasting any specialized electronic programming or media channel
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aimed at a target audience.
In 1910, De Forest transmitted a performance of Tosca by the Metropolitan Opera to friends in the New York area with wireless receivers. At this point in time, radio passed from the novelty stage to the entrepreneurial stage, during which various practical uses would be tested before radio would launch as a mass medium.
Regulating a New Medium The two most important international issues affecting radio in the first decade of the twentieth century were ship radio requirements and signal interference. Congress passed the Wireless Ship Act in 1910, which required that all major U.S. seagoing ships carrying more than fifty passengers and traveling more than two hundred miles off the coast be equipped with wireless equipment with a one- hundred-mile range. The importance of this act was underscored by the Titanic disaster two years later. A brand-new British luxury steamer, the Titanic sank in 1912. Although more than fifteen hundred people died in the tragedy, wireless reports played a critical role in pinpointing the Titanic’s location, enabling rescue ships to save over seven hundred lives.
NEWS OF THE TITANIC Despite the headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1,523 people died and 705 were rescued when the Titanic hit an iceberg on April 14, 1912 (the ship technically sank at 2:20 a.m. on April 15). The crew of the Titanic used the Marconi wireless equipment on board to send distress signals to other ships. Of the eight ships nearby, the Carpathia was the first to respond with lifeboats. Getty Images
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Radio Waves as a Natural Resource In the wake of the Titanic tragedy, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912, which addressed the problem of amateur radio operators increasingly cramming the airwaves. Because radio waves crossed state and national borders, legislators determined that broadcasting constituted a “natural resource”—a kind of interstate commerce. This meant that radio waves could not be owned; they were the collective property of all Americans, just like national parks. Therefore, transmitting on radio waves would require licensing from the Commerce Department. This act, which governed radio until 1927, also formally adopted the SOS Morse-code distress signal, which other countries had been using for several years. Further, the “natural resource” mandate led to the idea that radio, and eventually television, should provide a benefit to society—in the form of education and public service. The eventual establishment of public radio stations was one consequence of this idea; the Fairness Doctrine was another.
Radio Act of 1912 the first radio legislation passed by Congress, it addressed the problem of amateur radio operators cramming the airwaves.
The Impact of World War I By 1915, more than twenty American companies sold wireless point-to-point communication systems, primarily for use in ship-to-shore communication. Having established a reputation for efficiency and honesty, American Marconi (a subsidiary of British Marconi) was the biggest and best of these companies. But in 1914, with World War I beginning in Europe and with America warily watching the conflict, the U.S. Navy questioned the wisdom of allowing a foreign-controlled company to wield so much power. American corporations, especially GE and AT&T, capitalized on the navy’s xenophobia and succeeded in undercutting Marconi’s influence.
As wireless telegraphy played an increasingly large role in military operations, the navy sought tight controls on information. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the navy closed down all amateur radio operations and took control of key radio transmitters to ensure military security. As the war was nearing its end in 1919, British Marconi placed an order with GE for twenty-four potent new alternators, which were strong enough to power a transoceanic system of radio stations that could connect the world. But the U.S. Navy grew concerned and moved to ensure that such powerful new radio technology would not fall under foreign control.
At this time, President Woodrow Wilson and the navy saw an opportunity to
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slow Britain’s influence over communication and to promote a U.S. plan for the control of emerging wireless operations as part of the larger goal of developing the United States as an international power. Thus corporate heads and government leaders conspired to make sure radio communication would serve American interests.
The Formation of RCA Some members of Congress and the corporate community opposed federal legislation that would grant the government or the navy a radio monopoly. Consequently, GE developed a compromise plan that would create a private sector monopoly—that is, a private company that would have the government’s approval to dominate the radio industry. First, GE broke off negotiations to sell key radio technologies to European-owned companies like British Marconi, thereby limiting those companies’ global reach. Second, GE took the lead in founding a new company, Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which soon acquired American Marconi and radio patents of other U.S. companies. Upon its founding in 1919, RCA had pooled the necessary technology and patents to monopolize the wireless industry and expand American communication technology throughout the world.9
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) a company developed during World War I that was designed, with government approval, to pool radio patents; the formation of RCA gave the United States almost total control over the emerging mass medium of broadcasting.
Under RCA’s patent pool arrangement, wireless patents from the navy, AT&T, GE, the former American Marconi, and other companies were combined to ensure U.S. control over the manufacture of radio transmitters and receivers. Initially AT&T, then the government-sanctioned monopoly provider of telephone services, manufactured most transmitters, while GE (and later Westinghouse) made radio receivers. RCA administered the pool, collecting patent royalties and distributing them to pool members. To protect these profits, the government did not permit RCA to manufacture equipment or to operate radio stations under its own name for several years. Instead, RCA’s initial function was to ensure that radio parts were standardized by manufacturers and to control frequency interference by amateur radio operators, which increasingly became a problem after the war.
A government restriction at the time mandated that no more than 20 percent of RCA could be owned by foreigners. This restriction, later raised to 25 percent, became law in 1927 and applied to all U.S. broadcasting stocks and facilities. Because of this rule, Rupert Murdoch—the head of Australia’s News Corp.—
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became a U.S. citizen in 1985, so he could buy a number of TV stations and form the Fox television network. In 2013, the FCC ruled it would allow exemptions to the 25 percent foreign ownership limit on a case-by-case basis.
RCA’s most significant impact was that it gave the United States almost total control over the emerging mass medium of broadcasting. At the time, the United States was the only country that placed broadcasting under the care of commercial, rather than military or government, interests. By pooling more than two thousand patents and sharing research developments, RCA ensured the global dominance of the United States in mass communication, a position it maintained in electronic hardware into the 1960s and maintains in program content today.
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THE EVOLUTION OF RADIO
When Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad set up a crude radio studio above his Pittsburgh garage in 1916, placing a microphone in front of a phonograph to broadcast music and news to his friends (whom Conrad supplied with receivers) two evenings a week on experimental station 8XK, he un-officially became one of the medium’s first disc jockeys. In 1920, a Westinghouse executive, intrigued by Conrad’s curious hobby, realized the potential of radio as a mass medium. Westinghouse then established station KDKA, which is generally regarded as the first commercial broadcast station. KDKA is most noted for airing national returns from the Cox–Harding presidential election on November 2, 1920, an event most historians consider the first professional broadcast.
Other amateur broadcasters could also lay claim to being first. One of the earliest stations, operated by Charles “Doc” Herrold in San Jose, California, began in 1909 and later became KCBS. Additional experimental stations—in places like New York; Detroit; Medford, Massachusetts; and Pierre, South Dakota—broadcast voice and music prior to the establishment of KDKA. But KDKA’s success, with the financial backing of Westinghouse, signaled the start of broadcast radio.
In 1921, the U.S. Commerce Department officially licensed five radio stations for operation; by early 1923, more than six hundred commercial and noncommercial stations were operating. Some stations were owned by AT&T, GE, and Westinghouse, but many were run by amateurs or were in-dependently owned by universities or businesses. By the end of 1923, as many as 550,000 radio receivers, most manufactured by GE and Westinghouse, had been sold for about $55 each (about $701 in today’s dollars). Just as the “guts” of the phonograph had been put inside a piece of furniture to create a consumer product, the vacuum tubes, electrical posts, and bulky batteries that made up the radio receiver were placed inside stylish furniture and marketed to households. By 1925, 5.5 million radio sets were in use across America, and radio was officially a mass medium.
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WESTINGHOUSE ENGINEER FRANK CONRAD Broadcasting from his garage, Conrad transformed his hobby into Pittsburgh’s KDKA, one of the first radio stations. Although this early station is widely celebrated in history books as the first broadcasting outlet, one can’t underestimate the influence Westinghouse had in promoting this “historical first.” Westinghouse clearly saw the celebration of Conrad’s garage studio as a way to market the company and its radio equipment. The resulting legacy of Conrad’s garage studio has thus overshadowed other individuals who also experimented with radio broadcasting. © Bettmann/Corbis
Building the First Networks In a major power grab in 1922, AT&T, which already had a government- sanctioned monopoly in the telephone business, decided to break its RCA agreements in an attempt to monopolize radio as well. Identifying the new medium as the “wireless telephone,” AT&T argued that broadcasting was merely an extension of its control over the telephone. Ultimately, the corporate giant complained that RCA had gained too much monopoly power. In violation of its early agreements with RCA, AT&T began making and selling its own radio receivers.
In the same year, AT&T started WEAF (now WNBC) in New York, the first radio station to regularly sell commercial time to advertisers. AT&T claimed that under the RCA agreements it had the exclusive right to sell ads, which AT&T called toll broadcasting. Most people in radio at the time recoiled at the idea of using the medium for crass advertising, viewing it instead as a public information service. In fact, stations that had earlier tried to sell ads received “cease and desist” letters from the Department of Commerce. Yet by August 1922, AT&T had sold its
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first ad to a New York real estate developer for $50. The idea of promoting the new medium as a public service, along the lines of today’s noncommercial National Public Radio (NPR), ended when executives realized that radio ads offered another opportunity for profits long after radio-set sales had saturated the consumer market.
The initial strategy behind AT&T’s toll broadcasting idea was an effort to conquer radio. By its agreements with RCA, AT&T retained the rights to interconnect the signals between two or more radio stations via telephone wires. In 1923, when AT&T aired a program simultaneously on its flagship WEAF station and on WNAC in Boston, the phone company created the first network: a cost- saving operation that links (at that time, through special phone lines; today, through satellite relays) a group of broadcast stations that share programming produced at a central location. By the end of 1924, AT&T had interconnected twenty-two stations to air a talk by President Calvin Coolidge. Some of these stations were owned by AT&T, but most simply consented to become AT&T “affiliates,” agreeing to air the phone company’s programs. These network stations informally became known as the telephone group and later as the Broadcasting Corporation of America (BCA).
network a broadcast process that links, through special phone lines or satellite transmissions, groups of radio or TV stations that share programming produced at a central location.
In response, GE, Westinghouse, and RCA interconnected a smaller set of competing stations, known as the radio group. Initially, their network linked WGY in Schenectady, New York (then GE’s national headquarters), and WJZ in Manhattan. The radio group had to use inferior Western Union telegraph lines when AT&T denied the group access to telephone wires. By this time, AT&T had sold its stock in RCA and refused to lease its lines to competing radio networks. The telephone monopoly was now enmeshed in a battle to defeat RCA for control of radio.
This clash, among other problems, eventually led to a government investigation and an arbitration settlement in 1925. In the agreement, the Justice Department, irritated by AT&T’s power grab, redefined patent agreements. AT&T received a monopoly on providing the wires, known as long lines, to interconnect stations nationwide. In exchange, AT&T sold its BCA network to RCA for $1 million and agreed not to reenter broadcasting for eight years (a banishment that actually extended into the 1990s).
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DAVID SARNOFF As a young man, Sarnoff taught himself Morse code and learned as much as possible in Marconi’s experimental shop in New York. He was then given a job as wireless operator for the station on Nantucket Island. He went on to create NBC and network radio. Sarnoff’s calculated ambition in the radio industry can easily be compared to Bill Gates’s drive to control the computer software and Internet industries. © Bettmann/Corbis
Sarnoff and NBC: Building the “Blue” and “Red” Networks After Lee De Forest, David Sarnoff was among the first to envision wireless telegraphy as a modern mass medium. From the time he served as Marconi’s personal messenger (at age fifteen), Sarnoff rose rapidly at American Marconi. He became a wireless operator, helping relay information about the Titanic survivors in 1912. Promoted to a series of management positions, Sarnoff was closely involved in RCA’s creation in 1919, when most radio executives saw wireless merely as point-to-point communication. But with Sarnoff as RCA’s first commercial manager, radio’s potential as a mass medium was quickly realized. In 1921, at age thirty, Sarnoff became RCA’s general manager.
After RCA bought AT&T’s telephone group network (BCA), Sarnoff created a
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new subsidiary in September 1926 called the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Its ownership was shared by RCA (50 percent), General Electric (30 percent), and Westinghouse (20 percent). This loose network of stations would be hooked together by AT&T long lines. Shortly thereafter, the original telephone group became known as the NBC-Red network, and the radio group (the network established by RCA, GE, and Westinghouse) became the NBC-Blue network.
Although NBC owned a number of stations by the late 1920s, many independent stations also began affiliating with the NBC networks to receive programming. NBC affiliates, though independently owned, signed contracts to be part of the network and paid NBC to carry its programs. In exchange, NBC reserved time slots, which it sold to national advertisers. NBC centralized costs and programming by bringing the best musical, dramatic, and comedic talent to one place, from which programs could be produced and then distributed all over the country. By 1933, NBC-Red had twenty-eight affiliates, and NBC-Blue had twenty-four. One result of this is that network radio may have actually helped modernize America by de-emphasizing the local and the regional in favor of national programs broadcast to nearly everyone.
THE RADIO GAME was released by Milton Bradley soon after David Sarnoff launched the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This family-friendly board game is played on a stylized map of the United States, illustrated in four colors that represent the four U.S. time zones. Some circles on the game map are linked by red lines, while other circles are linked by blue lines—representing the NBC-Red network and the NBC- Blue network, respectively.
David Sarnoff’s leadership at RCA was capped by two other negotiations that solidified his stature as the driving force behind radio’s development as a modern medium: cutting a deal with General Motors for the manufacture of car radios (under the brand name Motorola) in 1929, and merging RCA with the Victor
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Talking Machine Company. Afterward, until the mid-1960s, the company was known as RCA Victor, adopting as its corporate symbol the famous terrier sitting alertly next to a Victrola radio-phonograph. The merger gave RCA control over Victor’s records and recording equipment, making the radio company a major player in the sound recording industry. In 1930, David Sarnoff became president of RCA, and he ran it for the next forty years.
Government Scrutiny Ends RCA-NBC Monopoly As early as 1923, the Federal Trade Commission had charged RCA with violations of antitrust laws, but the FTC allowed the monopoly to continue. By the late 1920s, the government, concerned about NBC’s growing control over radio content, intensified its scrutiny. Then, in 1930, federal marshals charged RCA-NBC with a number of violations, including exercising too much control over manufacturing and programming. The government had originally sanctioned a closely supervised monopoly for wireless communication, but following the collapse of the stock market in 1929, the public became increasingly distrustful of big business.
RCA acted quickly. To eliminate its monopolizing partnerships, Sarnoff’s company proposed buying out GE’s and Westinghouse’s remaining shares in RCA’s manufacturing business. Now RCA would compete directly against GE, Westinghouse, and other radio manufacturers, encouraging more competition in the radio manufacturing industry. In 1932, days before the antitrust case against RCA was to go to trial, the government accepted RCA’s proposal for breaking up its monopoly. Ironically, in the mid-1980s, GE bought RCA, a shell of its former self and no longer competitive with foreign electronics firms.10 GE was chiefly interested in RCA’s brand-name status and its still-lucrative subsidiary, NBC.
CBS and Paley: Challenging NBC Even with RCA’s head start and its favored status, the two NBC networks faced competitors in the late 1920s. The competitors, however, all found it tough going. One group, United Independent Broadcasters (UIB), even lined up twelve prospective affiliates and offered them $500 a week for access to ten hours of station time in exchange for quality programs. UIB was cash-poor, however, and AT&T would not rent the new company its lines to link the affiliates.
Enter the Columbia Phonograph Company, which was looking for a way to preempt RCA’s merger with the Victor Company, then the record company’s major competitor. With backing from Columbia, UIB launched the new Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System (CPBS), a wobbly sixteen-affiliate network, in 1927. But after losing $100,000 in the first month, the record company pulled out. Later, CPBS dropped the word Phonograph from its title, creating the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).
In 1928, William Paley, the twenty-seven-year-old son of Sam Paley, owner of a Philadelphia cigar company, bought a controlling interest in CBS to sponsor the
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cigar brand, La Palina. One of Paley’s first moves was to hire the public relations pioneer Edward Bernays to polish the new network’s image. (Bernays played a significant role in the development of the public relations industry; see Chapter 12.) Paley and Bernays modified a concept called option time, in which CBS paid affiliate stations $50 per hour for an option on a portion of their time. The network provided programs to the affiliates and sold ad space or sponsorships to various product companies. In theory, CBS could now control up to twenty-four hours a day of its affiliates’ radio time. Some affiliates received thousands of dollars per week merely to serve as conduits for CBS programs and ads. Because NBC was still charging some of its affiliates as much as $96 a week to carry its network programs, the CBS offer was extremely appealing.
CBS HELPED ESTABLISH ITSELF as a premier radio network by attracting top talent from NBC, like comedic duo George Burns and Gracie Allen. They first brought their “Dumb Dora” and straight man act from stage to radio in 1929, and then continued on various radio programs in the 1930s and 1940s, with the most well known being The Burns and Allen Show. CBS also reaped the benefits when Burns and Allen moved their eponymous show to television in 1950. © Bettmann/Corbis
option time a business tactic, now illegal, whereby a radio network in the 1920s and 1930s paid an affiliate station a set fee per hour for an option to control programming and advertising on that station.
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By 1933, Paley’s efforts had netted CBS more than ninety affiliates, many of them defecting from NBC. Paley also concentrated on developing news programs and entertainment shows, particularly soap operas and comedy-variety series. In the process, CBS successfully raided NBC, not just for affiliates but for top talent as well. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Paley lured a number of radio stars from NBC, including Jack Benny, Frank Sinatra, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Groucho Marx. During World War II, Edward R. Murrow’s powerful firsthand news reports from bomb-riddled London established CBS as the premier radio news network, a reputation it carried forward to television. In 1949, near the end of big-time network radio, CBS finally surpassed NBC as the highest-rated network. Although William Paley had intended to run CBS only for six months to help get it off the ground, he ultimately ran it for more than fifty years.
Bringing Order to Chaos with the Radio Act of 1927 In the 1920s, as radio moved from narrowcasting to broadcasting, the battle for more frequency space and less channel interference intensified. Manufacturers, engineers, station operators, network executives, and the listening public demanded action. Many wanted more sweeping regulation than the simple licensing function granted under the Radio Act of 1912, which gave the Commerce Department little power to deny a license or to unclog the airwaves.
Beginning in 1924, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover ordered radio stations to share time by setting aside certain frequencies for entertainment and news, and others for farm and weather reports. To challenge Hoover, a station in Chicago jammed the airwaves, intentionally moving its signal onto an unauthorized frequency. In 1926, the courts decided that based on the existing Radio Act, Hoover had the power only to grant licenses, not to restrict stations from operating. Within the year, two hundred new stations clogged the airwaves, creating a chaotic period in which nearly all radios had poor reception. By early 1927, sales of radio sets had declined sharply.
To restore order to the airwaves, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927, which stated an extremely important principle—licensees did not own their channels but could only license them as long as they operated to serve the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.” To oversee licenses and negotiate channel problems, the 1927 act created the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), whose members were appointed by the president. Although the FRC was intended as a temporary committee, it grew into a powerful regulatory agency. With passage of the Communications Act of 1934, the FRC became the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Its jurisdiction covered not only radio but also the telephone and the telegraph (and later television, cable, and the Internet). More significantly, by this time Congress and the president had sided with the already-powerful radio networks and acceded to a system of advertising-supported commercial broadcasting as best serving the “public interest, convenience, or
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necessity,” overriding the concerns of educational, labor, and citizen broadcasting advocates.11 (See Table 5.1.)
Radio Act of 1927 the second radio legislation passed by Congress; in an attempt to restore order to the airwaves, the act stated that licensees did not own their channels but could license them if they operated to serve the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.”
Federal Radio Commission (FRC) abody established in 1927 to oversee radio licenses and negotiate channel problems.
Communications Act of 1934 the far-reaching act that established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the federal regulatory structure for U.S. broadcasting.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) an independent U.S. government agency charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, cable, and the Internet.
TABLE 5.1 MAJOR ACTS IN THE HISTORY OF U.S. RADIO
Act Provisions Effects
Wireless Ship Act of 1910
Required U.S. seagoing ships carrying more than fifty passengers and traveling more than two hundred miles off the coast to be equipped with wireless equipment with a one- hundred-mile range.
Saved lives at sea, including more than seven hundred rescued by ships responding to the Titanic’s distress signals two years later.
Radio Act of 1912 Required radio operators to obtain a license, gave the Commerce Department the power to deny a license, and began a uniform system of assigning call letters to identify
The federal government began to assert control over radio. Penalties were established for stations that interfere with other stations’ signals.
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stations.
Radio Act of 1927 Established the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) as a tem- porary agency to oversee licenses and negotiate channel assignments.
First expressed the now- fundamental principle that licensees did not own their channels but could only license them as long as they operated to serve the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.”
Communications Act of 1934
Established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to replace the FRC. The FCC regulated radio; the telephone; the telegraph; and later television, cable, and the Internet.
Congress tacitly agreed to a system of advertising-supported commercial broadcasting despite concerns of the public.
Telecommunications Act of 1996
Eliminated most radio and television station ownership rules, some dating back more than fifty years.
Enormous national and regional station groups formed, dramatically changing the sound and localism of radio in the United States.
In 1941, an activist FCC went after the networks. Declaring that NBC and CBS could no longer force affiliates to carry programs they did not want, the government outlawed the practice of option time, which Paley had used to build CBS into a major network. The FCC also demanded that RCA sell one of its two NBC networks. RCA and NBC claimed that the rulings would bankrupt them. The Supreme Court sided with the FCC, however, and RCA eventually sold NBC-Blue to a group of businessmen for $8 million in the mid-1940s. It became the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). These government crackdowns brought long- overdue reform to the radio industry, but they had not come soon enough to prevent considerable damage to noncommercial radio.
The Golden Age of Radio Many programs on television today were initially formulated for radio. The first weather forecasts and farm reports on radio began in the 1920s. Regularly scheduled radio news analysis began in 1927, with H. V. Kaltenborn, a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, providing commentary on AT&T’s WEAF. The first regular network news analysis began on CBS in 1930 and featured Lowell Thomas, who would remain on radio for forty-four years.
Early Radio Programming Early on, only a handful of stations operated in most large radio markets, and popular stations were affiliated with CBS, NBC-Red, or NBC-Blue. Many large stations employed their own in-house orchestras and aired live music daily.
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Listeners had favorite evening programs, usually fifteen minutes long, to which they would tune in each night. Families gathered around the radio to hear such shows as Amos ’n’ Andy, The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet, and Fibber McGee and Molly, or one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats.
Among the most popular early programs on radio, the variety show was the forerunner to popular TV shows like the Ed Sullivan Show. The variety show, developed from stage acts and vaudeville, began with the Eveready Hour in 1923 on WEAF. Considered experimental, the program presented classical music, minstrel shows, comedy sketches, and dramatic readings. Stars from vaudeville, musical comedy, and New York theater and opera would occasionally make guest appearances.
By the 1930s, studio-audience quiz shows—Professor Quiz and the Old Time Spelling Bee—had emerged. The quiz formats were later copied by television, particularly in the 1950s. Truth or Consequences, based on a nineteenth-century parlor game, first aired on radio in 1940 and featured guests performing goofy stunts. It ran for seventeen years on radio and another twenty-seven years on television, influencing TV stunt shows like CBS’s Beat the Clock in the 1950s and NBC’s Fear Factor in the early 2000s.
Dramatic programs, mostly radio plays that were broadcast live from theaters, developed as early as 1922. Historians mark the appearance of Clara, Lu, and Em on WGN in 1931 as the first soap opera. One year later, Colgate-Palmolive bought the program, put it on NBC, and began selling the soap products that gave this dramatic genre its distinctive nickname. Early “soaps” were fifteen minutes in length and ran five or six days a week. By 1940, sixty different soap operas occupied nearly eighty hours of network radio time each week.
Most radio programs had a single sponsor that created and produced each show. The networks distributed these programs live around the country, charging the sponsors advertising fees. Many shows—the Palmolive Hour, General Motors Family Party, the Lucky Strike Orchestra, and the Eveready Hour among them— were named after the sole sponsor’s product.
Radio Programming as a Cultural Mirror The situation comedy, a major staple of TV programming today, began on radio in the mid-1920s. By the early 1930s, the most popular comedy was Amos ’n’ Andy, which started on Chicago radio in 1925 before moving to NBC-Blue in 1929. Amos ’n’ Andy was based on the conventions of the nineteenth-century minstrel show and featured black characters stereotyped as shiftless and stupid. Created as a blackface stage act by two white comedians, Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, the program was criticized as racist. But NBC and the program’s producers claimed that Amos ’n’ Andy was as popular among black audiences as among white audiences.12
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FIRESIDE CHATS This giant bank of radio network microphones makes us wonder today how President Franklin D. Roosevelt managed to project such an intimate and reassuring tone in his famous fireside chats. Conceived originally to promote FDR’s New Deal policies amid the Great Depression, these chats were delivered between 1933 and 1944 and touched on topics of national interest. Roosevelt was the first president to effectively use broadcasting to communicate with citizens; he also gave nearly a thousand press conferences during his twelve-plus years as president, revealing a strong commitment to using media and news to speak early and often with the American people. © Bettmann/Corbis
Amos ’n’ Andy also launched the idea of the serial show: a program that featured continuing story lines from one day to the next. The format was soon copied by soap operas and other radio dramas. Amos ’n’ Andy aired six nights a week from 7:00 to 7:15 p.m. During the show’s first year on the network, radio-set sales rose nearly 25 percent nationally. To keep people coming to restaurants and movie theaters, owners broadcast Amos ’n’ Andy in lobbies, rest rooms, and entryways. Early radio research estimated that the program aired in more than half of all radio homes in the nation during the 1930–31 season, making it the most popular radio series in history. In 1951, it made a brief transition to television (Correll and Gosden sold the rights to CBS for $1 million), becoming the first TV series to have an entirely black cast. But amid a strengthening Civil Rights movement and a formal protest by the NAACP (which argued that “every character
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is either a clown or a crook”), CBS canceled the program in 1953.13
The Authority of Radio The most famous single radio broadcast of all time was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds on the radio series Mercury Theater of the Air. Orson Welles produced, hosted, and acted in this popular series, which adapted science fiction, mystery, and historical adventure dramas for radio. On Halloween eve in 1938, the twenty-three-year-old Welles aired the 1898 Martian invasion novel in the style of a radio news program. For people who missed the opening disclaimer, the program sounded like a real news report, with eyewitness accounts of battles between Martian invaders and the U.S. Army.
The program created a panic that lasted several hours. In New Jersey, some people walked through the streets with wet towels around their heads for protection from deadly Martian heat rays. In New York, young men reported to their National Guard headquarters to prepare for battle. Across the nation, calls jammed police switchboards. Afterward, Orson Welles, once the radio voice of The Shadow, used the notoriety of this broadcast to launch a film career. Meanwhile, the FCC called for stricter warnings both before and during programs that imitated the style of radio news.
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EARLY RADIO’S EFFECT AS A MASS MEDIUM On Halloween eve in 1938, Orson Welles’s radio dramatization of War of the Worlds (far left) created a panic up and down the East Coast, especially in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey—the setting for the fictional Martian invasion that many listeners assumed was real. A seventy-six-year-old Grover’s Mill resident (left) guards a warehouse against alien invaders. Hulton Archive/Getty Images © Bettmann/Corbis
EARLY RADIO’S EFFECT AS A MASS MEDIUM On Halloween eve in 1938, Orson Welles’s radio dramatization of War of the Worlds (far left) created a panic up and down the East Coast, especially in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey—the setting for the fictional Martian invasion that many listeners assumed was real. A seventy-six-year-old Grover’s Mill resident (left) guards a warehouse against alien invaders.
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RADIO REINVENTS ITSELF
Older media forms do not generally disappear when confronted by newer forms. Instead, they adapt. Although radio threatened sound recording in the 1920s, the recording industry adjusted to the economic and social challenges posed by radio’s arrival. Remarkably, the arrival of television in the 1950s marked the only time in media history when a new medium stole virtually every national programming and advertising strategy from an older medium. Television snatched radio’s advertisers, program genres, major celebrities, and large evening audiences. The TV set even physically displaced the radio as the living room centerpiece of choice across America.
Nevertheless, radio adapted and survived, a story that is especially important today, as newspapers, magazines, books, and other media appear in new digital formats. In contemporary culture, we have grown accustomed to such media convergence, but to best understand this blurring of the boundaries between media forms, it is useful to look at the 1950s and the ways in which radio responded to the advent of television with adaptive innovations in technology and program content.
Transistors Make Radio Portable A key development in radio’s adaptation to television occurred with the invention of the transistor by Bell Laboratories in 1947. Transistors were small electrical devices that, like vacuum tubes, could receive and amplify radio signals. However, they used less power and produced less heat than vacuum tubes, and they were more durable and less expensive. Best of all, they were tiny. Transistors, which also revolutionized hearing aids, constituted the first step in replacing bulky and delicate tubes, leading eventually to today’s integrated circuits.
transistors invented by Bell Laboratories in 1947, these tiny pieces of technology, which receive and amplify radio signals, make portable radios possible.
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ADVERTISEMENTS for pocket transistor radios, which became popular in the 1950s, emphasized their portability. Courtesy of the Advertising Archives
Texas Instruments marketed the first transistor radio in 1953 for about $40. Using even smaller transistors, Sony introduced the pocket radio in 1957. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that transistor radios became cheaper than conventional tube and battery radios. For a while, the term transistor became a synonym for a small, portable radio.
The development of transistors let radio go where television could not—to the beach, to the office, into bedrooms and bathrooms, and into nearly all new cars. (Before the transistor, car radios were a luxury item.) By the 1960s, most radio listening took place outside the home.
The FM Revolution and Edwin Armstrong By the time the broadcast industry launched commercial television in the 1950s, many people, including David Sarnoff of RCA, were predicting radio’s demise. To fund television’s development and to protect his radio holdings, Sarnoff had even delayed a dramatic breakthrough in broadcast sound, what he himself called a
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“revolution”—FM radio. Edwin Armstrong, who first discovered and developed FM radio in the 1920s
and early 1930s, is often considered the most prolific and influential inventor in radio history. He used De Forest’s vacuum tube to invent an amplifying system that enabled radio receivers to pick up distant signals, rendering the enormous alternators used for generating power in early radio transmitters obsolete. In 1922, he sold a “super” version of his circuit to RCA for $200,000 and sixty thousand shares of RCA stock, which made him a millionaire as well as RCA’s largest private stockholder.
FIGURE 5.2 AM AND FM WAVES Data from: Adapted from David Cheshire, The Video Manual, 1982.
Armstrong also worked on the major problem of radio reception: electrical interference. Between 1930 and 1933, the inventor filed five patents on FM, or frequency modulation. Offering static-free radio reception, FM supplied greater fidelity and clarity than AM, making FM ideal for music. AM, or amplitude modulation (modulation refers to the variation in waveforms), stressed the volume, or height, of radio waves; FM accentuated the pitch, or distance, between radio waves (see Figure 5.2).
FM (frequency modulation) a type of radio and sound transmission that offers static-less reception and greater fidelity and clarity than AM radio by accentuating the pitch or distance between radio waves.
AM (amplitude modulation)
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a type of radio and sound transmission that stresses the volume or height of radio waves.
Although David Sarnoff, RCA’s president, thought that television would replace radio, he helped Armstrong set up the first experimental FM station atop the Empire State Building in New York City. Eventually, though, Sarnoff thwarted FM’s development (which he was able to do because RCA had an option on Armstrong’s new patents). Instead, in 1935 Sarnoff threw RCA’s considerable weight behind the development of television. With the FCC allocating and reassigning scarce frequency spaces, RCA wanted to ensure that channels went to television before they went to FM. Most of all, however, Sarnoff wanted to protect RCA’s existing AM empire. Thus Sarnoff decided to close down Armstrong’s station.
Armstrong forged ahead without RCA. He founded a new FM station and advised other engineers, who started more than twenty experimental stations between 1935 and the early 1940s. In 1941, the FCC approved limited space allocations for commercial FM licenses. During the next few years, FM grew in fits and starts. Between 1946 and early 1949, the number of commercial FM stations expanded from 48 to 700. But then the FCC (with RCA’s urging) moved FM’s frequency space to a new band on the electromagnetic spectrum, rendering some 400,000 prewar FM receiver sets useless. FM’s future became uncertain, and by 1954, the number of FM stations had fallen to 560. On January 31, 1954, Edwin Armstrong—weary from years of legal skirmishes over patents with RCA, Lee De Forest, and others—wrote a note apologizing to his wife, removed the air conditioner from his thirteenth-story New York apartment window, and jumped to his death.
Although AM stations had greater reach, ultimately they could not match the crisp fidelity of FM, which made FM preferable for music. In the early 1960s, the FCC opened up more spectrum space for the superior sound of FM, infusing new life into radio. In the early 1970s, about 70 percent of listeners tuned almost exclusively to AM radio, but by the 1980s, FM had surpassed AM in profitability. By the 2010s, more than 75 percent of all listeners preferred FM. This expansion of FM represented one of the chief ways radio survived television.
The Rise of Format and Top 40 Radio Live and recorded music had long been radio’s single biggest staple, accounting for 48 percent of all programming in 1938. Although live music on radio was generally considered superior to recorded music, early disc jockeys made a significant contribution to the latter, demonstrating that music alone could drive radio. In fact, when television snatched radio’s program ideas and national sponsors, radio’s dependence on recorded music became a necessity and helped the medium survive the 1950s.
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As early as 1949, station owner Todd Storz in Omaha, Nebraska, experimented with formula-driven radio, or format radio. Under this system, management rather than deejays controlled programming each hour. When Storz and his program manager noticed that bar patrons and waitresses repeatedly played certain favorite songs from the records available in a jukebox, they began researching record sales to identify the most popular tunes. From observing jukebox culture, Storz hit on the idea of rotation: playing the top songs many times during the day. By the mid- 1950s, the management-control idea combined with the rock-and-roll explosion, and the Top 40 format was born. The term Top 40 came to refer to the forty most popular hits in a given week as measured by record sales.
format radio the concept of radio stations developing and playing specific styles (or formats) geared to listeners’ age, race, or gender; in format radio, management, rather than deejays, controls programming choices.
rotation in format radio programming, the practice of playing the most popular or best-selling songs many times throughout the day.
Top 40 format the first radio format, in which stations played the forty most popular hits in a given week, as measured by record sales.
As format radio grew, program directors combined rapid deejay chatter with the best-selling songs of the day and occasional oldies—popular songs from a few months earlier. By the early 1960s, to avoid “dead air,” managers asked deejays to talk over the beginning and the end of a song so that listeners would feel less compelled to switch stations. Ads, news, weather forecasts, and station identifications were all designed to fit a consistent station environment. Listeners, tuning in at any moment, would recognize the station by its distinctive sound.
In format radio, management carefully coordinates, or programs, each hour, dictating what the deejay will do at various intervals throughout each hour of the day. Management creates a program log—once called a hot clock in radio jargon— that deejays must follow. By the mid-1960s, one study had determined that in a typical hour on Top 40 radio, listeners could expect to hear about twenty ads; numerous weather, time, and contest announcements; multiple recitations of the station’s call letters; about three minutes of news; and approximately twelve songs.
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Radio managers further sectioned off programming into day parts, which typically consisted of time blocks covering 6 to 10 a.m., 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., 3 to 7 p.m., and 7 p.m. to midnight. Each day part, or block, was programmed through ratings research according to who was listening. For instance, a Top 40 station would feature its top deejays in the morning and afternoon periods when audiences, many riding in cars, were largest. From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., research determined that women at home and secretaries at work usually controlled the dial, so program managers, capitalizing on the gender stereotypes of the day, played more romantic ballads and less hard rock. Teenagers tended to be heavy evening listeners, so program managers often discarded news breaks at this time, since research showed that teens turned the dial when news came on.
Critics of format radio argued that only the top songs received play and that lesser-known songs deserving airtime received meager attention. Although a few popular star deejays continued to play a role in programming, many others quit when managers introduced formats. Program directors approached programming as a science, but deejays considered it an art form. The program directors’ position, which generated more revenue, triumphed.
Resisting the Top 40 The expansion of FM in the mid-1960s created room for experimenting, particularly with classical music, jazz, blues, and non–Top 40 rock songs. progressive rock emerged as an alternative to conventional formats. Many noncommercial stations broadcast from college campuses, where student deejays and managers rejected the commercialism associated with Top 40 tunes and began playing lesser-known alternative music and longer album cuts (such as Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and the Doors’ “The End”). Until that time, most rock on radio had been consigned almost exclusively to Top 40 formats, with song length averaging about three minutes.
progressive rock an alternative music format that developed as a backlash to the popularity of Top 40.
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RYAN SEACREST may be best known for hosting TV’s American Idol, but he began his career in radio when he hosted a local radio show while attending the University of Georgia. In the style of his own idols—Dick Clark and Casey Kasem—Seacrest now hosts two nationally syndicated radio shows, On Air with Ryan Seacrest and American Top 40, in addition to his television projects. Mark Davis/Getty Images
Experimental FM stations, both commercial and noncommercial, offered a cultural space for hard-edged political folk music and for rock music that commented on the Civil Rights movement and protested America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. By the 1970s, however, progressive rock had been copied, tamed, and absorbed by mainstream radio under the format labeled album- oriented rock (AOR). By 1972, AOR-driven album sales accounted for more than 85 percent of the retail record business. By the 1980s, as first-generation rock and rollers aged and became more affluent, AOR stations became less political and played mostly white, post-Beatles music, featuring such groups as Pink Floyd, Genesis, AC/DC, and Queen.
album-oriented rock (AOR) the radio music format that features album cuts from mainstream rock bands.
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THE SOUNDS OF COMMERCIAL RADIO
Contemporary radio sounds very different from its predecessor. In contrast to the few stations per market in the 1930s, most large markets today include more than forty stations that vie for listener loyalty. Although a few radio personalities—such as Glenn Beck, Ryan Seacrest, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Joyner, Tavis Smiley, and Jim Rome—are nationally prominent, and some shows are syndicated nationally, local deejays and their music are the stars at most radio stations.
However, listeners today are unlike radio’s first audiences in several ways. First, listeners in the 1930s tuned in to their favorite shows at set times. Today, less driven by particular shows, radio has become a secondary, or background, medium that follows the rhythms of daily life. Alternately, people can listen to radio programs as podcasts any time of the day. Second, in the 1930s, peak listening time occurred during the evening hours—dubbed prime time in the TV era—while today’s heaviest radio listening occurs during drive time, between 6 and 9 a.m. and between 4 and 7 p.m. Third, stations today are more specialized. Listeners are loyal to favorite stations, music formats, and even radio personalities, rather than to specific shows. Although more than fifteen thousand radio stations now operate in the United States, people generally listen to only four or five stations that target them.
drive time in radio programming, the periods between 6 and 10 A.M. and 4 and 7 P.M., when people are commuting to and from work or school; these periods constitute the largest listening audiences of the day.
Format Specialization Stations today use a variety of formats based on managed program logs and day parts. All told, more than forty different radio formats, plus variations, serve diverse groups of listeners (see Figure 5.3). To please advertisers, who want to know exactly who is listening, formats usually target audiences according to their age, income, gender, or race/ethnicity. Radio’s specialization enables advertisers to reach smaller target audiences at costs that are much lower than those for television.
Targeting listeners has become extremely competitive, however, because forty or fifty stations may be available in a large radio market. About 10 percent of all stations across the country switch formats each year in an effort to find a formula
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that generates more advertising money. Some stations, particularly those in large cities, even rent blocks of time to various local ethnic or civic groups; this enables the groups to dictate their own formats and sell ads.
News, Talk, and Information Radio The nation’s fastest-growing format throughout much of the 1990s was the news/talk/informationformat (see “Case Study: Host: The Origins of Talk Radio” on page 158). In 1987, only 170 radio stations operated formats dominated by either news programs or talk shows, which tend to appeal to adults over age thirty- five (except for sports talk programs, which draw mostly male sports fans of all ages). Today, more than two thousand stations carry the format—more stations than carry any other format. It is the most dominant format on AM radio and the second most popular format (by number of listeners) in the nation (see Figure 5.3 on page 157 and Table 5.2). A news/talk/information format, though more expensive to produce than a music format, appeals to advertisers looking to target working- and middle-class adult consumers. Nevertheless, most radio stations continue to be driven by a variety of less expensive music formats.
news/talk/information the fastest-growing radio format in the 1990s, dominated by news programs and talk shows.
FIGURE 5.3 THE MOST POPULAR RADIO FORMATS IN THE UNITED STATES AMONG PERSONS AGE TWELVE AND OLDER Data from: Nielsen report: “State of the Media: Audio Today 2016, How America Listens,” February 25, 2016, http://vhet337bl8816t3lw2ltlf5f.wpengine.netdna- cdn.com/StateofThe%20MediaQ12016.pdf.
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T
CASE STUDY
Host: The Origins of Talk Radio
he origins of contemporary political talk radio can be traced to three phenomena of the 1980s. The first of these involved AM
music stations getting absolutely murdered by FM, which could broadcast music in stereo and allowed for much better fidelity on high and low notes. The human voice, on the other hand, is midrange and doesn’t require high fidelity. The eighties’ proliferation of talk formats on the AM band also provided new careers for some music deejays whose chatty personas didn’t fit well with FM’s all-about-the-music ethos.
The second big factor was the repeal, late in Ronald Reagan’s second term, of what was known as the Fairness Doctrine. This was a 1949 FCC rule designed to minimize any possible restrictions on free speech caused by limited access to broadcasting outlets. The idea was that, as one of the conditions for receiving an FCC broadcast license, a station had to “devote reasonable attention to the coverage of controversial issues of public importance,” and consequently had to provide “reasonable, although not necessarily equal,” opportunities for opposing sides to express their views. Because of the Fairness Doctrine, talk stations had to hire and program symmetrically. Weirdly enough, up through the mid-eighties it was usually the U.S. right that benefited most from the Doctrine. Pioneer talk syndicator Ed McLaughlin, who managed San Francisco’s KGO in the 1960s, recalls that “I had more liberals on the air than I had conservatives or even moderates for that matter, and I had a hell of a time finding the other voice.”
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SEAN HANNITY, a conservative political correspondent, has been hosting talk radio shows for more than a quarter of a century, Rob Kim/Getty Images
The Fairness Doctrine’s repeal was part of the sweeping deregulations of the Reagan era, which aimed to liberate all sorts of industries from government interference and allow them to compete freely in the marketplace. The old, Rooseveltian logic of the Doctrine had been that since the airwaves belonged to everyone, a license to profit from those airwaves conferred on the broadcast industry some special obligation to serve the public interest. After 1987, though, just another industry is pretty much what radio became, and its only real responsibility now is to attract and retain listeners in order to generate revenue. In other words, the sort of distinction explicitly drawn by FCC Chairman Newton Minow in the 1960s—namely, that between “the public interest” and “merely what interests the public”—no longer exists.
More or less on the heels of the Fairness Doctrine’s repeal came the West Coast and then national syndication of The Rush Limbaugh Show through Mr. McLaughlin’s EFM Media. Limbaugh is the third great progenitor of today’s political talk radio partly because he’s a host of extraordinary, once-in-a-generation talent and charisma whose show’s blend of news, entertainment, and partisan analysis became the model for legions of imitators. But he was also the first great promulgator of the Mainstream Media’s Liberal Bias (MMLB) idea. This turned out to be a brilliantly effective rhetorical move, since the MMLB concept functioned simultaneously as a standard around which Rush’s audience could rally, as an articulation of the need for right-wing (i.e., unbiased) media, and as a mechanism by which any criticism or refutation of conservative ideas could be dismissed (either as biased or as the product of indoctrination by biased media). Boiled way down, the MMLB thesis
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is able both to exploit and to perpetuate many conservatives’ dissatisfaction with extant media sources—and it’s this dissatisfaction that cements political talk radio’s large and loyal audience. Source: Excerpted from David Foster Wallace, “Host: The Origins of Talk Radio,” Atlantic, April 2005, pp. 66–68.
TABLE 5.2 TOP TALK RADIO WEEKLY AUDIENCE (IN MILLIONS)
Talk-Show Host 2003 2008 2016
Rush Limbaugh (Conservative) 14.50 14.25 13.25
Sean Hannity (Conservative) 11.75 13.25 12.50
Dave Ramsey (Financial Advice) * 4.50 8.25
Glenn Beck (Conservative) * 6.75 7.00
Mark Levin (Conservative) N/A 5.50 7.00
Michael Savage (Conservative) 7.00 8.25 5.25
Music Formats The adult contemporary (AC) format, also known as middle-of-the-road, or MOR, is among radio’s oldest and most popular formats, reaching about 7.6 percent of all listeners, most of them over age forty, with an eclectic mix of news, talk, oldies, and soft rock music—what Broadcasting magazine describes as “not too soft, not too loud, not too fast, not too slow, not too hard, not too lush, not too old, not too new.” Now encompassing everything from rap to pop-punk songs, Top 40 radio—also called contemporary hit radio (CHR)—still appeals to many teens and young adults. A renewed focus on producing pop singles in the sound recording industry has recently boosted listenership of this format.
adult contemporary (AC) one of the oldest and most popular radio music formats, typically featuring a mix of news, talk, oldies, and soft rock.
contemporary hit radio (CHR) originally called Top 40 radio, this radio format encompasses everything from hip-hop to children’s songs; it appeals to many teens and young adults.
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Country is the most popular format in the nation (except during morning drive time, when news/talk/information is number one). Many stations are in tiny markets, where country is traditionally the default format for communities with only one radio station. Country music has old roots in radio, beginning in 1925 with the influential Grand Ole Opry program on WSM in Nashville. Although Top 40 drove country music out of many radio markets in the 1950s, the growth of FM in the 1960s brought it back, as station managers looked for market niches not served by rock music.
country claiming the largest number of radio stations in the United States, this radio format includes such subdivisions as old- time, progressive, country-rock, western swing, and country- gospel.
WENDY WILLIAMS refers to herself as the “Queen of All Media,” but before her daytime TV talk show, she got her start with a nearly two-decade career in radio. She began as a substitute deejay on an urban contemporary station in New York before gaining notoriety with her celebrity interviews and gossip. AP Photo/Julie Jacobson
Many formats appeal to particular ethnic or racial groups. In 1947, WDIA in Memphis was the first station to program exclusively for black listeners. Now called urban contemporary, this format targets a wide variety of African American listeners, primarily in large cities. Urban contemporary, which typically
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plays popular dance, rap, R&B, and hip-hop music (featuring performers like Wiz Khalifa and Tyler, the Creator), also subdivides by age, featuring an urban AC category with performers like Maxwell, Alicia Keys, and Robin Thicke.
urban contemporary one of radio’s more popular formats, primarily targeting African American listeners in urban areas with dance, R&B, and hip-hop music.
Spanish-language radio, one of radio’s fastest-growing formats, is concentrated mostly in large Hispanic markets, such as Miami, New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas (where KCOR, the first all-Spanish- language station, originated in San Antonio in 1947). Besides talk shows and news segments in Spanish, this format features a variety of Spanish, Caribbean, and Latin American musical styles, including calypso, flamenco, mariachi, merengue, reggae, samba, salsa, and Tejano.
In addition, today there are other formats that are spin-offs from album- oriented rock. Classic rock serves up rock favorites from the mid-1960s through the 1980s to the baby-boom generation and other listeners who have outgrown Top 40. The oldies format originally served adults who grew up on 1950s and early- 1960s rock and roll. As that audience has aged, oldies formats now target younger audiences with the classic hits format, featuring songs from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The alternative format recaptures some of the experimental approach of the FM stations of the 1960s, although with much more controlled playlists, and has helped introduce artists such as the Dead Weather and Cage the Elephant.
Research indicates that most people identify closely with the music they listened to as adolescents and young adults. This tendency partially explains why classic hits and classic rock stations combined have surpassed CHR stations today. It also helps explain the recent nostalgia for music from the 1980s and 1990s.
Nonprofit Radio and NPR Nonprofit radio maintains a voice in a landscape dominated by commercial radio conglomerates. But the road to viability for nonprofit radio in the United States has not been easy. In the 1930s, the Wagner-Hatfield Amendment to the 1934 Communications Act intended to set aside 25 percent of radio for a wide variety of nonprofit stations. When the amendment was defeated in 1935, the future of educational and noncommercial radio looked bleak. Many nonprofits had sold out to for-profit owners during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The stations that remained were often banished from the air during the evening hours or assigned weak signals by federal regulators who favored commercial owners and their
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lobbying agents. Still, nonprofit public radio survived. Today, more than three thousand nonprofit stations operate, most of them on the FM band.
The Early Years of Nonprofit Radio Two government rulings, both in 1948, aided nonprofit radio. First, the government began authorizing noncommercial licenses to stations not affiliated with labor, religious, education, or civic groups. The first license went to Lewis Kimball Hill, a radio reporter and pacifist during World War II who started the Pacifica Foundation to run experimental public stations. Pacifica stations, like Hill, have often challenged the status quo in radio as well as in government. Most notably, in the 1950s they aired the poetry, prose, and music of performers considered radical, left-wing, or communist who were blacklisted by television and seldom acknowledged by AM stations. Over the years, Pacifica has been fined and reprimanded by the FCC and Congress for airing programs that critics considered inappropriate for public airwaves. Today, Pacifica has more than one hundred affiliate stations.
Pacifica Foundation a radio broadcasting foundation established in Berkeley, California, by journalist and World War II pacifist Lewis Hill; in 1949, Hill established KPFA, the first nonprofit community radio station.
Second, the FCC approved 10-watt FM stations. Prior to this, radio stations had to have at least 250 watts to get licensed. A 10-watt station with a broadcast range of only about seven miles took very little capital to operate, allowing more people to participate, and such stations became training sites for students interested in broadcasting. Although the FCC stopped licensing new 10-watt stations in 1978, about one hundred longtime 10-watters are still in operation.
Creation of the First Noncommercial Networks During the 1960s, nonprofit broadcasting found a Congress sympathetic to an old idea: using radio and television as educational tools. As a result, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) were created as the first noncommercial networks. Under the provisions of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), NPR and PBS were mandated to provide alternatives to commercial broadcasting. Now, NPR’s popular news and interview programs, such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered, are thriving, and they contribute to the network’s audience of thirty-two million listeners per week.
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National Public Radio (NPR) noncommercial radio established in 1967 by the U.S. Congress to provide an alternative to commercial radio.
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) noncommercial television established in 1967 by the U.S. Congress to provide an alternative to commercial television.
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 the act by the U.S. Congress that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) a private, nonprofit corporation created by Congress in 1967 to funnel federal funds to nonprofit radio and public television.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Comparing Commercial and Noncommercial Radio
After the arrival and growth of commercial TV, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was created in 1967 as the funding agent for public broadcasting—an alternative to commercial TV and radio featuring educational and cultural programming that could not be easily sustained by commercial broadcasters in search of large general audiences. As a result, National Public Radio (NPR) developed to provide national programming to public stations to
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supplement local programming efforts. Today, NPR affiliates get just 2 percent of their funding from the federal government. Most money for public radio comes instead from corporate sponsorships, individual grants, and private donations.
1 DESCRIPTION Listen to a typical morning or late-afternoon hour of a popular local commercial talk-news radio station and a typical hour of your local NPR station from the same time period for two to three days. Keep a log of what topics are covered and what news stories are reported. For the commercial station, log what commercials are carried and how much time in an hour is devoted to ads. For the noncommercial station, note how much time is devoted to recognizing the station’s sources of funding support and who the supporters are.
2 ANALYSIS Look for patterns. What kinds of stories are covered? What kinds of topics are discussed? Create a chart to categorize the stories. To cover events and issues, do the stations use actual reporters at the scene? How much time is given to reporting compared to time devoted to opinion? How many sources are cited in each story? What kinds of interview sources are used? Are they expert sources or regular person-on-the-street interviews? How many sources are men, and how many are women?
3 INTERPRETATION What do these patterns mean? Is there a balance between reporting and opinion? Do you detect any bias, and if so, how did you determine this? Are the stations serving as watchdogs to ensure that democracy’s best interests are being served? What effect, if any, do you think the advertisers/supporters have on the programming? What arguments might you make about commercial and noncommercial radio based on your findings?
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4 EVALUATION Which station seems to be doing a better job serving its local audience? Why? Do you buy the 1930s argument that noncommercial stations serve narrow, special interests while commercial stations serve capitalism and the public interest? Why or why not? From which station did you learn the most, and which station did you find most entertaining? Explain. What did you like and dislike about each station?
5 ENGAGEMENT Join your college radio station. Talk to the station manager about the goals for a typical hour of programming and what audience the station is trying to reach. Finally, pitch program or topic ideas that would improve your college station’s programming.
Over the years, however, public radio has faced waning government support and the threat of losing its federal funding. In 1994, a conservative majority in Congress cut financial support and threatened to scrap the CPB, the funding authority for public broadcasting. In 2011, the House voted to end financing for the CPB, but the Senate voted against the measure. Consequently, stations have become more reliant on private donations and corporate sponsorship, which could cause some public broadcasters to steer clear of controversial subjects, especially those that critically examine corporations (see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Comparing Commercial and Noncommercial Radio” above).
Like commercial stations, nonprofit radio has adopted the format style. However, the dominant style in public radio is a loose variety format whereby a station may actually switch from jazz, classical music, and alternative rock to news and talk during different parts of the day. Noncommercial radio remains the place for both tradition and experimentation, as well as for programs that do not draw enough listeners for commercial success.
New Radio Technologies Offer More Stations Over the past decade or so, two alternative radio technologies have helped expand radio beyond its traditional AM and FM bands and bring more diverse sounds to listeners: satellite and HD (digital) radio.
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Going Visual: Video, Radio, and the Web This video looks at how radio stations adapted to the Internet by providing multimedia on their Web sites to attract online listeners.
Discussion: If video is now important to radio, what might that mean for journalism and broadcasting students who are considering a job in radio?
Satellite Radio A series of satellites launched to cover the continental United States created a subscription-based national satellite radio service. Two companies, XM and Sirius, completed their national introduction by 2002 and merged into a single provider in 2008. The merger was precipitated by their struggles to make a profit after building competing satellite systems and battling for listeners. SiriusXM offers about 175 digital music, news, and talk channels to the continental United States, with monthly prices starting at $14.99 and satellite radio receivers costing from $50 to $200. SiriusXM access is also available to mobile devices via an app.
satellite radio pay radio services that deliver various radio formats nationally via satellite.
Programming includes a range of music channels, from rock and reggae to Spanish Top 40 and opera, as well as channels dedicated to NASCAR, NPR, cooking, and comedy. Another feature of satellite radio’s programming is popular personalities who host their own shows or have their own channels, including Howard Stern, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, and Bruce Springsteen. U.S. automakers (investors in the satellite radio companies) now equip most new cars with a satellite band, in addition to AM and FM, in order to promote further
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adoption of satellite radio. SiriusXM had about thirty million subscribers by 2016.
HD Radio Available to the public since 2004, HD radio is a digital technology that enables AM and FM radio broadcasters to multicast up to three additional compressed digital signals within their traditional analog frequency. For example, KNOW, a public radio station at 91.1 FM in Minneapolis–St. Paul, runs its National Public Radio news/talk/information format on 91.1 HD1, runs Radio Heartland (acoustic and Americana music) on 91.1 HD2, and runs the BBC News service on 91.1 HD3. About twenty-two hundred radio stations now broadcast in HD. To tune in, listeners need a radio with the HD band, which brings in CD-quality digital signals. Digital HD radio also provides program data, such as artist name and song title, and enables listeners to tag songs for playlists that can later be downloaded to an iPod and purchased on iTunes. The rollout of HD has been slow, but by 2016, every major auto manufacturer was selling automobile models with built-in HD radio receivers.
HD radio a digital technology that enables AM and FM radio broadcasters to multicast two to three additional compressed digital signals within their traditional analog frequency.
Radio and Convergence Like every other mass medium, radio is moving into the future by converging with the Internet. Interestingly, this convergence is taking radio back to its roots in some aspects. Internet radio allows for much more variety in radio, which is reminiscent of radio’s earliest years, when nearly any individual or group with some technical skill could start a radio station. Moreover, podcasts bring back such content as storytelling, instructional programs, and local topics of interest, which have largely been missing in corporate radio. And portable listening devices like the iPod along with radio apps for the iPad and smartphones hark back to the compact portability that first came with the popularization of transistor radios in the 1950s.
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S
GLOBAL VILLAGE
Radio Goes Local, Global, and Local Again
ince the 1950s, radio has focused on music content and its local connection to its audience. Local deejays personally connected
with their listeners, introduced them to new music, and encouraged them to call in with song requests. Local stations also took their shows into the community, with live broadcasts from local festivals and events or from an advertiser (such as a local car dealership) that wanted its weekend sale to sound like an event.
Two things in the 1990s changed all of that. First, federal deregulation enabled small chains of stations to grow into enormous cross-country corporations, with hundreds of stations following the same few nationally prescribed formats. With the increasing corporatization, stations often lost their local flavor. Second, the invention of the Web enabled the development of Internet radio.
Small stations started streaming their live broadcasts, and as computer connections got faster, more and more listeners from around the world logged in. Local went global; even the tiniest stations could have international listeners, who might also financially support the local station. For example, KQNY 91.9 FM—Plumas Community Radio in Quincy, California (population 1,728), high in the Sierra Nevada—has listeners from Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Mexico, who enjoy hearing the eclectic mix of programming from its mostly volunteer staff.1
At the same time, Internet-only start-ups bypassed terrestrial
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broadcasting (which requires expensive transmitters and towers) and directly streamed their signals globally on the Internet. Pandora, established in 2000, is now the largest of those services. Not to be outdone, the largest terrestrial radio corporation in the country, Clear Channel, changed its name to iHeartMedia in 2014, signaling its focus on its iHeartRadio streaming service as the future of radio.
All of this has made for a rich global radio listening environment. The London-based newspaper the Telegraph maintains a list of the world’s best Internet radio stations, “guaranteed to introduce you to something fresh, whatever your tastes.” A sampling of the list includes FIP Radio 105.1 FM in Paris; Radio Reverb 97.2 FM in Brighton, England; P2 in Sweden; Venice Classic Radio in Italy; Ralph Radio in Russia; RTVE.es in Spain; MyOpusRadio in Bangalore, India; Radio Zero 97.7 FM in Santiago, Chile; WFMU 91.1 FM in Jersey City, New Jersey; KCOU 88.1 FM in Columbia, Missouri; and KEXP 90.3 FM in Seattle.2
Jehad Nga/The New York Times/Redux/Getty Images
The biggest recent entry to the global radio business is Apple. As the company’s iTunes music download business has been declining, it has pinned its hopes for the future on Apple Music, a subscription-based streaming service introduced in 2015. Apple Music carries a number of streams, but the main feature is the 24/7 live Beats 1 station, led by renowned British deejay Zane Lowe and with studios based in Los Angeles, New York, and London. “We’re looking for the most exciting music and people that love it, in all corners of the globe,” Lowe says. “Broadcasting to 100 countries, that shared experience just got so much bigger.”3
The newspaper the Australian forecasts the possible end of local radio with Apple’s “global radio station.” “If you don’t like the offerings of
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terrestrial broadcasters, or the satellite-delivered formats, Apple Music will let you do it yourself. If enough of us take this option it will mean the end of the radio industry as we know it.”4
But executives of old-fashioned local terrestrial radio stations appear confident of the radio industry’s survival. “We should be bullish about radio’s future,” says National Association of Broadcasters president Gordon Smith. “Why? Because no other medium has what broadcasting has—its connection to local communities.”5
Internet Radio Internet radio emerged in the 1990s with the popularity of the Web. Internet radio stations come in two types. The first involves an existing AM, FM, satellite, or HD station “streaming” a simulcast version of its on-air signal over the Web. More than 12,300 radio stations stream their programming over the Web today. 14 iHeartRadio is one of the major streaming sites for broadcast and custom digital stations. The second kind of online radio station is one that has been created exclusively for the Internet. Pandora, 8tracks, Slacker, and Last.fm are some of the leading Internet radio services. In fact, services like Pandora allow users to have more control over their listening experience and the selections that are played. Listeners can create individualized stations based on a specific artist or song that they request.
Internet radio online radio stations that either “stream” simulcast versions of on-air radio broadcasts over the Web or are created exclusively for the Internet.
Beginning in 2002, a Copyright Royalty Board established by the Library of Congress began to assess royalty fees for streaming copyrighted songs over the Internet based on a percentage of each station’s revenue. Webcasters complained that royalty rates set by the board were too high and threatened their financial viability, particularly compared to satellite radio, which pays a lower royalty rate, and broadcasters, who pay no royalty rates at all. For decades, radio broadcasters have paid mechanical royalties to songwriters and music publishers but no royalties to the performing artists or record companies. Broadcasters have argued that the promotional value of getting songs played is sufficient compensation.
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In 2009, Congress passed the Webcaster Settlement Act, which was considered a lifeline for Internet radio. The act enabled Internet stations to negotiate royalty fees directly with the music industry, at rates presumably more reasonable than what the Copyright Royalty Board had proposed. In 2012, Clear Channel became the first company to strike a deal directly with the recording industry. Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) pledged to pay royalties to Big Machine Label Group for broadcasting the songs of Taylor Swift and its other artists in exchange for a limit on royalties it must pay for streaming those artists’ music on its iHeartRadio.com site.
PANDORA RADIO This free online music streaming service provides a customizable interface for each user, including personalized song recommendations. Its success has paved the way for other streaming competitors that seek to emulate the traditional radio experience, such as Slacker Radio, iHeartRadio, and SiriusXM Internet Radio.
Clear Channel’s deal with the music industry opened up a new dialogue about equalizing the royalty rates paid by broadcast radio, satellite radio, and Internet radio. Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, argued before Congress in 2012 that the rates were most unfair to companies like his. In the previous year, Westergren said, Pandora paid 50 percent of its revenue for performance royalties, whereas satellite radio service SiriusXM paid 7.5 percent of its revenue for performance royalties, and broadcast radio paid nothing. He noted that a car equipped with an AM/FM radio, satellite radio, and streaming Internet radio could deliver the same
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song to a listener through all three technologies, but the various radio services would pay markedly different levels of performance royalties to the artist and record company.15
Podcasting and Portable Listening Developed in 2004, podcasting (the term marries iPod and broadcasting) refers to the practice of making audio files available on the Internet so that listeners can download and listen to them on their phones, iPods, or computers. This distribution method quickly became mainstream, as mass media companies created commercial podcasts to promote and extend existing content, such as news and reality TV, while independent producers developed new programs, such as public radio’s Serial, a popular weekly audio nonfiction narrative. By 2016, one in five Americans were listening to podcasts at least once a month.16
podcasting a distribution method (coined from “iPod” and “broadcasting”) that enables listeners to download audio program files from the Internet for playback on computers or digital music players.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Radio: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow Scholars and radio producers explain how radio adapts to and influences other media.
Discussion: Do you expect that the Internet will be the end of radio, or will radio stations still be around decades from now?
For the broadcast radio industry, portability used to mean listening on a transistor or car radio. But with the digital turn to iPods and mobile phones, broadcasters haven’t been as easily available on today’s primary portable audio
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devices. Hoping to change that, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has been lobbying the FCC and the mobile phone industry to include FM radio capability in all mobile phones. New mobile phones in the United States now have FM radio chips, but Sprint is the only major cell phone company to enable the chips with the NextRadio app.17 Although the NAB argues that the enabled radio chip would be most important for enabling listeners to access local broadcast radio in times of emergencies and disasters, the chip would also be commercially beneficial for radio broadcasters, putting them on the same digital devices as their nonbroadcast radio competitors, like Pandora. At the same time, radio streaming apps like iHeartRadio and TuneIn offer an alternative means for listening to thousands of radio stations on mobile phones.
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THE ECONOMICS OF BROADCAST RADIO
Radio continues to be one of the most used mass media, reaching about 93 percent of American teenagers and adults every week.18 Because of radio’s broad reach, the airwaves are very desirable real estate for advertisers, who want to reach people in and out of their homes; for record labels, who want their songs played; and for radio station owners, who want to create large radio groups to dominate multiple markets.
Local and National Advertising About 10 percent of all U.S. spending on media advertising goes to radio stations. Like newspapers, radio generates its largest profits by selling local and regional ads. Thirty-second radio spot ads range from $1,500 in large markets to just a few dollars in the smallest markets. Today, gross advertising receipts for radio are more than $17.3 billion (about 75 percent of the revenues from local ad sales, with the remainder in national spot, network, and digital radio sales), up from about $16 billion in 2009.19 Although industry revenue has dropped from a peak of $21.7 billion in 2006, the number of stations keeps growing, now totaling 15,480 stations (4,684 AM stations, 6,701 FM commercial stations, and 4,095 FM educational stations).20 Unlike television, in which nearly 40 percent of a station’s expenses goes toward buying syndicated programs, local radio stations get much of their content free from the recording industry. Therefore, only about 20 percent of a typical radio station’s budget goes toward covering programming costs. But, as noted earlier, that free music content is in doubt as the music industry—which already charges performance royalties for Internet radio stations—moves toward charging radio broadcasters performance royalties for playing music on the air.
When radio stations want to purchase programming, they often turn to national network radio, which generates more than $1 billion in ad sales annually by offering dozens of specialized services. For example, Westwood One, the nation’s largest radio network service, managed by Cumulus Media, reaches more than 245 million consumers a week with a range of programming, including regular network radio news (e.g., ABC, CBS, and NBC), entertainment programs (e.g., The Bob & Tom Show), talk shows (e.g., The Mark Levin Show), and complete twenty-four- hour formats (e.g., Hot Country, Hits Now!, and Jack FM). Dozens of companies offer national program and format services, typically providing local stations with programming in exchange for time slots for national ads. The most successful radio network programs are the shows broadcast by affiliates in the Top 20 markets, which offer advertisers half of the country’s radio audience.
Manipulating Playlists with Payola
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Radio’s impact on music industry profits—radio airplay serves to popularize recordings—has required ongoing government oversight to expose illegal playlist manipulation. Payola, the practice by which record promoters pay deejays to play particular records, was rampant during the 1950s as record companies sought to guarantee record sales (see Chapter 4). In response, management took control of programming, arguing that if individual deejays had less impact on which records would be played, the deejays would be less susceptible to bribery.
payola the unethical (but not always illegal) practice of record promoters’ paying deejays or radio programmers to favor particular songs over others.
Despite congressional hearings and new regulations, payola persisted. Record promoters showered their favors on a few influential, high-profile deejays, whose backing could make or break a record nationally, or on key program managers in charge of Top 40 formats in large urban markets. For example, in 2010, Univision Radio paid $1 million to settle allegations of payola and end an FCC investigation.
More recently, as streaming music and streaming radio services have grown, the practice of payola has again surfaced. But because streaming services aren’t broadcasting, they fall outside the FCC’s oversight. Billboard magazine reports that music promoters have been paying to influence playlists at services like Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music. Playlists, used by hundreds of thousands of subscribers as a way to discover music, are created by the streaming services, influential individuals, or the music labels themselves. Spotify announced in 2015 that it would prohibit any playlists that had been influenced by money or other compensation. Yet the three major music labels themselves are invested in influencing streaming music. Universal Music Group features its music playlists on Digster, Sony showcases its music on Filtr, and Warner Music Group promotes its playlists on Topsify.21
Radio Ownership: From Diversity to Consolidation The Telecommunications Act of 1996 substantially changed the rules concerning ownership of the public airwaves because the FCC eliminated most ownership restrictions on radio. As a result, twenty-one hundred stations and $15 billion changed hands that year alone. From 1995 to 2005, the number of radio station owners declined by one-third, from sixty-six hundred to about forty-four hundred.22
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Telecommunications Act of 1996 the sweeping update of telecommunications law that led to a wave of media consolidation.
Once upon a time, the FCC tried to encourage diversity in broadcast ownership. From the 1950s through the 1980s, a media company could not own more than seven AM, seven FM, and seven TV stations nationally, and could own only one radio station per market. Just prior to the 1996 act, the ownership rules were relaxed to allow any single person or company to own up to twenty AM, twenty FM, and twelve TV stations nationwide, but only two in the same market.
CLEAR CHANNEL COMMUNICATIONS has been a target for protesters who object to the company’s media dominance, allowed by FCC deregulation. Clear Channel has shed some stations in recent years, but as a result of an economic downturn rather than increased regulation. The company changed its name to iHeartMedia in 2014 to reflect its future in streaming digital radio. Richard B. Levine/Newscom
The 1996 act allows individuals and companies to acquire as many radio stations as they want, with relaxed restrictions on the number of stations a single broadcaster may own in the same city: The larger the market or area, the more stations a company may own within that market. For example, in areas where forty-five or more stations are available to listeners, a broadcaster may own up to eight stations, but not more than five of one type (AM or FM). In areas with fourteen or fewer stations, a broadcaster may own up to five stations (three of any one type). In very small markets with a handful of stations, a broadcast company may not own more than half the stations.
The consequences of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and other deregulation have been significant. Consider the cases of Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia) and Cumulus, two of the largest radio chain owners in terms of
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number of stations owned (see Table 5.3). Clear Channel Communications was formed in 1972 with one San Antonio station. Eventually, it gobbled up enough conglomerates to become the largest radio chain owner in the country, peaking in a pre-recession 2005 with 1,205 stations. Today, as iHeartMedia, it owns 860 radio stations and about 750,000 billboard and outdoor displays in over forty countries across five continents, including 950 digital displays across thirty-seven U.S. markets. iHeartMedia also distributes many of the leading syndicated programs, including The Rush Limbaugh Show, The Glenn Beck Program, On Air with Ryan Seacrest, and Delilah. iHeartMedia is also an Internet radio source, with iHeartRadio, which has more than 80 million registered users. Cumulus became the second-largest radio conglomerate when it merged with Citadel in 2011 in a $2.5 billion deal and bought radio network service Dial Global (now Westwood One) in 2013, and has since been bumped to the third place spot by Educational Media Foundation, which owns 715 radio stations.
TABLE 5.3 TOP TWELVE RADIO COMPANIES (BY NUMBER OF STATIONS), 2016
Rank Company Number of Stations
1 iHeartMedia (Top property: WLTW-FM, New York) 860
2 Educational Media Foundation (KLVB, Citrus Heights, CA) 715
3 Cumulus Media (KNBR-AM, San Francisco) 454
4 Townsquare Media (KSAS-FM, Boise) 309
5 Alpha Media (KINK-FM, Portland, OR) 249
6 American Family Radio (WAFR, Tupelo, MS) 191
7 Entercom (WEEI-AM, Boston) 125
8 CBS Radio (KROQ-FM, Los Angeles)* 117
9 Salem Media Group (KLTY, Dallas–Ft. Worth) 116
10 Saga Communications (WSNY, Columbus, OH) 99
11 Midwest Communications (WTAQ-FM, Green Bay) 72
12 Univision (KLVE-FM, Los Angeles) 68
Data from: The 10-K annual reports and business profiles for each radio company.
* CBS announced in 2016 that it planned to sell its radio group.
Townsquare Media, the fourth largest radio company, launched in 2010 with the buyout of a 62-station group, grew to 309 stations by 2016 by focusing on acquiring stations in midsize markets. Two other major radio groups, the previously mentioned Educational Media Foundation and American Family Radio, are nonprofit religious broadcasters. The Educational Media Foundation also
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syndicates the K-Love and Air1 contemporary Christian music formats to hundreds of stations. American Family Radio is a conservative Christian activist organization that was originally established by Rev. Donald Wildmon in 1977 as the National Federation for Decency.
ALTERNATIVE RADIO VOICES can also be found on college stations, typically started by students and community members. There are around 520 such stations currently active in the United States, broadcasting in an eclectic variety of formats. As rock radio influence has declined, college radio has become a major outlet for new indie bands. © Thomas Fricke/Corbis
Combined, the top three commercial groups—iHeartMedia, Educational Media Foundation, and Cumulus—own nearly 2,000 radio stations (about 12 and a half percent of all U.S. stations) and dominate the fifty largest markets in the United States. As a result of the consolidations permitted by deregulation, in most American cities just a few corporations dominate the radio market.
A smaller radio conglomerate, but one that is perhaps the most dominant in a single format area, is Univision. With a $3 billion takeover of Hispanic Broadcasting in 2003, Univision is the top Spanish-language radio broadcaster in the United States. The company is also the largest Spanish-language television broadcaster in the United States (see Chapter 6), as well as the owner of the top two Spanish-language cable networks (Galavisión and UniMás) and Univision Online, the most popular Spanish-language Web site in the United States.
Alternative Voices
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As large corporations gained control of America’s radio airwaves, activists in hundreds of communities across the United States protested in the 1990s by starting up their own noncommercial “pirate” radio stations, capable of broadcasting over a few miles with low-power FM signals of 1 to 10 watts. The NAB and other industry groups pressed to have the pirate broadcasters closed down, citing their illegality and their potential to create interference with existing stations. Between 1995 and 2000, more than five hundred illegal micropower radio stations were shut down. Still, an estimated one hundred to one thousand pirate stations are in operation in the United States, in both large urban areas and small rural towns.
LOW-POWER FM RADIO To help communities or organizations set up LPFM stations, nonprofit groups like the Prometheus Radio Project provide support in obtaining government licenses and also actually construct the stations. For construction endeavors known as “barn raisings,” Prometheus will send volunteers “to raise the antenna mast, build the studio, and flip on the station switch.” Shown here is the barn raising for station WRFU 104.5 FM in Urbana, Illinois. JJ Tiziou Photography
The major complaint of pirate radio station operators was that the FCC had long ago ceased licensing low-power community radio stations. In 2000, the FCC, responding to tens of thousands of inquiries about the development of a new local radio broadcasting service, approved a new noncommercial low-power FM (LPFM) class of 100-watt stations (with a broadcast coverage reach of about five miles) in order to give voice to local groups lacking access to the public airwaves. LPFM station licensees included mostly religious groups but also high schools, colleges and universities, Native American tribes, labor groups, and museums.
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low-power FM (LPFM) a new class of noncommercial radio stations approved by the FCC in 2000 to give voice to local groups lacking access to the public airwaves; the 10-watt and 100-watt stations broadcast to a small, community-based area.
LPFM stations are located in unused frequencies on the FM dial. Still, the NAB and National Public Radio fought to delay and limit the number of LPFM stations, arguing that such stations would cause interference with existing full-power FM stations. The passage of the Local Community Radio Act in 2011 created opportunities for more LPFM station applications in 2013. By 2016, more than fifteen hundred LPFM stations were broadcasting. A major advocate of LPFM stations is the Prometheus Radio Project, a nonprofit formed by radio activists in 1998. Prometheus has helped educate community organizations about low-power radio and has sponsored at least a dozen “barn raisings” to build community stations in places like Hudson, New York; Opelousas, Louisiana; and Woodburn, Oregon.
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RADIO AND THE DEMOCRACY OF THE AIRWAVES
As radio was the first national electronic mass medium, its influence in the formation of American culture cannot be overestimated. Radio has given us soap operas, situation comedies, and broadcast news; it helped popularize rock and roll, car culture, and the politics of talk radio. Yet for all its national influence, broadcast radio is still a supremely local medium. For decades, listeners have tuned in to hear the familiar voices of their community’s deejays and talk-show hosts and hear the regional flavor of popular music over airwaves that the public owns.
The early debates over radio gave us one of the most important and enduring ideas in communication policy: a requirement to operate in the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.” But the broadcasting industry has long been at odds with this policy, arguing that radio corporations invest heavily in technology and should be able to have more control over the radio frequencies on which they operate and, moreover, own as many stations as they want. Deregulation in the past few decades has moved the industry closer to that corporate vision, as nearly every radio market in the nation is dominated by a few owners, and those owners are required to renew their broadcasting licenses only every eight years.
This trend in ownership has moved radio away from its localism, as radio groups often manage hundreds of stations from afar. Given broadcasters’ reluctance to publicly raise questions about their own economic arrangements, public debate regarding radio as a natural resource has remained minuscule. As citizens look to the future, a big question remains to be answered: With a few large broadcast companies now permitted to dominate radio ownership nationwide, how much is consolidation of power restricting the number and kinds of voices permitted to speak over public airwaves? To ensure that mass media industries continue to serve democracy and local communities, the public needs to play a role in developing the answer to this question.
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5 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the developmental stages of mass media. Like other mass media, radio evolved in three stages, but it also influenced an important dichotomy in mass media technology: wired versus wireless.
In radio’s novelty stage, several inventors transcended the wires of the telegraph and telephone to solve the problem of wireless communication. In the entrepreneurial stage, inventors tested ship-to-shore radio, while others developed person-to-person toll radio transmissions and other schemes to make money from wireless communication. Finally, when radio stations began broadcasting to the general public (who bought radio receivers for their homes), radio became a mass medium.
As the first electronic mass medium, radio set the pattern for an ongoing battle between wired and wireless technologies. For example, television brought images to wireless broadcasting. Then, cable television’s wires brought television signals to places where receiving antennas didn’t work. Satellite television (wireless from outer space) followed as an innovation to bring TV where cable didn’t exist. Now, broadcast, cable, and satellite all compete against one another.
Similarly, think of how cell phones have eliminated millions of traditional phone, or land, lines. The Internet, like the telephone, also began with wires, but Wi-Fi and home wireless systems are eliminating those wires, too. And radio? Most listeners get traditional local (wireless) radio broadcast signals, but now listeners may use a wired Internet connection to stream Internet radio or download Webcasts and podcasts. The radio industry’s push for the future is to ensure that all mobile phones have enabled FM radio chips so that local radio listening through the Internet can be (again) wireless.
Both wired and wireless technologies have advantages and disadvantages. Do we want the stability and the tethers of a wired connection? Or do we want the freedom and occasional instability (“Can you hear me now?”) of wireless media? Can radio’s development help us understand wired-versus-wireless battles in other media?
KEY TERMS
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The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
telegraph, 141 Morse code, 141 electromagnetic waves, 142 radio waves, 142 wireless telegraphy, 142 wireless telephony, 143 broadcasting, 144 narrowcasting, 144 Radio Act of 1912, 145 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 146 network, 147 option time, 150 Radio Act of 1927, 150 Federal Radio Commission (FRC), 150 Communications Act of 1934, 150 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 150 transistors, 154 FM, 155 AM, 155 format radio, 155 rotation, 156 Top 40 format, 156 progressive rock, 156 album-oriented rock (AOR), 156 drive time, 157 news/talk/information, 157 adult contemporary (AC), 159 contemporary hit radio (CHR), 159 country, 159 urban contemporary, 159
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Pacifica Foundation, 160 National Public Radio (NPR), 160 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 160 Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, 160 Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), 160 satellite radio, 162 HD radio, 162 Internet radio, 164 podcasting, 164 payola, 166 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 166 low-power FM (LPFM), 168
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
Early Technology and the Development of Radio 1. Why was the development of the telegraph important in media
history? What were some of the disadvantages of telegraph technology?
2. How is the concept of wireless different from that of radio? 3. What was Guglielmo Marconi’s role in the development of
wireless telegraphy? 4. What were Lee De Forest’s contributions to radio? 5. Why was the RCA monopoly formed? 6. How did broadcasting, unlike print media, come to be federally
regulated? The Evolution of Radio
7. What was AT&T’s role in the early days of radio?
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8. Why did the government-sanctioned RCA monopoly end? 9. What is the significance of the Radio Act of 1927 and the
Communications Act of 1934? Radio Reinvents Itself 10. How did radio adapt to the arrival of television? 11. What was Edwin Armstrong’s role in the advancement of radio
technology? Why did RCA hamper Armstrong’s work? 12. What is format radio, and why was it important to the survival of
radio? The Sounds of Commercial Radio 13. Why are there so many radio formats today? 14. Why did Top 40 radio diminish as a format in the 1980s and
1990s? 15. What is the state of nonprofit radio today? 16. Why are performance royalties a topic of debate between
broadcast radio, satellite radio, Internet radio, and the recording industry?
The Economics of Broadcast Radio 17. What are the current ownership rules governing American radio? 18. What has been the main effect of the Telecommunications Act of
1996 on radio station ownership? 19. Why did the FCC create a new class of low-power FM stations? Radio and the Democracy of the Airwaves 20. Throughout the history of radio, why did the government
encourage monopoly or oligopoly ownership of radio broadcasting?
21. What is the relevance of localism to debates about ownership in radio?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. Count the number and types of radio stations in your area today. What formats do they use? Do a little research, and find out who owns the stations in your market. How much diversity is there among the highest-rated stations?
2. If you could own and manage a commercial radio station, what
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format would you choose, and why? 3. How might radio be used to improve social and political discussions
in the United States? 4. If you were a broadcast radio executive, what arguments would you
make in favor of broadcast radio over Internet radio?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter.
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6 Television and Cable The Power of Visual Culture
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Ali Goldstein/© Comedy Central / Everett Collection
SOUNDS AND IMAGES
TELEVISION MAY BE OUR FINAL LINK to
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true “mass” communication—a medium that in the 1960s through the 1980s attracted forty million viewers to a single episode of a popular prime-time drama like Bonanza (1959–1973) or a “must-see” comedy like Seinfeld (1989–1998). Today, the only program that attracts that kind of audience happens once a year—the Super Bowl, which drew 112 million viewers in 2016. Back in its full-blown mass media stage, television was available only on traditional TV sets, and people mostly watched only the original broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC. Things are different today, as television has entered the fourth stage in the life cycle of a mass medium— convergence. Today, audiences watch TV on everything from big flat-screen digital sets to tiny smartphones and tablet screens. Back in the day, the networks either made or bought almost all TV shows, usually bankrolled by Hollywood film studios. These days, everyone from broadcast networks to cable channels to Internet services like Netflix and Amazon is producing original shows. Audiences today also watch the same show in multiple ways. For example, in 2015, for the first seven episodes of the Comedy Central show Inside Amy Schumer, 27 million people viewed the program on YouTube streams, 4.5 million watched on Facebook, 1.2 million viewed on Hulu, and 4.2 million watched on Snapchat. Only 1.4 million on an average evening watched the show on cable’s Comedy Central.1
THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF TELEVISION THE DEVELOPMENT OF CABLE
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TECHNOLOGY AND CONVERGENCE CHANGE VIEWING HABITS MAJOR PROGRAMMING TRENDS REGULATORY CHALLENGES TO TELEVISION AND CABLE THE ECONOMICS AND OWNERSHIP OF TELEVISION AND CABLE TELEVISION, CABLE, AND DEMOCRACY
◄ Amy Schumer’s sketch comedy show Inside Amy Schumer, which premiered in 2013, airs on the TV network Comedy Central, but the vast majority of the show’s fans watch it on other platforms.
The first major crack in the networks’ mass audience dominance came when cable TV developed in the 1970s. At first, cable channels like HBO and TNT survived by redistributing old movies and network TV programs. But when HBO began producing popular award-winning original series like The Sopranos, the networks’ hold on viewers began to erode. Premium cable services like HBO (True Detective) and Showtime (Homeland) led the way, but now basic cable channels like AMC (The Walking Dead) and FX (Better Call Saul) are producing popular original programming.
What cable really did was introduce a better business model—earning money from monthly subscription fees and advertising. The old network model relied solely on advertising revenue. The networks, worried about the loss both of viewers and of ad dollars to its upstart competitor, decided they wanted a piece of that action. Some networks started buying cable channels (NBC, for example, has purchased stakes in A&E, Syfy, USA Network, and the Weather Channel). The networks and local TV stations also championed retransmission consent—fees that cable providers like Comcast pay to local TV stations and the major networks each month for the right to carry their channels. Typically, cable companies in large- market cities pay their local broadcasters and the national networks about fifty to seventy-five cents per month for each cable subscriber. Those fees are then passed
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along to subscribers.
In recent years, retransmission fees have caused some friction between broadcasters and cable companies. For example, in 2013, when fee negotiations between CBS and Time Warner broke down, the station was dropped from Time Warner’s lineup in some markets for almost a month. In the same year, the evolving relationship between broadcasters and cable TV took a dramatic turn when General Electric, which started and owned NBC (and Universal Studios), sold majority control of its flagship network (and the film company) to Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider. Comcast now produces or owns a significant amount of programming for use on its broadcast and cable channels, and exercises control over retransmission fees.
While the major tensions between cable and broadcasters appear to have quieted down, a new battle is brewing as the Internet and smaller screens are quickly becoming the future of television. On the surface, a mutually beneficial relationship has developed among streaming online services and broadcasters and cable providers—Hulu, after all, is jointly owned by Disney (ABC), 21st Century Fox (Fox), and Comcast (NBC). Internet streaming services help cable and broadcast networks increase their audiences through time shifting, as viewers watch favorite TV shows days, even weeks, after they originally aired. But these services are no longer satisfied to distribute network reruns and old cable shows— Netflix (Orange Is the New Black; Daredevil) and Amazon (Transparent; Mozart in the Jungle) now develop original programming.
As the newest battle shakes up the TV landscape, one thing remains unchanged: high-quality stories that resonate with viewers. In the fragmented marketplace, in which the “mass” audience has shrunk, there may be plenty of room for small, quirky shows that attract younger fans who grew up on the Internet.
BROADCAST NETWORKS TODAY may resent the development of original programming by cable networks and streaming services, but in the beginning, network television actually stole most of its programming and business ideas from radio. Old radio scripts began reappearing in TV form, snatching radio’s sponsors, its program ideas, and even its prime-time evening audience. For example, in 1949, The Lone Ranger rode over to television from radio, where it had originated in 1933. Since replacing radio in the 1950s as our most popular mass medium, television has sparked repeated arguments about its social and cultural impact. Television has not only been accused of having a negative impact on children and young people but also faced criticism for enabling and sustaining a sharply partisan political system. But there are other sides to this story. In times of crisis, our fragmented and pluralistic society has embraced television as common ground. It was TV that exposed many to Civil Rights violations in the South and to the shared loss after the Kennedy and King assassinations in the 1960s. On September 11, 2001—in shock and horror—we turned on television sets to learn that nearly three thousand people had been killed in that day’s terrorist attacks. In 2013, we viewed the Boston Marathon bombing attacks on TV and online, and in 2016, we watched
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the ISIS attacks in Brussels. For better or worse, television remains a central touchstone in our daily lives.
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Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
In this chapter, we examine television and cable’s cultural, social, and economic impact. We will:
Review television’s early technological development Discuss the TV boom in the 1950s and the impact of the quiz-show scandals Examine cable’s technological development and basic services Explore new viewing technologies, such as computers, smartphones, and tablets Learn about major programming genres: comedy, drama, news, and reality TV Trace the key rules and regulations of television and cable Inspect the costs related to the production, distribution, and syndication of programs Investigate the impact of television and cable on democracy and culture
As you read through this chapter, think about your own experiences with television programs and the impact they have on you. What was your favorite show as a child? Were there shows you weren’t allowed to watch when you were young? If so, why? What attracts you to your favorite programs now? For more questions to help you think through the role of television and cable in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF TELEVISION
In 1948, only 1 percent of America’s households had a TV set; by 1953, more than 50 percent had one; and since the early 1960s, more than 90 percent of all homes have at least one. Television’s rise throughout the 1950s created fears that radio— as well as books, magazines, and movies—would become irrelevant and unnecessary, but both radio and print media adapted. In fact, today more radio stations are operating and more books and magazines are being published than ever before; only ticket sales for movies have declined slightly since the 1960s.
Three major historical developments in television’s early years helped shape it: (1) technological innovations and patent wars, (2) the wresting of content control from advertisers, and (3) the sociocultural impact of the infamous quiz-show scandals.
Early Innovations in TV Technology In its novelty stage, television’s earliest pioneers were trying to isolate TV waves from the electromagnetic spectrum (as radio’s pioneers had done with radio waves). The big question was, if a person could transmit audio signals from one place to another, why not visual images as well? Inventors from a number of nations toyed with the idea of sending “tele-visual” images for nearly a hundred years before what we know as TV developed.
CIVIL RIGHTS In the 1950s and 1960s, television images of Civil Rights struggles visually documented the inequalities faced by black citizens. Seeing these images made the
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events and struggles more “real” to a nation of viewers and helped garner support for the movement. © Bettmann/Corbis
From roughly 1897 to 1907, the development by several inventors of the cathode ray tube, the forerunner of the TV picture tube, combined principles of the camera and electricity. Because television images could not physically float through the air, technicians and inventors developed a method of encoding them at a transmission point (TV station) and decoding them at a reception point (TV set). In the 1880s, German inventor Paul Nipkow developed the scanning disk, a large flat metal disk with a series of small perforations organized in a spiral pattern. As the disk rotated, it separated pictures into pinpoints of light that could be transmitted as a series of electronic lines. As the disk spun, each small hole scanned one line of a scene to be televised. For years, Nipkow’s mechanical disk served as the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images.
Electronic Technology: Zworykin and Farnsworth The story of television’s invention included a complex patents battle between two independent inventors: Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth. It began in Russia in 1907, when physicist Boris Rosing improved Nipkow’s mechanical scanning device. Rosing’s lab assistant, Vladimir Zworykin, left Russia for America in 1919 and went to work for Westinghouse and then RCA. In 1923, Zworykin invented the iconoscope, the first TV camera tube to convert light rays into electrical signals, and he received a patent for it in 1928.
Around the same time, Idaho teenager Philo Farnsworth also figured out that a mechanical scanning system would not send pictures through the air over long distances. On September 7, 1927, the twenty-one-year-old Farnsworth transmitted the first electronic TV picture: He rotated a straight line scratched on a square of painted glass by 90 degrees. RCA, then the world leader in broadcasting technology, challenged Farnsworth in a major patents battle, in part over Zworykin’s innovations for Westinghouse and RCA. Farnsworth had to rely on his high school science teacher to retrieve his original drawings from 1922. Finally, in 1930, Farnsworth received a patent for the first electronic television.
After the company’s court defeat, RCA’s president, David Sarnoff, had to negotiate to use Farnsworth’s patents. Farnsworth later licensed these patents to RCA and AT&T for use in the commercial development of television. At the end of television’s development stage, Farnsworth conducted the first public demonstration of television at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1934—five years before RCA’s famous public demonstration at the 1939 World’s Fair.
Setting Technical Standards
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Figuring out how to push TV as a business and elevate it to a mass medium meant creating a coherent set of technical standards for product manufacturers. In the late 1930s, the National Television Systems Committee (NTSC), a group representing major electronics firms, began outlining industry-wide manufacturing practices and compromising on technical standards. As a result, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted an analog standard (based on radio waves) for all U.S. TV sets in 1941. About thirty countries, including Japan, Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and most Latin American nations, also adopted this system. (Most of Europe and Asia, however, adopted a slightly superior technical system shortly thereafter.)
analog in television, standard broadcast signals made of radio waves (replaced by digital standards in 2009).
The United States continued to use analog signals until 2009, when they were replaced by digital signals. These signals translate TV images and sounds into binary codes (ones and zeros like computers use) and allow for increased channel capacity and improved image quality and sound. HDTV, or high-definition television, digital signals offer the highest resolution and sharpest image.
digital in television, the type of signals that are transmitted as binary code.
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PHILO FARNSWORTH, one of the inventors of television, experiments with an early version of an electronic TV set. © Bettmann/Corbis
Assigning Frequencies and Freezing TV Licenses In the early days of television, the number of TV stations a city or market could support was limited because airwave spectrum frequencies interfered with one another. Thus a market could have a channel 2 and a channel 4 but not a channel 3. Cable systems “fixed” this problem by sending channels through cable wires that don’t interfere with one another. Today, a frequency that once carried one analog TV signal can carry eight or nine compressed digital channels.
In the 1940s, the FCC began assigning channels in specific geographic areas to make sure there was no interference. As a result, for years New Jersey had no TV stations because those signals would have interfered with the New York stations. But by 1948 the FCC had issued nearly one hundred TV licenses, and there was growing concern about the finite number of channels and the frequency- interference problems. The FCC declared a freeze on new licenses from 1948 to 1952.
During this time, cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles had several TV stations, while other areas—including Little Rock, Arkansas, and Portland, Oregon—had none. In non-TV cities, movie audiences increased. Cities with TV stations, however, saw a 20 to 40 percent drop in movie attendance during this period. Taxi receipts and nightclub attendance also fell in TV cities, as did library book circulation. Radio listening also declined.
After a second NTSC conference in 1952 sorted out the technical problems, the FCC ended the licensing freeze, and almost thirteen hundred communities received
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TV channel allocations. By the mid-1950s, there were more than four hundred television stations in operation—a 400 percent surge since the prefreeze era—and television became a mass medium. Today, about seventeen hundred TV stations are in operation.
The Introduction of Color Television In 1952, the FCC tentatively approved an experimental CBS color system. However, because black-and-white TV sets could not receive its signal, the system was incompatible with the sets most Americans owned. In 1954, RCA’s color system, which sent TV images in color but allowed older sets to receive the color images as black-and-white, usurped CBS’s system to become the color standard. Although NBC began broadcasting a few shows in color in the mid-1950s, it wasn’t until 1966, when the consumer market for color sets had taken off, that the Big Three networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC) broadcast their entire evening lineups in color.
Controlling Content—TV Grows Up By the early 1960s, television had become a dominant mass medium and cultural force, with more than 90 percent of U.S. households owning at least one set. Television’s new standing came as its programs moved away from the influence of radio and established a separate identity. Two important contributors to this identity were a major change in the sponsorship structure of television programming and, more significant, a major scandal.
NETWORK TALK SHOWS were established in part by the format of NBC’s Tonight Show, which debuted in 1954. The Tonight Show continues to air on NBC with host Jimmy Fallon, but it has faced more competition than it did in its earlier incarnations. One such competitor was Comedy Central’s Nightly Show, which featured comedian Larry
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Wilmore giving his satirical take on current events. The Nightly Show itself was a spin-off of Comedy Central’s long-running Daily Show. Bryan Bedder/Getty Images
Program Format Changes Inhibit Sponsorship Like radio in the 1930s and 1940s, early TV programs were often developed, produced, and supported by a single sponsor. Many of the top-rated programs in the 1950s even included the sponsor’s name in the title: Buick Circus Hour, Camel News Caravan, and Colgate Comedy Hour. Having a single sponsor for a show meant that the advertiser could easily influence the program’s content. In the early 1950s, the broadcast networks became increasingly unhappy with the lack of creative control in this arrangement. Luckily, the growing popularity, and growing cost, of television offered opportunities to alter this financial setup. In 1952, for example, a single one-hour TV show cost a sponsor about $35,000, a figure that rose to $90,000 by the end of the decade.
David Sarnoff, then head of RCA-NBC, and William Paley, head of CBS, saw an opportunity to diminish the sponsors’ role. In 1953, Sarnoff appointed Sylvester “Pat” Weaver (father of actress Sigourney Weaver) as the president of NBC. Previously an advertising executive, Weaver undermined his former profession by increasing program length from fifteen minutes (then the standard for radio programs) to thirty minutes or longer, substantially raising program costs for advertisers and discouraging some from sponsoring programs.
In addition, the introduction of two new types of programs—the magazine format and the TV spectacular—greatly helped the networks gain control over content. The magazine program featured multiple segments—news, talk, comedy, and music—similar to the varied content found in a general-interest publication or newsmagazine of the day, such as Life or Time. In January 1952, NBC introduced the Today show as a three-hour morning talk-news program. Then, in September 1954, NBC premiered the ninety-minute Tonight Show. Because both shows ran daily rather than weekly, studio production costs were prohibitive for a single sponsor. Consequently, NBC offered spot ads within the shows: Advertisers paid the network for thirty- or sixty-second time slots. The network, not the sponsor, now produced and owned the programs or bought them from independent producers.
The television spectacular is today recognized by a more modest term, the television special. At NBC, Weaver bought the rights to special programs, like the Broadway production of Peter Pan, and sold spot ads to multiple sponsors. The 1955 TV version of Peter Pan was a particular success, with sixty-five million viewers. More typical specials featured music-variety shows hosted by famous singers, such as Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole. NBC has returned to annual live specials, producing updated versions of The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, and The Wiz.
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The Rise and Fall of Quiz Shows In 1955, CBS aired the $64,000 Question, reviving radio’s quiz-show genre (radio’s version was the more modest $64 Question). Sponsored by Revlon, the program ran in prime time (the hours between 8 and 11 p.m., when networks traditionally draw their largest audiences and charge their highest advertising rates) and became the most popular TV show in America during its first year. Revlon followed the show’s success with the $64,000 Challenge in 1956; by the end of 1958, twenty-two quiz shows aired on network television. Revlon’s cosmetic sales skyrocketed from $1.2 million before its sponsorship of the quiz shows to nearly $10 million by 1959.
prime time in television programming, the hours between 8 and 11 P.M. (or 7 and 10 P.M. in the Midwest), when networks have traditionally drawn their largest audiences and charged their highest advertising rates.
Compared with dramas and sitcoms, quiz shows were (and are) cheap to produce, with inexpensive sets and mostly nonactors as guests. The problem was that most of these shows were rigged. To heighten the drama, key contestants were rehearsed and given the answers.
The most notorious rigging occurred on Twenty-One, a quiz show owned by Geritol (whose profits climbed by $4 million one year after it began to sponsor the program in 1956). A young Columbia University English professor from a famous literary family, Charles Van Doren, won $129,000 in 1957 during his fifteen-week run on the program; his fame even landed him a job on NBC’s Today show. But in 1958, after a series of contestants accused the quiz show Dotto of being fixed, the networks quickly dropped twenty quiz shows. Following further rumors, a TV Guide story, a New York grand jury probe, and a 1959 congressional investigation during which Van Doren admitted to cheating, big-money prime-time quiz shows ended.
Quiz-Show Scandal Hurts the Promise of TV The impact of the quiz-show scandal was enormous. First, the sponsors’ pressure on TV executives to rig the programs and the subsequent fraud put an end to any role that major sponsors had in creating TV content. Second, and more important, the fraud undermined Americans’ expectation of the democratic promise of television—to bring inexpensive information and entertainment into every household. Many people had trusted their own eyes—what they saw on TV—more than the words they heard on radio or read in print. But the scandal provided the
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first dramatic indication that TV images could be manipulated. In fact, our contemporary love-hate relationship with electronic culture and new gadgets began during this time.
TWENTY-ONE In 1957, the most popular contestant on the quiz show Twenty-One was college professor Charles Van Doren (left). Congressional hearings on rigged quiz shows revealed that Van Doren had been given some answers. Host Jack Barry, pictured here above the sponsor’s logo, nearly had his career ruined, but made a comeback in the late 1960s with the syndicated game show The Joker’s Wild. The Everett Collection
The third, and most important, impact of the quiz-show scandal was that it magnified the division between “high” and “low” culture attitudes toward television. The fact that Charles Van Doren had come from a family of Ivy League intellectuals and cheated for fame and money drove a wedge between skeptical intellectuals and the popular new medium. This was best expressed in 1961 by FCC commissioner Newton Minow, who labeled game shows, westerns, cartoons, and other popular genres as part of television’s “vast wasteland.” Critics have used the “wasteland” metaphor ever since to admonish the TV industry for failing to live up to its potential. Prime-time quiz shows did have a brief comeback in 1999, when ABC’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire emerged as that season’s No. 1 program.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF CABLE
Most historians mark the period from the late 1950s, when the networks gained control over TV’s content, to the end of the 1970s as the network era. Except for British and American anthology dramas on PBS, this was a time when the Big Three broadcast networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—dictated virtually every trend in programming and collectively accounted for more than 95 percent of all prime- time TV viewing. In 2012, however, this figure was less than 40 percent. Why the drastic drop? Because cable television systems—along with home video and later streaming technology—had cut into the broadcast networks’ audience.
network era the period in television history, roughly from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, that refers to the dominance of the Big Three networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—over programming and prime-time viewing habits; the era began eroding with a decline in viewing and with the development of VCRs, cable, and new TV networks.
CATV—Community Antenna Television The first small cable systems—called CATV, or community antenna television— originated in the late 1940s in Oregon, Pennsylvania, and New York City, where mountains or tall buildings blocked TV signals. These systems served roughly 10 percent of the country and, because of early technical and regulatory limits, contained only twelve channels. Even at this early stage, though, TV sales personnel, broadcasters, and electronics firms recognized two big advantages of cable. First, by routing and reamplifying each channel in a separate wire, cable eliminated over-the-air interference. Second, running signals through coaxial cable increased channel capacity.
CATV (community antenna television) an early cable system that originated where mountains or tall buildings blocked TV signals; because of early technical and regulatory limits, CATV contained only twelve channels.
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In the beginning, small communities with CATV often received twice as many channels as were available over the air in much larger cities. That technological advantage, combined with cable’s ability to deliver clear reception, would soon propel the new cable industry into competition with conventional broadcast television. But unlike radio, which freed mass communication from unwieldy wires, early cable technology relied on wires.
The Wires and Satellites behind Cable Television The idea of using space satellites to receive and transmit communication signals is right out of science fiction: In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke (who studied physics and mathematics and would later write dozens of sci-fi books, including 2001: A Space Odyssey) published the original theories for a global communications system based on three satellites equally spaced from one another, rotating with the earth’s orbit. In the mid-1950s, these theories became reality, as the Soviet Union and then the United States successfully sent satellites into orbit around the earth.
In 1960, AT&T launched Telstar, the first communication satellite capable of receiving, amplifying, and returning signals. Telstar was able to process and relay telephone and occasional television signals between the United States and Europe. By the mid-1960s, scientists had figured out how to lock communication satellites into geosynchronous orbit, in which they circled the earth at the same speed as the earth revolves on its axis. For cable television, the breakthrough was the launch of domestic communication satellites: Canada’s Anik in 1972 and the United States’ Westar in 1974.
Advances in satellite technology in the 1970s dramatically changed the fortunes of cable by creating a reliable system for the distribution of programming to cable companies across the nation. The first cable network to use satellites for regular transmission of TV programming was Home Box Office (HBO), which began delivering such programming as uncut, commercial-free movies and exclusive live coverage of major boxing matches for a monthly fee in 1975. The second cable network began in 1976, when media owner Ted Turner distributed his small Atlanta broadcast TV station, WTBS, to cable systems across the country.
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FIGURE 6.1 A BASIC CABLE TELEVISION SYSTEM Data from: Clear Creek Telephone & Television, www.ccmtc.com.
Cable Threatens Broadcasting While only 14 percent of all U.S. homes received cable in 1977, by 1985 that percentage had climbed to 46. By the summer of 1997, basic cable channels had captured a larger prime-time audience than the broadcast networks had. The cable industry’s rapid rise to prominence was partly due to the shortcomings of broadcast television. Beyond improving signal reception in most communities, the cable era introduced narrowcasting—the providing of specialized programming for diverse and fragmented groups. Attracting both advertisers and audiences, cable programs provide access to certain target audiences (like young male viewers for ESPN’s numerous channels) that cannot be guaranteed in broadcasting. For example, a golf-equipment manufacturer can buy ads on the Golf Channel and reach only golf enthusiasts. (See “Case Study: ESPN: Sports and Stories” on pages 182–183 for more on narrowcasting.)
narrowcasting any specialized electronic programming or media channel aimed at a target audience.
As cable channels have become more and more like specialized magazines or radio formats, they have siphoned off network viewers, and the networks’ role as the chief programmer of our shared culture has eroded. For example, back in 1980,
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the Big Three evening news programs had a combined audience of more than fifty million on a typical weekday evening. By 2012 and 2013, though, that audience had shrunk to twenty million.2
Cable Services Cable consumers usually choose programming from a two-tiered structure: basic cable services like CNN and premium cable services like HBO. These services are the production arm of the cable industry, supplying programming to the nation’s six-thousand-plus cable operations, which function as program distributors to cable households.
Basic Cable Services A typical basic cable system today includes a hundred-plus channel lineup composed of local broadcast signals; access channels (for local government, education, and general public use); regional PBS stations; and a variety of cable channels, such as ESPN, CNN, MTV, USA, Bravo, Nickelodeon, Disney, Comedy Central, BET, Telemundo, the Weather Channel, superstations (independent TV stations uplinked to a satellite, such as WGN in Chicago), and others, depending on the cable system’s capacity and regional interests. Typically, local cable companies pay each of these satellite-delivered services between a few cents per month per subscriber ($.06 per month per subscriber for low-cost, low-demand channels like C-SPAN) and over $4 per month per subscriber (for high-cost, high-demand channels like ESPN). That fee is passed along to consumers as part of their basic monthly cable rate, which averaged—depending on the study and the location— between $70 and $90 per month by 2014. In addition, cable system capacities continue to increase as a result of high-bandwidth fiber-optic cable and digital cable, allowing for expanded offerings such as premium channels, pay-per-view programs, and video-on-demand.
basic cable in cable programming, a tier of channels composed of local broadcast signals, nonbroadcast access channels (for local government, education, and general public use), a few regional PBS stations, and a variety of cable channels downlinked from communication satellites.
superstations local independent TV stations, such as WTBS in Atlanta or WGN in Chicago, that have uplinked their signals onto a communication satellite to make themselves available
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nationwide.
CASE STUDY
ESPN: Sports and Stories
common way many of us satisfy our cultural and personal need for storytelling is through sports: We form loyalties to local and
national teams. We follow the exploits of favorite players. We boo our team’s rivals. We suffer with our team when the players have a bad game or an awful season. We celebrate the victories.
The appeal of sports is similar to the appeal of our favorite books, TV shows, and movies—we are interested in characters, in plot development, in conflict and drama. Sporting events have all of this. The NBA finals in 2015 drew the largest audiences in years—mostly because of an intriguing story line. The Golden State Warriors (who did win) had not reached the finals in forty years and had the league’s MVP in Stephen Curry—arguably the best shooter in the history of the NBA. The Cleveland Cavaliers, on the other hand, reached the finals on the back of star player LeBron James, who had left the Miami Heat (where he won two championships) to try to bring victory to his hometown Cavs—who have never won a championship.
One of the best sports stories on television over the past thirty years, though, may be not a single sporting event but the tale of an upstart cable network based in Bristol, Connecticut. ESPN (Entertainment Sports Programming Network) began in 1979 and has now surpassed all the major broadcast networks as the “brand” that frames and presents sports on television. In fact, cable operators around the country regard
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ESPN as the top service when it comes to helping them “gain and retain customers.”1 One of ESPN’s main attractions is its “live” aspect and its ability to draw large TV and cable audiences—many of them young men—to events in real time. In a third-screen world full of mobile devices, this is a big plus for ESPN and something that advertisers especially like.
Today, the ESPN flagship channel reaches more than 100 million U.S. homes. And ESPN, Inc., now provides a sports smorgasbord—a menu of media offerings that includes ESPN2 (sporting events, news, and original programs), ESPN Classic (historic sporting events), ESPN Deportes (Spanish-language sports network), ESPN HD (high- definition channel), ESPNEWS (twenty-four-hour sports news channel), ESPNU (college games), ESPN Radio, and ESPN Outdoors. ESPN also creates original programming for TV and radio and operates ESPN.com, which is among the most popular sites on the Internet. ESPN makes its various channels available in more than two hundred countries.
Data from: www.forbes.com/sites/frankbi/2015/01/08/espn-leads-all-cable- networks-in-affliate-fees/#6474ab90e60c.
Each year, ESPN’s channels air more than five thousand live and original hours of sports programming, covering more than sixty-five different sports. In 2002, ESPN even outbid NBC for six years of NBA games—offering $2.4 billion, which at the time was just over a year’s
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worth of ESPN revenues. ESPN’s major triumph was probably wrestling the Monday Night Football contract away from its sports partner, ABC (both ESPN and ABC are owned by Disney). For eight years, beginning in 2006, ESPN agreed to pay the NFL $1.1 billion a year for the broadcasting rights to MNF, the most highly rated sports series in prime-time TV history. ESPN also pays the NFL another $1.9 billion a year to carry other NFL games. In 2006, ABC turned over control of its sports programming division, ABC Sports, to ESPN, which now carries games on ABC under the ESPN logo.
The story of ESPN’s birth also has its share of drama. The creator of ESPN was Bill Rasmussen, an out-of-work sports announcer who had been fired in 1978 by the New England Whalers (now the Carolina Hurricanes), a professional hockey team. Rasmussen wanted to bring sports programs to cable TV, which was just emerging from the shadow of broadcast television. But few backers thought this would be a good idea. Eventually, Rasmussen managed to land a contract with the NCAA to cover college games. He also lured Anheuser-Busch to become cable’s first million-dollar advertiser. Getty Oil then agreed to put up $10 million to finance this sports adventure, and ESPN took off.
Today, ESPN is 80 percent owned by the Disney Company, while the Hearst Corporation holds the other 20 percent interest. The sports giant earned over $14 billion in worldwide revenue in 2013, but lately revenue has declined due to its high monthly subscriber costs and its long-term expensive NFL and NBA contracts. Data from: Frank Bi, “ESPN Leads All Cable Networks in Affiliate Fees,” Forbes, January 8, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/frankbi/2015/01/08/espn- leads-all-cable-networks-in-affiliate-fees/#6474ab90e60c.
LAST WEEK TONIGHT is a satirical news program hosted by comic personality John Oliver and aired on the premium channel HBO. Although its audience is not as wide as that of other basic cable news shows like The O’Reilly Factor,
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critics argue that Last Week Tonight has become a major source of news for the eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old age group because of its satire and sharp-witted lampoon of politics and the news media. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images
Premium Cable Services Besides basic programming, cable offers a wide range of special channels, known as premium channels, which lure customers with the promise of no advertising; recent and classic Hollywood movies; and original movies or series, like HBO’s Game of Thrones, True Detective, or Girls, and Showtime’s Homeland, Masters of Sex, or Nurse Jackie. These channels are a major source of revenue for cable companies: The cost to them is $4 to $6 per month per subscriber to carry a premium channel, but the cable company can charge customers $10 or more per month and reap a nice profit. Premium services also include pay-per-view (PPV) programs; video-on-demand (VOD); and interactive services that enable consumers to use their televisions to bank, shop, play games, and access the Internet.
premium channels in cable programming, a tier of channels that subscribers can order at an additional monthly fee over their basic cable service; these may include movie channels and interactive services.
Beginning in 1985, cable companies began introducing new viewing options for their customers. Pay-per-view (PPV) channels came first, offering recently released movies or special one-time sporting events to subscribers who paid a designated charge to their cable company, allowing them to view the program. In the early 2000s, cable companies introduced video-on-demand (VOD). This service enables customers to choose among hundreds of titles and watch their selection whenever they want in the same way as a video, pausing and fast- forwarding when desired. Along with online downloading and streaming services and digital video recorders (DVRs), VOD services today are ending the era of the local video store.
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pay-per-view (PPV) a cable-television service that allows customers to select a particular movie for a fee, or to pay $25 to $40 for a special one-time event.
video-on-demand (VOD) cable television technology that enables viewers to instantly order programming, such as movies, to be digitally delivered to their sets.
DBS: Cable without Wires By 1999, cable penetration had hit 70 percent. But direct broadcast satellite (DBS) services presented a big challenge to cable—especially in regions with rugged terrain and isolated homes, where the installation of cable wiring hadn’t always been possible or profitable. Instead of using wires, DBS transmits its signal directly to small satellite dishes near or on customers’ homes. As a result, cable penetration dropped to 44 percent by 2012. In addition, new over-the-air digital signals and better online options meant that many customers began moving away from either cable or DBS subscriptions.
direct broadcast satellite (DBS) asatellite-based service that for a monthly fee downlinks hundreds of satellite channels and services; DBS began distributing video programming directly to households in 1994.
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THE WALKING DEAD, AMC’s hit drama about a zombie apocalypse, has consistently set records for highest Nielsen ratings of a cable series. It also attracts positive buzz and pay- channel subscribers. © AMC/Photofest
Satellite service began in the mid-1970s, when satellite dishes were set up to receive cable programming. Small-town and rural residents bypassed FCC restrictions by buying receiving dishes and downlinking, for free, the same channels that cable companies were supplying to wired communities. Not surprisingly, satellite programmers filed a flurry of legal challenges against those who were receiving their signals for free. Because the law was unclear, a number of cable channels began scrambling their signals, and most satellite users had to buy or rent descramblers and subscribe to services, just as cable customers did. By 1994, full-scale DBS service was available. Today, DBS companies like DirecTV and Dish (formerly the Dish Network) offer consumers most of the channels and tiers of service that cable companies carry (including Internet, television, and phone services) at a comparable and often cheaper monthly cost. But with over- the-air digital signals and online streaming options like Netflix and Amazon Prime now competing, many customers have been moving away from both cable and DBS subscriptions.
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TECHNOLOGY AND CONVERGENCE CHANGE VIEWING HABITS
Among the biggest technical innovations in TV viewing are nontelevision delivery systems. We can skip a network broadcast and still watch our favorite shows on DVRs, laptops, or mobile devices for free or for a nominal cost. Not only is television being reinvented, but its audiences—although fragmented—are also growing. A few years ago, televisions glimmered in the average U.S. household just over seven hours a day; but by 2014, when you add in downloading, streaming, DVR playback, and smartphone/tablet viewing, that figure has expanded to more than eight hours a day. All these options mean that we are still watching television but at different times, in different places, and on different kinds of screens.
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Television Networks Evolve Insiders discuss how cable and satellite have changed the television market.
Discussion: How might definitions of a TV network change in the realm of new digital media?
Home Video In 1975–76, the consumer introduction of videocassettes and videocassette recorders (VCRs) enabled viewers to tape-record TV programs and play them back later. VCRs got a boost from a failed suit brought against Sony by Disney and MCA (now NBC Universal) in 1976: The two film studios alleged that home taping violated their movie copyrights. In 1979, a federal court ruled in favor of Sony and permitted home taping for personal use. In response, the movie studios quickly set up videotaping facilities so that they could rent and sell movies in video stores, which became popular in the early 1980s. Over time, the VHS format gave way to DVDs. But today the standard DVD is threatened by both the Internet and a consumer market move toward high-definition DVDs.
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By 2012, more than 50 percent of U.S. homes had DVRs (digital video recorders), which enable users to download specific programs onto the DVR’s computer memory and watch at a later time. While offering greater flexibility for viewers, DVRs also provide a means to “watch” the watchers. DVRs give advertisers information about what each household views, allowing them to target viewers with specific ads when they play back their programs. This kind of technology has raised concerns among some lawmakers and consumer groups over the tracking of personal viewing and buying habits by marketers.
The impact of home video has been enormous. More than 95 percent of American homes today are equipped with either DVD or DVR players, resulting in two major developments: video rentals and time shifting. Video rentals, formerly the province of walk-in video stores like Blockbuster, have given way to mail services like Netflix or online services like iTunes. Time shifting, which began during the VCR era, occurs when viewers record shows and watch them at a later, more convenient time. Time shifting and video rentals, however, have threatened the TV industry’s advertising-driven business model; when viewers watch programs on DVDs and DVRs, they often aren’t watching the ads that normally accompany network or cable shows.
time shifting the process whereby television viewers record shows and watch them later, when it is convenient for them.
The Third Screen: TV Converges with the Internet The Internet has transformed the way many of us, especially younger generations, watch movies, TV, and cable programming. These new online viewing experiences are often labeled third screens, usually meaning that computer screens are the third major way we view content (movie screens and traditional TV sets are the first and second screens, respectively). By far the most popular site for viewing video online is YouTube, owned by Google. Containing some original shows, classic TV episodes, full-length films, and of course the homemade user-uploaded clips that first made the site famous, YouTube remains at the center of video consumption online.
third screens the computer-type screens on which consumers can view television, movies, music, newspapers, and books.
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But YouTube has competition from sites that offer full-length episodes of current and recent programming. While viewers might be able to watch snippets of a show on YouTube, it’s rare that they will find a full episode of popular, professionally produced TV shows like The Walking Dead, New Girl, and Homeland. Services like iTunes or Amazon Instant Video offer the ability to download full seasons of these shows, charging just $0.99 to $2.99 per episode. And streaming site Hulu (a partnership among NBC, Fox, and Disney) allows viewers to watch a certain number of episodes of a show for free—but with ads.
THE MINDY PROJECT aired on Fox for three seasons; the network canceled the low-rated cult favorite in 2015. However, Hulu, seeking to expand its original programming lineup, commissioned two new seasons of thirteen episodes each—a continuation that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. © 20thCentFox/Everett Collection
In late 2010, Hulu started Hulu Plus, a paid subscription service. For about $8 a month, viewers can stream full seasons of current and older programs and some movies and documentaries on their computer, TV, or mobile device. Hulu Plus had more than 9 million subscribers by 2016, up from 2 million in early 2012. HBO Now, a stand-alone version of HBO, launched in 2015, allowing viewers to watch cable-free content on Apple devices. Netflix, which started streaming videos back in 2008, has moved further away from a DVD-through-mail model and has become more focused on a less expensive (no postal costs) online streaming model. According to Nielsen’s 2014 “Digital Consumer” report, “38 percent of U.S. consumers say they subscribe to or use Netflix to stream video.”3 With over 42
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million U.S. subscribers by 2016, Netflix has become much bigger than Comcast, the largest cable company, with its 27 million U.S. subscribers.4 Netflix has also been negotiating with major film and TV studios for the rights to stream current episodes of prime-time television shows—and seemed willing to pay between $70,000 and $100,000 per episode.5
In addition, cable TV giants like Comcast and Time Warner are making programs available to download or stream through sites like Xfinity TV and TV Everywhere. These programs are open only to subscribers, who can download cable TV shows using a password and username. Comcast introduced Xfinity Streampix in February 2012, expanding the Xfinity offerings to include even more movies from top Hollywood studios and past seasons of TV shows. Other companies have attempted to create streaming services of their own, though some, like Redbox, have failed to catch on.
In most cases, these third-screen sites operate as catch-up services rather than as replacements for broadcast or cable TV, allowing viewers and fans to “catch up” on movies and programs that played earlier in theaters or on television (see Figure 6.2). Now, with devices like the Roku box and gaming consoles that can stream programming directly to our television sets, and newer television sets that are Internet ready, the TV itself has become one of the latest converged devices.
FIGURE 6.2 CROSS-PLATFORM VIEWING IN HOURS AND MINUTES Data from: Nielsen, The Total Audience Report, Q3 2015, http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2015-reports/total- audience-report-q3-2015.pdf.
Fourth Screens: Smartphones and Mobile Video According to Nielsen’s 2014 “Digital Consumer” report, 84 percent of smartphone and tablet owners said they used those devices as an additional screen while
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watching television “at the same time.”6 Such multitasking has further accelerated with new fourth-screen technologies like smartphones, iPods, iPads, and mobile TV devices. For the past few years, these devices have forced major changes in consumer viewing habits and media content creation. Thus cable and DBS operators have begun to capitalize on this trend: Cablevision, Time Warner, and the Dish Network released iPad apps in 2011, allowing their subscribers to watch live TV on their iPads at no additional charge in the hopes of deterring their customers from cutting their subscriptions. However, some cable programmers— like Discovery and Viacom—have pushed back, arguing at one point that their existing contracts with cable and DBS operators did not cover third or fourth screens.
fourth screens technologies like smartphones, iPods, iPads, and mobile TV devices, which are forcing major changes in consumer viewing habits and media content creation.
The multifunctionality and portability of third- and fourth-screen devices mean that consumers may no longer need television sets—just as landline telephones have fallen out of favor as more people rely solely on their mobile phones. If where we watch TV programming changes, does TV programming also need to change to keep up? Reality shows like The Voice and dramas like Game of Thrones—with many contestants or characters and multiple plotlines—are considered best suited for the digital age, enabling viewers to talk to one another on various social networks about favorite singers, characters, and plot twists at the same time as they watch these programs on traditional—or nontraditional—TV.
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MAJOR PROGRAMMING TRENDS
Television programming began by borrowing genres from radio, such as variety shows, sitcoms, soap operas, and newscasts. Starting in 1955, the Big Three networks gradually moved their entertainment divisions to Los Angeles because of its proximity to Hollywood production studios. Network news operations, however, remained in New York. Ever since, Los Angeles and New York came to represent the two major branches of TV programming: entertainment and information. Although there is considerable blurring between these categories today, the two were once more distinct. In the sections that follow, we focus on these long-standing program developments and explore newer trends (see Figure 6.3).
FIGURE 6.3 THE TOP 10 SHOWS OF THE 2014–15 SEASON* *In millions of viewers, including first seven days of DVR data. Data from: TV Insider, “These Are the Most-Watched TV Shows of the 2014-2015 Season,” June 3, 2015, www.tvinsider.com/article/1989/top-50-tv-shows-2014-2015-highest-rated- winners-and-losers.
TV Entertainment: Our Comic Culture The networks began to move their entertainment divisions to Los Angeles partly because of the success of the pioneering comedy series I Love Lucy (1951–1957). Lucy’s owners and costars, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, began filming the top- rated sitcom in California near their home. In 1951, Lucy became the first TV program to be filmed before a live Hollywood audience. Prior to the days of
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videotape (invented in 1956), the only way to preserve a live broadcast, other than filming it like a movie, was through a technique called kinescope. In this process, a film camera recorded a live TV show off a studio monitor. The quality of the kinescope was poor, and most series that were saved in this way have not survived. I Love Lucy, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Dragnet are among a handful of series from the 1950s that have endured because they were originally shot and preserved on film, like movies. In capturing I Love Lucy on film for future generations, the program’s producers understood the enduring appeal of comedy, which is a central programming strategy both for broadcast networks and cable. TV comedy is usually delivered in two formats: sketch comedy and situation comedy (usually referred to as sitcoms).
kinescope before the days of videotape, a 1950s technique for preserving television broadcasts by using a film camera to record a live TV show off a studio monitor.
Sketch comedy, or short comedy skits, was a key element in early TV variety shows, which also included singers, dancers, acrobats, animal acts, stand-up comics, and ventriloquists. According to one TV historian, variety shows “resurrected the essentials of stage variety entertainment” and played to noisy studio audiences.7 Vaudeville and stage performers were TV’s first stars of sketch comedy. They included Milton Berle, TV’s first major celebrity, in Texaco Star Theater (1948–1967), and Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and Carl Reiner in Your Show of Shows (1950–1954), on which playwright Neil Simon, filmmakers Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, and writer Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H) all served for a time as writers. Today, NBC’s Saturday Night Live (1975–) carries on the sketch comedy tradition. Comedy Central has also aired several high-profile and well- liked sketch series, including Key & Peele and the current Inside Amy Schumer. The hour-long variety shows that once showcased more sketch comedy are far less common, being more expensive to produce than half-hour sitcoms. However, stars like Neil Patrick Harris and Maya Rudolph have attempted to revive the variety format in recent years, and some talk shows like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon have incorporated elements of sketch comedy and variety.
sketch comedy short television comedy skits that are usually segments of TV variety shows; sometimes known as vaudeo, the marriage of vaudeville and video.
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The situation comedy, or sitcom, features a recurring cast; each episode establishes a narrative situation, complicates it, develops increasing confusion among its characters, and then usually resolves the complications.8 I Love Lucy, Seinfeld, New Girl, The Big Bang Theory, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are all examples of this genre.
situation comedy a type of comedy series that features a recurring cast and set as well as several narrative scenes; each episode establishes a situation, complicates it, develops increasing confusion among its characters, and then resolves the complications.
COMEDIES are often among the most popular shows on television. I Love Lucy was the top- ranked show from 1952 to 1955 and was a model for other shows, such as Dick Van Dyke, Laverne & Shirley, Roseanne, and Will & Grace. © CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
In many sitcoms, character development is downplayed in favor of zany plots. Characters are usually static and predictable, and they generally do not develop much during the course of a series. Much like viewers of soap operas, sitcom fans feel just a little bit smarter than the characters, whose lives seem wacky and out of control. In some sitcoms (once referred to as “domestic comedies”), characters and
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settings are typically more important than complicated predicaments. Although an episode might offer a goofy situation as a subplot, the main narrative usually features a personal problem or family crisis that characters have to resolve. Greater emphasis is placed on character development than on reestablishing the order that has been disrupted by confusion. Such comedies take place primarily at home (Modern Family), at the workplace (Parks and Recreation), or at both (Curb Your Enthusiasm).
AMERICAN HORROR STORY Each season of this anthology horror series takes place in a different time and place and features fresh characters who are not directly connected to the previous season’s story, though many of the actors return to play different roles in several seasons. The series, which has aired on FX since 2011, is part of a recent resurgence of season-based anthology programs. Other examples include HBO’s True Detective and FX’s Fargo, both of which have introduced all-new casts and a new story line with each new season. Everett Collection, Inc
In TV history, some sitcoms have mixed dramatic and comedic elements. This blurring of serious and comic themes marks a contemporary hybrid, sometimes labeled dramedy, which has included such series as The Wonder Years (1988– 1993), Ally McBeal (1997–2002), HBO’s Sex and the City (1999–2004), Showtime’s The Big C (2010–2013), Fox’s musical-dramedy Glee (2009–2015), and Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black (2013–).
TV Entertainment: Our Dramatic Culture Because the production of TV entertainment was centered in New York City in its
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early days, many of its ideas, sets, technicians, actors, and directors came from New York theater. Young stage actors—including Anne Bancroft, Ossie Davis, James Dean, Grace Kelly, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, and Joanne Woodward—often worked in television if they could not find stage work. The TV dramas that grew from these early influences fit roughly into two categories: the anthology drama and the episodic series.
Anthology Drama and the Miniseries In the early 1950s, television—like cable in the early 1980s—served a more elite and wealthier audience. Anthology dramas brought live dramatic theater to that audience. Influenced by stage plays, anthologies offered new, artistically significant teleplays (scripts written for television), casts, directors, writers, and sets from one week to the next. In the 1952–53 season alone, there were eighteen anthology dramas, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–1965), the Twilight Zone (1959–1964), and Kraft Television Theater (1947–1958), which was created to introduce Kraft’s Cheez Whiz.
anthology dramas a popular form of early TV programming that brought live dramatic theater to television; influenced by stage plays, anthologies offered new teleplays, casts, directors, writers, and sets from week to week.
The anthology’s brief run as a dramatic staple on television ended for both economic and political reasons. First, advertisers disliked anthologies because they often presented stories containing complex human problems that were not easily resolved. The commercials that interrupted the drama, however, told upbeat stories in which problems were easily solved by purchasing a product; by contrast, anthologies made the simplicity of the commercial pitch ring false. A second reason for the demise of anthology dramas was a change in audience. The people who could afford TV sets in the early 1950s could also afford tickets to a play. For these viewers, the anthology drama was a welcome addition given their cultural tastes. By 1956, however, working- and middle-class families were increasingly able to afford television, and the prices of sets dropped. Anthology dramas were not as popular in this newly expanded market. Third, anthology dramas were expensive to produce—double the cost of most other TV genres in the 1950s— because each week meant a new story line, along with new writers, casts, and sets. Sponsors and networks came to realize that it would be easier and less expensive to build audience allegiance with an ongoing program featuring the same cast and set.
Finally, anthologies that dealt seriously with the changing social landscape
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often attracted controversy. This was especially true during the attempts by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his followers to rid media industries and government agencies of left-leaning political influences. (See Chapter 16 for more on blacklisting.) By the early 1960s, this dramatic form had virtually disappeared from network television, although its legacy continues on public television with the imported British program Masterpiece Theatre (1971–)—now known as either Masterpiece Classic or Masterpiece Mystery!—the longest-running prime-time drama series on U.S. television.
In fact, these British shows resemble U.S. TV miniseries—serialized TV shows that run over a two-day to two-week period, usually on consecutive evenings. A cross between an extended anthology drama and a network serial, the most famous U.S. miniseries was probably Roots (1977), based on Alex Haley’s novelized version of his family’s slave history. The final episode of Roots, which ran on eight consecutive nights, drew an audience of more than 100 million viewers. Contemporary British series like Doc Martin (2005–), Downton Abbey (2010– 2016), and Sherlock (2011–) last three to eight episodes over a few weeks, making them more like miniseries than traditional network dramas, even though they have multiple seasons. The miniseries has also experienced a recent resurgence in the United States, with high-quality and popular miniseries on cable, like True Detective (HBO), American Horror Story (FX), and Hatfields and McCoys (History Channel).
Episodic Series Abandoning anthologies, producers and writers increasingly developed episodic series, first used on radio in 1929. In this format, main characters continue from week to week, sets and locales remain the same, and technical crews stay with the program. The episodic series comes in two general types: chapter shows and serial programs.
episodic series a narrative form well suited to television because the main characters appear every week, sets and locales remain the same, and technical crews stay with the program; episodic series feature new adventures each week, but a handful of characters emerge with whom viewers can regularly identify (for contrast, see chapter show).
Chapter shows are self-contained stories with a recurring set of main characters who confront a problem, face a series of conflicts, and find a resolution. This structure can be used in a wide range of sitcoms—like The Big Bang Theory
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(2007–)—and dramatic genres, including adult westerns like Gunsmoke (1955– 1975); police/detective shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–2015); and science fiction like Star Trek (1966–1969). Culturally, television dramas often function as a window into the hopes and fears of the American psyche. For example, in the 1970s, police/detective dramas became a staple, mirroring anxieties about the urban unrest of the time, precipitated by the decline of manufacturing and the loss of factory jobs. Americans’ popular entertainment reflected the idea of heroic police and tenacious detectives protecting a nation from menacing forces that were undermining the economy and the cities. Such shows as Hawaii Five-O (1968–1980), The Mod Squad (1968–1973), and The Rockford Files (1974–1980) all ranked among the nation’s top-rated programs during that time.
chapter show in television production, any situation comedy or dramatic program whose narrative structure includes self-contained stories that feature a problem, a series of conflicts, and a resolution from week to week (for contrast, see serial program and episodic series).
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Television Drama: Then and Now Head to LaunchPad to watch clips from two different drama series: one several decades old, and one recent.
Discussion: What evidence of storytelling changes can you see by comparing and contrasting the two clips?
In contrast to chapter shows, serial programs are open-ended episodic shows; that is, most story lines continue from episode to episode. Cheaper to produce than chapter shows, employing just a few indoor sets, and running five days a week, daytime soap operas are among the longest-running serial programs in the history of television. Acquiring their name from soap product ads that sponsored these
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programs in the days of fifteen-minute radio dramas, soaps feature cliff-hanging story lines and intimate close-up shots that tend to create strong audience allegiance. Soaps also probably do the best job of any genre at imitating the actual open-ended rhythms of daily life. However, popular daytime network soaps have mostly disappeared in the digital age, with so many choices and small screens drawing away viewers, especially younger ones. In 2015–16, just four remained on the networks, including General Hospital (1963–) and The Young and the Restless (1973–).
serial program a radio or TV program, such as a soap opera, that features continuing story lines from day to day or week to week (for contrast, see chapter show).
Another type of drama is the hybrid, which developed in the early 1980s with the appearance of Hill Street Blues (1981–1987). Often mixing comic situations and grim plots, this multiple-cast show looked like an open-ended soap opera. On occasion, as in real life, crimes were not solved and recurring characters died. As a hybrid form, Hill Street Blues combined elements of both chapter and serial television by featuring some self-contained plots that were resolved in a single episode as well as other plotlines that continued from week to week. This blend has been used by many successful dramatic hybrids, including The X-Files (1993– 2002), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Lost (2004–2010), TNT’s The Closer (2005–2012), and AMC’s Breaking Bad (2008–2013) and The Walking Dead (2010–).
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RACHEL MADDOW hosts one of the most widely viewed daily opinion shows, the Emmy Award– winning Rachel Maddow Show, on MSNBC. Maddow has been honored with the Walter Cronkite Faith and Freedom Award, the John Steinbeck Award, and two Gracie Allen Awards for excellence. Recently, Maddow’s reporting on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, helped raise the crisis to national attention. D Dipasupil/Getty Images
TV Information: Our Daily News Culture For about forty years (from the 1960s to the 2000s), broadcast news, especially on local TV stations, consistently topped print journalism in national research polls that asked which news medium was most trustworthy. Most studies at the time suggested that this had to do with TV’s intimacy as a medium—its ability to create loyalty with viewers who connect personally with the news anchors we “invite” into our living rooms each evening. Print reporters and editors, by comparison, seemed anonymous and detached. But this distinction began breaking down as print reporters started discussing their work on cable TV news programs and became more accessible to their readers through e-mail, blogs, and newspaper Web sites. In this section, we focus on the traditional network evening news, its history, and the changes in TV news ushered in by twenty-four-hour cable news channels.
Network News Originally featuring a panel of reporters interrogating political figures, NBC’s weekly Meet the Press (1947–) is the oldest show on television. Daily evening newscasts, though, began on NBC in February 1948 with the Camel Newsreel Theater, sponsored by the cigarette company. Originally a ten-minute Fox Movietone newsreel that was also shown in theaters, it became a live, fifteen- minute broadcast in 1949. In 1956, the Huntley Brinkley Report debuted with Chet Huntley in New York and David Brinkley in Washington, D.C. This coanchored NBC program became the most popular TV evening news show at the time and served as the dual-anchor model for hundreds of local news broadcasts. After Huntley retired in 1970, the program was renamed NBC Nightly News. Tom Brokaw eventually settled in as sole anchor in September 1983 and passed the chair to Brian Williams in 2004. In 2015, amid a scandal over inaccurate statements, Williams was replaced by Lester Holt, the first black solo anchor on network news.
Over at CBS, the network’s flagship evening news program, The CBS-TV News with Douglas Edwards, premiered in May 1948. In 1956, the program became the first news show to be videotaped for rebroadcast on affiliate stations (stations that contract with a network to carry its programs) in Central and Western time zones. Walter Cronkite succeeded Edwards in 1962, starting a nineteen-year run as the influential anchor of the renamed CBS Evening News. Some critics believe
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Cronkite’s eventual on-air opposition to the Vietnam War helped convince mainstream Americans to oppose it. Cronkite retired and gave way to Dan Rather in 1981. In 2006, CBS hired Katie Couric to serve as the first woman solo anchor on a network evening news program. But with stagnant ratings, she was replaced in 2011 by Scott Pelley.
affiliate station a radio or TV station that, though independently owned, signs a contract to be part of a network and receives money to carry the network’s programs; in exchange, the network reserves time slots, which it sells to national advertisers.
After premiering an unsuccessful daily program in 1948, ABC launched a daily news show in 1953, anchored by John Daly—the head of ABC News and the host of CBS’s evening game show What’s My Line? After Daly left in 1960, John Cameron Swayze, Peter Jennings, Harry Reasoner, and Howard K. Smith all took a turn in the anchor’s chair. In 1978, ABC World News Tonight premiered, featuring four anchors: Frank Reynolds in Washington, D.C.; Jennings in London; Barbara Walters in New York; and Max Robinson in Chicago. Robinson was the first black reporter to coanchor a network news program, while Walters was the first woman. In 1983, Jennings became the sole anchor of the broadcast until his death in 2005. The desk was then shared by coanchors Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff (who was severely injured covering the Iraq War in 2006) until Charles Gibson—from ABC’s Good Morning America—took over in 2006. Gibson retired in 2009 and was replaced by Diane Sawyer, formerly of CBS’s 60 Minutes and ABC’s Good Morning America. David Muir took over in 2014.
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WALTER CRONKITE In 1968, after popular CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite visited Vietnam, CBS produced the documentary Report from Vietnam by Walter Cronkite. At the end of the program, Cronkite offered this terse observation: “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Most political observers said that Cronkite’s opposition to the war influenced President Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection. © CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
Cable News Changes the Game The first 24/7 cable TV news channel, Cable News Network (CNN), premiered in 1980 and was the brainchild of Ted Turner, who had already revolutionized cable with his Atlanta-based superstation WTBS (Turner Broadcast Service). When Turner turned a profit with CNN in 1985 (along with its sister Headline News channel), he revealed a need and a lucrative market for twenty-four-hour news. Spawning a host of competitors in the United States and worldwide, CNN now battles for viewers with other twenty-four-hour news providers, including the Fox News Channel; MSNBC; CNBC; Euronews; British Sky Broadcasting; and thousands of Web and blog sites, like Politico, the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, and Salon.
Cable news has significantly changed the TV news game by offering viewers
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information and stories in a 24/7 loop. Rather than waiting until 5:30 or 6:30 p.m. to watch the national network news, viewers can access news updates and breaking stories at any time. Cable news also challenges the network program formulas. Daily opinion programs, such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show and Fox News’ Sean Hannity Show, often celebrate argument, opinion, and speculation over traditional reporting based on verified facts. These programs emerged primarily because of their low cost compared with that of traditional network news. At the same time, satirical “fake news” programs like The Daily Show have challenged traditional news outlets by discussing the news in larger contexts, something the conventional thirty-minute daily broadcasts rarely do. (See Chapter 14 for more on fake news programs.)
Reality TV and Other Enduring Genres Dramas, comedies, and news are some of the longest-standing TV genres, but others have played major roles in the medium’s history, including talk shows, game shows, variety shows, and news-magazines. Reality-based programs are the newest significant trend; they include everything from The Voice and Deadliest Catch to Top Chef and Teen Mom. One reason for their popularity is that these shows introduce us to characters and people who seem more “like us” and less like celebrities. Additionally, these programs have helped the networks and cable providers deal with the high cost of programming. Featuring nonactors, cheap sets, and no extensive scripts, reality shows are much less expensive to produce than sitcoms and dramas. While reality-based programs have played a major role in network prime time since the late 1990s, the genre was actually inspired by cable’s The Real World (1992–), the longest-running program on MTV. Changing locations and casts from season to season, The Real World follows a group of strangers who live and work together for a few months and records their interpersonal entanglements and up-and-down relationships. The Real World has significantly influenced the structure of today’s reality TV programs, including Survivor, Project Runway, Teen Mom, and Dancing with the Stars. (See “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: TV and the State of Storytelling” on page 194.)
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DISCOVERY CHANNEL was launched in 1985 and is one of the most widely distributed cable networks today. Its dedication to top-quality nonfictional and reality programming— typically on themes of popular science, nature, history, and geography—has won the channel several Emmy nominations and awards. One of its most popular programs, Deadliest Catch (2005–), focuses on several crab fishing crews. The drama comes from the nail-biting action on the fishing vessels, but the interpersonal relationships—and rivalries—among cast members provide juicy story lines. Everett Collection, Inc
Another growing trend is Spanish-language television, like Univision and Telemundo. For the 2013–14 TV season, the popular network Univision reached about 3 million viewers in prime time each day (more than the CW but only about one-third of the prime-time viewership for CBS and NBC, the top-rated networks). That was down from 3.7 million in 2012–13. But in June 2014, Univision’s ratings soared during soccer’s World Cup. Sometimes beating ESPN throughout the World Cup, Univision had nearly 7 million viewers for the Brazil–Mexico match. The first foreign-language U.S. network began in 1961, when the owners of the nation’s first Spanish-language TV station in San Antonio acquired a TV station in Los Angeles, setting up what was then called the Spanish International Network. It officially became Univision in 1986 and has built audiences in major urban areas with large Hispanic populations through its popular talk-variety programs and telenovelas (Spanish-language soap operas, mostly produced in Mexico), which air each weekday evening. Today, Univision Communications owns and operates more than sixty TV stations in the United States. Its Univision Network, carried by seventeen hundred cable affiliates, reaches almost all U.S. Hispanic households.
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Public Television Struggles to Find Its Place Another key programmer in TV history has been public television. Under President Lyndon Johnson, and in response to a report from the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and later, in 1969, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). In part, Congress intended public television to target viewers who were “less attractive” to commercial networks and advertisers. Besides providing programs for viewers over age fifty, public television has figured prominently in programming for audiences under age twelve, with children’s series like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001), Sesame Street (1969–), and Barney & Friends (1991–). The major networks have largely abdicated the responsibility of developing educational series aimed at children under age twelve. When Congress passed a law in 1996 ordering the networks to offer three hours of children’s educational programming per week, the networks sidestepped the mandate by taking advantage of the law’s vagueness on what constituted “educational” to claim that many of their routine sitcoms, cartoons, and dramatic shows satisfied the legislation’s requirements.
The original Carnegie Commission report also recommended that Congress create a financial plan to provide long-term support for public television, in part to protect it from political interference. However, Congress did not do this, nor did it require wealthy commercial broadcasters to subsidize public television (as many other countries do). As federal funding levels dropped in the 1980s, PBS depended more and more on corporate underwriting. By the early 2000s, corporate sponsors funded more than 25 percent of all public television, although corporate sponsorship declined in 2009 as the economy suffered. In 2010, Congress gave an extra $25 million to PBS to help sustain it during the economic downturn.9 However, only about 15 percent of funding for public broadcasting (which includes both television and radio) has come from the federal government, with the bulk of support being provided by viewers, listeners, and corporations.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
TV and the State of Storytelling
The rise of the reality program over the past decade has more to do with the cheaper cost of this genre than with the wild popularity of these programs. In fact, in the history of television and viewer numbers,
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traditional sitcoms and dramas—and even prime-time news programs like 60 Minutes and 20/20—have been far more popular than successful reality programs like American Idol. But when national broadcast TV executives cut costs by reducing writing and production staffs and hiring “regular people” instead of trained actors, does the craft of storytelling suffer at the expense of commercial savings? Can good stories be told in a reality program? In this exercise, let’s compare the storytelling competence of a reality program with that of a more traditional comedy sitcom or drama.
1 DESCRIPTION Pick a current reality program and a current sitcom or drama. Choose programs that either started in the last year or two or have been on television for roughly the same period of time. Now develop a “viewing sheet” that allows you to take notes as you watch the two programs over a three- to four- week period. Keep track of main characters, plotlines, settings, conflicts, and resolutions. Also track the main problems that are posed in the programs and how they are portrayed or worked out in each episode. Find out and compare the basic production costs of each program.
2 ANALYSIS Look for patterns and differences in the ways stories are told in the two programs. At a general level, what are the conflicts about? (For example, are they about men versus women, managers versus employees, tradition versus change, individuals versus institutions, honesty versus dishonesty, authenticity versus artificiality?) How complicated or simple are the tensions in the two programs, and how are problems resolved? Are there some conflicts that you feel should not be permitted—like pitting older contestants against younger or white against black? Are there noticeable differences between “the look” of one program and that of the other?
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3 INTERPRETATION What do some of the patterns mean? What seems to be the point of each program? What do the programs say about relationships, values, masculinity or femininity, power, social class, and so on? What is the value of each program for its viewers?
4 EVALUATION What are the strengths and weaknesses of each program? Which program would you judge as better at telling a compelling story that you want to watch each week? How could each program improve its storytelling?
5 ENGAGEMENT Either through online forums or via personal contacts, find other viewers of these programs. Ask them follow-up questions about what they like or don’t like about such shows, what they might change, and what the programs’ creators might do differently. Then report your findings to the programs’ producers through a letter, a phone call, or an e-mail. Try to elicit responses from the producers about the status of their programs. How did they respond to your findings?
Despite support from the Obama administration, there have still been attempts to reduce or eliminate CPB funds in recent years. Because public television is a visible target, some politicians have used it as an example of government waste. However, a 2012 ProPublica study showed that CPB’s $440 million subsidy amounted to “0.12 percent of the $3.8 trillion federal budget—or about $1.35 per person per year.”10 To counter proposed cutbacks, public broadcasting began inserting promotional messages from sponsors every fifteen minutes in some programs beginning in fall 2011.11 Some critics and public TV executives worried that such corporate messages would offend loyal viewers accustomed to uninterrupted programming and would compromise public television’s mission to air programs that might be considered controversial or commercially less viable.
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PUBLIC TELEVISION The most influential children’s show in TV history, Sesame Street (1969–) has been teaching children their letters and numbers for more than forty-five years. The program has also helped break down ethnic, racial, and class barriers by introducing TV audiences to a rich and diverse cast of puppets and people. However, in 2015, a controversy erupted over the production company’s decision to move the program from PBS to the subscription network HBO. Photofest
Also troubling to public television (in contrast to public radio, which increased its audience from two million listeners per week in 1980 to more than thirty million per week in 2010) is that the audience for PBS has declined. PBS content chief John Boland attributed the loss to the same market fragmentation and third-screen technology that has plagued the broadcast networks: “We are spread thin in trying to maintain our TV service and meet the needs of consumers on other platforms.”12 One viewer segment that PBS is watching closely is the children’s audience— which declined 22 percent between 2010 and 2014, as it did on several cable channels aimed at children. One report suggests that more and more parents are using on-demand services like Netflix to control what their children watch, while other reports indicate that educational video games and tablets are commanding more attention from younger viewers.13
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REGULATORY CHALLENGES TO TELEVISION AND CABLE
Though cable cut into broadcast TV’s viewership, both types of programming came under scrutiny from the U.S. government. Initially, thanks to extensive lobbying efforts, cable’s growth was suppressed to ensure that no harm came to local broadcasters and traditional TV networks’ ad revenue streams. Later, as cable developed, FCC officials worried that power and profits were growing increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer industry players’ hands. Thus the FCC set out to mitigate the situation through a variety of rules and regulations.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
What Makes Public Television Public? TV executives and critics explain how public television is different from broadcast and cable networks. Discussion: In a commercial media system that includes hundreds of commercial channels, what do you see as the role of public systems like PBS and NPR?
Government Regulations Temporarily Restrict Network Control By the late 1960s, a progressive and active FCC, increasingly concerned about the monopoly-like impact of the Big Three networks, passed a series of regulations that began undercutting their power. The first, the Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR), introduced in April 1970, reduced the networks’ control of prime-time programming from four to three hours. This move was an effort to encourage more local news and public affairs programs, usually slated for the 6–7 p.m. time block. However, most stations simply ran thirty minutes of local news at 6 p.m. and then acquired syndicated quiz shows (Wheel of Fortune) or infotainment programs (Entertainment Tonight) to fill up the remaining half hour, during which they could sell lucrative regional ads.
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http://macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR) an FCC regulation that reduced networks’ control of prime- time programming to encourage more local news and public affairs programs, often between 6 and 7 P.M.
In a second move, in 1970 the FCC created the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules—called fin-syn—which “constituted the most damaging attack against the network TV monopoly in FCC history,” according to one historian.14 Throughout the 1960s, the networks had run their own syndication companies. The networks sometimes demanded as much as 50 percent of the profits that TV producers earned from airing older shows as reruns in local TV markets. This was the case even though those shows were no longer on the networks and most of them had been developed not by the networks but by independent companies. The networks claimed that since popular TV series had gained a national audience because of the networks’ reach, production companies owed them compensation even after shows completed their prime-time runs. The FCC banned the networks from reaping such profits from program syndication.
fin-syn (Financial Interest and Syndication Rules) FCC rules that prohibited the major networks from running their own syndication companies or from charging production companies additional fees after shows had completed their prime-time runs; most fin-syn rules were rescinded in the mid-1990s.
The Department of Justice instituted a third policy action in 1975. Reacting to a number of legal claims against monopolistic practices, the Justice Department limited the networks’ production of non-news shows, requiring them to seek most of their programming from independent production companies and film studios. Initially, the limit was three hours of network-created prime-time entertainment programs per week, but this was raised to five hours by the late 1980s. In addition, the networks were limited to producing eight hours per week of in-house entertainment or non-news programs outside prime time, most of which were devoted to soap operas (which were inexpensive to produce and popular with advertisers). However, given that the networks could produce their own TV newsmagazines and select which programs to license, they retained a great deal of
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power over the content of prime-time television. With the growth of cable and home video in the 1990s, the FCC gradually
phased out the ban limiting network production because the TV market grew more competitive. Beginning in 1995, the networks were again allowed to syndicate and profit from rerun programs, but only from those they produced. The elimination of fin-syn and other rules opened the door for megadeals (such as Disney’s acquisition of ABC in 1995) that have constrained independent producers from creating new shows and competing in prime time. Many independent companies and TV critics have complained that the corporations that now own the networks— Disney, CBS, 21st Century Fox, and Comcast—have exerted too much power and control over broadcast television content.
Balancing Cable’s Growth against Broadcasters’ Interests By the early 1970s, cable’s rapid growth, capacity for more channels, and better reception led the FCC to seriously examine industry issues. In 1972, the commission updated or enacted two regulations with long-term effects on cable’s expansion: must-carry rules and access-channel mandates.
Must-Carry Rules First established by the FCC in 1965 and reaffirmed in 1972, the must-carry rules required all cable operators to assign channels to and carry all local TV broadcasts on their systems. This rule ensured that local network affiliates, independent stations (those not carrying network programs), and public television channels would benefit from cable’s clearer reception. However, to protect regional TV stations and their local advertising, the guidelines limited the number of distant commercial TV signals that a cable system could import to two or three independent stations per market. The guidelines also prohibited cable companies from bringing in network-affiliated stations from another city when a local station already carried that network’s programming.
must-carry rules rules established by the FCC requiring all cable operators to assign channels to and carry all local TV broadcasts on their systems, thereby ensuring that local network affiliates, independent stations (those not carrying network programs), and public television channels would benefit from cable’s clearer reception.
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Access-Channel Mandates In 1972, the FCC also mandated access channels in the nation’s top one hundred TV markets, requiring cable systems to provide and fund a tier of nonbroadcast channels dedicated to local education, government, and the public. The FCC required large-market cable operators to assign separate channels for each access service, while cable operators in smaller markets (and with fewer channels) could require education, government, and the public to share one channel. In addition to free public-access channels, the FCC called for leased channels. Citizens could buy time on these channels and produce their own programs or present controversial views.
access channels in cable television, a tier of nonbroadcast channels dedicated to local education, government, and the public.
leased channels in cable television, channels that allow citizens to buy time for producing programs or presenting their own viewpoints.
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SEINFELD (1989–1998) was not an immediate hit, but it was in the ratings top three for the final five of its nine seasons. Now, over twenty-five years after its first episode, the show can still be seen in heavy syndication on TV. Produced by Sony Pictures Television and NBC, Seinfeld is the type of successful show the fin-syn rules targeted to keep out of the networks’ hands. The show also made news in 2015 when Hulu acquired exclusive streaming rights to all episodes. © Castle Rock Entertainment/Everett Collection
Cable’s Role: Electronic Publisher or Common Carrier? Because the Communications Act of 1934 had not anticipated cable, the industry’s regulatory status was unclear at first. In the 1970s, cable operators argued that they should be considered electronic publishers and be able to choose which channels and content to carry. Cable companies wanted the same “publishing” freedoms and legal protections that broadcast and print media enjoyed in selecting content. Just as local broadcasters could choose to carry local news or Jeopardy! at 6 P.M., cable companies wanted to choose what channels to carry.
electronic publishers communication businesses, such as broadcasters or cable TV companies, that are entitled to choose what channels or content to carry.
At the time, the FCC argued the opposite: Cable systems were common
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carriers, providing services that do not get involved in content. Like telephone operators, who do not question the topics of personal conversations (“Hi, I’m the phone company, and what are you going to be talking about today?”), cable companies, the FCC argued, should offer at least part of their services on a first- come, first-served basis to whoever could pay the rate.
common carrier a communication or transportation business, such as a phone company or a taxi service, that is required by law to offer service on a first-come, first-served basis to whoever can pay the rate; such companies do not get involved in content.
In 1979, the debate over this issue ended in the landmark Midwest Video case, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the rights of cable companies to determine channel content and defined the industry as a form of “electronic publishing.”15 Although the FCC could no longer mandate channels’ content, the Court said that communities could “request” access channels as part of contract negotiations in the franchising process. Access channels are no longer a requirement, but most cable companies continue to offer them in some form to remain on good terms with their communities.
Intriguingly, must-carry rules seem to contradict the Midwest Video ruling, since they require cable operators to carry certain local content. But this is a quirky exception to the Midwest Video ruling—mostly due to politics and economics. Must-carry rules have endured because of the lobbying power of the National Association of Broadcasters and the major TV networks. Over the years, these groups have successfully argued that cable companies should carry most local over-the-air broadcast stations on their systems so that local broadcasters can stay financially viable as cable systems expand their menus of channels and services.
Franchising Frenzy After the Midwest Video decision, the future of cable programming was secure, and competition to obtain franchises to supply local cable service became intense. Essentially, a cable franchise is a mini-monopoly awarded by a local community to the most attractive bidder, usually for a fifteen-year period. Although a few large cities permitted two companies to build different parts of their cable systems, most communities granted franchises to only one company so that there wouldn’t be more than one operator trampling over private property to string wire from utility poles or to bury cables underground. Most of the nation’s cable systems were built between the late 1970s and the early 1990s.
During the franchising process, a city (or state) would outline its cable system
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needs and request bids from various cable companies. (Potential cable companies were prohibited from also owning broadcast stations or newspapers in the community.) In its bid, a company would make a list of promises to the city about construction schedules, system design, subscription rates, channel capacity, types of programming, financial backing, deadlines, and a franchise fee: the money the cable company would pay the city annually for the right to operate the local cable system. Lots of wheeling and dealing transpired in these negotiations, along with occasional corruption (e.g., paying off local city officials who voted on which company got the franchise), as few laws existed to regulate franchise negotiations. Often, battles over broken promises, unreasonable contracts, or escalating rates ended up in court.
Today, a federal cable policy act from 1984 dictates the franchise fees for most U.S. municipalities. This act helps cities use such fees to establish and fund access channels for local government, educational, and community programming as part of their license agreement. For example, Groton, Massachusetts (population around ten thousand), has a cable contract with Charter Communications. According to the terms of the contract with Groton, Charter returns 4.25 percent of its revenue to the town (5 percent is the maximum a city can charge a cable operator). This money, which has amounted to about $100,000 a year, helps underwrite the city’s cable- access programs and other community services.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 Between 1984 and 1996, lawmakers went back and forth on cable rates and rules, creating a number of cable acts. One Congress would try to end must-carry rules or abandon rate regulation, and then a later one would restore the rules. Congress finally rewrote the nation’s communications laws in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, bringing cable fully under the federal rules that had long governed the telephone, radio, and TV industries. In its most significant move, Congress used the Telecommunications Act to knock down regulatory barriers, allowing regional phone companies, long-distance carriers, and cable companies to enter one another’s markets. The act allows cable companies to offer telephone services, and it permits phone companies to offer Internet services and buy or construct cable systems in communities with fewer than fifty thousand residents. For the first time, owners could operate TV or radio stations in the same market where they owned a cable system. Congress hoped that the new rules would spur competition and lower both phone and cable rates, but this has not typically happened. Instead, cable and phone companies have merged operations in many markets, keeping prices at a premium and competition to a minimum.
Telecommunications Act of 1996 the sweeping update of telecommunications law that led to a wave of media consolidation.
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The 1996 act has had a mixed impact on cable customers. Cable companies argued that it would lead to more competition and innovations in programming, services, and technology. But in fact there is not extensive competition in cable. About 90 percent of communities in the United States still have only one local cable company. In these areas, cable rates have risen faster; and in communities with multiple cable providers, the competition makes a difference—monthly rates are an average of 10 percent lower, according to one FCC study.16 The rise of DBS companies like Dish in the last few years has also made cable prices more competitive. As more customers eventually “cut the cord” and move to cheaper streaming services, cable rates are predicted to drop.
Still, the cable industry has delivered on some of its technology promises, investing nearly $150 billion in technological infrastructure between 1996 and 2009, with most of the funds used for installing high-speed fiber-optic wires to carry TV and phone services. This has enabled cable companies to offer what they call the “triple play”—or the bundling of digital cable television, broadband Internet, and telephone service. By 2015, U.S. cable companies had signed more than forty-six million households to digital programming packages, while 67 percent of households had high-speed cable Internet service and more than thirty million households received their telephone service from cable companies.17
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THE ECONOMICS AND OWNERSHIP OF TELEVISION AND CABLE
It is not much of a stretch to define TV programming as a system that mostly delivers viewers to merchandise displayed in blocks of ads. And with more than $60 billion at stake in advertising revenues each year, networks and cable services work hard to attract the audiences and subscribers that bring in the advertising dollars. But although broadcast and cable advertising have declined in prominence, one recent study reported that more than 80 percent of consumers say that TV advertising—of all ad formats—has the most impact or influence on their buying decisions. A distant second, third, and fourth in the study were magazines (50 percent), online (47 percent), and newspapers (44 percent).18 (See Figure 6.4 for costs for a thirty-second commercial during prime-time programs.) To understand the TV economy today, we need to examine the production, distribution, and syndication of programming; the rating systems that set advertising rates; and the ownership structure that controls programming and delivers content to our homes.
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FIGURE 6.4 PRIME-TIME NETWORK TV PRICING, 2015 The average costs are shown for a thirty-second commercial during prime-time programs on Monday and Thursday nights in 2015. Data from: “Cost for a 30-Second Commercial,” Advertising Age: Marketing Fact Pack, 2016 edition, pp. 18–19. Note:* = Canceled shows
Production The key to the TV industry’s success is offering programs that viewers will habitually watch each week—whether at scheduled times or via catch-up viewing. The networks, producers, and film studios spend fortunes creating programs that they hope will keep us coming back.
Production costs generally fall into two categories: below-the-line and above- the-line. Below-the-line costs, which account for roughly 40 percent of a new program’s production budget, include the technical, or “hardware,” side of production: equipment, special effects, cameras and crews, sets and designers,
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carpenters, electricians, art directors, wardrobe, lighting, and transportation. Above- the-line, or “software,” costs include the creative talent: actors, writers, producers, editors, and directors. These costs account for about 60 percent of a program’s budget, except in the case of successful long-running series (like Friends or The Big Bang Theory), in which salary demands by actors can drive up above-the-line costs to more than 90 percent.
Most prime-time programs today are developed by independent production companies that are owned or backed by a major film studio, such as Sony or Disney. In addition to providing and renting production facilities, these film studios serve as a bank, offering enough capital to carry producers through one or more seasons. In television, programs are funded through deficit financing. This means that the production company leases the show to a network or cable channel for a license fee that is actually lower than the cost of production. (The company hopes to recoup this loss later in lucrative rerun syndication.) Typically, a network leases an episode of a one-hour drama for about $1.5 million for two airings. Each episode, however, might cost the program’s producers about $2.5 million to make, meaning they lose about $1 million per episode. After two years of production (usually forty-four to forty-six episodes), an average network show builds up a large deficit.
deficit financing in television, the process whereby a TV production company leases its programs to a network for a license fee that is actually less than the cost of production; the company hopes to recoup this loss later in rerun syndication.
Because of smaller audiences and fewer episodes per season, costs for original programs on cable channels are lower than those for network broadcasts.19 In 2014–15, cable channels paid over $1 million per episode in licensing fees to production companies. Some cable shows, like AMC’s Breaking Bad, cost about $3 million per episode, but since cable seasons are shorter (usually ten to thirteen episodes per season, compared to twenty-two to twenty-three for broadcast networks), cable channels build up smaller deficits. And unlike networks, cable channels air far fewer programs each year and have two revenue streams to pay for original programs—monthly subscription fees and advertising. (However, because network audiences are usually larger, ad revenue is higher for the traditional networks.) Cable channels also keep costs down by airing three to four new programs a year at most, compared to the ten to twenty that the broadcast networks air.
Still, both networks and cable channels build up deficits. This is where film studios like Disney, Sony, and Twentieth (now 21st) Century Fox have been
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playing a crucial role: They finance the deficit and hope to profit on lucrative deals when the show—such as CSI, Friends, Bones, or The Office—goes into domestic and international syndication.
OFF-NETWORK SYNDICATION programs often include reruns of popular network sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory, which airs on local stations as well as cable channel TBS—where it sometimes beats network programming in the ratings. © CBS/Photofest
To save money and control content, many networks and cable stations create programs that are less expensive than sitcoms and dramas. These include TV newsmagazines and reality programs. For example, NBC’s Dateline requires only about half the outlay (between $700,000 and $900,000 per episode) demanded by a new hour-long drama. In addition, by producing projects in-house, networks and cable channels avoid paying license fees to independent producers and movie studio production companies.
Distribution Programs are paid for in a variety of ways. Cable service providers (e.g., Time Warner Cable or Cablevision) rely mostly on customer subscriptions to pay for distributing their channels, but they also have to pay the broadcast networks retransmission fees to carry network channels and programming. While broadcast networks do earn carriage fees from cable and DBS providers, they pay affiliate stations license fees to carry their programs. In return, the networks sell the bulk of advertising time to recoup their fees and their investments in these programs. In this arrangement, local stations receive national programs that attract large local audiences and are allotted some local ad time to sell during the programs to
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generate their own revenue.
retransmission fee the fee that cable providers pay to broadcast networks for the right to carry their channels.
A common misconception is that TV networks own their affiliated stations. This is not usually true. Although traditional networks like NBC own stations in major markets like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, throughout most of the country networks sign short-term contracts to rent time on local stations. Years ago, the FCC placed restrictions on network-owned-and-operated stations (called O & Os). But the sweeping Telecommunications Act of 1996 abolished most ownership restrictions. Today, owners can buy many stations as long as they reach no more than 39 percent of the nation’s 120 million–plus TV households.
O & Os TV stations “owned and operated” by networks.
Although a local affiliate typically carries a network’s entire lineup, a station may substitute another program. According to clearance rules established in the 1940s by the Justice Department and the FCC, all local affiliates are ultimately responsible for the content of their channels and must clear, or approve, all network programming. Over the years, some of the circumstances in which local affiliates have rejected a network’s programming have been controversial. For example, in 1956 singer Nat King Cole was one of the first African American performers to host a network variety program. However, as a result of pressure applied by several white southern organizations, the program had trouble attracting a national sponsor. When some affiliates, both southern and northern, refused to carry the program, NBC canceled it in 1957. More recently, affiliates may occasionally substitute other programming for network programs they think may offend their local audiences, especially if the programs contain explicit sexual content.
Syndication Keeps Shows Going and Going … Syndication—leasing TV stations or cable networks the exclusive right to air TV shows—is a critical component of the distribution process. Each year, executives from thousands of local TV stations and cable firms gather at the National
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Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) convention to buy or barter for programs that are up for syndication. In so doing, they acquire the exclusive local market rights, usually for two- or three-year periods, to game shows, talk shows, and evergreens—popular old network reruns, such as I Love Lucy.
syndication leasing TV stations or cable networks the exclusive right to air TV shows.
evergreens in TV syndication, popular, lucrative, and enduring network reruns, such as the Andy Griffith Show and I Love Lucy.
Syndication plays a large role in programming for both broadcast and cable networks. For local network-affiliated stations, syndicated programs are often used during fringe time—programming immediately before the evening’s prime-time schedule (early fringe) and following the local evening news or a network late- night talk show (late fringe). Cable channels also syndicate network shows but are more flexible with time slots; for example, TNT may run older network syndicated episodes of Law & Order or Bones during its prime-time schedule, along with original cable programs like Rizzoli & Isles.
fringe time in television, the time slot either immediately before the evening’s prime-time schedule (called early fringe) or immediately following the local evening news or the network’s late-night talk shows (called late fringe).
Types of Syndication In off-network syndication (commonly called “reruns”), older programs that no longer run during network prime time are made available for reruns to local stations, cable operators, online services, and foreign markets. This type of syndication occurs when a program builds up a supply of episodes (usually three or four seasons’ worth) that are then leased to hundreds of TV stations and cable or DBS providers in the United States and overseas. A show can be put into rerun syndication even if new episodes are airing on network television. Rerun, or off-
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network, syndication is the key to erasing the losses generated by deficit financing. With a successful program, the profits can be enormous. For instance, the early rerun cycle of Friends earned, on average, $4 million an episode from syndication in 250-plus markets, plus cable, totaling over $1 billion. Because the show’s success meant the original production costs were already covered, the syndication market became almost pure profit for the producers and their backers. This is why deficit financing endures: Although investors rarely hit the jackpot, when they do, the revenues more than cover a lot of losses and failed programs.
off-network syndication in television, the process whereby older programs that no longer run during prime time are made available for reruns to local stations, cable operators, online services, and foreign markets.
FIRST-RUN SYNDICATION programs often include talk shows like The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which debuted in 2003 and is now one of the highest-rated daytime series. MANDEL NGAN/Getty Images
First-run syndication relates to any program specifically produced for sale
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into syndication markets. Quiz programs such as Wheel of Fortune and daytime talk or advice shows like The Ellen DeGeneres Show or Dr. Phil are made for first- run syndication. The producers of these programs usually sell them directly to local markets around the country and the world.
first-run syndication in television, the process whereby new programs are specifically produced for sale in syndication markets rather than for network television.
Barter versus Cash Deals Most financing of television syndication is either a cash deal or a barter deal. In a cash deal, the distributor offers a series for syndication to the highest bidder. Because of exclusive contractual arrangements, programs air on only one broadcast outlet per city in a major TV market or, in the case of cable, on one cable channel’s service across the country. Whoever bids the most gets to syndicate the program (which can range from a few thousand dollars for a week’s worth of episodes in a small market to $250,000 a week in a large market). In a variation of a cash deal called cash-plus, distributors retain some time to sell national commercial spots in successful syndicated shows (when the show is distributed, it already contains the national ads). While this means the local station has less ad time to sell, it also usually pays less for the syndicated show.
Although syndicators prefer cash deals, barter deals are usually arranged for new, untested, or older but less popular programs. In a straight barter deal, no money changes hands. Instead, a syndicator offers a program to a local TV station in exchange for a split of the advertising revenue. For example, in a 7/5 barter deal, during each airing the show’s producers and syndicator retain seven minutes of ad time for national spots and leave stations with five minutes of ad time for local spots. As programs become more profitable, syndicators repackage and lease the shows as cash-plus deals.
Measuring Television Viewing Primarily, TV shows live or die based on how satisfied advertisers are with the quantity and quality of the viewing audience. Since 1950, the major organization that tracks and rates prime-time viewing has been the Nielsen Corporation, which estimates what viewers are watching in the nation’s major markets. Ratings services like Nielsen provide advertisers, broadcast networks, local stations, and cable channels with considerable details about viewers—from race and gender to age, occupation, and educational background.
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The Impact of Ratings and Shares on Programming In TV measurement, a rating is a statistical estimate expressed as the percentage of households that are tuned to a program in the market being sampled. Another audience measure is the share, a statistical estimate of the percentage of homes that are tuned to a specific program but expressed as a percentage of households that are actually using their sets at the time of the sample. For instance, let’s say on a typical night that five thousand metered homes are sampled by Nielsen in 210 large U.S. cities, and four thousand of those households have their TV sets turned on. Of those four thousand, about one thousand are tuned to The Voice on NBC. The rating for that show is 20 percent—that is, one thousand households watching The Voice out of five thousand TV sets monitored. The share is 25 percent—one thousand homes watching The Voice out of a total of four thousand sets turned on.
rating in TV audience measurement, a statistical estimate expressed as a percentage of households tuned to a program in the local or national market being sampled.
share in TV audience measurement, a statistical estimate of the percentage of homes tuned to a certain program compared with those simply using their sets at the time of a sample.
NICHE MARKETS As TV’s audience gets fragmented among broadcast, cable, DVRs, and the Internet, some shows have focused on targeting smaller niche audiences instead of
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the broad public. IFC’s Portlandia, for example, has a relatively small but devoted fan base that supports the show’s culturally specific satire. Scott Green/© IFC/Everett Collection
The importance of ratings and shares to the survival of TV programs cannot be overestimated. In practice, television is an industry in which networks, producers, and distributors target, guarantee, and “sell” viewers in blocks to advertisers. Audience measurement tells advertisers not only how many people are watching but, more important, what kinds of people are watching. Prime-time advertisers on the broadcast networks have mainly been interested in reaching relatively affluent eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old viewers, who account for most consumer spending. If a show is attracting those viewers, advertisers will compete to buy time during that program. Typically, as many as nine out of ten new shows introduced each fall on the networks either do not attain the required ratings or fail to reach the “right” viewers. The result is cancellation. Cable, in contrast, targets smaller audiences, so programs that do not attract a large audience might survive on cable because most of cable’s revenues come from subscription fees rather than advertising. For example, on cable, AMC’s award-winning Breaking Bad was considered successful. However, that show rarely attracted an audience of over 2 million in its first two seasons. But by the fifth and final season, its audience had grown to 6 million viewers, and the show’s finale drew over 10 million viewers in 2013. (The show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, has credited Netflix with Breaking Bad’s rating surge, because its streaming service allowed viewers to catch up with the series.) By comparison, CBS’s NCIS drew an average audience of 22.4 million for each show in 2013–14.
Assessing Today’s Converged and Multiscreen Markets During the height of the network era, a prime-time series with a rating of 17 or 18 and a share of between 28 and 30 was generally a success. By the late 2000s, though, with increasing competition from cable, DVDs, and the Internet, the threshold for success had dropped to a rating of 3 or 4 and a share of under 10. In fact, with all the screen options and targeted audiences, it is almost impossible for a TV program today to crack the highest-rated series list (see Table 6.1). Unfortunately, many popular programs have been canceled over the years because advertisers considered their audiences too young, too old, or too poor. To account for the rise of DVRs, Nielsen now offers three versions of its ratings: live; live plus twenty-four hours, counting how many DVR users played shows within a day of recording; and live plus seven days, adding in how many viewers played the shows within a week. TV series that benefit from large boosts in live plus seven numbers include huge hits like The Big Bang Theory, moderate performers like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and more niche-specific shows like New Girl.20
In its efforts to keep up with TV’s move to smaller screens, Nielsen is also using special software to track TV viewing on computers and mobile devices.
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Today, with the fragmentation of media audiences, the increase in third- and fourth-screen technologies, and the decline in traditional TV set viewing, targeting smaller niche markets and consumers has become advertisers’ main game.
The biggest revenue game changer in the small-screen world will probably be Google’s YouTube, which in 2011 and 2012 entered into a joint venture with nearly a hundred content producers to create niche online channels. YouTube advances up to $5 million to each content producer, and it keeps the ad money it collects until the advance is paid off; revenue after that is split between YouTube and the content producer. Some familiar names have signed on, including Madonna, Shaquille O’Neal, and Amy Poehler. Among the popular channels already launched are the music video site Noisey, which had twenty-seven million visits in its first two months, and Drive, a channel for auto fans, which had seven million views in its first four months.
TABLE 6.1 THE TOP 10 HIGHEST-RATED TV SERIES; INDIVIDUAL PROGRAMS (SINCE 1960) Note: The Seinfeld finale, which aired in May 1998, drew a rating of 41-plus and a total viewership of 76 million; in contrast, the final episode of Friends in May 2004 had a 25 rating and drew about 52 million viewers. (The M*A*S*H finale in 1983 had more than 100 million viewers.) Data from: The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1997 (Mahwah, N.J.: World Almanac Books, 1996), 296; Corbett Steinberg, TV Facts (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985); A.C. Nielsen Media Research.
Program Network Date Rating
1 M*A*S*H (final episode) CBS 2/28/83 60.2
2 Dallas (“Who Shot J.R.?” episode) CBS 11/21/80 53.3
3 The Fugitive (final episode) ABC 8/29/67 45.9
4 Cheers (final episode) NBC 5/20/93 45.5
5 Ed Sullivan Show (Beatles’ first U.S. TV appearance) CBS 2/9/64 45.3
6 Beverly Hillbillies CBS 1/8/64 44.0
7 Ed Sullivan Show (Beatles’ second U.S. TV appearance) CBS 2/16/64 43.8
8 Beverly Hillbillies CBS 1/15/64 42.8
9 Beverly Hillbillies CBS 2/26/64 42.4
10 Beverly Hillbillies CBS 3/25/64 42.2
The way advertising works online differs substantially from the way it works on network TV, where advertisers pay as much as $400,000 to buy one thirty- second ad during Fox’s Empire. Online advertisers pay a rate called a CPM (“cost per mille”; mille is Latin for “one thousand”), meaning the rate per one thousand impressions—which is a single ad shown to a person visiting an online site. So if a product company or ad agency purchases one thousand online impressions at a $1
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CPM rate, that means the company or agency would spend $10 to have its advertisement displayed ten thousand times. Popular online sites where advertisers are reaching targeted audiences could set a CPM rate between $10 and $100, while less popular sites might command only a $.10 to $.20 CPM rate from ad agencies and product companies. For some of its new YouTube TV channels, analysts are predicting that Google might be able to charge as much as $20 CPM for a relatively popular site.
The Major Programming Corporations After deregulation began in the 1980s, many players in TV and cable consolidated to broaden their offerings, expand their market share, and lower expenses. For example, Disney now owns both ABC and ESPN and can spread the costs of sports programming over its networks and its various ESPN cable channels. This business strategy has produced an oligopoly in which just a handful of media corporations now controls programming.
The Major Broadcast Networks Despite their declining reach and the rise of cable, the traditional networks have remained attractive business investments. In 1985, General Electric, which once helped start RCA-NBC, bought back NBC. In 1995, Disney bought ABC for $19 billion; in 1999, Viacom acquired CBS for $37 billion (Viacom and CBS split in 2005, but Viacom’s CEO, Sumner Redstone, has remained CBS’s main stockholder and executive chairman; in 2014, his holdings in both CBS and Viacom totaled $6 billion). And in January 2011, the FCC and the Department of Justice approved Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal from GE—a deal valued at $30 billion.
To combat audience erosion in the 1990s, the major networks began acquiring or developing cable channels to recapture viewers. Thus what appears to be competition between TV and cable is sometimes an illusion. NBC, for example, operates MSNBC, CNBC, and Bravo, while ABC owns ESPN along with portions of Lifetime, A&E, and History.
T R A C K I N G T E C H N O L O G Y
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T
Binging Gives TV Shows a Second Chance—and Viewers a Second Home
raditional broadcast networks like Fox and NBC have been slow to understand or adapt to how TV viewers today—old and young, friends and families—like to binge-watch, usually on multiple episodes without commercial interruption. The old structure of watching a new TV episode in the fall or catching
the rerun over the summer is a discredited model in these digital days. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, among other services, have transformed TV viewing—even extending the lives of shows that died after relatively few seasons on old-time network TV. Take Arrested Development, a critically beloved comedy that Fox killed in 2006. In 2013, Netflix resurrected the show and released all episodes of the new “season” at once, for fans’ binging pleasure. Other marginally rated network shows have since made similar leaps: Hulu picked up The Mindy Project, which Fox canceled after three seasons, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was scheduled to air on NBC before the network got cold feet and sold the series to Netflix directly, where it became a streaming and binging hit.
In an article for Wired magazine, cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken tried to answer the “why we binge-watch” question. He first offered a commonsense response: “One way to answer this question is to say, well, we binge on TV for the same reason we binge on food. For a sense of security, creature comfort, to make the world go away.”1
But then, as cultural anthropologists do, he dug deeper: “So much of contemporary culture leaves the station without us; binging is a way to climb aboard … and get back in touch with culture outside the constraints of time. Binge-watching breaks the linearity of having to watch TV on someone else’s terms.”2 In other words, the digital age, technologically sophisticated and rapidly evolving, overflows with information and stories. So binging allows us to catch up and not feel left out because we missed The Walking Dead, Person of Interest, or Parks and Recreation (pictured below) when these series first came out. Netflix shows like Daredevil can be binged immediately or months after
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their initial release.
McCracken argues that TV binging is partly about making reality “go away” in order to build a refuge from everyday life. “The second screen,” he says, “in some ways becomes our second home.” Then by drawing our friends and family into a particular series and the binging ritual, “we can make that world—that show—a place of sudden commonality.” McCracken says that when we binge-watch a program, “we don’t just watch … we occupy. We inhabit it. Such relocation is powerful for creating meaning for the self and for the family, especially as TV has taken on a new role in our lives. It has become the structural equivalent of our place in the country, our second home.”3 Creators of cult TV shows, then, aren’t the only ones who feel an increased sense of security in the new binge-friendly market.
Everett Collection
Major Cable and DBS Companies In the late 1990s, cable became a coveted investment, not so much for its ability to carry TV programming as for its access to households connected with high- bandwidth wires. Today, there are about 5,000 U.S. cable systems, down from 11,200 in 1994. Since the 1990s, thousands of cable systems have been bought by large multiple-system operators (MSOs), corporations like Comcast and Time Warner Cable (TWC) that own many cable systems. For years the industry called its major players multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), a term that included DBS providers like DirecTV and Dish. By 2014, cable’s main
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trade organization, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), had moved away from the MVPD classification and started using the term video subscription services, which now also includes Netflix and Hulu Plus (see Table 6.2). Some critics say that the new classification term has provided new hope for the 2014 failed merger between Comcast and TWC—for years the dominant two U.S. cable companies. Cable attorneys argue that the streaming service Netflix now dwarfs Comcast and TWC—with 43 million U.S. subscribers in 2016, more than those of Comcast and TWC combined. In addition, with AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV in 2015, the subscriber numbers of the merged phone and DBS providers also surpassed those of Comcast.
multiple-system operators (MSOs) large corporations that own numerous cable television systems.
multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) the cable industry’s name for its largest revenue generators, including cable companies and DBS providers.
video subscription services a term referring to cable and video-on-demand providers, introduced to include streaming-only companies like Hulu Plus and Netflix.
In the cable industry, Comcast became the top player after its takeover of NBC and move into network broadcasting. Back in 2001, AT&T had merged its cable and broadband industry in a $72 billion deal with Comcast, then the third-largest MSO. The new Comcast instantly became the cable industry leader. In 2015, Comcast also owned E!, NBCSN, the Golf Channel, Universal Studios, Fandango (the online movie ticket site), and a 32 percent stake in Hulu (with Fox and Disney). In 2015, there were about 660 companies still operating the nation’s 5,000 cable systems. Along with Comcast, the other large MSOs included TWC, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, and Cablevision Systems.
In the DBS market, DirecTV and Dish control virtually all the DBS service in the continental United States. In 2008, News Corp. sold DirecTV to cable service provider Liberty Media, which also owned the Encore and Starz movie channels. The independently owned Dish was founded as EchoStar Communications in 1980. In 2015, to counter the merger talks between Comcast and TWC, DirecTV merged with AT&T. Over the last few years, TV services (combined with existing voice and Internet services) offered by telephone giants AT&T (U-verse) and
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Verizon (FiOS) have developed into viable competitors for cable and DBS.
The Effects of Consolidation
TABLE 6.2 TOP 10 VIDEO SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES IN 2015 Data from: National Cable & Telecommunications Association, “Industry Data,” www.ncta.com/industry-data.
Rank Video Subscription Service Subscribers
1 Netflix 43.2 million
2 AT&T 25.4 million
3 Comcast 22.3 million
4 Dish 13.9 million
5 Time Warner Cable 11.0 million
6 Hulu 9.0 million
7 Verizon FiOS 5.8 million
8 Charter Communications 4.4 million
9 Cox Communications 4.0 million
10 Cablevision 2.6 million
There are some concerns that the trend toward mergers of cable, DBS, broadcasting, and telephone companies will limit expression of political viewpoints, programming options, and technical innovation, and lead to price- fixing. These concerns raise an important question: In an economic climate in which fewer owners control the circulation of communication, what happens to new ideas or controversial views that may not always be profitable to circulate?
The response from the industries is that, given the tremendous capital investment it takes to run television, cable, and other media enterprises, it is necessary to form business conglomerates in order to buy up struggling companies and keep them afloat. This argument suggests that without today’s video subscription services, many smaller ventures in programming would not be possible. However, there is evidence that large MSOs and other big media companies can wield their monopoly power unfairly. Business disputes have caused disruptions as networks and cable providers have dropped one another from their services, leaving customers in the dark. For example, in August 2013, Time Warner Cable took CBS off its systems for a month in a bitter dispute over retransmission fee hikes the network sought. In addition to blacking out WCBS in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, and five other markets, the cable company yanked Showtime from its systems. This is one of many examples that illustrate what can happen when a few large corporations engage in arguments over prices and programs: Consumers are often left with little recourse or choice in markets with
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minimal or no competition and programming from just a handful of large media companies.
Alternative Voices After suffering through years of rising rates and limited expansion of services, some small U.S. cities have decided to challenge the private monopolies of cable giants by building competing, publicly owned cable systems. So far, the municipally owned cable systems number in the hundreds and can be found in places like Glasgow, Kentucky; Kutztown, Pennsylvania; Cedar Falls, Iowa; and Provo, Utah. In most cases, they’re operated by the community-owned, nonprofit electric utilities. There are more than two thousand such municipal utilities across the United States, serving about 14 percent of the population and creating the potential for more municipal utilities to expand into communications services. As nonprofit entities, the municipal operations are less expensive for cable subscribers, too.
More than a quarter of the country’s two thousand municipal utilities offer broadband services, including cable, high-speed Internet, and telephone. How will commercial cable operators fend off this unprecedented competition? In 2016 in Glasgow, Kentucky, the local Electric Plant Board offered bundled services that were about $20 a month cheaper than Comcast’s $100 per-month cost. According to William Ray, superintendent of the board, “If cable operators are afraid of cities competing with them, there is a defense that is impregnable—they can charge reasonable rates, offer consummate customer service, improve their product, and conduct their business as if they were a guest that owes their existence to the benevolence of the city that has invited them in.”21
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TELEVISION, CABLE, AND DEMOCRACY
In the 1950s, television’s arrival significantly changed the media landscape— particularly the radio and magazine industries, both of which had to cultivate specialized audiences and markets to survive. In its heyday, television carried the egalitarian promise that it could bypass traditional print literacy and reach all segments of society. This promise was reenergized in the 1970s when cable-access channels gave local communities the chance to create their own TV programming. In such a heterogeneous and diverse nation, the concept of a visual, affordable mass medium, giving citizens entertainment and information that they could all talk about the next day, held great appeal. However, since its creation, commercial television has tended to serve the interests of profit more often than those of democracy. Despite this, television remains the main storytelling medium of our time.
The development of cable, VCRs and DVD players, DVRs, the Internet, and smartphone services has fragmented television’s audience by appealing to viewers’ individual and special needs. These changes and services, by providing more specialized and individual choices, also alter television’s role as a national unifying cultural force, potentially de-emphasizing the idea that we are all citizens of a larger nation and world. Moreover, many cable channels have survived mostly by offering live sports or recycling old television shows and movies. Although cable and on-demand streaming services like Netflix are creating more and more original high-quality programs, they rarely reach even the diminished audience numbers commanded by the traditional broadcast networks. In fact, given that the television networks and many leading cable channels are now owned by the same media conglomerates, cable has evolved into something of an extension of the networks.
Even though cable audiences are growing and network viewership is contracting, the division between the two is blurring. New generations who have grown up on cable and the Internet rarely make a distinction between a broadcast network, a cable service, DBS, and an on-demand program. In addition, tablets, smartphones, and Internet services that now offer or create our favorite “TV” programs are breaking down the distinctions between mobile devices and TV screens. Cable, which once offered promise as a place for alternative programming and noncommercial voices, is now being usurped by the Internet, where all kinds of TV experiments are under way.
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TV AND DEMOCRACY The first televised presidential debates took place in 1960, pitting Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy against Vice President Richard Nixon. Don Hewitt, who later created the long-running TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes, directed the first debate and has argued that the TV makeup that Nixon turned down would have helped create a better appearance alongside that of his tanned opponent. In fact, one study at the time reported that a majority of radio listeners thought Nixon won the first debate while a majority of TV viewers believed Kennedy won. Paul Schutzer/Timepix-Getty Images
The bottom line is that television, despite the audience fragmentation, still provides a gathering place for friends and family at the same time that it provides anywhere access to a favorite show. Like all media forms before it, television is adapting to changing technology and shifting economics. As the technology becomes more portable and personal, TV-related industries continue to search for less expensive ways to produce stories and more channels on which to deliver them. But what will remain common ground on this shifting terrain is that television continues as our nation’s chief storyteller, whether those stories come in the form of news bulletins, sporting events, cable dramas, network sitcoms, or YouTube vignettes.
TV’s future will be about serving smaller rather than larger audiences. As sites like YouTube develop original programming and as niche cable services like the
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Weather Channel produce reality TV series about storms, no audience seems too small and no subject matter too narrow for today’s TV world. For example, by 2013, Duck Dynasty—a program about an eccentric Louisiana family that got rich making products for duck hunters—had become a hit series on A&E. The program averaged 12.4 million viewers in 2012–13, a cable record, but then lost 75 percent of those viewers by 2015, as many viewers grew weary of the series. An overwhelming number of programming choices like this now exist for big and small TV screens alike. How might this converged TV landscape—with its volatile ups and downs in viewer numbers—change how audiences watch, and pay for, TV? With hundreds of shows available, will we adopt à la carte viewing habits, in which we download or stream only the shows that interest us, rather than pay for cable (or DBS) packages with hundreds of channels we don’t watch?
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6 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is mass media, cultural expression, and storytelling. As television and cable change their shape and size, do they remain the dominant way our culture tells stories?
By the end of the 1950s, television had become an “electronic hearth,” where families gathered in living rooms to share cultural experiences. By 2012, though, the television experience had splintered. Now we are watching programming on our laptops, smartphones, and tablets, making the experience increasingly individual rather than communal. Still, television remains the mass medium that can reach most of us at a single moment in time, whether it’s during a popular sitcom or during a presidential debate.
In this shift, what has been lost, and what has been gained? As an electronic hearth, television has offered coverage of special moments—inaugurations, assassinations, moonwalks, space disasters, Super Bowls, Roots, the Olympics, 9/11, hurricanes, presidential campaigns, Arab uprisings, World Cups—that brought large heterogeneous groups together for the common experience of sharing information, celebrating triumphs, mourning loss, and electing presidents. Accessible now in multiple digitized versions, the TV image has become portable —just as radio became portable in the 1950s. Today, we can watch television in cars, in the park, and in class (even when we’re not supposed to).
The bottom line is that television in all its configurations is now both electronic hearth and digital encounter. It still provides a gathering place for friends and family, but now we can also watch a favorite show almost whenever or wherever we want. Like all media forms before it, television is adapting to changing technology and shifting economics. As technology becomes more portable and personal, the network TV, cable, and video subscription industries search for less expensive ways to produce and deliver television. Still, television remains the main place—whether it’s the big LED screen or the handheld smartphone—where we go for stories. In what ways do you think this will change or remain the case in the future? Where do you prefer to get your stories?
KEY TERMS
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The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
analog, 176 digital, 176 prime time, 178 network era, 180 CATV, 180 narrowcasting, 181 basic cable, 181 superstations, 181 premium channels, 184 pay-per-view (PPV), 184 video-on-demand (VOD), 184 direct broadcast satellite (DBS), 184 time shifting, 185 third screens, 185 fourth screens, 187 kinescope, 188 sketch comedy, 188 situation comedy, 188 anthology dramas, 189 episodic series, 190 chapter shows, 190 serial programs, 190 affiliate stations, 191 Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR), 195 fin-syn, 196 must-carry rules, 196 access channels, 196 leased channels, 198 electronic publishers, 198 common carriers, 198
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Telecommunications Act of 1996, 199 deficit financing, 201 retransmission fees, 202 O & Os, 202 syndication, 202 evergreens, 202 fringe time, 202 off-network syndication, 202 first-run syndication, 203 rating, 203 share, 203 multiple-system operators (MSOs), 207 multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), 207 video subscription services, 207
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
The Origins and Development of Television 1. What were the major technical standards established for
television in the 1940s? What happened to analog television? 2. Why did the FCC freeze the allocation of TV licenses between
1948 and 1952? 3. How did the sponsorship of network programs change during the
1950s? The Development of Cable
4. What is CATV, and what were its advantages over broadcast television?
5. How did satellite distribution change the cable industry? 6. What is DBS? How well does it compete with the cable
industry?
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Technology and Convergence Change Viewing Habits 7. How have computers and mobile devices challenged the TV and
cable industries? 8. What has happened to the audience in the digital era of third and
fourth screens? Major Programming Trends
9. What are the differences between sketch comedy and sitcoms on television?
10. How did news develop at the networks in the late 1940s and 1950s?
11. What are the challenges faced by public broadcasting today? Regulatory Challenges to Television and Cable 12. What rules and regulations did the government impose to restrict
the networks’ power? 13. How did cable pose a challenge to broadcasting, and how did the
FCC respond to cable’s early development? 14. How did the Telecommunications Act of 1996 change the
economic shape and future of the television and cable industries? The Economics and Ownership of Television and Cable 15. Why has it become more difficult for independent producers to
create programs for television? 16. What are the differences between off-network syndication and
first-run syndication? 17. What are ratings and shares in TV audience measurement? Television, Cable, and Democracy 18. Why has television’s role as a national cultural center changed
over the years? What are programmers doing to retain some of their influence?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. How much television do you watch today? How has technology influenced your current viewing habits?
2. If you were a television or cable executive, what changes would you try to make in today’s programs? How would you try to adapt to third- and fourth-screen technologies?
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3. Do you think the must-carry rules violate a cable company’s First Amendment rights? Why or why not?
4. How do you think new technologies will further change TV viewing habits?
5. How could television be used to improve our social and political life?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter. VIDEO: WIRED OR WIRELESS: TELEVISION DELIVERY TODAY This video explores the switch to digital TV signals in 2009 and how it is changing television delivery.
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7 Movies and the Impact of Images
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© Lucasfilm Ltd./Everett Collection
SOUNDS AND IMAGES
“A LONG TIME AGO in a galaxy far, far away …”
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So begins the now-famous opening credit crawl of Star Wars. The first appearance of those words was in movie theaters on earth, but the time now is rather long ago: May 25, 1977. The space epic changed the culture of the movie industry. Star Wars—produced, written, and directed by George Lucas—departed from the personal filmmaking of the early 1970s and spawned a blockbuster mentality that formed a new primary audience for Hollywood: teenagers. It had all of the now-typical blockbuster characteristics, including massive promotion and lucrative merchandising tie-ins. Repeat attendance and positive buzz among young people made the first Star Wars the most successful movie of its generation. Star Wars has influenced not only the cultural side of moviemaking but also the technical form. In the first Star Wars trilogy, produced in the 1970s and 1980s, Lucas developed technologies that are now commonplace in moviemaking: digital animation, special effects, and computer-based film editing. With the second trilogy (which was a prequel to the
EARLY TECHNOLOGY AND THE EVOLUTION OF MOVIES THE RISE OF THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIO SYSTEM THE STUDIO SYSTEM’S GOLDEN AGE THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM THE ECONOMICS OF THE MOVIE BUSINESS POPULAR MOVIES AND DEMOCRACY
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◄ Fans of the classic 1970s Star Wars films were skeptical when George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company in 2012 for $4.06 billion, but a new trilogy of films starting with The Force Awakens has brought new life to the Star Wars franchise.
narrative of the original Star Wars), Lucas again broke new ground in the film industry.
Several scenes of Star Wars: Episode I— The Phantom Menace (1999) were shot on digital video, easing integration with digital special effects. The Phantom Menace also became the first full-length motion picture from a major studio to use digital projectors in its exhibition, which began the movement to replace standard film projectors in theaters around the world. By the time the last installment of the second trilogy—Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith (2005)—was released, Star Wars was firmly in place as one of the most successful film series of all time, with more than $4.5 billion in worldwide box office revenue.1
The third Star Wars trilogy opened in late 2015 with Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens. The story picks up thirty years after Star Wars: Episode VI— Return of the Jedi (1983). Incredibly, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia return from the original trilogy, played by original actors Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher, respectively. However, perhaps the biggest news regarding The Force Awakens is on the business side: For the first time, Star Wars is a Disney property. In 2012, Disney paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm—George Lucas’s independent production company, which had controlled the Star Wars legacy from its inception.
At the time of the announcement, Disney CEO Robert Iger spoke about the business possibilities: “This transaction combines a world-class portfolio of content including Star Wars, one of the greatest family entertainment franchises of all time, with Disney’s unique and unparalleled creativity across multiple platforms, businesses, and markets to generate sustained growth and drive significant long-term value.”2 In plain language, this means more Star Wars on television, in digital games, in theme parks, and in consumer products.
Some purists may groan at the volume of these ancillaries, but Disney’s track
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record at turning its acquisitions into even greater media and merchandise franchises is enviable. Two other important movie brand acquisitions were its purchase of Pixar for $7.6 billion in 2006, and Marvel for $3.96 billion in 2009.3 Pixar has created some of the most successful animated movies of the past two decades, such as Up (2009), Toy Story 3 (2010), Cars 2 (2011), Monsters University (2013), Inside Out (2015), and Finding Dory (2016). Marvel, in retrospect, appears to be even more of a bargain. Disney-produced films from the Marvel cinematic universe include The Avengers (2012), Iron Man 3 (2013), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), and Doctor Strange (2016).
In fact, Disney’s business for the first film in the third Star Wars trilogy (Episode VII) exceeded all expectations. Four months after its December 2015 premiere in the United States, The Force Awakens had grossed more than $935 million in domestic box-office receipts and totaled more than $2 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-earning film in U.S. box-office history. Episode VIII is scheduled for a 2017 release, and the story continues in Episode IX, expected in 2019.
Disney’s purchase of the Star Wars franchise is yielding more than just another trilogy. In between each new episode premiere, Disney is releasing individual anthology films that fill in parts of the entire Star Wars saga. The first is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), which covers events leading up to Star Wars: A New Hope (the original Star Wars film from 1977). Disney has additional anthology films scheduled for 2018 and 2020, strategically ensuring a new Star Wars film for every year through 2020. The plan is likely to please fans and generate an enormous return on investment for Disney’s Star Wars franchise.
DATING BACK TO THE LATE 1800S, films have had a substantial social and cultural impact on society. Blockbuster movies such as Star Wars, E.T., Titanic, Lord of the Rings, Avatar, and The Avengers represent what Hollywood has become—America’s storyteller. Movies tell communal stories that evoke and symbolize our most enduring values and our secret desires (from The Wizard of Oz to The Godfather to the Batman series).
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
Films have also helped moviegoers sort through experiences that either affirmed or deviated from their own values. Some movies—for instance, Last
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Tango in Paris (1972), Scarface (1983), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and 12 Years a Slave (2013)—have allowed audiences to survey “the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden” and to experience, in a controlled way, “the possibility of stepping across this boundary.”4 Such films— criticized by some for appearing to glorify crime and violence, verge on pornography, trample on sacred beliefs, or promote unpatriotic viewpoints—have even, on occasion, been banned from public viewing.
Finally, movies have acted to bring people together. Movies distract us from our daily struggles: They evoke and symbolize universal themes of human experience (that of childhood, coming of age, family relations, growing older, and coping with death); they can help us understand and respond to major historical events and tragedies (for instance, the Holocaust and 9/11); and they encourage us to reexamine contemporary ideas as the world evolves, particularly in terms of how we think about race, class, spirituality, gender, and sexuality.
In this chapter, we examine the rich legacy and current standing of movies. We will:
Consider film’s early technology and the evolution of film as a mass medium Look at the arrival of silent feature films; the emergence of Hollywood; and the development of the studio system with regard to production, distribution, and exhibition Explore the coming of sound and the power of movie storytelling Analyze major film genres, directors, and alternatives to Hollywood’s style, including independent films, foreign films, and documentaries Survey the movie business today—its major players, economic clout, technological advances, and implications for democracy Examine how convergence has changed the way the industry distributes movies and the way we experience them
As you consider these topics, think about your own relationship with movies. What is the first movie you remember watching? What are your movie-watching experiences like today? How have certain movies made you think differently about an issue, yourself, or others? For more questions to help you think through the role of movies in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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EARLY TECHNOLOGY AND THE EVOLUTION OF MOVIES
History often credits a handful of enterprising individuals with developing the new technologies that lead to new categories of mass media. Such innovations, however, are usually the result of simultaneous investigations by numerous people. In addition, the innovations of both known and unknown inventors are propelled by economic and social forces as well as by individual abilities.5
The Development of Film The concept of film goes back as early as Leonardo da Vinci, who theorized in the late fifteenth century about creating a device that would reproduce reality. Other early precursors to film included the Magic Lantern, developed in the seventeenth century, which projected images painted on glass plates using an oil lamp as a light source; the thaumatrope, invented in 1824, a two-sided card with different images on each side that appeared to combine the images when twirled; and the zoetrope, introduced in 1834, a cylindrical device that rapidly twirled images inside a cylinder, which appeared to make the images move.
EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE’S study of horses in motion proved that a racehorse gets all four feet off the ground during a gallop. In his various studies of motion, Muybridge would use up to
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twelve cameras at a time. Eadweard Muybridge/ Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Muybridge and Goodwin Make Pictures Move The development stage of movies began when inventors started manipulating photographs to make them appear to move while simultaneously projecting them onto a screen. Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer living in America, is credited with being the first to do both. He studied motion by using multiple cameras to take successive photographs of humans and animals in motion. One of Muybridge’s first projects involved using photography to determine if a racehorse actually lifts all four feet from the ground at full gallop (it does). By 1880, Muybridge had developed a method for projecting the photographic images onto a wall for public viewing. These early image sequences were extremely brief, showing only a horse jumping over a fence or a man running a few feet, because only so many photographs could be mounted inside the spinning cylinder that projected the images.
Meanwhile, other inventors were also working on capturing moving images and projecting them. In 1884, George Eastman (founder of Eastman Kodak) developed the first roll film—a huge improvement over the heavy metal and glass plates used to make individual photos. The first roll film had a paper backing that had to be stripped off during the film developing stage. Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, a Frenchman living in England, invented the first motion picture camera using roll film. Le Prince, who disappeared mysteriously on a train ride to Paris in 1890, is credited with filming the first motion picture, Roundhay Garden Scene, in 1888. About two seconds’ worth of the film survives today.
In 1889, a New Jersey minister, Hannibal Goodwin, improved Eastman’s roll film by using thin strips of transparent, pliable material called celluloid, which could hold a coating of chemicals sensitive to light. Goodwin’s breakthrough solved a major problem: It enabled a strip of film to move through a camera and be photographed in rapid succession, producing a series of pictures. Because celluloid was transparent (except for the images made on it during filming), it was ideal for projection, as light could easily shine through it. George Eastman, who also announced the development of celluloid film, legally battled Goodwin for years over the patent rights. The courts eventually awarded Goodwin the invention, but Eastman’s company became the major manufacturer of film stock for motion pictures after buying Goodwin’s patents.
celluloid a transparent and pliable film that can hold a coating of chemicals sensitive to light.
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Edison and the Lumières Create Motion Pictures As with the development of sound recording, Thomas Edison takes center stage in most accounts of the invention of motion pictures. In the late 1800s, Edison initially planned to merge phonograph technology and moving images to create talking pictures (which would not happen in feature films until 1927). Because there was no breakthrough, however, Edison lost interest. He directed an assistant, William Kennedy Dickson, to combine his incandescent lightbulb, Goodwin’s celluloid, and Le Prince’s camera to create another early movie camera, the kinetograph, and a single-person viewing system, the kinetoscope. This small projection system housed fifty feet of film that revolved on spools (the device was similar to those in a library microfilm reader). Viewers looked through a hole and saw images moving on a tiny plate. In 1894, the first kinetoscope parlor, featuring two rows of coin-operated machines, opened on Broadway in New York.
kinetograph an early movie camera developed by Thomas Edison’s assistant in the 1890s.
kinetoscope an early film projection system that served as a kind of peep show in which viewers looked through a hole and saw images moving on a tiny plate.
Meanwhile, in France, brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière developed the cinematograph, a combined camera, film developer, and projection system. The projection system was particularly important, as it allowed more than one person at a time to see the moving images on a large screen. In a Paris café on December 28, 1895, the Lumières projected ten short movies for viewers who paid one franc each, on such subjects as a man falling off a horse and a child trying to grab a fish from a bowl. Within three weeks, twenty-five hundred people were coming each night to see how, according to one Paris paper, film “perpetuates the image of movement.”
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KINETOSCOPES allowed individuals to view motion pictures through a window in a cabinet that held the film. The first kinetoscope parlor opened in 1894 and was such a hit that many others quickly followed. Everett Collection
With innovators around the world now dabbling in moving pictures, Edison’s lab renewed its interest in film. Edison patented several inventions and manufactured a new large-screen system called the vitascope, which enabled filmstrips of longer lengths to be projected without interruption and hinted at the potential of movies as a future mass medium. Staged at a music hall in New York in April 1896, Edison’s first public showing of the vitascope featured shots from a boxing match and waves rolling onto a beach. Some members of the audience were so taken with the realism of the film images that they stepped back from the screen’s crashing waves to avoid getting their feet wet. Early movie demonstrations such as these marked the beginning of the film industry’s entrepreneurial stage. By 1900, short movies had become a part of the entertainment industry and were showing up in amusement arcades, traveling carnivals, wax museums, and vaudeville theater.
vitascope a large-screen movie projection system developed by Thomas Edison.
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The Introduction of Narrative The shift to the mass medium stage for movies occurred with the introduction of narrative films: movies that tell stories. Audiences quickly tired of static films of waves breaking on beaches or vaudeville acts recorded by immobile cameras. To become a mass medium, the early silent films had to offer what books achieved: the suspension of disbelief. They had to create narrative worlds that engaged an audience’s imagination.
narrative films movies that tell a story, with dramatic action and conflict emerging mainly from individual characters.
Some of the earliest narrative films were produced and directed by French magician and inventor Georges Méliès, who opened the first public movie theater in France in 1896. Méliès may have been the first director to realize that a movie was not simply a means of recording reality. He understood that a movie could be artificially planned and controlled like a staged play. Méliès began producing short fantasy and fairy-tale films—including The Vanishing Lady (1896), Cinderella (1899), and A Trip to the Moon (1902)—by increasingly using editing and existing camera tricks and techniques, such as slow motion and cartoon animation, which became key ingredients in future narrative filmmaking.
The first American filmmaker to adapt Méliès’s innovations to narrative film was Edwin S. Porter. A cameraman who had studied Méliès’s work in an Edison lab, Porter mastered the technique of editing diverse shots together to tell a coherent story. Porter shot narrative scenes out of order (for instance, some in a studio and some outdoors) and reassembled, or edited, them to make a story. In 1902, he made what is regarded as America’s first narrative film, The Life of an American Fireman. It also contained the first close-up shot in U.S. narrative film history—a ringing fire alarm. Until then, moviemakers thought close-ups cheated the audience of the opportunity to see an entire scene. Porter’s most important film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), introduced the western genre as well as chase scenes. In this popular eleven-minute movie, which inspired many copycats, Porter demonstrated the art of film suspense by alternating shots of the robbers with those of a posse in hot pursuit.
The Arrival of Nickelodeons Another major development in the evolution of film as a mass medium was the arrival of nickelodeons—a form of movie theater whose name combines the admission price with the Greek word for “theater.” According to media historian
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Douglas Gomery, these small and uncomfortable makeshift theaters were often converted storefronts redecorated to mimic vaudeville theaters: “In front, large, hand-painted posters announced the movies for the day. Inside, the screening of news, documentary, comedy, fantasy, and dramatic shorts lasted about one hour.”6 Usually a piano player added live music, and sometimes theater operators used sound effects to simulate gunshots or loud crashes. Because they showed silent films that transcended language barriers, nickelodeons flourished during the great European immigration at the turn of the twentieth century. These theaters filled a need for many newly arrived people struggling to learn English and seeking an inexpensive escape from the hard life of the city. Often managed by immigrants, nickelodeons required a minimal investment: just a secondhand projector and a large white sheet. Between 1907 and 1909, the number of nickelodeons grew from five thousand to ten thousand. The craze peaked by 1910, when entrepreneurs began to seek more affluent spectators, attracting them with larger and more lavish movie theaters.
nickelodeons the first small makeshift movie theaters, which were often converted cigar stores, pawnshops, or restaurants redecorated to mimic vaudeville theaters.
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THE RISE OF THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIO SYSTEM
By the 1910s, movies had become a major industry. Among the first to try his hand at dominating the movie business and reaping its profits, Thomas Edison formed the Motion Picture Patents Company, known as the Trust, in 1908. A cartel of major U.S. and French film producers, the company pooled patents in an effort to control film’s major technology, acquired most major film distributorships, and signed an exclusive deal with George Eastman, who agreed to supply movie film only to Trust-approved companies.
However, some independent producers refused to bow to the Trust’s terms. They saw too much demand for films, too much money to be made, and too many ways to avoid the Trust’s scrutiny. Some producers began to relocate from the centers of film production in New York and New Jersey to Cuba and Florida. Ultimately, though, Hollywood became the film capital of the world. Southern California offered cheap labor, diverse scenery for outdoor shooting, and a mild climate suitable for year-round production. Geographically far from the Trust’s headquarters in New Jersey, independent producers in Hollywood could easily slip over the border into Mexico to escape legal prosecution brought by the Trust for patent violations.
Wanting to free their movie operations from the Trust’s tyrannical grasp, two Hungarian immigrants—Adolph Zukor, who would eventually run Paramount Pictures, and William Fox, who would found the Fox Film Corporation (which later became Twentieth Century Fox)—played a role in the collapse of Edison’s Trust. Zukor’s early companies figured out ways to bypass the Trust, and a suit by Fox, a nickelodeon operator turned film distributor, resulted in the Trust’s breakup due to restraint-of-trade violations in 1917.
Ironically, entrepreneurs like Zukor developed other tactics for controlling the industry. The strategies, many of which are still used today, were more ambitious than just monopolizing patents and technology. They aimed at dominating the movie business at all three essential levels—production, everything involved in making a movie, from securing a script and actors to raising money and filming; distribution, getting the films into theaters; and exhibition, playing films in theaters. This control—or vertical integration—of all levels of the movie business gave certain studios great power and eventually spawned a film industry that turned into an oligopoly, a situation in which a few firms control the bulk of the business.
vertical integration in media economics, the phenomenon of controlling a mass media industry at its three essential levels: production,
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distribution, and exhibition; the term is most frequently used in reference to the film industry.
oligopoly in media economics, an organizational structure in which a few firms control most of an industry’s production and distribution resources.
MARY PICKFORD With legions of fans, Mary Pickford became the first woman ever to make a salary of $1 million in a year and gained the freedom to take artistic risks with her roles. (She would famously tell Adolph Zukor in 1915, “No, I really cannot afford to work for only $10,000 a week.”) In 1919 she launched United Artists, a film distributing company, with Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith. No woman since has been as powerful a player in the movie industry. Here she is seen with Buddy Rogers in My Best Girl. Everett Collection
Production
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In the early days of film, producers and distributors had not yet recognized that fans would seek not only particular film stories—like dramas, westerns, and romances—but also particular film actors. Responding to discerning audiences and competing against Edison’s Trust, Adolph Zukor hired a number of popular actors and formed the Famous Players Company in 1912. His idea was to control movie production not through patents but through exclusive contracts with actors. One Famous Players performer was Mary Pickford. Known as “America’s Sweetheart” for her portrayal of spunky and innocent heroines, Pickford was “unspoiled” by a theater background and better suited to the more subtle and intimate new medium. She became so popular that audiences waited in line to see her movies, and producers were forced to pay her increasingly higher salaries.
An astute businesswoman, Mary Pickford was the key figure in elevating the financial status and professional role of film actors. In 1910, Pickford made about $100 a week, but by 1914 she was earning $1,000 a week, and by 1917, $15,000 a week. Having appeared in nearly two hundred films, Pickford was so influential that in 1919 she broke from Zukor to form her own company, United Artists. Joining her were actor Douglas Fairbanks (her future husband), comedian-director Charlie Chaplin, and director D. W. Griffith.
Although United Artists represented a brief triumph of autonomy for a few powerful actors, by the 1920s the studio system firmly controlled creative talent in the industry. Pioneered by director Thomas Ince and his company, Triangle, the studio system constituted a sort of assembly-line process for moviemaking: actors, directors, editors, writers, and others all worked under exclusive contracts for the major studios. Ince also developed the notion of the studio head; he appointed producers to handle hiring, logistics, and finances so that he could more easily supervise many pictures at one time. The system was so efficient that each major studio was producing a feature film every week. Pooling talent, rather than patents, was a more ingenious approach for movie studios aiming to dominate film production.
studio system an early film production system that constituted a sort of assembly-line process for moviemaking; major film studios controlled not only actors but also directors, editors, writers, and other employees, all of whom worked under exclusive contracts.
Distribution An early effort to control movie distribution occurred around 1904, when movie companies provided vaudeville theaters with films and projectors on a film
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exchange system. In exchange for their short films, shown between live acts, movie producers received a small percentage of the vaudeville ticket-gate receipts. Gradually, as the number of production companies and the popularity of narrative films grew, demand for a distribution system serving national and international markets increased as well. One way Edison’s Trust sought to control distribution was by withholding equipment from companies not willing to pay the Trust’s patent-use fees.
However, as with the production of film, independent film companies looked for distribution strategies outside the Trust. Again, Adolph Zukor led the fight, developing block booking. Under this system, which was eventually outlawed as monopolistic, exhibitors had to agree to rent new or marginal films with no stars in order to gain access to popular films with big stars like Mary Pickford. Such contracts enabled the new studios to test-market new stars without taking much financial risk.
block booking an early tactic of movie studios to control exhibition, involving pressuring theater operators to accept marginal films with no stars in order to get access to films with the most popular stars.
Another distribution strategy involved the marketing of American films in Europe. When World War I disrupted the once-powerful European film production industry, only U.S. studios were able to meet the demand for films in Europe. The war marked a turning point and made the United States the leader in the commercial movie business worldwide. After the war, no other nation’s film industry could compete economically with Hollywood. By the mid-1920s, foreign revenue from U.S. films totaled $100 million. Today, Hollywood continues to dominate the world market.
Exhibition Edison’s Trust attempted to monopolize exhibition by controlling the flow of
films to theater owners. If theaters wanted to ensure they had films to show their patrons, they had to purchase a license from the Trust and pay whatever price it asked. Otherwise, they were locked out of the Trust and had to try to find enough films from independent producers to show. Eventually, the flow of films from independents in Hollywood and foreign films enabled theater owners to resist the Trust’s scheme.
After the collapse of the Trust, emerging studios in Hollywood had their own ideas on how to control exhibition. When industrious theater owners began
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forming film cooperatives to compete with block-booking tactics, producers like Zukor conspired to dominate exhibition by buying up theaters. By 1921, Zukor’s Paramount owned three hundred theaters, solidifying its ability to show the movies it produced. In 1925, a business merger between Paramount and Publix (then the country’s largest theater chain, with more than five hundred screens) gave Zukor enormous influence over movie exhibition.
MOVIE PALACES Many movie palaces of the 1920s were elaborate, opulent buildings. The one pictured here includes space for a live band at the front of the theater to provide music and sound effects for the movie. Everett Collection
Zukor and the heads of several major studios understood that they did not have to own all the theaters to ensure that their movies would be shown. Instead, the major studios (which would eventually include MGM, RKO, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, and Paramount) only needed to own the first-run theaters (about 15 percent of the nation’s theaters), which premiered new films in major downtown areas and generated 85 to 95 percent of all film revenue.
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BUSTER KEATON (1895–1966) Born into a vaudeville family, Keaton honed his comic skills early on. He got his start acting in a few shorts in 1917 and went on to star in some of the most memorable silent films of the 1920s, including classics such as Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1927), and Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928). Because of Keaton’s ability to match physical comedy with an unfailingly deadpan and stoic face, he gained the nickname the Great Stone Face. Everett Collection
The studios quickly realized that to earn revenue from these first-run theaters, they would have to draw the middle and upper-middle classes to the movies. To do so, they built movie palaces— full-time single-screen movie theaters that offered a more hospitable moviegoing environment, providing elegant décor usually reserved for high-society opera, ballet, symphony, and live theater. Another major innovation in exhibition was the development of mid-city movie theaters, built in convenient locations near urban mass-transit stations to attract the business of the urban and suburban middle class. This idea continues today, as multiplexes featuring multiple screens lure middle-class crowds to interstate highway crossroads.
movie palaces ornate, lavish single-screen movie theaters that emerged in the 1910s in the United States.
multiplexes contemporary movie theaters that exhibit many movies at the
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same time on multiple screens.
By the late 1920s, the major studios had clearly established vertical integration in the industry. What had been many small competitive firms in the early 1900s was now a few powerful studios, including the Big Five—Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, and RKO—and the Little Three (which did not own theaters)—Columbia, Universal, and United Artists. Together, these eight companies formed a powerful oligopoly, which made it increasingly difficult for independent companies to make, distribute, and exhibit commercial films.
Big Five/Little Three from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, the major movie studios that were vertically integrated and that dominated the industry; the Big Five were Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, and RKO, and the Little Three were those studios that did not own theaters: Columbia, Universal, and United Artists.
Little Three See Big Five/Little Three.
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THE STUDIO SYSTEM’S GOLDEN AGE
Many consider Hollywood’s Golden Age as beginning in 1915 with innovations in feature-length narrative film in the silent era, peaking with the introduction of sound and the development of the classic Hollywood style, and ending with the transformation of the Hollywood studio system post–World War II.
Hollywood Narrative and the Silent Era D. W. Griffith, among the first “star” directors, was the single most important director in Hollywood’s early days. Griffith paved the way for all future narrative filmmakers by refining many of the narrative techniques introduced by Méliès and Porter and using nearly all of them in one film for the first time, including varied camera distances, close-up shots, multiple story lines, fast-paced editing, and symbolic imagery. Despite the cringe-inducing racism of this pioneering and controversial film, The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the first feature-length film (more than an hour long) produced in America. The three-hour epic was also the first blockbuster and cost moviegoers a record $2 admission. Although considered a technical masterpiece, the film glorified the Ku Klux Klan and stereotyped southern blacks, leading to a campaign against the film by the NAACP and protests and riots at many screenings. Nevertheless, the movie triggered Hollywood’s fascination with narrative films.
blockbuster the type of big-budget special effects film that typically has a summer or holiday release date, heavy promotion, and lucrative merchandising tie-ins.
Feature films became the standard throughout the 1920s and introduced many of the film genres we continue to see produced today. The most popular films during the silent era were historical and religious epics, including Napoleon (1927), Ben-Hur (1925), and The Ten Commandments (1923), but the silent era also produced pioneering social dramas, mysteries, comedies, horror films, science-fiction films, war films, crime dramas, westerns, and spy films. The silent era also introduced numerous technical innovations, established the Hollywood star system, and cemented the reputation of movies as a viable art form, when they had previously been seen as novelty entertainment.
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THE JAZZ SINGER (1927), one of the first commercially successful talkies, helped bring about Hollywood’s transition from silent movies to movies with sound. The film stars Al Jolson as Jack Rabinowitz, a Jewish American who defies his family’s wishes by putting on blackface makeup and pursuing a career as a jazz musician. Everett Collection
The Introduction of Sound With the studio system and Hollywood’s worldwide dominance firmly in place, the next big challenge was to bring sound to moving pictures. Various attempts at talkies had failed since Edison first tried to link phonograph and moving picture technologies in the 1890s. During the 1910s, however, technical breakthroughs at AT&T’s research arm, Bell Labs, produced prototypes of loudspeakers and sound amplifiers. Experiments with sound continued during the 1920s, particularly at Warner Brothers studios, which released numerous short sound films of vaudeville acts featuring singers and comedians. The studio packaged them as a novelty along with silent feature films.
talkies movies with sound, beginning in 1927.
In 1927, Warner Brothers produced The Jazz Singer, a feature-length film starring Al Jolson, a charismatic and popular vaudeville singer who wore blackface makeup as part of his act. This further demonstrated, as did The Birth of a Nation, that racism in America carried into the film industry. An experiment, The Jazz Singer was basically a silent film interspersed with musical numbers and brief
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dialogue (“Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet”). At first there was only modest interest in the movie, which featured just 354 spoken words. But the film grew in popularity as it toured the Midwest, where audiences stood and cheered the short bursts of dialogue. The breakthrough film, however, was Warner Brothers’ 1928 release The Singing Fool, which also starred Jolson. Costing $200,000 to make, the film took in $5 million and “proved to all doubters that talkies were here to stay.”7
Warner Brothers, however, was not the only studio exploring sound technology. Five months before The Jazz Singer opened, Fox studio premiered sound-film newsreels. Fox’s newsreel company, Movietone, captured the first film footage with sound of the takeoff and return of Charles Lindbergh, who piloted the first solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in May 1927. Fox’s Movietone system recorded sound directly onto the film, running it on a narrow filmstrip that ran alongside the larger image portion of the film. Superior to the sound-on-record system, the Movietone method eventually became film’s standard sound system.
newsreels weekly ten-minute magazine-style compilations of filmed news events from around the world organized in a sequence of short reports; prominent in movie theaters between the 1920s and the 1950s.
Boosted by the innovation of sound, annual movie attendance in the United States rose from sixty million a week in 1927 to ninety million a week in 1929. By 1935, the world had adopted talking films as the commercial standard.
The Development of the Hollywood Style By the time sound came to movies, Hollywood dictated not only the business but also the style of most moviemaking worldwide. That style, or model, for storytelling developed with the rise of the studio system in the 1920s, solidified during the first two decades of the sound era, and continues to dominate American filmmaking today. The model serves up three ingredients that give Hollywood movies their distinctive flavor: the narrative, the genre, and the author (or director). The right blend of these ingredients—combined with timing, marketing, and luck —has led to many movie hits, from 1930s and 1940s classics like It Happened One Night, Gone with the Wind, The Philadelphia Story, and Casablanca to recent successes like Gravity (2013) and Gone Girl (2014).
Hollywood Narratives
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American filmmakers from D. W. Griffith to Steven Spielberg have understood the allure of narrative, which always includes two basic components: the story (what happens to whom) and the discourse (how the story is told). Further, Hollywood codified a familiar narrative structure across all genres. Most movies, like most TV shows and novels, feature recognizable character types (protagonist, antagonist, romantic interest, sidekick); a clear beginning, middle, and end (even with flashbacks and flash-forwards, the sequence of events is usually clear to the viewer); and a plot propelled by the main character’s experiencing and resolving a conflict by the end of the movie.
Within Hollywood’s classic narratives, filmgoers find an amazing array of intriguing cultural variations. For example, familiar narrative conventions of heroes, villains, conflicts, and resolutions may be made more unique with inventions like computer-generated imagery (CGI) or digital remastering for an IMAX 3D Experience release. This combination of convention and invention— standardized Hollywood stories and differentiated special effects—provides a powerful economic package that satisfies most audiences’ appetites for both the familiar and the distinctive.
Hollywood Genres In general, Hollywood narratives fit a genre, or category, in which conventions regarding similar characters, scenes, structures, and themes recur in combination. Grouping films by category is another way for the industry to achieve the two related economic goals of product standardization and product differentiation. By making films that fall into popular genres, the movie industry provides familiar models that can be imitated. It is much easier for a studio to promote a film that already fits into a preexisting category with which viewers are familiar. Among the most familiar genres are comedy, adventure, drama, action, thriller/suspense, horror, romantic comedy, musical, documentary/performance, western, gangster, fantasy–science fiction, and film noir.
genre a narrative category in which conventions regarding similar characters, scenes, structures, and themes recur in combination.
Because most Hollywood narratives try to create believable worlds, the artificial style of musicals is sometimes a disruption of what many viewers expect. Musicals’ popularity peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, but they showed a small resurgence in the 2000s with Moulin Rouge! (2001), Chicago (2002), and Les Misérables (2012). Still, no live-action musicals rank among the top fifty highest- grossing films of all time.
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One fascinating genre is the horror film, which also claims none of the top fifty highest-grossing films of all time. In fact, from Psycho (1960) to The Conjuring (2013), this lightly regarded genre has earned only one Oscar for best picture: Silence of the Lambs (1991). Yet these movies are extremely popular with teenagers, among the largest theatergoing audience, who are in search of cultural choices distinct from those of their parents. Critics suggest that the teen appeal of horror movies is similar to the allure of gangster rap or heavy-metal music; they believe teens enjoy the horror genre because it is a cultural form that often carries anti-adult messages and does not appeal to most adults.
The film noir genre (French for “black film”) developed in the United States in the late 1920s and hit its peak after World War II. Still, the genre continues to influence movies today. Using low-lighting techniques, few daytime scenes, and bleak urban settings, films in this genre (such as The Big Sleep, 1946, and Sunset Boulevard, 1950) explore unstable characters and the sinister side of human nature. Although the French critics who first identified noir as a genre place these films in the 1940s, their influence resonates in contemporary films—sometimes called neo- noir—including Se7en (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), and Sin City (2005).
Hollywood “Authors” In commercial filmmaking, the director serves as the main author of a film. Sometimes called “auteurs,” successful directors develop a particular cinematic style or an interest in particular topics that differentiates their narratives from those of other directors. Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, redefined the suspense drama through editing techniques that heightened tension (Rear Window, 1954; Vertigo, 1958; North by Northwest, 1959; Psycho, 1960).
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FILM GENRES Psycho (1960), a classic horror film, tells the story of Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh), who flees to a motel after embezzling $40,000 from her employer. There, she meets the motel owner, Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins), and her untimely death. The infamous shower scene, pictured here, is widely considered one of the most iconic horror film sequences. Everett Collection
The contemporary status of directors stems from two breakthrough films: Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), which became surprise box-office hits. Their inexpensive budgets, rock-and-roll soundtracks, and big payoffs created opportunities for a new generation of directors. The success of these films exposed cracks in the Hollywood system, which was losing money in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Studio executives seemed at a loss to explain and predict the tastes of a new generation of moviegoers. Yet Hopper and Lucas had tapped into the anxieties of the postwar baby-boom generation in its search for self-realization, its longing for an innocent past, and its efforts to cope with the turbulence of the 1960s.
This opened the door for a new wave of directors who were trained in California or New York film schools and were also products of the 1960s, such as Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, 1972), William Friedkin (The Exorcist, 1973), Steven Spielberg (Jaws, 1975), Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, 1976), Brian De Palma (Carrie, 1976), and George Lucas (Star Wars, 1977). Combining news or documentary techniques and Hollywood narratives, these films demonstrated how mass media borders had become blurred and how movies had become dependent on audiences who were used to television and rock and roll. These films signaled the start of a period that Scorsese has called “the deification of the director.” A handful of successful directors gained the kind of economic clout and celebrity standing that had belonged almost exclusively to top movie stars.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Breaking Barriers with 12 Years a Slave Visit LaunchPad to view a short clip from the Oscar-winning movie from director Steve McQueen.
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http://macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Discussion: How do you think 12 Years a Slave differs from previous depictions of black history in America?
Although the status of directors grew in the 1960s and 1970s, recognition for women directors of Hollywood features remained rare.8 A breakthrough came with Kathryn Bigelow’s best director Academy Award for The Hurt Locker (2009), which also won the best picture award. Prior to Bigelow’s win, only three women had received an Academy Award nomination for directing a feature film: Lina Wertmüller in 1976 for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion in 1994 for The Piano, and Sofia Coppola in 2004 for Lost in Translation. Both Wertmüller and Campion are from outside the United States, where women directors frequently receive more opportunities for film development. Some women in the United States get an opportunity to direct because of their prominent standing as popular actors; Barbra Streisand, Jodie Foster, Penny Marshall, and Sally Field all fall into this category. Other women have come to direct films via their scriptwriting achievements. For example, Jennifer Lee, who wrote Wreck-It Ralph (2012), followed up by writing and directing Frozen (2013). Other women directors—like Bigelow, Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, 2008), Sarah Gavron (Suffragette, 2015), Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone, 2010), and Kimberly Peirce (Carrie, 2013)—have moved past debut films and proven themselves as experienced studio auteurs. Nevertheless, a recent study finds that women were hired to direct only 3.4 percent of major Hollywood releases.9
Members of minority groups, including African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, have also struggled for recognition in Hollywood. Still, some have succeeded as directors, crossing over from careers as actors or gaining notoriety through independent filmmaking. Among the most successful contemporary African American directors are Ava DuVernay (Selma, 2014), Lee Daniels (The Butler, 2013, and the TV series Empire), John Singleton (Abduction, 2011), Tyler Perry (A Madea Christmas, 2013), and Spike Lee (Chi-Raq, 2015). (See “Case Study: Breaking through Hollywood’s Race Barrier” on page 228.) Asian Americans such as M. Night Shyamalan (After Earth, 2013), Ang Lee (Life of Pi, 2012), Wayne Wang (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, 2011), and documentarian Arthur Dong (The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, 2015) have built accomplished directing careers. Chris Eyre (Hide Away, 2011) remains the most noted Native American director, working mainly as an independent filmmaker.
Outside the Hollywood System Since the rise of the studio system, Hollywood has focused on feature-length movies that command popular attention and earn the most money. However, the movie industry has a long tradition of films made outside the Hollywood studio system. In the following sections, we look at three alternatives to Hollywood:
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international films, documentaries, and independent films.
WOMEN DIRECTORS have long struggled in Hollywood. However, some, like Kathryn Bigelow and Ava DuVernay, are making a name for themselves. Known for her rough-and-tumble style of filmmaking and her penchant for directing action and thriller movies, Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for best director for The Hurt Locker in 2010. DuVernay (below) wasn’t nominated for her acclaimed Martin Luther King film Selma, but the project vaulted her into consideration for even bigger films. Atsushi Nishijima/© Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection
Global Cinema For generations, Hollywood has dominated the global movie scene. In many countries, American films capture up to 90 percent of the market. In striking contrast, foreign films constitute only a tiny fraction—less than 2 percent—of motion pictures seen in the United States today. Despite Hollywood’s domination of global film distribution, other countries have a rich history of producing both successful and provocative short-subject and feature films. For example, cinematic movements of the twentieth century—such as German expressionism (capturing psychological moods), Soviet social realism (presenting a positive view of Soviet life), Italian neorealism (focusing on the everyday lives of Italians), and European new-wave cinema (experimenting with the language of film)—and post–World War II Japanese, Hong Kong, Korean, Australian, Indian, Canadian, and British cinema have all been extremely influential, demonstrating alternatives to the Hollywood approach.
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T
CASE STUDY
Breaking through Hollywood’s Race Barrier
he problem of the term black cinema is that such a term needs to exist. (Do we, for example, talk about a white cinema in the
United States?) But there is a long history of blacks’ exclusion from the industry as writers, directors, and actors—not to mention even as audience members at theaters—so when a film like Dope (2015) by director Rick Famuyiwa gets praised as “revolutionary” and “subversive,” it’s because this teen coming-of-age story dares to feature a cast that for the most part isn’t white. Even more exciting (and sadly rare), it opened not in a handful of theaters but on over two thousand screens nationwide.
Despite African Americans’ long support of the film industry, their moviegoing experience has not been the same as that of whites. From the late 1800s until the passage of Civil Rights legislation in the mid- 1960s, many theater owners discriminated against black patrons. In large cities, blacks often had to attend separate theaters, where new movies might not appear until a year or two after white theaters had shown them. In smaller towns and in the South, blacks were often allowed to patronize local theaters only after midnight. In addition, some theater managers required black patrons to sit in less desirable areas of the theater.1
Changes began taking place during and after World War II. In response to the “white flight” from central cities during the suburbanization of the 1950s, many downtown and neighborhood theaters began catering to black customers in order to keep from going out of business. By the
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late 1960s and early 1970s, these theaters had become major venues for popular commercial films, even featuring a few movies about African Americans, including Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Learning Tree (1969), and Sounder (1972).
Based on the popularity of these films, Gordon Parks, the black photographer turned filmmaker who directed The Learning Tree (adapted from his own novel), went on to make commercial action/adventure films, including Shaft (1971, remade by John Singleton in 2000). Popular in urban theaters—especially among black teenagers—the movies produced by Parks and his son, Gordon Parks Jr. (Super Fly, 1972), spawned a number of commercial imitators. Labeled blaxploitation movies, these films were the subject of heated cultural debates in the 1970s; like some rap songs today, they were both praised for their realistic depictions of black urban life and criticized for glorifying violence.
Opportunities for black film directors have expanded since the 1980s and 1990s, but only recently have black filmmakers achieved a measure of mainstream success. Lee Daniels received only the second Academy Award nomination for a black director for Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire in 2009 (the first was John Singleton, for Boyz N the Hood in 1991). In 2013, 12 Years a Slave, a film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir by black British director Steve McQueen, won three Academy Awards, including best picture, and a best director nomination for McQueen. McQueen became the first black director to win a best picture award. But the lack of regular recognition of nonwhite actors, writers, and directors for the Academy Awards in 2016, hosted by comedian Chris Rock, pictured below, led to much discussion and a trending #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. Beyond industry awards, women and people of color still have few opportunities across all parts of the U.S. film industry, particularly in being able to make decisions on what stories get told. “It’s not about what’s being lauded,” said acclaimed African American actor Don Cheadle. “It’s about what’s getting greenlit … and who’s being developed to be the people who can sit in those chairs to greenlight a film. And that is much more important than who’s going to walk across a stage and say thank you.”2
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KINETOSCOPES iKevin Winter/Getty Images
Early on, Americans showed interest in British and French short films and in experimental films, such as Germany’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Foreign-language movies did reasonably well throughout the 1920s, especially in ethnic neighborhood theaters in large American cities. For a time, Hollywood studios even dubbed some popular American movies into Spanish, Italian, French, and German for these theaters. But the Depression brought cutbacks, and by the 1930s, the daughters and sons of turn-of-the-century immigrants—many of whom were trying to assimilate into mainstream American culture—preferred their Hollywood movies in English.10
Postwar prosperity, rising globalism, and the gradual decline of the studios’ hold over theater exhibition in the 1950s and 1960s stimulated the rise of art-house theaters, and these decades saw a rebirth of interest in foreign-language films by such prominent directors as Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman (Wild Strawberries, 1957), Italy’s Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 1960), France’s François Truffaut (Jules and Jim, 1961), Japan’s Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, 1954), and India’s Satyajit Ray (Apu Trilogy, 1955–1959). Catering to academic audiences, art houses made a statement against Hollywood commercialism as they sought to show alternative movies.
By the late 1970s, however, the home video market had emerged, and audiences began staying home to watch both foreign and domestic films. New multiplex theater owners rejected the smaller profit margins of most foreign titles, which lacked the promotional hype of U.S. films. As a result, between 1966 and 1990 the number of foreign films released annually in the United States dropped by two-thirds, from nearly three hundred to about one hundred titles per year.
With the growth of superstore video chains like Blockbuster in the 1990s, which were supplanted by online video services like Netflix in the 2000s, viewers gained access to a larger selection of foreign-language titles. The successes of Amélie (France, 2001), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sweden, 2009), and
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Instructions Not Included (Mexico, 2013) illustrate that U.S. audiences are willing to watch subtitled films with non-Hollywood perspectives. However, foreign films are losing ground as they compete with the expanding independent American film market for screen space.
GLOBALIZATION OF FILM Today, U.S. production companies often partner with foreign crews to make big- budget movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016). Featuring a predominantly Chinese cast but with English dialogue, this film was produced jointly by the China Film Group and the U.S.-based Weinstein Company. In China, the movie received a wide theatrical release, while in the U.S. it was released exclusively on Netflix. Everett Collection
Today, the largest film industry is in India, out of Bollywood (a play on words combining city names Bombay—now Mumbai—and Hollywood), where about a thousand films a year are produced—mostly romance or adventure musicals in a distinct style.11 In comparison, Hollywood moviemakers release five hundred to six hundred films a year. (For a broader perspective, see “Global Village: Beyond Hollywood: Asian Cinema” on pages 232–233.)
The Documentary Tradition Both TV news and nonfiction films trace their roots to the movie industry’s
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interest films and newsreels of the late 1890s. In Britain, interest films compiled footage of regional wars, political leaders, industrial workers, and agricultural scenes, and were screened with fiction shorts. Pioneered in France and England, newsreels consisted of weekly ten-minute magazine-style compilations of filmed news events from around the world. International news services began supplying theaters and movie studios with newsreels, and by 1911, they had become a regular part of the moviegoing menu.
DOCUMENTARY FILMS Amy, a documentary released in 2015, tells the story of British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse. The film, praised for its powerful depiction of Winehouse’s rise and fall, won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2016. Roger Kisby/Getty Images
Over time, the documentary film genre developed as a style that interprets reality by recording actual people and settings. As an educational, noncommercial form, the documentary usually required the backing of industry, government, or philanthropy to cover costs. In support of a clear alternative to Hollywood cinema, some nations began creating special units, such as Canada’s National Film Board, to sponsor documentaries. In the United States, art and film received considerable support from the Roosevelt administration during the Depression.
documentary a movie or TV news genre that documents reality by
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recording actual characters and settings.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the development of portable cameras had led to cinema verité (a French term for “truth film”). This documentary style allowed filmmakers to go where cameras could not go before and record fragments of everyday life more unobtrusively. Directly opposed to packaged, high-gloss Hollywood features, verité aimed to track reality, employing a rough, grainy look and shaky, handheld camera work. Among the key innovators in cinema verité was Drew Associates, led by Robert Drew, a former Life magazine photographer. Through his connection to Time Inc. (which owned Life) and its chain of TV stations, Drew shot the groundbreaking documentary Primary, which followed the 1960 Democratic presidential primary race between Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy.
cinema verité French term for truth film, a documentary style that records fragments of everyday life unobtrusively; it often features a rough, grainy look and shaky, handheld camera work.
Perhaps the major contribution of documentaries has been their willingness to tackle controversial or unpopular subject matter. For example, American documentary filmmaker Michael Moore often addresses complex topics that target corporations or the government. His films include Roger and Me (1989), a comic and controversial look at the relationship between the city of Flint, Michigan, and General Motors; the Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine (2002), an exploration of gun violence; and the recent Where to Invade Next, a look at other countries’ quality of life. Moore’s later films are part of a resurgence in high-profile documentary filmmaking in the United States, which included The Fog of War (2003), Super Size Me (2004), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The Cove (2009), Bully (2012), and He Named Me Malala (2015).
The Rise of Independent Films The success of documentary films like Super Size Me and Fahrenheit 9/11 dovetails with the rise of indies, or independently produced films. As opposed to directors working in the Hollywood system, independent filmmakers typically operate on a shoestring budget and show their movies in thousands of campus auditoriums and at hundreds of small film festivals. The decreasing costs of portable technology, including smaller digital cameras and computer editing, have kept many documentary and independent filmmakers in business. Successful
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independents like Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, 2003; The Bling Ring, 2013) and Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, 1995; Only Lovers Left Alive, 2014) continue to find substantial audiences in college and art-house theaters and through online DVD and streaming services like Netflix, which promote work produced outside the studio system. Meanwhile, independent-minded filmmakers like Wes Anderson (Rushmore, 1998; The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014), Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, 2010; Noah, 2014), and David O. Russell (American Hustle, 2013; Joy, 2015) have established careers somewhere between fully independent and studio backed, often with smaller companies financing their films before they’re picked up by bigger studios.
indies independent music and film production houses that work outside industry oligopolies; they often produce less mainstream music and film.
INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVALS, like the Sundance Film Festival, are widely recognized in the film industry as a place to discover new talent and acquire independently made films on topics that might otherwise be too controversial, too niche-specific, or too original for a major studio-backed picture. One of the breakout hits of Sundance 2016 was The Birth of a Nation, a historical drama about Nat Turner, the slave who led a violent revolt in 1831. After the festival, Fox Searchlight Pictures picked up the film for a wider release. Everett Collection
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Distributing smaller films can be big business for the studios. The rise of independent film festivals in the 1990s—especially the Sundance Film Festival held every January in Park City, Utah—helped Hollywood rediscover low-cost independent films as an alternative to traditional movies with Titanic-size budgets. Films such as Little Miss Sunshine (2006), 500 Days of Summer (2009), Whiplash (2014), and The Birth of a Nation (2016) were able to generate industry buzz and garner major studio distribution deals through Sundance screenings, becoming star vehicles for several directors and actors. As with the recording industry, the major studios see these festivals—which also include New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, the South by Southwest festival in Austin, and international film festivals in Toronto and Cannes—as important venues for discovering new talent. Some major studios even purchased successful independent film companies (Disney’s purchase of Miramax) or developed in-house indie divisions (Sony’s Sony Pictures Classics) to specifically handle the development and distribution of indies.
But by 2010, the independent film business as a feeder system for major studios was declining due to the poor economy and studios’ waning interest in smaller specialty films. Disney sold Miramax for $660 million to an investor group composed of Hollywood outsiders. Viacom folded its independent unit, Paramount Vantage, into its main studio, and Time Warner closed its Warner Independent and Picturehouse in-house indie divisions. Meanwhile, producers of low-budget independent films increasingly looked to alternative digital distribution models, such as Internet downloads, direct DVD sales, and on-demand screenings via cable and services like Netflix.
GLOBAL VILLAGE
Beyond Hollywood: Asian Cinema
sian nations easily outstrip Hollywood in quantity of films produced.
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A India alone produces about a thousand movies a year. But from India to
South Korea, Asian films are increasingly challenging Hollywood in terms of quality, and they have become more
influential as Asian directors, actors, and film styles are exported to Hollywood and the world.
© Sony Pictures Releasing/Everett Collection
India
Part musical, part action, part romance, and part suspense, the epic films of Bollywood typically have fantastic sets, hordes of extras, plenty of wet saris, and symbolic fountain bursts (as a substitute for kissing and sex, which are prohibited from being shown). Indian movie fans pay from $.75 to $5 to see these films, and they feel shortchanged if the movies are shorter than three hours. With many films produced in less than a week, however, most of the Bollywood fare is cheaply produced and badly acted. But these production aesthetics are changing, as bigger-budget releases target middle and upper classes in India, the twenty-five million Indians living abroad, and Western audiences. Jab
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Tak Hai Jaan (2012), a romance starring Shah Rukh Khan—India’s most famous leading man—had the most successful U.S. box-office opening of any Bollywood film.
China
Since the late 1980s, Chinese cinema has developed an international reputation. Leading this generation of directors are Yimou Zhang (House of Flying Daggers, 2004; Coming Home, 2014) and Kaige Chen (Farewell My Concubine, 1993; Monk Comes Down the Mountain, 2015), whose work has spanned such genres as historical epics, love stories, contemporary tales of city life, and action fantasy. These directors have also helped make international stars out of Li Gong (Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005; Coming Home, 2014) and Ziyi Zhang (Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005; Dangerous Liaisons, 2012). The Mermaid (2016), pictured here, is the current highest-grossing Chinese film of all time, having made over $550 million at the box office.
Hong Kong
Hong Kong films were the most talked about—and the most influential —film genre in cinema throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. The style of highly choreographed action with often breathtaking, balletlike violence became hugely popular around the world, reaching American audiences and in some cases even outselling Hollywood blockbusters. Hong Kong directors like John Woo, Ringo Lam, and Jackie Chan (who also acts in his movies) have directed Hollywood action films; and stars like Jet Li (Lethal Weapon 4, 1998; The Expendables 3, 2014), Yun-Fat Chow (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, 2007; The Monkey King, 2014), and Malaysia’s Michelle Yeoh (Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny, 2016) are landing leading roles in American movies.
Japan
Americans may be most familiar with low-budget monster movies like Godzilla, but the widely heralded films of the late director Akira Kurosawa have had an even greater impact: His Seven Samurai (1954) was remade by Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Hidden Fortress (1958) was George Lucas’s inspiration for Star Wars. Hayao Miyazaki (Ponyo, 2009; The Wind Rises, 2013) is the country’s top director of anime movies. Japanese thrillers like Ringu (1998), Ringu 2 (1999), and Ju-on: The Grudge (2003) were remade into successful American horror films. Hirokazu Koreeda’s drama Like Father, Like Son (2013) won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival
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and caught the attention of Steven Spielberg, who acquired the remake rights for his company DreamWorks.
South Korea
The end of military regimes in the late 1980s and corporate investment in the film business in the 1990s created a new era in Korean moviemaking. Leading directors include Kim Jee-woon; Lee Chang- dong (nominated for the Palme d’Or award at Cannes for Poetry, 2010); and Chan-wook Park, whose Vengeance Trilogy films (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 2002; Oldboy, 2003; and Lady Vengeance, 2005) have won international acclaim, including the Grand Prix at Cannes for Oldboy, which was remade in the United States in 2013 by director Spike Lee. Joon-ho Bong’s science-fiction film Snowpiercer (2013)— based on a French graphic novel, filmed in the Czech Republic, and starring a mostly English-speaking cast (including Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton)—epitomizes the international outlook of Korean cinema.
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THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM
After years of thriving, the Hollywood movie industry began to falter after 1946. Weekly movie attendance in the United States peaked at ninety million in 1946, then fell to under twenty-five million by 1963. Critics and observers began talking about the death of Hollywood, claiming that the Golden Age was over. However, the movie industry adapted and survived, just as it continues to do today. Among the changing conditions facing the film industry were the communist witch-hunts in Hollywood, the end of the industry’s vertical integration, suburbanization, the arrival of television, and the appearance of home entertainment.
The Hollywood Ten In 1947, in the wake of the unfolding Cold War with the Soviet Union, conservative members of Congress began investigating Hollywood for alleged subversive and communist ties. That year, aggressive witch-hunts for political radicals in the film industry by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) led to the famous Hollywood Ten hearings and subsequent trial. (HUAC included future president Richard M. Nixon, then a congressman from California.)
Hollywood Ten the nine screenwriters and one film director subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) who were sent to prison in the late 1940s for refusing to disclose their memberships or to identify communist sympathizers.
During the investigations, HUAC coerced prominent people from the film industry to declare their patriotism and to give up the names of colleagues suspected of having politically unfriendly tendencies. Upset over labor union strikes and outspoken writers, many film executives were eager to testify and provide names. For instance, Jack L. Warner of Warner Brothers suggested that whenever film writers made fun of the wealthy or America’s political system in their work, or if their movies were sympathetic to “Indians and the colored folks,”12 they were engaging in communist propaganda. Other “friendly” HUAC witnesses included actors Gary Cooper and Ronald Reagan, director Elia Kazan, and producer Walt Disney. Whether they believed it was their patriotic duty or they feared losing their jobs, many prominent actors, directors, and other film executives also “named names.”
Eventually, HUAC subpoenaed ten unwilling witnesses who were questioned
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about their memberships in various organizations. The so-called Hollywood Ten— nine screenwriters and one director—refused to discuss their memberships or to identify communist sympathizers. Charged with contempt of Congress in November 1947, they were eventually sent to prison. Although jailing the Hollywood Ten clearly violated their free-speech rights, in the atmosphere of the Cold War many people worried that “the American way” could be sabotaged via unpatriotic messages planted in films. Upon release from jail, the Hollywood Ten found themselves blacklisted, or boycotted, by the major studios, and their careers in the film industry were all but ruined. The national fervor over communism continued to plague Hollywood well into the 1950s.
THE HOLLYWOOD TEN While many studio heads, producers, and actors “named names” to HUAC, others, such as the group shown here, held protests to demand the release of the Hollywood Ten. Everett Collection
The Paramount Decision Coinciding with the HUAC investigations, the government also increased its scrutiny of the movie industry’s aggressive business practices. By the mid-1940s, the Justice Department demanded that the five major film companies—Paramount, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, and RKO—end vertical integration, which involved the simultaneous control over production, distribution, and exhibition. In 1948, after a series of court appeals, the Supreme Court ruled against the film industry in what is commonly known as the Paramount decision, forcing the studios to gradually divest themselves of their theaters.
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Paramount decision the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended vertical integration in the film industry by forcing the studios to divest themselves of their theaters.
Although the government had hoped to increase competition, the Paramount case never really changed the oligopoly structure of the Hollywood film industry because it failed to challenge the industry’s control over distribution. However, the 1948 decision did create opportunities in the exhibition part of the industry for those outside Hollywood. In addition to art houses showing documentaries or foreign films, thousands of drive-in theaters sprang up in farmers’ fields, welcoming new suburbanites who embraced the automobile. Although drive-ins had been around since the 1930s, by the end of the 1950s, more than four thousand existed. The Paramount decision encouraged new indoor theater openings as well, but the major studios continued to dominate distribution.
Moving to the Suburbs Common sense might suggest that television alone precipitated the decline in post– World War II movie attendance, but the most dramatic drop actually occurred in the late 1940s—before most Americans even owned TV sets.13
MOVIES TAKE ON SOCIAL ISSUES
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Rebel without a Cause (1955), starring James Dean and Natalie Wood, was marketed in movie posters as “Warner Bros. Challenging Drama of Today’s Teenage Violence!” James Dean’s memorable portrayal of a troubled youth forever fixed his place in movie history. He was killed in a car crash a month before the movie opened. Everett Collection
The transformation from a wartime economy and a surge in consumer production had a significant impact on moviegoing. With industries turning from armaments to appliances, Americans started cashing in their wartime savings bonds for household goods and new cars. Discretionary income that formerly went to buying movie tickets now went to acquiring consumer products, and the biggest product of all was a new house far from the downtown movie theaters—in the suburbs, where tax bases were lower. Home ownership in the United States doubled between 1945 and 1950, while the moviegoing public decreased just as quickly. Additionally, after the war, the average age for couples entering marriage dropped from twenty-four to nineteen. Unlike their parents, many postwar couples had their first child before they turned twenty-one. The combination of social and economic changes meant there were significantly fewer couples dating at the movies. Then, when television exploded in the late 1950s, there was even less discretionary income—and less reason to go to the movies.
Television Changes Hollywood In the late 1940s, radio’s popularity had a strong impact on film. Not only were 1948 and 1949 high points in radio listenership, but with the mass migration to the suburbs, radio offered Americans an inexpensive entertainment alternative to the movies (as it had during the Great Depression). As a result, many people stayed home and listened to radio programs until television displaced both radio and movies as the medium of national entertainment in the mid-1950s. The movie industry responded in a variety of ways.
First, with growing legions of people gathering around their living room TV sets, movie content slowly shifted toward more serious subjects. At first, this shift was a response to the war and an acknowledgment of life’s complexity, but later movies focused on subject matter that television did not encourage. This shift began with film noir in the 1940s but continued into the 1950s, as commercial movies, for the first time, explored larger social problems, such as alcoholism (The Lost Weekend, 1945), anti-Semitism (Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947), mental illness (The Snake Pit, 1948), racism (Pinky, 1949), adult–teen relationships (Rebel without a Cause, 1955), drug abuse (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955), and—
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perhaps most controversial—sexuality (Peyton Place, 1957; Butterfield 8, 1960; Lolita, 1962).
These and other films challenged the authority of the industry’s own prohibitive Motion Picture Production Code. Hollywood adopted the Code in the early 1930s to restrict film depictions of violence, crime, drug use, and sexual behavior and to quiet public and political concerns that the movie business was lowering the moral standards of America. (For more on the Code, see Chapter 16.) In 1967, after the Code had been ignored by producers for several years, the Motion Picture Association of America initiated the current ratings system, which rated films for age appropriateness rather than censoring all adult content.
Second, just as radio worked to improve sound to maintain an advantage over television in the 1950s, the film industry introduced a host of technological improvements to lure Americans away from their TV sets. Technicolor, invented by an MIT scientist in 1917, had improved and was being used in more movies to draw people away from their black-and-white TV sets. In addition, Cinerama, CinemaScope, and VistaVision all arrived in movie theaters, featuring striking wide-screen images, multiple synchronized projectors, and stereophonic sound. Then 3-D (three-dimensional) movies appeared, although they wore off quickly as a novelty. Finally, Panavision, which used special Eastman color film and camera lenses that decreased the fuzziness of images, became the wide-screen standard throughout the industry. These developments, however, generally failed to address the movies’ primary problem: the middle-class flight to the suburbs, away from downtown theaters.
Hollywood Adapts to Home Entertainment Just as nickelodeons, movie palaces, and drive-ins transformed movie exhibition in earlier times, the introduction of cable television and the videocassette in the 1970s transformed contemporary movie exhibition. Although the video market became a financial bonanza for the movie industry, Hollywood ironically tried to stall the arrival of the VCR in the 1970s—even filing lawsuits to prohibit customers from copying movies from television. The 1997 introduction of the DVD helped reinvigorate the flat sales of the home video market as people began to acquire new movie collections on DVD. Today, home movie exhibition is again in transition, this time from DVD to Internet video. As DVD purchases began to decline, Hollywood endorsed the high-definition format Blu-ray in 2008 to revive sales, but the format didn’t grow quickly enough to help the video store business. The Movie Gallery–Hollywood Video chain shuttered its stores in 2010, and the biggest chain, Blockbuster, closed most of its stores by 2013. The only bright spot in DVD rentals has been at the low end of the market—automated kiosks like Redbox that rent movies for $1.50 to $2.00 a day—but even the kiosk rental business began to flatline by 2013.
The future of the video business is in Internet distribution. Movie fans can download or stream movies and television shows for rent or for purchase from
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services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Google Play, and the iTunes store to their television sets through devices like Roku, Apple TV, TiVo Premiere, video game consoles, and Internet-ready TVs. As people invest in wide-screen TVs (including 3-D televisions) and sophisticated sound systems, home entertainment is getting bigger and keeping pace with the movie theater experience. Interestingly, home entertainment is also getting smaller—movies are increasingly available to stream and download on portable devices like tablets, laptop computers, and smartphones.
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THE ECONOMICS OF THE MOVIE BUSINESS
Despite the development of network and cable television, video-on-demand, DVDs, and Internet downloads and streaming, the movie business has continued to thrive. In fact, since 1963, Americans have purchased roughly 1 billion movie tickets each year; in 2015, 1.32 billion tickets were sold.14 With first-run movie tickets in some areas rising to $15 (and 3-D movies costing even more), gross revenues from North American box-office sales have climbed above the $10 billion mark, up from $9.2 billion annually in 2006 (see Figure 7.1). The bigger news for Hollywood studios is that global box-office revenues have grown at a much more rapid rate, especially in China (though it returns less money to studios), Russia, and Mexico.15
The growing global market for Hollywood films has helped cushion the industry as the home video market undergoes a significant transformation, with the demise of the video rental business and the rise of video streaming. In order to flourish, the movie industry has had to continually revamp its production, distribution, and exhibition system and consolidate its ownership.
Production, Distribution, and Exhibition Today
FIGURE 7.1 NORTH AMERICAN AND GLOBAL BOX-OFFICE REVENUE, 2014 (IN $ BILLIONS) Data from: Motion Picture Association of America, “Global Box Office” www.mpaa.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/growth-of-global-box-office.jpg.
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In the 1970s, attendance by young moviegoers at new suburban multiplex theaters made megahits of The Godfather (1972), The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), Rocky (1976), and Star Wars (1977). During this period, Jaws and Star Wars became the first movies to gross more than $100 million at the U.S. box office in a single year. In trying to copy the success of these blockbuster hits, the major studios set in place economic strategies for future decades (see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: The Blockbuster Mentality” on page 241).
TABLE 7.1 THE TOP 10 ALL-TIME BOX-OFFICE CHAMPIONS* Date from: “All-Time Domestic Blockbusters,” Box Office Guru, April 9, 2016, www.boxofficeguru.com/blockbusters.htm. *Most rankings of the Top 10 most popular films are based on American box- office receipts. If these were adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind (1939) would become No. 2 in U.S. theater revenue. **Gross is shown in absolute dollars based on box-office sales in the United States and Canada.
Rank Title/Date Domestic Gross** ($ millions)
1 Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens (incl. 3-D & Imax, 2015)
$935.1
2 Avatar (2009) 760.5
3 Titanic (1997, 2012 3-D) 658.6
4 Jurassic World (2015) 652.3
5 The Avengers (2012) 623.4
6 The Dark Knight (2008) 533.3
7 Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace (1999, 2012 3-D)
474.5
8 Star Wars (1977) 461.0
9 The Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) 459.0
10 The Dark Knight Rises (2012) 448.1
Making Money on Movies Today With 80 to 90 percent of newly released movies failing to make money at the domestic box office, studios need a couple of major hits each year to offset losses on other films. (See Table 7.1 for a list of the highest-grossing films of all time.) The potential losses are great: Over the past decade, a major studio film, on average, cost about $66 million to produce and about $37 million for domestic marketing, advertising, and print costs.16
With climbing film costs, creating revenue from a movie is a formidable task. Studios make money on movies from six major sources:
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First, the studios get a portion of the theater box-office revenue— about 40 percent of the box-office take (the theaters get the rest). More recently, studios have found that they can often reel in bigger box-office receipts for 3-D films and their higher ticket prices. For example, admission to the 2-D version of a film costs $15 at a New York City multiplex, while the 3-D version costs closer to $20 at the same theater. In 2014, 3-D film screenings accounted for 14 percent of domestic box-office revenue. As Hollywood makes more 3-D films (the latest form of product differentiation), the challenge for major studios has been to increase the number of digital 3-D screens across the country. By 2014, about 37 percent of U.S. theater screens were capable of showing digital 3-D.
Second, about three to four months after the theatrical release comes the home video market, which includes video-on-demand (VOD), subscription streaming, and the remaining Blu-ray and DVD sales and rental business. This second release “window” generates more revenue than the domestic box-office income for major studios, but has been in transition as VOD has replaced the Blu-ray and DVD formats. Video-on-demand includes services like iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, Hulu Plus, and Netflix, and the VOD services of cable companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and Verizon, and satellite providers DirecTV and Dish. Depending on the agreement with the film distributer, movies may be purchased for instant viewing, rented for a limited period of time at a lower price, or instantly streamed as part of a monthly fee for access to a company’s entire library of licensed offerings. (Netflix, the largest streaming service, has over 45 million subscribers.)
Generally, discount rental kiosk companies like Redbox must wait twenty-eight days after films go on sale before they can rent them. Netflix has entered into a similar agreement with movie studios in exchange for more video-streaming content—a concession to Hollywood’s preference to first try to get the greater profits from selling movies as digital downloads or as DVDs before renting them or licensing them to a streaming service. Independent films and documentaries often bypass the theatrical box-office release window entirely because of the necessary steep marketing expenses and instead go straight to home video for release. An executive with the Weinstein Company, a leading independent studio, suggests that a traditional release to movie theaters makes sense only if the studio anticipates that the film will make gross revenues of more than $20 million.17 There is pressure from services like Netflix for Hollywood to release films simultaneously to
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the home video market and to theaters, but the theater industry and its major studio allies have fiercely protected the three- to four-month exclusive window that theaters have for movie releases, arguing that to lose exclusivity would destroy the movie theater business.18
Third are the next “windows” of release for a film: premium cable (such as HBO and Showtime), then network and basic cable showings, and finally the syndicated TV market. The price these cable and television outlets pay to the studios is negotiated on a film- by-film basis. Fourth, studios earn revenue from distributing films in foreign markets. In fact, at a record breaking $38 billion in 2015, international box-office gross revenues are more than triple the U.S. and Canadian box-office receipts, and they continue to climb annually, even as other countries produce more of their own films. Fifth, studios make money by distributing the work of independent producers and filmmakers, who hire the studios to gain wider circulation. Independents pay the studios between 30 and 50 percent of the box-office and home video money they make from movies. Sixth, revenue is earned from merchandise licensing and product placements in movies. In the early days of television and film, characters generally used generic products, or product labels weren’t highlighted in shots. But with soaring film production costs, product placements are adding extra revenue while lending an element of authenticity to the staging. Famous product placements in movies include Reese’s Pieces in E.T. (1982), Pepsi-Cola in Back to the Future II (1989), and an entire line of toy products in The Lego Movie (2014).
Theater Chains Consolidate Exhibition
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BLOCKBUSTERS like Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), a sequel to the 1977 classic, are sought after despite their large budgets because they can bring in many times their cost in box-office receipts, disc and video-on-demand sales, streaming, merchandising, and sequels that generate more of the same. The Force Awakens, which grossed over $2 billion worldwide, is the third-highest-grossing film of all time and revitalized a long-dormant franchise. Disney now plans to release a new Star Wars film every year, starting with Rogue One in December 2016. David James/© Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Lucasfilm Ltd./Everett Collection
Film exhibition is controlled by a handful of theater chains; the leading five companies operate more than 50 percent of U.S. screens. The major chains—AMC Entertainment, Regal Entertainment Group, Cinemark USA, Cineplex Entertainment, and Marcus Theatres—own thousands of screens in suburban malls and at highway crossroads, and most have expanded into international markets as well. Because distributors require access to movie screens, they do business with the chains that control the most screens. In a multiplex, an exhibitor can project a potential hit on two or three screens at the same time; films that do not debut well are relegated to the smallest theaters or bumped quickly for a new release.
The strategy of the leading theater chains during the mid-1990s was to build more megaplexes (facilities with fourteen or more screens), featuring upscale concession services and luxurious screening rooms equipped with stadium-style seating and digital sound to make moviegoing a special event. By 2016, the movie exhibition business had grown to 40,164 indoor screens, most of them at megaplex locations. To further combat the home theater market, movie theater chains added IMAX screens and digital projectors to exhibit specially mastered 3-D blockbusters that carry higher ticket prices.19
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megaplexes movie theater facilities with fourteen or more screens.
The Major Studio Players The current Hollywood commercial film business is ruled primarily by six companies: Warner Brothers, Paramount, 21st Century Fox, Universal, Columbia Pictures, and Disney—the Big Six. Except for Disney and Fox, all these companies are owned by large parent conglomerates (see Figure 7.2). The six major studios account for about 86 percent of the revenue generated by commercial films. They also control more than half the movie market in Europe and Asia. In the United States, three independent studios—sometimes called mini-majors—have maintained modest market share recently: Lionsgate (The Hunger Games, the Twilight series, the Divergent series), which purchased indie Summit Entertainment in 2012; the Weinstein Company (Carol, The Imitation Game); and Relativity (Masterminds, Before I Wake), which has recently run into financial problems.
Big Six the six major Hollywood studios that currently rule the commercial film business: Warner Brothers, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Columbia Pictures, and Disney.
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FIGURE 7.2 MARKET SHARE OF U.S. FILM STUDIOS AND DISTRIBUTORS, 2015 (IN $ MILLIONS) Note: Based on gross box-office revenue, January 1, 2015–December 31, 2015. Overall gross for period: $11.495 billion. Data from: Box Office Mojo, “Studio Market Share, 2015,” www.boxofficemojo.com/studio/.
In the 1980s, to offset losses resulting from box-office failures, the movie industry began to diversify, expanding into other product lines and other mass media. This expansion included television programming, print media, sound recordings, and home videos/DVDs, as well as cable and computers, electronic hardware and software, retail stores, and theme parks such as Universal Studios. To maintain the industry’s economic stability, management strategies today rely on both heavy advance promotion (which can double the cost of a commercial film) and synergy—the promotion and sale of a product throughout the various subsidiaries of the media conglomerate. Companies promote not only the new movie itself but also its book form, soundtrack, calendars, T-shirts, Web site, and toy action figures, as well as “the-making-of” story on television and the Internet. The Disney studio, in particular, has been successful with its multiple repackaging of youth-targeted movies, including comic books, toys, television specials, fast- food tie-ins, and theme-park attractions. Since the 1950s, this synergy has been a key characteristic of the film industry and an important element in the flood of corporate mergers that have made today’s Big Six even bigger.
synergy in media economics, the promotion and sale of a product (and all its versions) throughout the various subsidiaries of a media conglomerate.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
The Blockbuster Mentality
In the beginning of this chapter, we noted Hollywood’s shift toward a blockbuster mentality after the success
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of films like Star Wars. How pervasive is this blockbuster mentality, which targets an audience of young adults, releases action-packed big-budget films featuring heavy merchandising tie-ins, and produces sequels?
1 DESCRIPTION Consider a list of the all-time highest-grossing movies in the United States, such as the one on Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic.htm.
2 ANALYSIS Note patterns in the list. For example, of the thirty top-grossing films, nearly all of them target young audiences. Nearly all of these top-grossing films feature animated or digitally composited characters (Frozen, Shrek 2, Jurassic Park) or extensive special effects (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Avengers: Age of Ultron). Nearly all of the films also either spawned or are a part of a series, like Transformers, The Dark Knight, and Harry Potter. More than half of the films fit into the action movie genre. Nearly all of the Top 30 had intense merchandising campaigns that featured action figures, fast-food tie-ins, and an incredible variety of products for sale; that is, hardly any were “surprise” hits.
3 INTERPRETATION What do the patterns mean? It’s clear, economically, why Hollywood likes to have successful blockbuster movie franchises. But what kinds of films get left out of the mix? Hits like Forrest Gump (now bumped out of the Top 30), which may have had big-budget releases but lack some of the other attributes of blockbusters, are clearly anomalies of the blockbuster mentality, although they illustrate that strong characters and compelling stories can carry a film to great commercial success.
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4 EVALUATION It is likely that we will continue to see an increase in youth-oriented, animated/action movie franchises that are heavily merchandised and intended for wide international distribution. Indeed, Hollywood does not have a lot of motivation to put out the kinds of movies that don’t fit these categories. Is this a good thing? Can you think of a film that you thought was excellent and that would have probably been a bigger hit with better promotion and wider distribution?
5 ENGAGEMENT Watch independent and foreign films to see what you’re missing. Visit the Sundance Film Festival site and browse through the many films listed. Find these films on Netflix, Amazon, Google Play, or iTunes (and if the films are unavailable, let these services know). Write your cable company and request to have the Sundance Channel on your cable lineup. Organize an independent film night on your college campus and bring these films to a crowd.
The biggest corporate mergers have involved the internationalization of the American film business. Investment in American popular culture by the international electronics industry is particularly significant. This business strategy represents a new, high-tech kind of vertical integration—an attempt to control both the production of electronic equipment that consumers buy for their homes and the production and distribution of the content that runs on that equipment. This began in 1985, when Australia’s News Corp. bought Twentieth Century Fox (News Corp. has since split into two separate companies; the film division is under the umbrella of 21st Century Fox). Sony bought Columbia in 1989 for $4 billion. Vivendi, a French utility, acquired Universal in 2000 but sold it to General Electric, the parent of NBC, in 2003. Comcast bought a controlling stake in NBC Universal in 2009, and government agencies approved the merger in 2011. In 2006, Disney bought its animation partner, Pixar. It also bought Marvel in 2009, which gave Disney the rights to a host of characters, including Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, the X- Men, and the Fantastic Four. In 2012, Disney bought Lucasfilm, gaining control of the Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, plus the innovative technologies of George Lucas’s famed Industrial Light & Magic special-effects company.
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SYNERGIES in feature films can be easy for Disney, which is a $52.5 billion multinational corporation. Frozen (2013) is one of Disney’s biggest animated hits ever, and Frozen merchandise was in short supply in North America for fans wanting to celebrate the story of Anna and Elsa, two princess sisters who also became attractions at Disney resort parks. The movie’s soundtrack hit No. 1 in sales, and Disney Cruise Line and the Adventures by Disney tour company experienced a huge increase in holiday business to Geirangerfjord, Norway, the fjord that inspired the film’s fantasy kingdom of Arendelle. © Walt Disney Pictures/Everett Collection
Convergence: Movies Adjust to the Digital Turn The biggest challenge the movie industry faces today is the Internet. As broadband Internet service connects more households, movie fans are increasingly getting movies from the Web. After witnessing the difficulties that illegal file-sharing brought on the music labels (some of which share the same corporate parent as the Big Six), the movie industry has more quickly embraced the Internet for movie distribution. Apple’s iTunes store began selling digital downloads of a limited selection of movies in 2006, and in 2008, iTunes began renting new movies from all the major studios for just $3.99. In the same year, online DVD rental service Netflix began streaming some movies and television shows to customers’ computer screens and televisions.
The popularity of Netflix’s streaming service opened the door to other similar services. Hulu, a joint venture by NBC Universal (Universal Studios), 21st Century Fox, and Disney, was created as the studios’ attempt to divert attention from YouTube and get viewers to either watch free, ad-supported streaming movies and television shows online or subscribe to Hulu Plus, Hulu’s premium service. Comcast operates a similar Web site, called Xfinity. Google’s YouTube, the most popular online video service, moved to offer commercial films in 2010 by redesigning its interface to be more film-friendly and offering online rentals. Amazon, Vudu (owned by Walmart), and CinemaNow (owned by retailer Best Buy) also operate digital movie stores.
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Movies are also increasingly available to stream or download on mobile phones and tablets. Several companies, including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Google, and Apple, have developed distribution to mobile devices. Small screens don’t offer an optimal viewing experience, but if customers watch movies on their mobile devices, they will likely use the same company’s service to continue viewing on the larger screens of computers and televisions.
The year 2012 marked a turning point: For the first time, movie fans accessed more movies through digital online media than through physical copies, like DVDs and Blu-ray discs.20 For the movie industry, this shift to Internet distribution has mixed consequences. On the one hand, the industry needs to offer movies where people want to access them, and digital distribution is a growing market. “We’re agnostic about where the money comes from,” says Eammon Bowles, president of the independent distributor Magnolia Pictures. “We don’t care. Basically, our philosophy is we want to make the film available for however the customer wants to purchase it.”21 On the other hand, although providing streaming is less expensive than producing physical DVDs, the revenue is still much lower compared to DVD sales; this shift has had a larger impact on the major studios, which had grown reliant on healthy DVD revenue.
The digital turn creates two long-term paths for Hollywood. One path is that studios and theaters will lean even more heavily toward making and showing big- budget blockbuster film franchises with a lot of special effects, since people will want to watch those on the big screen (especially IMAX and 3-D) for the full effect —and they are easy to export for international audiences. The other path involves inexpensive digital distribution of lower-budget documentaries and independent films, which probably wouldn’t get wide theatrical distribution anyway but could find an audience in those who watch at home.
The Internet has also become an essential tool for movie marketing, and one that studios are finding less expensive than traditional methods, like television ads or billboards. Films regularly have Web pages, but many studios now also use a full menu of social media to promote films in advance of their release. For example, the marketing plan for Lionsgate’s 2012 movie The Hunger Games, which launched an enormously successful movie franchise, employed “near- constant use of Facebook and Twitter, a YouTube channel, a Tumblr blog, iPhone games and live Yahoo streaming from the premiere” to build interest that made it a hit film.22
Alternative Voices With the major studios exerting such a profound influence on the worldwide production, distribution, and exhibition of movies, new alternatives have helped open and redefine the movie industry. The digital revolution in movie production is the most recent opportunity to wrest some power away from the Hollywood studios. Substantially cheaper and more accessible than standard film equipment, digital video is a shift from celluloid film; it allows filmmakers to replace
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expensive and bulky 16-mm and 35-mm film cameras with less expensive, lightweight digital video cameras. For moviemakers, digital video also means seeing camera work instantly instead of waiting for film to be developed, and being able to capture additional footage without concern for the high cost of film stock and processing.
digital video the production format that is replacing celluloid film and revolutionizing filmmaking because the cameras are more portable and production costs are much less expensive.
Though digital video has become commonplace on big studio productions, the greatest impact of digital technology has been on independent filmmakers. Low- cost digital video opened up the creative process to countless new artists. With digital video camera equipment and computer-based desktop editors, movies can be made for a fraction of what the cost would be on film. For example, Hardcore Henry (2015) was shot mainly with a consumer-brand GoPro Hero 3 camera. Digital cameras are now the norm for independent filmmakers. Ironically, both independent and Hollywood filmmakers have to contend with issues of preserving digital content: Celluloid film stock can last a hundred years, whereas digital formats can be lost as storage formats fail and devices become obsolete.23
HARDCORE HENRY (2015), an action film by Russian director Ilya Naishuller, was shot with an inexpensive GoPro Hero 3 helmet camera, worn by various actors playing the title character to achieve the first-person shooter point of view. The producers raised about $255,000 from more than two thousand backers on the Indiegogo crowdfunding platform to make the film’s first version. American-based STX Entertainment then
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acquired the film for $10 million, made improvements, and released it worldwide in 2016. Everett Collection, Inc
Because digital production puts movies in the same format as the Internet, independent filmmakers have new distribution venues beyond film festivals or the major studios. For example, Vimeo, YouTube, and Netflix have grown into leading Internet sites for the screening and distribution of short films and film festival entries, providing filmmakers with their most valuable asset—an audience. Others have used the Web to sell DVDs directly, sell merchandise, or accept contributions for free movie downloads.
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POPULAR MOVIES AND DEMOCRACY
At the cultural level, movies function as consensus narratives, a term that describes cultural products that become popular and provide shared cultural experiences. These consensus narratives operate across different times and cultures. In this sense, movies are part of a long narrative tradition, encompassing “the oral formulaic of Homer’s day, the theater of Sophocles, the Elizabethan theater, the English novel from Defoe to Dickens, … the silent film, the sound film, and television during the Network Era.”24 Consensus narratives—whether they are dramas, romances, westerns, or mysteries—speak to central myths and values in an accessible language that often bridges global boundaries.
consensus narratives cultural products that become popular and command wide attention, providing shared cultural experiences.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
More Than a Movie: Social Issues and Film Independent filmmakers are using social media to get moviegoers involved.
Discussion: Do you think the convergence of digital media with social-issue movies helps such films make a larger impact? Why or why not?
At the international level, countries continue to struggle with questions about the influence of American films on local customs and culture. As with other American mass media industries, the long reach of Hollywood movies is one of the key contradictions of contemporary life: Do such films contribute to a global
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village in which people throughout the world share a universal culture that breaks down barriers? Or does an American-based common culture stifle the development of local cultures worldwide and diversity in moviemaking? Clearly, the steady production of profitable action/ adventure movies—whether they originate in the United States, Africa, France, or China—continues, not only because these movies appeal to mass audiences but also because they translate easily into other languages.
With the rise of international media conglomerates, it has become more difficult to awaken public debate over issues of movie diversity and America’s domination of the film business. Consequently, issues concerning increased competition and a greater variety of movies sometimes fall by the wayside. As critical consumers, those of us who enjoy movies and recognize their cultural significance must raise these broader issues in public forums as well as in our personal conversations.
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7 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is mass media, cultural expression, and storytelling. The movie industry is a particularly potent example of this, as Hollywood movies dominate international screens. But Hollywood dominates our domestic screens as well. Does this limit our exposure to other kinds of stories?
In the 1920s, when the burgeoning film industries in Europe lay in ruins after World War I, Hollywood gained an international dominance it has never relinquished. Critics have long cited America’s cultural imperialism, claiming America floods the world with its movies, music, television shows, fashion, and products. The strength of American cultural and economic power is evident when you witness a Thai man in a Tommy Hilfiger shirt watching Transformers at a Bangkok bar while eating a hamburger and drinking a Coke. Critics feel that American-produced culture overwhelms indigenous cultural industries, which will never be able to compete at the same level.
But other cultures are good at bending and blending our content. Hip-hop has been remade into regional music in places like Senegal, Portugal, Taiwan, and the Philippines. McDonald’s is global, but in India you can get a McAloo Tikki sandwich—a spicy fried potato and pea vegetarian patty. In Turkey you can get a McTurco, a kebab with lamb or chicken. And in France you can order a beer with your meal.
While some may be proud of the success of America’s cultural exports, we might also ask ourselves this: What is the impact of our cultural dominance on our own media environment? Foreign films, for example, account for less than 2 percent of all releases in the United States. Is this because we find subtitles or other languages too challenging? At points in the twentieth century, American moviegoers were much more likely to see foreign films. Did our taste in movies change on our own accord, or did we simply forget how to appreciate different narratives and styles?
Of course, international content does make it to our shores. We exported rock and roll, and the British sent it back to us, with long hair. They also gave us The Office and House of Cards. Japan gave us anime, Pokémon, Iron Chef, and Hello Kitty.
But in a world where globalization is a key phenomenon, Hollywood rarely
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shows us the world through another’s eyes. The burden falls to us to search out and watch those movies until Hollywood finally gets the message.
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
celluloid, 218 kinetograph, 219 kinetoscope, 219 vitascope, 219 narrative films, 220 nickelodeons, 220 vertical integration, 221 oligopoly, 221 studio system, 222 block booking, 222 movie palaces, 223 multiplexes, 224 Big Five, 224 Little Three, 224 blockbuster, 224 talkies, 224 newsreels, 225 genre, 225 documentary, 230 cinema verité, 230 indies, 230 Hollywood Ten, 234 Paramount decision, 235 megaplexes, 240 Big Six, 240
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synergy, 240 digital video, 243 consensus narratives, 244
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
Early Technology and the Evolution of Movies 1. How did film go from the novelty stage to the mass medium
stage? 2. Why were early silent films popular? 3. What contribution did nickelodeons make to film history?
The Rise of the Hollywood Studio System 4. Why did Hollywood end up as the center of film production? 5. Why did Thomas Edison and the patents Trust fail to shape and
control the film industry, and why did Adolph Zukor of Paramount succeed?
6. How does vertical integration work in the film business? The Studio System’s Golden Age
7. Why did a certain structure of film—called classic Hollywood narrative—become so dominant in moviemaking?
8. Why are genres and directors important to the film industry? 9. Why are documentaries an important alternative to traditional
Hollywood filmmaking? What contributions have they made to the film industry?
The Transformation of the Studio System 10. What political and cultural forces changed the Hollywood
system in the 1950s? 11. How did the movie industry respond to the advent of television? 12. How has the home entertainment industry developed and
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changed since the 1970s? The Economics of the Movie Business 13. What are the various ways in which major movie studios make
money from the film business? 14. How do a few large film studios manage to control most of the
commercial industry? 15. How is the movie industry adapting to the Internet? 16. What is the impact of inexpensive digital technology on
filmmaking? Popular Movies and Democracy 17. Do films contribute to a global village in which people
throughout the world share a universal culture? Or do U.S.-based films overwhelm the development of other cultures worldwide? Discuss.
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. Do some research, and compare your earliest memory of going to a movie with a parent’s or grandparent’s earliest memory.
2. Do you remember seeing a movie you were not allowed to see? Discuss the experience.
3. Do you prefer viewing films at a movie theater or at home, either by playing a DVD or by streaming/downloading from the Internet? How might your viewing preferences connect to the way in which the film industry is evolving?
4. If you were a Hollywood film producer or executive, what kinds of films would you like to see made? What changes would you make in what we see at the movies?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE Learning Curve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter.
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VIDEO: Gravity Watch a brief clip from Gravity, and discuss how the movie uses the most advanced technical tools in service of classical storytelling.
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PART 3 Words and Pictures
The dominant media of the nineteenth century featured printed material, with pictures supplementing the written text of newspapers, magazines, and books—our oldest mass media. When music, radio, and TV came along in the twentieth century, the newspaper, magazine, and book industries did not disappear; instead, they adapted. And in the twenty-first century, the story of our oldest media is still about adapting, but this time in the age of Apple and Amazon. We are still reading newspapers, subscribing to magazines, and buying books, but they now come in multiple forms.
As we wrestle with the changes of the digital age, does it make any difference whether we get our news from a printed newspaper or an online Web site? Does it matter if we hold a physical magazine or even this textbook in our hands, or is an online version just as good? What is clear is that newspapers, magazines, and books will continue in some form. Perhaps these forms will represent something entirely new, but the earlier, physical versions of these texts will continue to shape their digital content even as the ways they are read and interpreted change.
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture to explore an interactive timeline of the history of mass communication, practice your media literacy skills, test your knowledge of the concepts in the textbook with LearningCurve, explore and discuss current trends in mass communication with Video Activities and Video Tools, and more.
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8 Newspapers The Rise and Decline of Modern Journalism
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© Moviestore collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
WORDS AND PICTURES
AT THE 2016 ACADEMY AWARDS, the movie
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Spotlight won Oscars for best picture and best original screenplay. The movie depicts the work of the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting team, Spotlight, which won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2003 for its coverage of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Boston and across Massachusetts. The best picture award was unexpected, in part because we live in an era in which news media are routinely portrayed as villains by political pundits (and candidates) and because investigative journalism has been decimated by cutbacks in newsroom budgets across the country. Critically acclaimed, the movie showcases the kind of journalism that not only holds people in power accountable but also changes lives. Recognizing, let alone acknowledging, this kind of work is difficult in a time when we are awash in all the noise and drama of social media. Not since All the President’s Men in 1976—depicting the Washington Post’s critical coverage of the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, as well as prison time for many
THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS COMPETING MODELS OF MODERN PRINT JOURNALISM THE BUSINESS AND OWNERSHIP OF NEWSPAPERS CHALLENGES FACING NEWSPAPERS TODAY NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY
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in his inner circle—has a movie elevated the status of newspapers. Interestingly, Martin Baron, the editor of the Boston Globe who initiated the Spotlight project, became the editor of the Washington Post in 2013.
The movie Spotlight also distinguished itself for portraying good journalism as a team effort rather than just the work of a single heroic reporter. More broadly, journalism often celebrates or dramatizes the exploits of individuals rather than the ways in which institutions and organizations work—or don’t work. For example, CBS’s 60 Minutes—the gold standard for investigative journalism, on television since 1968—often portrays socioeconomic problems like homelessness by dramatizing the plight of an individual person or family.1 In doing so, the larger social problem of homelessness, which requires collective social action to actually solve, often plays out in the news as isolated personal problems demanding individual remedies.
In Spotlight, however, the team moves in a different direction. The reporters reveal to editor Baron evidence of fifty or more predatory priests, whom the church has protected by sending hush money to families of the victims. Baron, played by Liev Schreiber, argues against running individual stories and asks the team to uncover the larger systemic problem of priest abuse. He wants stories that explain institutional failure and dysfunction, not just a series of isolated reports about the church’s covering up for various rogue priests. In other words, Baron asks his team to report on the larger story—a major social and institutional problem that demands collective engagement by both the church’s and the press. In fact, the movie’s script was inspired by a 2009 case study from Columbia Journalism School. The case study argued that in the past, priest abuse stories across the country “were treated as isolated instances. The church, and to some degree the press, seemed content to portray the growing list of cases as stories of individual priests who had sinned, been exposed, and brought to justice.”2
Sadly, the kind of journalism portrayed in Spotlight is the exception rather than the rule. Investigative journalism that holds the powerful accountable is time consuming and expensive. It is on the decline, even though its stories are widely read and popular among both newspaper and TV audiences (60 Minutes, for example, is the only TV show to be rated No. 1 in three separate decades). In today’s newspaper world, however, the bottom line is often about managing costs and the value of newspapers to stockholders. For example, between 1993 and 2013, the economic value of the Boston Globe and its sister paper, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, fell 96 percent, from $1.8 billion when the New York Times bought the papers in 1993 to the $71 million paid by businessman John Henry in 2013.3
Despite these numbers, some big investors have been picking up papers at bargain prices. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos paid $250 million in 2013 for the Washington Post— last sold at auction in 1933. Investment guru Warren Buffett bought more than sixty newspapers in 2012 and 2013—at a time when many traditional print companies, looking at the decline in readership, were trying to unload their papers.
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If the journalism portrayed in Spotlight is to thrive, it will take more than the underwriting of a handful of billionaires who understand the value of good journalism to their communities. Operating like the Spotlight team, individual communities need to think about the diminishment of investigative journalism as a systemic problem that requires collective action in order to foster the kind of reporting that not only fully informs us but strengthens our democracy.
DESPITE THEIR CURRENT PREDICAMENTS, newspapers and their online offspring play many roles in contemporary culture. As chroniclers of daily life, newspapers both inform and entertain. By reporting on scientific, technological, and medical issues, newspapers disseminate specialized knowledge to the public. In reviews of films, concerts, and plays, they shape cultural trends. Investigative teams like the Boston Globe’s Spotlight unit expose corruption. Opinion pages trigger public debates and offer differing points of view. Columnists provide everything from advice on raising children to opinions on the United States’ role as an economic and military superpower. Newspapers help readers make choices about everything from what kind of food to eat to what kinds of leaders to elect.
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Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
Although newspapers have played a central role in daily life, in today’s digital age the industry is losing both papers and readers. Newspapers have lost their near monopoly on classified advertising, much of which has shifted to free Web sites, like craigslist and eBay. According to a 2015 report from the Pew Research Center, total print and digital newspaper ad revenues totaled $20 billion in 2014, with $16.4 billion coming from print ads (down 4 percent from 2013), and $3.5 billion coming from online ads (up 3 percent from 2013). By comparison, print ads brought in $47 billion back in 2005, with online ads accounting for an additional $2 billion in revenue.4 As the Pew report indicates, the slow growth of digital revenue for newspapers has not come close to offsetting the major declines in print ads over the past ten years.
In terms of circulation, Pew reports that after two years of slight gains in 2012 and 2013, both weekday and Sunday circulation declined in 2014. Pew’s analysis of readership data shows that weekday circulation fell 3.3 percent from 2013, and Sunday circulation dropped 3.4 percent. Still, about 56 percent of newspaper readers report that they get their news from print editions exclusively.5
In this chapter, we examine the cultural, social, and economic impact of newspapers. We will:
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Trace the history of newspapers through a number of influential periods and styles Explore the early political-commercial press, the penny press, and yellow journalism Examine the modern era through the influence of the New York Times and journalism’s embrace of objectivity Look at interpretive journalism in the 1920s and 1930s and the revival of literary journalism in the 1960s Review issues of newspaper ownership, new technologies, citizen journalism, declining revenue, and the crucial role of newspapers in our democracy
As you read this chapter, think about your own early experiences with newspapers and the impact they have had on you and your family. Did you read certain sections of the paper, like sports or comics? What do you remember from your childhood about your parents’ reading habits? What are your own newspaper reading habits today? How often do you actually hold a newspaper? How often do you get your news online? For more questions to help you think through the role of newspapers in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS
The idea of news is as old as language itself. The earliest news was passed along orally from family to family, from tribe to tribe, by community leaders and oral historians. The earliest known written news account, or news sheet, Acta Diurna (Latin for “daily events”), was developed by Julius Caesar and posted in public spaces and on buildings in Rome in 59 BCE. Even in its oral and early written stages, news informed people on the state of their relations with neighboring tribes and towns. The development of the printing press in the fifteenth century greatly accelerated a society’s ability to send and receive information. Throughout history, news has satisfied our need to know things we cannot experience personally. Newspapers today continue to document daily life and bear witness to both ordinary and extraordinary events.
Colonial Newspapers and the Partisan Press The novelty and entrepreneurial stages of print-media development first happened in Europe with the rise of the printing press. In North America, the first newspaper, Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, was published on September 25, 1690, by Boston printer Benjamin Harris. The colonial government objected to Harris’s negative tone regarding British rule, and local ministers were offended by his published report that the king of France had an affair with his son’s wife. The newspaper was banned after one issue.
In 1704, the first regularly published newspaper appeared in the American colonies—the Boston News-Letter, published by John Campbell. Because European news took weeks to travel by ship, these early colonial papers were not very timely. In their more spirited sections, however, the papers did report local illnesses, public floggings, and even suicides. In 1721, also in Boston, James Franklin, the older brother of Benjamin Franklin, started the New England Courant. The Courant established a tradition of running stories that interested ordinary readers rather than printing articles that appealed primarily to business and colonial leaders. In 1729, Benjamin Franklin, at age twenty-four, took over the Pennsylvania Gazette and created, according to historians, the best of the colonial papers. Although a number of colonial papers operated solely on subsidies from political parties, the Gazette also made money by advertising products.
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COLONIAL NEWSPAPERS During the colonial period, New York printer John Peter Zenger was arrested for seditious libel. He eventually won his case, which established the precedent that today allows U.S. journalists and citizens to criticize public officials. In this 1734 issue, Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal reported his own arrest and the burning of the paper by the city’s “common Hangman.” Bettmann/Getty Images
Another important colonial paper, the New-York Weekly Journal, appeared in 1733. John Peter Zenger had been installed as the printer of the Journal by the Popular Party, a political group that opposed British rule and ran articles that criticized the royal governor of New York. After a Popular Party judge was dismissed from office, the Journal escalated its attack on the governor. When Zenger shielded the writers of the critical articles, he was arrested in 1734 for seditious libel—defaming a public official’s character in print. Championed by famed Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton, Zenger ultimately won his case in 1735. A sympathetic jury, in revolt against the colonial government, decided that newspapers had the right to criticize government leaders as long as the reports were true. After the Zenger case, the British never prosecuted another colonial printer. The Zenger decision would later provide a key foundation—the right of a democratic press to criticize public officials—for the First Amendment to the Constitution, adopted as part of the Bill of Rights in 1791. (See Chapter 16 for more on the First Amendment.)
By 1765, about thirty newspapers operated in the American colonies, with the first daily paper beginning in 1784. Newspapers were of two general types:
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political or commercial. Their development was shaped in large part by social, cultural, and political responses to British rule and by its eventual overthrow. Although the political and commercial papers carried both party news and business news, they had different agendas. Political papers, known as the partisan press, generally pushed the plan of the particular political group that subsidized the paper. The commercial press, by contrast, served business leaders, who were interested in economic issues. Both types of journalism left a legacy. The partisan press gave us the editorial pages, while the early commercial press was the forerunner of the business section.
partisan press an early dominant style of American journalism distinguished by opinion newspapers, which generally argued one political point of view or pushed the plan of the particular party that subsidized the paper.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even the largest of these papers rarely reached a circulation of fifteen hundred. Readership was primarily confined to educated or wealthy men who controlled local politics and commerce. During this time, though, a few pioneering women operated newspapers, including Elizabeth Timothy, the first American woman newspaper publisher (and mother of eight children). After her husband died of smallpox in 1738, Timothy took over the South Carolina Gazette, established in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin and the Timothy family. Also during this period, Anna Maul Zenger ran the New-York Weekly Journal throughout her husband’s trial and after his death in 1746.6
The Penny Press Era: Newspapers Become Mass Media By the late 1820s, the average newspaper cost six cents a copy and was sold through yearly subscriptions priced at ten to twelve dollars. Because that price was more than a week’s salary for most skilled workers, newspaper readers were mostly affluent. By the 1830s, however, the Industrial Revolution made possible the replacement of expensive handmade paper with cheaper machine-made paper. During this time, the rise of the middle class spurred the growth of literacy, setting the stage for a more popular and inclusive press. In addition, breakthroughs in technology, particularly the replacement of mechanical presses by steam-powered presses, permitted publishers to produce as many as four thousand newspapers an hour, which lowered the cost of newspapers. Penny papers soon began competing with six-cent papers. Though subscriptions remained the preferred sales tool of
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many penny papers, they began relying increasingly on daily street sales of individual copies.
penny papers (also penny press) refers to newspapers that, because of technological innovations in printing, were able to drop their price to one cent beginning in the 1830s, thereby making papers affordable to the working and emerging middle classes and enabling newspapers to become a genuine mass medium.
Day and the New York Sun In 1833, printer Benjamin Day founded the New York Sun with no subscriptions and the price set at one penny. The Sun—whose slogan was “It shines for all”— highlighted local events, scandals, police reports, and serialized stories. Like today’s supermarket tabloids, the Sun fabricated stories, including the infamous moon hoax, which reported “scientific” evidence of life on the moon. Within six months, the Sun’s lower price had generated a circulation of eight thousand, twice that of its nearest New York competitor.
The Sun’s success initiated a wave of penny papers that favored human- interest stories: news accounts that focus on the daily trials and triumphs of the human condition, often featuring ordinary individuals facing extraordinary challenges. These kinds of stories reveal journalism’s ties to literary traditions, such as the archetypal conflicts between good and evil, normal and deviant, or individuals and institutions.
human-interest stories news accounts that focus on the trials and tribulations of the human condition, often featuring ordinary individuals facing extraordinary challenges.
Bennett and the New York Morning Herald The penny press era also featured James Gordon Bennett’s New York Morning Herald, founded in 1835. Bennett, considered the first U.S. press baron, freed his newspaper from political influence. He established an independent paper serving middle- and working-class readers as well as his own business ambitions. The
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Herald carried political essays, news about scandals, business stories, a letters section, fashion notes, moral reflections, religious news, society gossip, colloquial tales and jokes, sports stories, and eventually reports from the Civil War. In addition, Bennett’s paper sponsored balloon races, financed safaris, and overplayed crime stories. By 1860, the Herald reached nearly eighty thousand readers, making it the world’s largest daily paper at the time.
Changing Economics and the Founding of the Associated Press The penny papers were innovative. For example, they were the first to assign reporters to cover crime, and readers enthusiastically embraced the reporting of local news and crime. By gradually separating daily front-page reporting from overt political viewpoints on an editorial page, penny papers shifted their economic base from political parties to the market—to advertising revenue, classified ads, and street sales. Although many partisan papers had taken a moral stand against advertising some controversial products and “services”—such as medical “miracle” cures, abortionists, and especially the slave trade—the penny press became more neutral toward advertisers and printed virtually any ad. In fact, many penny papers regarded advertising as consumer news. The rise in ad revenues and circulation accelerated the growth of the newspaper industry. In 1830, 650 weekly and 65 daily papers operated in the United States, reaching a circulation of 80,000. By 1840, a total of 1,140 weeklies and 140 dailies attracted more than 300,000 readers.
In 1848, six New York newspapers formed a cooperative arrangement and founded the Associated Press (AP), the first major news wire service. Wire services began as commercial organizations that relayed news stories and information around the country and the world using telegraph lines and, later, radio waves and digital transmissions. In the case of the AP, the New York papers provided access to both their own stories and those from other newspapers. In the 1850s, papers started sending reporters to cover Washington, D.C., and in the early 1860s, more than a hundred reporters from northern papers went south to cover the Civil War, relaying their reports back to their home papers via telegraph and wire services. The news wire companies enabled news to travel rapidly from coast to coast and set the stage for modern journalism.
wire services commercial organizations, such as the Associated Press, that share news stories and information by relaying them around the country and the world, originally via telegraph and now via satellite transmission.
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NEWSIES sold Hearst and Pulitzer papers on the streets of New York in the 1890s. With more than a dozen dailies competing, street tactics were ferocious, and publishers often made young “newsies”—newsboys and newsgirls—buy the papers they could not sell. Library of Congress
The marketing of news as a product and the use of modern technology to dramatically cut costs gradually elevated newspapers from an entrepreneurial stage to the status of a mass medium. By adapting news content, penny papers captured the middle- and working-class readers who could now afford the paper and also had more leisure time to read it. As newspapers sought to sustain their mass appeal, news and “factual” reports about crimes and other items of human interest eventually became more important than partisan articles about politics and commerce.
The Age of Yellow Journalism: Sensationalism and Investigation The rise of competitive dailies and the penny press triggered the next significant period in American journalism. In the late 1800s, yellow journalism emphasized profitable papers that carried exciting human-interest stories, crime news, large headlines, and more readable copy. Generally regarded as sensationalistic and the direct forerunner of today’s tabloid papers, reality TV, and celebrity-centered shows like Access Hollywood, yellow journalism featured two major
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developments: the emphasis on sensational or overly dramatic stories and early in- depth “detective” stories—the legacy for twentieth-century investigative journalism (news reports that hunt out and expose corruption, particularly in business and government). Reporting during this yellow journalism period increasingly became a crusading force for common people, with the press assuming a watchdog role on their behalf.
yellow journalism a newspaper style or era that peaked in the 1890s, it emphasized high-interest stories, sensational crime news, large headlines, and serious reports that exposed corruption, particularly in business and government.
investigative journalism news reports that hunt out and expose corruption, particularly in business and government.
YELLOW JOURNALISM Generally considered America’s first comic-strip character, the Yellow Kid was created in the mid-1890s by cartoonist Richard (R. F.) Outcault. The cartoon was so popular that newspaper barons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst
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fought over Outcault’s services, giving yellow journalism its name. Dept. of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library
During this period, a newspaper circulation war pitted Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World against William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. A key player in the war was the first popular cartoon strip, The Yellow Kid, created in 1895 by artist R. F. Outcault, who once worked for Thomas Edison. The phrase yellow journalism has since become associated with the cartoon strip, which was shuttled back and forth between the Hearst and Pulitzer papers during their furious battle for readers in the mid to late 1890s.
Pulitzer and the New York World Joseph Pulitzer, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant, began his career in newspaper publishing in the early 1870s as part owner of the St. Louis Post. He then bought the bankrupt St. Louis Dispatch for $2,500 at an auction in 1878 and merged it with the Post. The Post-Dispatch became known for stories that highlighted “sex and sin” (“A Denver Maiden Taken from Disreputable House”) and satires of the upper class (“St. Louis Swells”). Pulitzer also viewed the Post-Dispatch as a “national conscience” that promoted the public good. He carried on the legacies of James Gordon Bennett: making money and developing a “free and impartial” paper that would “serve no party but the people.” Within five years, the Post-Dispatch became one of the most influential newspapers in the Midwest.
In 1883, Pulitzer bought the New York World for $346,000. He encouraged plain writing and the inclusion of maps and illustrations to help immigrant and working-class readers understand the written text. In addition to running sensational stories on crime and sex, Pulitzer instituted advice columns and women’s pages. Like Bennett, Pulitzer treated advertising as a kind of news that displayed consumer products for readers. In fact, department stores became major advertisers during this period. This development contributed directly to the expansion of consumer culture and indirectly to the acknowledgment of women as newspaper readers. Eventually (because of pioneers like Nellie Bly—see Chapter 14), newspapers began employing women as reporters.
The World reflected the contradictory spirit of the yellow press. It crusaded for improved urban housing, better conditions for women, and equal labor laws. It campaigned against monopoly practices by AT&T, Standard Oil, and Equitable Insurance. Such popular crusades helped lay the groundwork for tightening federal antitrust laws in the early 1910s. At the same time, Pulitzer’s paper manufactured news events and staged stunts, such as sending star reporter Nellie Bly around the world in seventy-two days to beat the fictional “record” in the popular 1873 Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days. By 1887, the World’s Sunday circulation had soared to more than 250,000, the largest anywhere.
Pulitzer created a lasting legacy by leaving $2 million to start the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University in 1912. In 1917, part of Pulitzer’s
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Columbia endowment established the Pulitzer Prizes, the prestigious awards given each year for achievements in journalism, literature, drama, and music.
Hearst and the New York Journal The World faced its fiercest competition when William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Journal (a penny paper founded by Pulitzer’s brother Albert). Before moving to New York, the twenty-four-year-old Hearst took control of the San Francisco Examiner when his father, George Hearst, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1887 (the younger Hearst had recently been expelled from Harvard for playing a practical joke on his professors). In 1895, with an inheritance from his father, Hearst bought the ailing Journal and then raided Joseph Pulitzer’s paper for editors, writers, and cartoonists.
THE PENNY PRESS The World cover the same story in May 1898. New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY
Taking his cue from Bennett and Pulitzer, Hearst focused on lurid, sensational stories and appealed to immigrant readers by using large headlines and bold layout designs. To boost circulation, the Journal invented interviews, faked pictures, and encouraged conflicts that might result in a story. In promoting journalism as mere dramatic storytelling, Hearst reportedly said, “The modern editor of the popular journal does not care for facts. The editor wants novelty. The editor has no objection to facts if they are also novel. But he would prefer a novelty that is not a fact to a fact that is not a novelty.”7
Hearst is remembered as an unscrupulous publisher who once hired gangsters to distribute his newspapers. He was also, however, considered a champion of the underdog, and his paper’s readership soared among the working and middle classes. In 1896, the Journal’s daily circulation reached 450,000, and by 1897, the Sunday edition of the paper rivaled the 600,000 circulation of the World. By the
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1930s, Hearst’s holdings included more than forty daily and Sunday papers, thirteen magazines (including Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan), eight radio stations, and two film companies. In addition, he controlled King Features Syndicate, which sold and distributed articles, comics, and features to many of the nation’s dailies. Hearst, the model for Charles Foster Kane, the ruthless publisher in Orson Welles’s classic 1940 film Citizen Kane, operated the largest media business in the world—the Disney or Google of its day.
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COMPETING MODELS OF MODERN PRINT JOURNALISM
The early commercial and partisan presses were, to some extent, covering important events impartially. These papers often carried verbatim reports of presidential addresses and murder trials, or the annual statements of the U.S. Treasury. In the late nineteenth century, as newspapers pushed for greater circulation, newspaper reporting changed. Two distinct types of journalism emerged: the story-driven model, dramatizing important events and used by the penny papers and the yellow press; and the “just the facts” model, an approach that appeared to package information more impartially and that the six-cent papers favored.8 Implicit in these efforts was a question that is still debated today: Is there, in journalism, an ideal, attainable, objective model, or does the quest for objectivity actually conflict with journalists’ traditional role of raising important issues about potential abuses of power in a democratic society?
“Objectivity” in Modern Journalism As the consumer marketplace expanded during the Industrial Revolution, facts and news became marketable products. Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, the more a newspaper appeared not to take sides on its front pages, the more its readership base grew (although, as they are today, editorial pages were still often partisan). In addition, wire service organizations were serving a variety of newspaper clients in different regions of the country. To satisfy all clients, readers, and the wide range of political views, newspapers tried to appear more impartial.
Ochs and the New York Times The ideal of an impartial, or purely informational, news model was championed by Adolph Ochs, who bought the New York Times in 1896. The son of immigrant German Jews, Ochs grew up in Ohio and Tennessee, where at age twenty-one he took over the Chattanooga Times in 1878. Known more for his business and organizational ability than for his writing and editing skills, he transformed the Tennessee paper. Seeking a national stage and business expansion, Ochs moved to New York and invested $75,000 in the struggling Times. Through strategic hiring, Ochs and his editors rebuilt the paper around substantial news coverage and provocative editorial pages. To distance his New York paper from the yellow press, the editors also downplayed sensational stories, favoring the documentation of major events or issues.
Partly as a marketing strategy, Ochs offered a distinct contrast to the more sensational Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers: an informational paper that provided stock and real estate reports to businesses, court reports to legal professionals,
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treaty summaries to political leaders, and theater and book reviews to educated general readers and intellectuals. Ochs’s promotional gimmicks took direct aim at yellow journalism, advertising the Times under the motto “It does not soil the breakfast cloth.” Ochs’s strategy is similar to today’s advertising tactic of targeting upscale viewers and readers, who control a disproportionate share of consumer dollars.
With the Hearst and Pulitzer papers capturing the bulk of working- and middle- class readers, managers at the Times first tried to use their straightforward, “no frills” reporting to appeal to more affluent and educated readers. In 1898, however, Ochs lowered the paper’s price to a penny. He believed that people bought the World and the Journal primarily because they were cheap, not because of their stories. The Times began attracting middle-class readers who gravitated to the now- affordable paper as a status marker for the educated and well informed. Between 1898 and 1899, its circulation rose from 25,000 to 75,000. By 1921, the Times had a daily circulation of 330,000, and 500,000 on Sunday.
THE TAMPA BAY TIMES, like many modern newspapers, claims to gather information and present news in a straightforward way—without the opinion of the reporter. Times journalists Leonora LaPeter Anton (pictured) and Anthony Cormier, together with Michael Braga of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, jointly received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for their harrowing exposé of Florida’s mental hospitals.
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Using thoroughly researched statistics and firsthand testimony, the team of journalists revealed that many of the mental health facilities had fallen into disrepair as a result of state budget cuts. Will Vragovic/ZUMA Press/Newscom
“Just the Facts, Please” Early in the twentieth century, with reporters adopting a more “scientific” attitude to news- and fact-gathering, the ideal of objectivity began to anchor journalism. In objective journalism, which distinguishes factual reports from opinion columns, modern reporters strive to maintain a neutral attitude toward the issue or event they cover; they also search out competing points of view among the sources for a story.
objective journalism a modern style of journalism that distinguishes factual reports from opinion columns; reporters strive to remain neutral toward the issue or event they cover, searching out competing points of view among the sources for a story.
The story form for packaging and presenting this kind of reporting has been traditionally labeled the inverted-pyramid style. According to some historians, Civil War correspondents developed this style by imitating the terse, compact press releases (summarizing or imitating telegrams to generals) that came from President Abraham Lincoln and his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton.9 Often stripped of adverbs and adjectives, inverted-pyramid reports began—as they do today—with the most dramatic or newsworthy information. They answered who, what, where, when (and, less frequently, why or how) questions at the top of the story and then narrowed down the story to presumably less significant details. If wars or natural disasters disrupted the telegraph transmission of these dispatches, the information the reporter led with had the best chance of getting through.
inverted-pyramid style a style of journalism in which news reports begin with the most dramatic or newsworthy information—answering who, what, where, and when (and less frequently why or how) questions at the top of the story—and then trail off with less significant details.
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TABLE 8.1 TOP 10 NEWSPAPERS BY DIGITAL TRAFFIC Note: Figures are for total number of unique visitors for January 2015 (in thousands). Data from: Pew Research Center, “Newspapers: Fact Sheet,” April 29, 2015, www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/newspapers-fact-sheet/.
Total Digital Population Desktop Mobile
USAToday.com 54,548 25,198 34,621
NYTimes.com 53,966 28,974 31,481
DailyMail.co.uk 51,108 21,095 33,817
WashingtonPost.com 47,815 21,328 30,393
TheGuardian.com 28,152 13,120 16,483
NYDailynews.com 25,900 11,294 15,692
LATimes.com 25,185 12,943 13,484
NYPost.com 22,940 9,831 14,192
SFGate.com 19,043 9,948 10,080
Telegraph.co.uk 16,751 8,378 9,058
For much of the twentieth century, the inverted-pyramid style served as an efficient way to arrange a timely story. It also had the advantage of appearing to present news as straightforward factual information, thereby not offending readers of differing political affiliations. Among other things, the importance of objectivity and the reliance on the inverted pyramid signaled journalism’s break from the partisan tradition. Although impossible to achieve (journalism is, after all, a literary practice, not a science), objectivity nonetheless became the guiding ideal of the modern press.
Interpretive Journalism By the 1920s, there was a sense, especially after the trauma of World War I, that the impartial approach to reporting was insufficient for explaining complex national and global conditions. It was partly as a result of “drab, factual, objective reporting,” one news scholar contended, that “the American people were utterly amazed when war broke out in August 1914, as they had no understanding of the foreign scene to prepare them for it.”10
The Promise of Interpretive Journalism Under the sway of objectivity, modern journalism had downplayed an early role of the partisan press: offering analysis and opinion. But with the world becoming more complex, some papers began to reexplore the analytical function of news. The result was the rise of interpretive journalism, which aims to explain key issues or events and place them in a broader historical or social context. This shift
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http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/newspapers-fact-sheet/
allowed journalism to take an analytic turn in a world grown more interconnected and complicated.
interpretive journalism a type of journalism that involves analyzing and explaining key issues or events and placing them in a broader historical or social context.
Noting that objectivity and factuality should serve as the foundation for journalism, by the 1920s editor and columnist Walter Lippmann insisted that the press should do more. He ranked three press responsibilities: (1) “to make a current record”; (2) “to make a running analysis of it”; and (3) “on the basis of both, to suggest plans.”11 Indeed, reporters and readers alike have historically distinguished between informational reports and editorial (interpretive) pieces, which offer particular viewpoints or deeper analyses of the issues. Since the boundary between information and interpretation can be somewhat ambiguous, American papers have traditionally placed news analysis in separate labeled columns and placed opinion articles on certain pages so that readers do not confuse them with “straight news.” It was during this time that political columns developed to evaluate and provide context for news. Moving beyond the informational and storytelling functions of news, journalists and newspapers began to extend their role as analysts.
Broadcast News Embraces Interpretive Journalism In a surprising twist, the rise of broadcast radio in the 1930s also forced newspapers to become more analytical in their approach to news. At the time, the newspaper industry was upset that broadcasters took their news directly from papers and wire services. As a result, a battle developed between radio journalism and print news. Although mainstream newspapers tried to copyright the facts they reported and sued radio stations for routinely using newspapers as their main news sources, the papers lost many of these court battles. Editors and newspaper lobbyists argued that radio should be permitted to do only commentary. By conceding this interpretive role to radio, the print press tried to protect its dominion over “the facts.” It was in this environment that radio analysis began to flourish as a form of interpretive news. Lowell Thomas delivered the first daily network analysis for CBS on September 29, 1930, attacking Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. By 1941, twenty regular commentators— the forerunners of today’s radio talk-show hosts, “talking heads” on cable, and political bloggers—were explaining their version of the world to millions of listeners.
Some print journalists and editors came to believe, however, that interpretive stories, rather than objective reports, could better compete with radio. They
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realized that interpretation was a way to counter radio’s (and later television’s) superior ability to report breaking news quickly—even live. In 1933, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) supported the idea of interpretive journalism. Most newspapers, however, still did not embrace probing analysis during the 1930s. So in most U.S. dailies, interpretation remained relegated to a few editorial and opinion pages. It wasn’t until the 1950s—with the Korean War, the development of atomic power, tensions with the Soviet Union, and the anticommunist movement—that news analysis resurfaced on the newest medium: television. Interpretive journalism in newspapers grew at the same time, especially in such areas as the environment, science, agriculture, sports, health, politics, and business. Following the lead of the New York Times, many papers by the 1980s had developed an “op-ed” page—an opinion page opposite the traditional editorial page, which allowed a greater variety of columnists, news analyses, and letters to the editor.
Literary Forms of Journalism By the late 1960s, many people were criticizing America’s major social institutions. Political assassinations, Civil Rights protests, the Vietnam War, the drug culture, and the women’s movement were not easily explained. Faced with so much change and turmoil, many individuals began to lose faith in the ability of institutions to oversee and ensure the social order. Members of protest movements as well as many middle- and working-class Americans began to suspect the privileges and power of traditional authority. As a result, key institutions— including journalism—lost some of their credibility.
Journalism as an Art Form Throughout the first part of the twentieth century—journalism’s modern era— journalistic storytelling was downplayed in favor of the inverted-pyramid style and the separation of fact from opinion. Dissatisfied with these limitations, some reporters began exploring a new model of reporting. Literary journalism, sometimes dubbed “new journalism,” adapted fictional techniques, such as descriptive details and settings and extensive character dialogue, to nonfiction material and in-depth reporting. In the United States, literary journalism’s roots are evident in the work of nineteenth-century novelists like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser, all of whom started out as reporters. In the late 1930s and 1940s, literary journalism surfaced: Journalists, such as James Agee and John Hersey, began to demonstrate how writing about real events could achieve an artistry often associated only with fiction.
literary journalism news reports that adapt fictional storytelling techniques to
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nonfictional material; sometimes called new journalism.
In the 1960s, Tom Wolfe, a leading practitioner of new journalism, argued for mixing the content of reporting with the form of fiction to create “both the kind of objective reality of journalism” and “the subjective reality” of the novel.12 Writers such as Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood), Joan Didion (The White Album), Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night), and Hunter S. Thompson (Hell’s Angels) turned to new journalism to overcome flaws they perceived in routine reporting. Their often self-conscious treatment of social problems gave their writing a perspective that conventional journalism did not offer. After the 1960s’ tide of intense social upheaval ebbed, new journalism subsided as well. However, literary journalism not only influenced magazines like Mother Jones and Rolling Stone but also affected daily newspapers by emphasizing longer feature stories on cultural trends and social issues, with detailed description or dialogue. Today, writers such as Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Random Family), Dexter Filkins (The Forever War), and Åsne Seierstad (The Bookseller of Kabul) keep this tradition alive.
JOAN DIDION’S two essay collections—Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979)—are considered iconic pieces from the new journalism movement. Both books detail and analyze Didion’s life in California, where she experienced
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everything from the counterculture movement in San Francisco to encounters with members of the Black Panther Party, the Doors, and even followers of Charles Manson. Henry Clarke/Conde Nast via Getty Images
The Attack on Journalistic Objectivity Former New York Times columnist Tom Wicker argued that in the early 1960s an objective approach to news remained the dominant model. According to Wicker, the “press had so wrapped itself in the paper chains of ‘objective journalism’ that it had little ability to report anything beyond the bare and undeniable facts.”13 Eventually, the ideal of objectivity became suspect along with the authority of experts and professionals in various fields.
A number of reporters responded to the criticism by rethinking the framework of conventional journalism and adopting a variety of alternative techniques. One of these was advocacy journalism, in which the reporter actively promotes a particular cause or viewpoint. Precision journalism, another technique, attempts to make the news more scientifically accurate by using poll surveys and questionnaires. Today we call this “data journalism,” and it has increased in importance as newspapers and other news organizations take advantage of the availability of Internet data and the lack of space and time constraints in online journalism.
Contemporary Journalism in the TV and Internet Age In the early 1980s, a postmodern brand of journalism arose from two important developments. In 1980, the Columbus Dispatch became the first paper to go online; today, nearly all U.S. papers offer some Web services. Then the colorful USA Today, started by Gannett, arrived in 1982, radically changing the look of most major U.S. dailies.
USA Today Colors the Print Landscape USA Today made its mark by incorporating features closely associated with postmodern forms, including an emphasis on visual style over substantive news or analysis and the use of brief news items that appealed to readers’ busy schedules and shortened attention spans.
Now the second most widely circulated paper in the nation, USA Today represents the only successful launch of a new major U.S. daily newspaper in the last several decades. Showing its marketing savvy, USA Today was the first paper to openly acknowledge television’s central role in mass culture: The paper used TV-inspired color and designed its first vending boxes to look like color TVs. Even the writing style of USA Today mimics TV news by casting many reports in the
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present tense rather than the past tense (which was the print-news norm throughout the twentieth century).
Writing for Rolling Stone in March 1992, media critic Jon Katz argued that the authority of modern newspapers suffered in the wake of a variety of “new news” forms that combined immediacy, information, entertainment, persuasion, and analysis. Katz claimed that the news supremacy of most prominent daily papers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, was being challenged by “news” coming from talk shows, television sitcoms, popular films, and even rap music. In other words, society was changing from one in which the transmission of knowledge depended mainly on books, newspapers, and magazines to one dominated by a mix of print, visual, and digital information.
Online Journalism Redefines News What started out in the 1980s as simple, text-only experiments for newspapers developed into more robust Web sites in the 1990s, allowing newspapers to develop an online presence. Today, online journalism is completely changing the industry. First, rather than subscribing to a traditional paper, many readers now begin their day on their iPads, smartphones, or computers scanning a wide variety of news Web sites, including those of print papers, cable news channels, newsmagazines, bloggers, and online-only news organizations. Such sources are increasingly taking over the roles of more traditional forms of news, helping set the nation’s cultural, social, and political agendas. One of the biggest changes is that online news has sped up the news cycle to a constant stream of information and has challenged traditional news services to keep up. For instance, Matt Drudge, the conservative Internet gossip and news source behind the Drudge Report, hijacked the national agenda in January 1998 and launched a scandal when he posted a report that Newsweek had delayed the story about President Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Newspapers and the Internet: Convergence This video discusses the ways newspapers are adapting to online delivery of news.
Discussion: What different kinds of skills are needed to be effective in the new online world? What skills might remain the same?
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http://macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Another change is the way nontraditional sources and even newer digital technology help drive news stories. For example, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings, began in September 2011 when a group of protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district to express discontentment with overpaid CEOs, big banks, and Wall Street, all of which helped cause the 2008–09 financial collapse but still enjoyed a government bailout.
Mainstream media was slow to cover OWS, with early coverage simply pitting angry protesters against dismissive Wall Street executives and politicians, many of whom questioned the movement’s longevity as well as its vague agenda. But as retirees, teachers, labor unions, off-duty police officers, firefighters, and other government workers joined the college students, the jobless, and the homeless in OWS protests across the country, the coverage and narratives in the media became more complicated and nuanced. As in the Arab uprisings, sites like Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter became key organizational tools. But more than that, they became alternative media sources, documenting incidents of police brutality and arrests, and covering the issues protesters championed. In both the Arab Spring and the OWS stories, the Internet and social media gave ordinary people more agency than ever before. Still, it’s important to remember that while successful movements need good communication and media coverage, they also require enough people willing to challenge power, just as they did in the days of the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement.
In the digital age, newsrooms are integrating their digital and print operations and asking their journalists to tweet breaking news that links back to newspapers’ Web sites. However, editors are still facing a challenge to get reporters and editors to fully embrace what news executives regard as a reporter’s online responsibilities. In 2011, for example, then executive editor of the New York Times Jill Abramson noted that although the Times had fully integrated its online and print operations, some editors still tried to hold back on publishing a timely story online, hoping that it would make the front page of the print paper instead. “That’s a culture I’d like to break down, without diminishing the [reporters’] thrill of having their story on the front page of the paper,” said Abramson.14 (For more about how online news ventures are changing the newspaper industry, see pages 277–279.)
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THE BUSINESS AND OWNERSHIP OF NEWSPAPERS
In the news industry today, there are several kinds of papers. National newspapers (such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and USA Today) serve a broad readership across the country. Other papers primarily serve specific geographic regions. Roughly 70 metropolitan dailies have a weekday paid circulation of approximately 100,000 (much more if we count digital hits on their Web sites). About 35 of these papers have a circulation of more than 200,000 during the workweek. In addition, about 100 daily newspapers are classified as medium dailies, with circulations between 50,000 and 100,000. By far the largest number of U.S. dailies—about 1,200 papers—fall into the small-daily category, with circulations under 50,000. While dailies serve urban and suburban centers, over 7,000 nondaily and weekly newspapers (down from 14,000 back in 1910) serve smaller communities and average over 8,000 copies per issue.15 No matter the size of the paper, each must determine its approach, target readers, and deal with ownership issues in a time of technological transition and declining revenue.
Consensus versus Conflict: Newspapers Play Different Roles Smaller nondaily papers tend to promote social and economic harmony in their communities. Besides providing community calendars and meeting notices, nondaily papers focus on consensus-oriented journalism, carrying articles on local schools, social events, town government, property crimes, and zoning issues. Recalling the partisan spirit of an earlier era, small newspapers are often owned by business leaders who may also serve in local politics. Because consensus-oriented papers have a small advertising base, they are generally careful not to offend local advertisers, who provide the financial underpinnings for many of these papers. At their best, these small-town papers foster a sense of community; at their worst, they overlook or downplay discord and problems.
consensus-oriented journalism found in small communities, newspapers that promote social and economic harmony by providing community calendars and meeting notices and carrying articles on local schools, social events, town government, property crimes, and zoning issues.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES publishes infographics and other visual aids to supplement its text articles. These award-winning infographics typically present complex information in an accessible format—for example, the pictured graphic attempts to explain the United States’ historic 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in just a few hundred words.
In contrast, national and metro dailies practice conflict-oriented journalism, in which front-page news is often defined primarily as events, issues, or experiences that deviate from social norms. Under this news orientation, journalists see their role not merely as neutral fact-gatherers but also as observers who monitor their city’s institutions and problems. They often maintain an adversarial relationship with local politicians and public officials. These papers offer competing perspectives on such issues as education, government, poverty, crime, and the economy; and their publishers, editors, or reporters avoid playing major, overt roles in community politics. In theory, modern newspapers believe their role in large cities is to keep a wary eye fixed on recent local and state intrigue and events.
conflict-oriented journalism found in metropolitan areas, newspapers that define news
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primarily as events, issues, or experiences that deviate from social norms; journalists see their role as observers who monitor their city’s institutions and problems.
In telling stories about complex and controversial topics, conflict-oriented journalists often turn such topics into two-dimensional accounts, pitting one idea or person against another. This convention, or “telling both sides of a story,” allows a reporter to take the position of a detached observer. Although this practice offers the appearance of balance, it usually functions to generate conflict and sustain a lively news story. Sometimes, though, good reporters ignore the notion that there are two sides to every story in order to tell the fullest and best story possible. However, often faced with deadline pressures, reporters do not always have the time—or the space—to develop a multifaceted and complex report or series of reports. But with the digital revolution releasing journalism from time and space constraints, news observers see the potential for more complex and longer stories developing online (see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Covering the News Media Business” on page 265).
FREDERICK DOUGLASS helped found the North Star in 1847. It was printed in the basement of the Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, a gathering spot for abolitionists and “underground” activities in Rochester, New York. At the time, the white-owned New York Herald urged Rochester’s citizens to throw the North Star’s printing press into Lake Ontario. Under Douglass’s leadership, the paper came out weekly until 1860, addressing problems facing blacks around the country and offering a forum for Douglass to debate his fellow black activists. Library of Congress/Getty Images
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MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Covering the News Media Business
With the economic challenges in journalism over the last decade, the loss of jobs has affected what gets covered as news. We already know that many local newspapers have closed or consolidated their statehouse and federal news bureaus. But what about coverage of the changing news media business itself? Over the years, critics have claimed that business news pages tend to favor issues related to management and downplay the role of everyday employees, focusing on positive business stories—such as managers’ promotions—and minimizing negative news. So do local newspapers today cover business in general and their own business owners well? Are there any stories in the news about editors and reporters and the challenges they face? Using the LexisNexis database or the Pew Research Center, check the business coverage in a regional daily paper to see how the paper covers itself and the news media business in general. You can also call business editors and reporters at your local or regional paper and ask them about how they cover economic issues related to their own business.
1 DESCRIPTION Track three to four weeks’ worth of business and economic news in your local paper or a regional paper you have access to through LexisNexis or the Pew Research Center. You could pick a story about a paper that has recently
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been sold to another company, such as the purchase of the Columbus Dispatch by New Media Investment Group or the sale of the San Diego Union-Tribune to Tribune Publishing, both in 2015. Examine both the business pages and the front and local sections for business/economic stories in general and media business stories in particular. Devise a chart and create categories for sorting stories (e.g., business scandal stories, earnings reports, home foreclosures, job promotion reports, and news-media-related stories), and gauge whether these stories are positive or negative. If possible, compare your local or regional paper’s coverage of the news media business to coverage in one of the nation’s dailies, like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, over the same period.
2 ANALYSIS Look for patterns in the coverage. How many economic or business stories were produced over the period? How many were positive? How many were negative? How many stories did you find in which individual reporters or columnists discuss the impact of the economy and the Internet on the newspaper business? Compared to the local or regional paper, are there differences in the frequency and kinds of coverage offered in the national newspaper? Does your paper cover the business of the parent company that owns the local paper? Does it cover national or international business stories? What are the differences between the local/regional coverage and national coverage of business in general and the news media in particular?
3 INTERPRETATION What do some of the patterns mean? Did you find examples in which the coverage of business seems comprehensive and fair? If business news gets more positive coverage than does political news, what might this mean? What does it mean if certain businesses are not being covered adequately by local/regional and national news operations? If men are quoted as sources more often than women are quoted in these stories, what might this mean? What does it mean if there are very few stories about the news business in general and about the paper you are studying specifically? What does it mean if there are differences between local/regional coverage and national coverage of business and news media?
4 EVALUATION 563
Determine which papers and stories you would judge as stronger models for how business and news media get covered, and which ones you would judge as weaker models. What do you think makes a good business or media story, and what makes a weak one? Are some elements that should be included missing from coverage? If so, make suggestions.
5 ENGAGEMENT Either write to or e-mail the editor or a business reporter to offer your findings, or make an appointment with the editor or business reporter to discuss what you discovered or to ask questions about the kind of coverage you have found. Note what the newspaper is doing well, and make a recommendation on how to improve business and news media coverage. Possibly recommend issues and trends of concern to college students— college loans, credit card debt, rise of college tuition costs—that aren’t being covered well, and suggest ways to report on these better. Recommend stories about the news media (and your newspaper’s owner) that you would like to see covered.
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Newspapers Target Specific Readers Historically, small-town weeklies and daily newspapers have served predominantly white, mainstream readers. However, ever since Benjamin Franklin launched the short-lived German-language Philadelphische Zeitung in 1732, newspapers aimed at ethnic groups have played a major role in initiating immigrants into American society. During the nineteenth century, Swedish- and Norwegian-language papers
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informed various immigrant communities in the Midwest. The early twentieth century gave rise to papers written in German, Yiddish, Russian, and Polish, assisting the massive influx of European immigrants.
Throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, several hundred foreign-language daily and nondaily presses published papers in at least forty different languages in the United States. Many are financially healthy today, supported by classified ads, local businesses, and increased ad revenue from long- distance phone companies and Internet services, which see the ethnic press as an ideal place to reach those customers most likely to need international communication services.16 Although the financial crisis took its toll and some ethnic newspapers failed, loyal readers allowed such papers to fare better overall than the mainstream press.17
Most of these weekly and monthly newspapers serve some of the same functions for their constituencies—minorities and immigrants, as well as disabled veterans, retired workers, gay and lesbian communities, and the homeless—that the “majority” papers do. These papers, however, are often published outside the social mainstream. Consequently, they provide viewpoints that are different from the mostly middle- and upper-class establishment attitudes that have shaped the media throughout much of America’s history. As noted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, ethnic newspapers and media “cover stories about the activities of those ethnic groups in the United States that are largely ignored by the mainstream press, they provide ethnic angles to news that actually is covered more widely, and they report on events and issues taking place back in the home countries from which those populations or their family members emigrated. These outlets have also traditionally been leaders in their communities.”18
African American Newspapers Between 1827 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, forty newspapers directed at black readers and opposed to slavery struggled for survival. These papers faced not only higher rates of illiteracy among potential readers but also hostility from white society and the majority press of the day. The first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, operated from 1827 to 1829 and opposed the racism of many New York newspapers. In addition, it offered a public voice for antislavery societies. Other notable papers included the Alienated American (1852–1856) and the New Orleans Daily Creole, which began its short life in 1856 as the first black-owned daily in the South. The most influential oppositional newspaper was Frederick Douglass’s North Star, a weekly antislavery newspaper in Rochester, New York, which was published from 1847 to 1860 and reached a circulation of three thousand. Douglass, a former slave, wrote essays on slavery and on a variety of national and international topics.
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AFRICAN AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS This 1936 scene reveals the newsroom of Harlem’s Amsterdam News, one of the nation’s leading African American newspapers. Ironically, the Civil Rights movement and affirmative action policies since the 1960s served to drain talented reporters from the black press by encouraging them to work for larger, mainstream newspapers. Hansel Mieth/Getty Images
Since 1827, 5,500 newspapers have been edited or started by African Americans.19 These papers, with an average life span of nine years, have taken stands against race baiting, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan. They also promoted racial pride long before the Civil Rights movement. The most widely circulated black-owned paper was Robert C. Vann’s weekly Pittsburgh Courier, founded in 1910. Its circulation peaked at 350,000 in 1947—the year professional baseball was integrated by Jackie Robinson, thanks in part to relentless editorials in the Courier that denounced the color barrier in pro sports. As they have throughout their history, these papers offer oppositional viewpoints to the mainstream press and record the daily activities of black communities by listing weddings, births, deaths, graduations, meetings, and church functions. Today, the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) reports that there are roughly two hundred African American newspapers, including Baltimore’s Afro-American, New York’s Amsterdam News, and the Chicago Defender, which celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 2005.20 None of these publish daily editions any longer, and most are weeklies.
The circulation rates of most black papers dropped sharply after the 1960s. The combined circulation of the local and national editions of the Pittsburgh Courier, for instance, dropped from 202,080 in 1944 to 20,000 in 1966, when it was
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reorganized as the New Pittsburgh Courier. Several factors contributed to these declines. First, television and black radio stations tapped into the limited pool of money that businesses allocated for advertising. Second, some advertisers, to avoid controversy, withdrew their support when the black press started giving favorable coverage to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Third, the loss of industrial urban jobs in the 1970s and 1980s not only diminished readership but also hurt small neighborhood businesses, which could no longer afford to advertise in both the mainstream and the black press. Finally, after the enactment of Civil Rights and affirmative action laws, mainstream papers raided black papers, seeking to integrate their newsrooms with African American journalists. Black papers could seldom match the offers from large white-owned dailies.
While a more integrated mainstream press initially hurt black papers—an ironic effect of the Civil Rights laws—by 2011 that trend had reversed a bit, as some black reporters and editors returned to black press newsrooms.21 Overall, however, the number of African Americans in newsrooms is declining. The ASNE reports that in each year between 1998 and 2007, nearly three thousand African Americans worked in various journalistic jobs at daily newspapers, but by 2015, that number had fallen to fewer than sixteen hundred.22 Most of this decline is due to newsroom cutbacks in response to declining print ad revenue and the 2008–09 economic crisis.
According to ASNE data, the total workforce at daily newspapers hovered between 54,000 and 55,000 from 1986 to 2007. But during that time, the number of minorities working in newsrooms grew from 3,400 to 7,400. However, by 2015, the total workforce had shrunk to 32,900, with the number of minorities falling to 4,200.23
Spanish-Language Newspapers Bilingual and Spanish-language newspapers have served a variety of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other Hispanic readerships since 1808, when El Misisipi was founded in New Orleans. Throughout the 1800s, Texas had more than 150 Spanish-language papers.24 Los Angeles’ La Opinión, founded in 1926, is now the nation’s largest Spanish-language daily. Other prominent publications are in Miami (La Voz and Diario Las Américas), Houston (La Información), Chicago (El Mañana Daily News and La Raza), and New York (El Diario–La Prensa). By 2011, about eight hundred Spanish-language papers operated in the United States, most of them weekly and nondaily papers, although since 2004, no new Hispanic papers have been founded.25 Until the late 1960s, mainstream newspapers virtually ignored Hispanic issues and culture. But with the influx of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban immigrants throughout the 1980s and 1990s, many mainstream papers began to feature weekly Spanish-language supplements. The first was the Miami Herald’s “El Nuevo Herald,” introduced in 1976. Other mainstream papers also joined in, but many had folded their Spanish-language supplements by the mid- 1990s. In 1995, the Los Angeles Times discontinued its supplement, “Nuestro Tiempo,” and the Miami Herald trimmed budgets and staff for “El Nuevo Herald.”
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Spanish-language radio and television had beaten newspapers to these potential customers and advertisers. As the U.S. Hispanic population reached 17 percent in 2013, Hispanic journalists accounted for about 4 percent of the newsroom workforce at U.S. daily newspapers.26 According to ASNE, Hispanic journalists in daily newsrooms peaked at just over twenty-four hundred in 2006 but had declined to fewer than fourteen hundred by 2015.27
THE WORLD JOURNAL is a national daily paper that targets Chinese immigrants by focusing on news from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Southeast Asian communities.
Asian American Newspapers In the 1980s, hundreds of small papers emerged to serve immigrants from Pakistan, Laos, Cambodia, and China. While people of Asian descent made up only about 5.3 percent of the U.S. population in 2013, this percentage is expected to rise to 9 percent by 2050.28 Today, fifty small U.S. papers are printed in Vietnamese. Ethnic papers like these help readers both adjust to foreign surroundings and retain ties to their traditional heritage. In addition, these papers often cover major stories downplayed in the mainstream press. For example, in the aftermath of 9/11, airport
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security teams detained thousands of Middle Eastern–looking men. The Weekly Bangla Patrika—a Long Island, New York, paper—reported on the one hundred people the Bangladeshi community lost in the 9/11 attacks and on how it feels to be innocent yet targeted by ethnic profiling.29
A growth area in newspapers is Chinese publications. Even amid a poor economy, a new Chinese newspaper, News for Chinese, started in 2008. The Chinese-language paper began as a free monthly distributed in the San Francisco area. In early 2009, it began publishing twice a week. By 2014, the World Journal, the largest U.S.-based Chinese-language paper, was publishing editions in seven U.S. and Canadian cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Vancouver, and Toronto.30 According to ASNE, Asian American journalists working in newsrooms peaked at almost eighteen hundred in 2007 but had declined to fewer than one thousand by 2015.31
Native American Newspapers An activist Native American press has provided oppositional voices to mainstream American media since 1828, when the Cherokee Phoenix appeared in Georgia. Another prominent early paper was the Cherokee Rose Bud, founded in 1848 by tribal women in the Oklahoma territory. The Native American Press Association has documented more than 350 Native American papers, most of them printed in English but a few in tribal languages. Currently, two national papers are the Native American Times, which offers perspectives on “sovereign rights, civil rights, and government-to-government relationships with the federal government,” and Indian Country Today, owned by the Oneida Nation in New York. According to ASNE data, Native American journalists in daily newsrooms peaked at 324 in 2007 but had declined to 118 by 2015.32
To counter the neglect of Native American culture’s viewpoints by the mainstream press, Native American newspapers have both helped educate various tribes about their heritage and helped build community solidarity. These papers have also reported on the problems as well as the progress among tribes that have opened casinos and gambling resorts. Overall, these smaller papers provide a forum for debates on tribal conflicts and concerns, and they often signal the mainstream press on issues—such as gambling or hunting and fishing rights—that have particular significance for the larger culture.
The Underground Press The mid to late 1960s saw an explosion of alternative newspapers. Labeled the underground press at the time, these papers questioned mainstream political policies and conventional values, often voicing radical opinions. Generally running on shoestring budgets, they were also erratic in meeting publication schedules. Springing up on college campuses and in major cities, underground papers were inspired by the writings of socialists and intellectuals from the 1930s and 1940s and by a new wave of thinkers and artists. Particularly inspirational were poets and
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writers (such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones, and Eldridge Cleaver) and “protest” musicians (including Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez). In criticizing social institutions, alternative papers questioned the official reports distributed by public relations agents, government spokespeople, and the conventional press (see “Case Study: Alternative Journalism: Dorothy Day and I. F. Stone” on page 271).
underground press radical newspapers, run on shoestring budgets, that question mainstream political policies and conventional values; the term usually refers to a journalism movement of the 1960s.
During the 1960s, underground papers played a unique role in documenting social tension by including the voices of students, women, African Americans, Native Americans, gay men and lesbians, and others whose opinions were often excluded from the mainstream press. The first and largest underground paper, the Village Voice, was founded in Greenwich Village in 1955. It is still distributed free, surviving through advertising, though its staff has been cut heavily in recent years. The paper today also has a significant online presence, its Web site winning two national awards, including the Editor and Publisher EPPY Award for best overall U.S. weekly newspaper online.33
Among campus underground papers, the Berkeley Barb was the most influential, developing amid the free-speech movement in the mid-1960s. Despite their irreverent tone, many underground papers turned a spotlight on racial and gender inequities and occasionally goaded mainstream journalism to examine social issues. Like the black press, though, many early underground papers folded after the 1960s. Given their radical outlook, it was difficult for them to appeal to advertisers. In addition, as with the black press, mainstream papers raided alternatives and expanded their own coverage of culture by hiring the underground’s best writers. Still, today more than 130 papers, reaching 25 million readers, are members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.
Newspaper Operations Today, a weekly paper might employ only two or three people, while a major metro daily might have a staff of more than one thousand, including workers in the newsroom and online operations, and in departments for circulation (distributing the newspaper), advertising (selling ad space), and mechanical operations (assembling and printing the paper). In either situation, however, most newspapers distinguish business operations from editorial or news functions. Journalists’ and readers’ praise or criticism usually rests on the quality of a paper’s news and
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editorial components, but business and advertising concerns today dictate whether papers will survive.
Most major daily papers would like to devote one-half to two-thirds of their pages to advertisements. Newspapers carry everything from full-page spreads for department stores to shrinking classified ads, which consumers can purchase for a few dollars to advertise used cars or old furniture (although many Web sites now do this for free). In most cases, ads are positioned in the paper first. The newshole —space not taken up by ads—accounts for the remaining 35 to 50 percent of the content of daily newspapers, including front-page news. The newshole and physical size of many newspapers had shrunk substantially by 2010.
newshole the space left over in a newspaper for news content after all the ads are placed.
CASE STUDY
Alternative Journalism: Dorothy Day and I. F. Stone
ver the years, a number of unconventional reporters have struggled against the status quo to find a place for unheard
voices and alternative ways to practice their craft. For example, Ida Wells fearlessly investigated violence against blacks for the Memphis Free Speech in the late nineteenth century. Newspaper lore offers a rich history of alternative journalists and their publications, such as Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker and I. F. Stone’s Weekly.
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In 1933, Dorothy Day (1897–1980) cofounded a radical religious organization with a monthly newspaper, the Catholic Worker, that opposed war and supported social reforms. Like many young intellectual writers during World War I, Day was a pacifist; she also joined the Socialist Party. Quitting college at age eighteen to work as an activist reporter for socialist newspapers, Day participated in the ongoing suffrage movement to give women the right to vote. Throughout the 1930s, her Catholic Worker organization invested in thirty hospices for the poor and homeless, providing food and shelter for five thousand people a day. This legacy endures today, with the organization continuing to fund soup kitchens and homeless shelters throughout the country. For more than eighty years, the Worker has consistently advocated personal activism to further social justice, opposing anti-Semitism, Japanese American internment camps during World War II, nuclear weapons, the Korean War, military drafts, and the communist witch- hunts of the 1950s. The Worker’s circulation peaked in 1938 at 190,000, then fell dramatically during World War II, when Day’s pacifism was at odds with much of America. Today, the Catholic Worker has a circulation of about 30,000.
Bettmann/Getty Images
I. F. Stone (1907–1989) shared Dorothy Day’s passion for social activism. He also started early, publishing his own monthly paper at the age of fourteen and becoming a full-time reporter by age twenty. He worked as a Washington political writer for the Nation in the early 1940s and later for the New York Daily Compass. Throughout his career, Stone challenged the conventions and privileges of both politics and journalism. In 1941, for example, he resigned from the National Press Club when it refused to serve his guest, the nation’s first African American federal judge. In the early 1950s, he actively opposed Joseph
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McCarthy’s rabid campaign to rid government and the media of alleged communists.
AP Images
When the Daily Compass failed in 1952, the radical Stone was unable to find a newspaper job and decided to create his own newsletter, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, which he published for nineteen years. Practicing interpretive and investigative reporting, Stone became as adept as any major journalist at tracking down government records to discover contradictions, inaccuracies, and lies. Over the years, Stone questioned decisions by the Supreme Court, investigated the substandard living conditions of many African Americans, and criticized political corruption. He guided the Weekly to a circulation that reached seventy thousand during the 1960s, when he probed American investments of money and military might in Vietnam. I. F. Stone and Dorothy Day embodied a spirit of independent reporting that has been threatened by first the rise of chain ownership, then the decline in readership. Stone, who believed that alternative ideas were crucial to maintaining a healthy democracy, once wrote that “there must be free play for so-called ‘subversive’ ideas—every idea ‘subverts’ the old to make way for the new. To shut off ‘subversion’ is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.”1
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FIGURE 8.1 WHO REPORTS FROM U.S. STATEHOUSES? (PERCENTAGE OF ALL STATEHOUSE REPORTERS) Note: The “less than full-time” category includes reporters who work during session only, as well as other staff, such as interns and videographers. “Additional sectors” represent the following: professional publications, multiplatform media companies, and “other,” which includes freelancers, magazines, and alternative weeklies. Figures may not add up to 100 percent because of rounding. Data from: Pew Research, “America’s Shifting Statehouse Press Corp: Fewer Print Reporters Assigned to State Capitals,” July 10, 2014, www.journalism.org/2014/07/10/americas- shifting-statehouse-press/.
News and Editorial Responsibilities The chain of command at most larger papers begins with the publisher and owner at the top and then moves, on the news and editorial side, to the editor in chief and managing editor, who are in charge of the daily news-gathering and writing processes. Under the main editors, assistant editors have traditionally run different news divisions, including features, sports, photos, local news, state news, and wire service reports that contain major national and international news. Increasingly, many editorial positions are being eliminated or condensed to the job of a single editor, whose chief responsibility is often ensuring that stories are posted first online (to give them the immediacy that radio and TV news have always had), then updated, and then prepared for the print edition.
Reporters work for editors. General assignment reporters handle all sorts of stories that might emerge—or “break”—in a given day. Specialty reporters are assigned to particular beats (police, courts, schools, local and national government) or topics (education, religion, health, environment, technology). On large dailies, bureau reporters also file reports from other major cities. Large daily papers feature columnists and critics who cover various aspects of culture, such as politics, books, television, movies, and food. While papers used to employ a separate staff for their online operations, the current trend is to have traditional reporters file both online and print versions of their stories— accompanied by images or video they are responsible for gathering.
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POLITICAL CARTOONS are often syndicated features in newspapers and reflect the issues of the day. By RJ Matson/Politicalcartoons.com
Recent consolidation and cutbacks have led to layoffs and the closing of bureaus outside a paper’s city limits. For example, in 1985, more than six hundred newspapers had reporters stationed in Washington, D.C.; in 2015, that number was under two hundred.34 The downside of these money-saving measures in our nation’s capital and in various U.S. state capitals is that far fewer versions of stories are being produced, and readers must often rely on a single version of a news report. According to the ASNE, the workforce in daily U.S. newsrooms declined by 11,000 jobs during the height of the recession in 2008 and 2009.35 A small turnaround occurred in 2010 with 100 new jobs created overall, driven by the increase of 220 jobs in “freestanding digital news organizations.”36 But ASNE reported that from 2011 to 2015, the total number of daily newsroom jobs fell by almost 10,000, from 41,600 to 32,900.37
Wire Services and Feature Syndication Major daily papers might have one hundred or so local reporters and writers, but they still cannot cover the world or produce enough material to fill up the newshole each day. Newspapers rely on wire services and syndicated feature services to supplement local coverage. A few major dailies, such as the New York Times, run their own wire services, selling their stories to other papers to reprint. Other agencies, such as the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI), have hundreds of staffers stationed throughout major U.S. cities and world capitals. They submit stories and photos each day for distribution to newspapers across the country. Some U.S. papers also subscribe to foreign wire services, such as Agence France-Presse in Paris or Reuters in London.
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Daily papers generally pay monthly fees for access to all wire stories. Although they use only a fraction of what is available over the wires, editors monitor wire services each day for important stories and ideas for local angles. Wire services have greatly expanded the reach and scope of news, as local editors depend on wire firms when they select statewide, national, or international reports for reprinting.
In addition, traditional feature syndicates, such as United Features (now known as Universal Uclick) and Tribune Media Services (now known as Gracenote), operated historically as commercial outlets that contracted with newspapers to provide work from the nation’s best political writers, editorial cartoonists, comic-strip artists, and self-help columnists. These companies served as brokers, distributing horoscopes and crossword puzzles as well as the political columns and comic strips that appealed to a wide audience. When a paper bid on and acquired the rights to a cartoonist or columnist, it signed exclusivity agreements with a syndicate to ensure that it was the only paper in the region to carry, say, Clarence Page, Maureen Dowd, Leonard Pitts, Connie Schultz, George Will, or cartoonist Mike Peters. Feature syndicates, like wire services, wielded great influence in determining which writers and cartoonists gained national prominence.
feature syndicates commercial outlets or brokers, such as United Features and King Features, that contract with newspapers to provide work from well-known political writers, editorial cartoonists, comic-strip artists, and self-help columnists.
Newspaper Ownership: Chains Lose Their Grip Edward Wyllis Scripps founded the first newspaper chain—a company that owns several papers throughout the country—in the 1890s. By the 1920s, there were about thirty chains in the United States, each owning an average of five papers. The emergence of chains paralleled the major business trend during the twentieth century: the movement toward oligopolies, in which a handful of corporations control each industry.
newspaper chain alarge company that owns several papers throughout the country.
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By the 1980s, more than 130 chains owned an average of nine papers each, with the 12 largest chains accounting for 40 percent of total circulation in the United States. By 2001, the top ten chains controlled more than one-half of the nation’s total daily newspaper circulation. Gannett, for example, the nation’s largest chain, owns over eighty daily papers (and hundreds of nondailies worldwide), ranging from small suburban papers to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Nashville Tennessean, and USA Today.
Around 2005, consolidation in newspaper ownership leveled off because the decline in newspaper circulation and ad sales panicked investors, leading to drops in the stock value of newspapers. Many newspaper chains responded by significantly reducing their newsroom staffs and selling off individual papers.
About the same time, large chains started to break up, selling individual newspapers to private equity firms and big banks (like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase) that deal in distressed and overleveraged companies with too much debt. For example, in 2006, Knight Ridder—then the nation’s second- leading chain—was sold for $4.5 billion to the McClatchy Company. McClatchy then broke up the chain by selling off twelve of its thirty-two papers, including the San Jose Mercury News and Philadelphia Newspapers (which included the Philadelpia Inquirer). McClatchy also sold its leading newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, to a private equity company for $530 million, less than half of what it had paid to buy it eight years earlier.
On a more promising note, in 2012, billionaire philanthropist Warren Buffett, CEO of the investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, spent $344 million and bought more than sixty newspapers (the company planned to retain about thirty). A newspaper junkie and former paperboy, Buffett has owned the Buffalo News in New York since 1977 and has run it profitably. In 2011, he also bought his hometown paper, the Omaha World-Herald, for $200 million. Buffett has argued that many smaller and regional newspapers will thrive if they have a strong sense of their local communities and do a good job of mixing their print and digital products. The New York Times reported that Buffett planned to buy more papers —“three years after telling shareholders that he would not buy a newspaper at any price.”38 In 2013, Buffett’s BH Media Group bought the Tulsa World in Oklahoma and the Roanoke Times in Virginia. In 2015, Buffett bought two more small dailies in Virginia and retained ownership of nearly thirty small and midsize daily newspapers.
While Warren Buffett concentrated on purchasing smaller regional papers, ownership of one of the nation’s three national newspapers also changed hands. Back in 2007, the Wall Street Journal, held by the Bancroft family for more than one hundred years, accepted a bid of nearly $5.8 billion from News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch (News Corp. also owns the New York Post and many papers in the United Kingdom and Australia). At the time, critics raised serious concerns about takeovers of newspapers by large entertainment conglomerates (Murdoch’s company at the time also owned TV stations, a network, cable channels, and a movie studio). As small subsidiaries in large media empires, newspapers are increasingly treated as just another product line that is expected to perform in the
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same way that a movie or TV program does. But in 2012, News Corp. decided to split its news and entertainment divisions, leading some critics to hope that Murdoch’s news operations would no longer be subject to the same high-profit expectations of Hollywood movies and sitcoms.
As chains lose their grip, there are concerns about who will own papers in the future and the effect the papers’ owners will have on content and press freedoms. Recent purchases by private equity groups are alarming, since these companies are usually more interested in turning a profit than supporting journalism. However, ideas exist for how to avoid this fate. For example, more support could be rallied for small independent owners, who could then make decisions based on what’s best for the paper—not just what’s best for the quarterly report. (For more on how newspapers and owners are trying new business models, see “New Models for Journalism” on pages 279–281.)
Joint Operating Agreements Combat Declining Competition Although the amount of regulation preventing newspaper monopolies has decreased, the government continues to monitor the declining number of newspapers in various American cities as well as mergers in cities where competition among papers might be endangered. In the mid-1920s, about five hundred American cities had two or more newspapers with separate owners. However, by 2010, fewer than fifteen cities had independent, competing papers.
In 1970, Congress passed the Newspaper Preservation Act, which enabled failing papers to continue operating through a joint operating agreement (JOA). Under a JOA, two competing papers keep separate news divisions while merging business and production operations for a period of years. Following the act’s passage, twenty-eight cities adopted JOAs. By 2003, sixteen of those JOAs had been terminated. By 2016, just five JOAs remained in place—in Detroit; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City; and York, Pennsylvania. Although JOAs and mergers have monopolistic tendencies, they have sometimes been the only way to maintain competition between newspapers.
joint operating agreement (JOA) in the newspaper industry, an economic arrangement, sanctioned by the government, that permits competing newspapers to operate separate editorial divisions while merging business and production operations.
For example, Detroit was one of the most competitive newspaper cities in the
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nation until 1989. The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, then owned by Gannett and Knight Ridder, respectively, both ranked among the ten most widely circulated papers in the country and sold their weekday editions for just fifteen cents a copy. Faced with declining revenue and increased costs, the papers’ managers asked for and received a JOA in 1989. But problems continued. Then, in 1995, a prolonged and bitter strike by several unions sharply reduced circulation, as the strikers formed a union-backed paper to compete against the existing newspapers. Many readers dropped their subscriptions to the News and the Free Press to support the strikers. Before the strike (and the rise of the Internet), Gannett and Knight Ridder had both reported profit margins of well over 15 percent on all their newspaper holdings.39 By 2010, Knight Ridder was out of the newspaper chain business, and neither Detroit paper ranked in the Top 20. In addition, the News and the Free Press became the first major papers to stop daily home delivery for part of the week, instead directing readers to the Web or to brief newsstand editions.
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CHALLENGES FACING NEWSPAPERS TODAY
Publishers and journalists today face worrisome issues, such as the decline in newspaper readership and the failure of many papers to attract younger readers. However, other problems persist as newspapers continue to converge with the Internet and grapple with the future of digital news. Still, most newspaper editors report that more people are reading their papers in combined print and digital form than at any time in history; however, those readers are often doing so for free on the various Web sites that newspapers support.
Readership Declines in the United States The decline in daily newspaper readership actually began during the Great Depression with the rise of radio. Between 1931 and 1939, six hundred newspapers ceased operation. Another circulation crisis occurred from the late 1960s through the 1970s with the rise in network television viewing and greater competition from suburban weeklies. In addition, with an increasing number of women working full- time outside the home, newspapers could no longer consistently count on one of their core readership groups.
Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, U.S. newspaper circulation dropped again, this time by more than 25 percent.40 In the face of such steep circulation and readership declines, however, overall audiences did start growing again thanks to online readers.
Remarkably, while the United States continues to experience declines in newspaper readership and advertising dollars, many other nations—where Internet news is still emerging—have experienced increases. For example, the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) reported that between 2003 and 2009, there was an 8.8 percent growth in newspaper readership worldwide, mostly concentrated in Asia, Africa, and South America.41 In 2013, WAN reported that between 2008 and 2013, “newspaper circulation dropped by 13 per cent in North America but rose 9.8 per cent in Asia,” while ad revenue “declined by 42.1 per cent in North America but rose by 6.2 per cent in Asia.”42 In 2014, circulation rose 9.8 percent in Asia, 1.2 percent in the Middle East and Africa, and 0.6 percent in Latin America, while it fell 1.3 percent in North America, 4.5 percent in Europe, and 5.3 percent in Australia and Oceania.43 In 2014, WAN reported that around 2.7 billion people worldwide read newspapers in print and about 770 million read them in digital forms. While digital ad sales continue to grow for newspapers worldwide, this still represents a small percentage of print news revenue. According to WAN, “Globally, 93 per cent of all newspaper revenues continue to come from print.”44
Going Local: How Small and Campus Papers
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Retain Readers Despite the doomsday headlines and predictions about the future of newspapers, it is important to note, as Pew’s State of the News Media 2010 report observes, that the problems of the newspaper business “are not uniform across the industry.” In fact, according to the report, “Small dailies and community weeklies, with the exception of some that are badly positioned or badly managed,” still do better than many “big-city papers.”45 That report back in 2010 also suggested that smaller papers in smaller communities remain “the dominant source for local information and the place for local merchants to advertise.”46
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Community Voices: Weekly Newspapers Journalists discuss the role of local newspapers in their communities.
Discussion: In a democratic society, why might having many community voices in the news media be a good thing?
Smaller newspapers continue to do better today for several reasons. First, small towns and cities often don’t have local TV stations, big-city magazines, or numerous radio stations competing against newspapers for ad space. This means that smaller papers are more likely to retain their revenue from local advertisers. Second, whether they are tiny weekly papers serving small towns or campus newspapers serving university towns, such papers have a loyal and steady base of readers who cannot get information on their small communities from any other source. In fact, many college newspaper editors report that the most popular feature in their papers is the police report: It serves as a kind of local gossip, listing the names of students busted over the weekend for underage drinking or public intoxication.
Finally, because smaller newspapers tend to be more consensus-oriented than conflict-driven in their approach to news, these papers usually do not see the big dips in ad revenue that may occur when editors tackle complex or controversial topics that are divisive. For example, when a major regional newspaper does an investigative series on local auto dealers for poor service or shady business practices, those dealers—for a while—can cancel advertising that the paper sorely needs. While local papers fill in the gaps left by large mainstream papers and other
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news media sources, they still face some of the same challenges as large papers and must continue to adapt to retain readers and advertisers.
Blogs Challenge Newspapers’ Authority Online The rise of blogs in the late 1990s brought amateurs into the realm of professional journalism. It was an awkward meeting. As National Press Club president Doug Harbrecht said to conservative blogger Matt Drudge in 1998 while introducing him to the press club’s members, “There aren’t many in this hallowed room who consider you a journalist. Real journalists … pride themselves on getting it first and right; they get to the bottom of the story, they bend over backwards to get the other side. Journalism means being painstakingly thorough, even-handed, and fair.”47 Harbrecht’s suggestion, of course, was that untrained bloggers weren’t as scrupulous as professionally trained journalists. In the following decade, though, as blogs like Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, The Dish: Biased and Balanced (http://dish.andrewsullivan.com), and Talking Points Memo gained credibility and a large readership, traditional journalism slowly began to try blogging, allowing some reporters to write a blog in addition to their regular newspaper, television, or radio work. Some newspapers, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, even hired journalists to blog exclusively for their Web sites.
By 2005, the wary relationship between journalism and blogging began to change. Blogging became less a journalistic sideline and more a viable main feature. Established journalists left major news organizations to begin new careers in the blogosphere. For example, in 2007, top journalists at the Washington Post left to launch Politico, a national blog (and, secondarily, a local newspaper) about Capitol Hill politics. Another breakthrough moment occurred when the Talking Points Memo blog won a George Polk Award for legal reporting in 2008. Explaining his view of blogging, editor and publisher Josh Marshall has said, “I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging. We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead, there are an ongoing series of dispatches.”48 Increasingly, because of qualified journalists moving online, Pew reported in 2014 that sites that started out as opinionated blogs have grown into legitimate news venues:
Digital players have exploded onto the news scene, bringing technological know-how and new money and luring top talent. BuzzFeed, once scoffed at for content viewed as “click bait,” now has a news staff of 170, including top names like Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Schoofs, and is the kind of place that ProPublica’s Paul Steiger says he would want to work at if he were young again. Mashable now has a news staff of 70 and enticed former New York Times assistant managing editor Jim Roberts to become its chief content officer. And in January of this year [2014], Ezra Klein left the Washington Post for Vox Media, which will become the new home for his explanatory journalism concept.49
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THE HUFFINGTON POST frequently publishes “listicles.” Formatted as easily digestible lists, these articles are dominated by photos and often include only a few sentences of text for each list item. Slammed by critics as a lowbrow form of journalism, listicles have nonetheless become hugely popular, pioneered by the Huffington Post and other media companies, such as BuzzFeed.
What distinguishes the best online news from so many opinion blogs still out there is the reliance on old-fashioned journalism—calling on reporters to interview people as sources, to look at documents, and to find evidence to support the story, whether it is in print or online. However, by 2016 some of these online sites were struggling, with audiences no longer hitting their Web pages but instead simply refreshing their social network feeds and apps. As the New York Times reported, “As social networks grew, visits to websites in some ways became unnecessary, leading to weakened traffic numbers for news sites.”50
Convergence: Newspapers Struggle in the Move to Digital Because of their local monopoly status, many newspapers were slower than other media to confront the challenges of the Internet. But faced with competition from
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the 24/7 news cycle on cable, newspapers responded by developing online versions of their papers. While some observers think newspapers are on the verge of extinction as the digital age eclipses the print era, the industry is no dinosaur. In fact, the history of communication demonstrates that older mass media have always adapted; so far, books, newspapers, and magazines have adjusted to the radio, television, and movie industries. And with nearly all fourteen hundred U.S. daily papers now online, newspapers are slowly solving one of the industry’s major economic headaches: the cost of newsprint. After salaries, paper is the industry’s largest expense, typically accounting for more than 25 percent of a newspaper’s total cost.
Online newspapers are truly taking advantage of the flexibility the Internet offers. Because space is not an issue online, newspapers can post stories and readers’ letters that they aren’t able to print in the paper edition. They can also run longer stories with more in-depth coverage, as well as offer immediate updates to breaking news. Also, most stories appear online before they appear in print; they can be posted at any time and updated several times a day.
Among the valuable resources that online newspapers offer with their stories are hyperlinks, which give readers access to related Web sites or to an archive of similar articles. Free of charge or for a modest fee, a reader can search the newspaper’s database from home and investigate the entire sequence and history of an ongoing story, such as a trial, over the course of several months. Taking advantage of the Internet’s multimedia capabilities, online newspapers offer readers the ability to stream audio and video files—everything from presidential news conferences to local sports highlights to original video footage from a storm disaster. Today’s online newspapers offer readers a dynamic, rather than a static, resource.
FIGURE 8.2 NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION FALLS IN 2014 Data from: Pew Research Center, “State of the News Media 2015,” www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/newspapers-fact-sheet-2015/
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However, these advances have yet to pay off. Online ads in the United States accounted for about 18 percent of the newspaper industry’s advertising in 2014— up from 13 percent back in 2010.51 So newspapers, even in decline, are still heavily dependent on print ads. But this trend does not seem likely to sustain papers for long. Ad revenue for newspaper print ads in 2009 declined 25 to 35 percent at many newspapers.52 To jump-start online revenue streams, more than four hundred daily newspapers collaborated with Yahoo! (the number-one portal to newspapers online) in 2006 to begin an advertising venture that aimed to increase papers’ online revenue by 10 to 20 percent. By summer 2010, with the addition of the large Gannett chain, Yahoo! had nearly nine hundred papers in the ad partnership. During an eighteen-month period in 2009–10, the Yahoo! consortium sold over thirty thousand online ad campaigns in local markets, with most revenue shared 50/50 between Yahoo! and its partner papers.53
PAYWALL The New York Times began charging readers for access to all online content in early 2011, via either a print subscription or a stand-alone online subscription. Recognizing the fact that readers today are gravitating toward reading the news on their smartphones or tablets, all the plans offered by the Times include some form of mobile access. Still, in order to mitigate the decrease in online traffic and to alleviate resistance from those who feel as if they shouldn’t have to pay for online content, the Times in 2014 began allowing readers free access to ten articles a month, as well as free access to articles via a search link or a link posted on a social networking site.
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By 2014, online ad sales for newspapers accounted for about 17 percent of U.S. newspapers’ advertising revenue, suggesting that online sales on average had risen just 1 percent a year since 2010. The Newspaper Association of America reported that print ad sales in 2013 had declined another 8.6 percent, which represented a loss of $1.6 billion. In terms of digital advertising—the revenue stream that could provide the foundation for a new business model for newspapers— sales were up just 1.5 percent in 2013. As the Nieman Journalism Lab noted: “In 2014, American newspapers still [got] 83 percent of their advertising revenue from print.”54
One of the business mistakes that most newspaper executives made near the beginning of the Internet age was giving away online content for free. Whereas their print versions always had two revenue streams—ads and subscriptions— newspaper executives weren’t convinced that online revenue would amount to much, so they used their online version as an advertisement for the printed paper. Since those early years, most newspapers are now trying to establish a paywall— charging a fee for online access to news content—but customers used to getting online content for free have shunned most online subscriptions. One paper that did charge early for online content was the Wall Street Journal, which pioneered one of the few successful paywalls in the digital era. In fact, the Journal, helped by the public’s interest in the economic crisis and 400,000 paid subscriptions to its online service, replaced USA Today as the nation’s most widely circulated newspaper in 2009. In early 2011, a University of Missouri study found that 46 percent of papers with circulations under 25,000 said they charged for some online content, while only 24 percent of papers with more than 25,000 in circulation charged for content.55
paywall an online portal that charges consumers a fee for access to news content.
An interesting case in the paywall experiments is the New York Times. In 2005, the paper began charging online readers for access to its editorials and columns, but the rest of the site was free. This system lasted only until 2007. But starting in March 2011, the paper added a paywall—a metered system that was mostly aimed at getting the New York Times’ most loyal online readers, rather than the casual online reader, to pay for online access. Under this paywall system, print subscribers would continue to get free Web access. Online-only subscribers could opt for one of three plans: $15 per month for Web and smartphone access, $20 per month for Web and tablet access, or $35 per month for an “all-you-can-eat” plan that would allow access to all the Times platforms. In its first few weeks of operation, the paper gained more than 100,000 new subscribers and lost only about
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15 percent of traffic from the days of free Web access—a more positive scenario than the 50 percent loss in online traffic some observers had predicted. And in October 2015, the Times reported surpassing 1 million paid subscribers to all its digital-only options and adding another 1.1 million subscribers to its combined print-plus-online services.56
In recent years, over 150 newspapers, including many small ones, launched various paywalls, many of them based on the New York Times’ metered model, in an attempt to reverse years of giving away their print content online for free. Larger metro dailies, including the Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Los Angeles Times, have also started their own paywalls and metered models. But in 2014, the Nieman Journalism Lab reported on a number of studies and a report on Gannett’s experiments with its various paywalls and concluded, “When you announce a paywall, you get a one-time boost from people who are willing to pay. But it plateaus. And maybe some of those subscribers eventually drop off. It’s not a growth model that does anything like replace the ongoing decline in print advertising revenue—which continues to decline somewhere in the high single digits every year.”57
New Models for Journalism In response to the challenges newspapers face, a number of journalists, economists, and citizens are calling for new business models—with more potential than paywalls—for combating newspapers’ decline. One avenue is developing new business ventures, such as the online-only papers begun by former print reporters, such as Politico. Another idea is for wealthy universities like Harvard and Yale to buy and support papers, thereby better insulating their public service and watchdog operations from the high profit expectations of the marketplace. Another possibility might be to get Internet companies involved. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post in 2013 is one example. Earlier, Google —worried that a decline in the quality of journalism meant fewer sites on which to post ads and earn online revenue—pledged $5 million to news foundations and companies to encourage innovation in digital journalism. Wealthy Internet companies like Microsoft and Google could expand into the news business and start producing content for both online and print papers. In fact, in March 2010, Yahoo! began hiring reporters to increase the presence of its online news site. The company hired reporters from Politico, Businessweek, the New York Observer, the Washington Post, and Talking Points Memo, among others.
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Politico quickly became a reputable place for Washington insiders as well as the general population to go for political news and reporting, allowing the organization to thrive at a time when other papers were struggling. As editor in chief John Harris states on the site, Politico aims to be more than just a place for politics; it also “hope[s] to add to the conversation about what’s next for journalism.” What do you think its success means for the future of the news media?
Additional ideas are coming from universities (where journalism school enrollments are actually increasing). For example, the dean of Columbia University’s Journalism School (started once upon a time with money bequeathed by nineteenth-century newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer) commissioned a study from Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, Columbia journalism professor and media scholar. Their report, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” focused on lost circulation, advertising revenue, and news jobs, and aimed to create a strategy for reporting that would hold public and government officials accountable.58 After all, citizens in democracies require basic access to reports, data, and documentation in order to be well informed. Here is an overview of their recommendations, some of which have already been implemented:
News organizations “substantially devoted to reporting on public affairs” should be allowed to operate as nonprofit entities in order to
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take in tax-deductible contributions while still collecting ad and subscription revenues. For example, the Poynter Institute owns and operates the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times), Florida’s largest newspaper. As a nonprofit, the Times is protected from the unrealistic 16 to 20 percent profit margins that publicly held newspapers had been expected to earn in the 1980s and 1990s. Public radio and TV, through federal reforms in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, should reorient their focus to “significant local news reporting in every community served by public stations and their Web sites.” Operating their own news services or supporting regional news organizations, public and private universities “should become ongoing sources of local, state, specialized subject and accountability news reporting as part of their educational mission.” A national Fund for Local News should be created with money the Federal Communications Commission collects from “telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers.” News services, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies should use the Internet to “increase the accessibility and usefulness of public information collected by federal, state, and local governments.”
As the journalism industry continues to reinvent itself and tries new avenues to ensure its future, not every “great” idea will work out. Some of the immediate backlash to Downie and Schudson’s report raised questions about the government’s becoming involved with traditionally independent news media. What is important, however, is that newspapers continue to experiment with new ideas and business models so that they can adapt and even thrive in the Internet age. (For more on the challenges facing journalism, see Chapter 14.)
Alternative Voices The combination of the online news surge and traditional newsroom cutbacks has led to a phenomenon known as citizen journalism, or citizen media (or community journalism for those projects in which the participants might not be citizens). As a grassroots movement, citizen journalism refers to people—activist amateurs and concerned citizens, not professional journalists—who use the Internet and blogs to disseminate news and information. In fact, with steep declines in newsroom staffs, many professional news media organizations—like CNN’s iReport and many regional newspapers—are increasingly trying to corral citizen journalists as an
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inexpensive way to make up for the journalists lost to newsroom downsizing.
citizen journalism a grassroots movement wherein activist amateurs and concerned citizens, not professional journalists, use the Internet and blogs to disseminate news and information.
Back in 2008, one study reported that more than one thousand community- based Web sites were in operation, posting citizen stories about local government, police, and city development.59 By 2015, more than fifteen hundred such sites were running. Some sites simply aggregate video footage from YouTube, mostly from natural disasters and crises, such as the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing in 2013. These disaster and crisis videos represent by far the biggest contribution to news by amateurs. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 40 percent of the “most watched news videos” over a fifteen-month period in 2011 and 2012 “came directly from citizens.”60
Beyond the citizen model, another Pew study in 2013 identified 170 specific nonprofit news organizations “with minimal staffs and modest budgets,” ranging “from the nationally known [like the investigative site ProPublica] to the hyperlocal,” that are trying to compensate for the loss of close to 20,000 commercial newsroom jobs over the last decade.61 In 2014, Pew studied 438 of these newer digital sites: “Of the 402 outlets that identified a business model, slightly more than half (204) are nonprofits compared with 196 that are commercial entities. In recent years, the nonprofit model has attracted a significant amount of foundation funding for news gathering.” In its State of the News Media 2014 report, Pew “estimated that roughly $150 million in philanthropy now goes to journalism annually. Some of that is used as seed money for digital nonprofit news organizations: 61% of the nonprofit news organizations surveyed by Pew Research began with a large start-up grant.” Pew noted that the “goal for these organizations is ultimately finding a sustainable business model less reliant on big giving.”62
Most journalists and many citizens want to see more professional models of journalism develop in the digital age so that people can decrease their reliance on unedited video footage and untrained amateurs as key sources for news. While many community-based sites and ordinary citizen reporters do not have the resources to provide the kind of regional news coverage that local newspapers once provided, there is still a lot of hope for community journalism moving forward. Some new digital sites have adopted what could be called a “pro-am” model for journalism, in which amateurs are trained by professionals. This practice is already followed at many universities, where students are trained by former and current journalists and then collaborate on print, broadcast, and online news projects with local news media.
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THE IOWA CENTER for Public Affairs Journalism is an “independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan news service” founded in 2009 by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Stephen J. Berry. The center’s goal is to publish rigorously researched investigative stories about events at the state level—an unusual approach in a landscape dominated by “clickbait” headlines and the national news media.
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NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY
Of all mass media, newspapers have played the leading role in sustaining democracy and championing freedom. Over the years, newspapers have fought heroic battles in places that had little tolerance for differing points of view. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), from 1992 through mid- 2016, 1,189 reporters from around the world were killed while doing their jobs. In 2016, CPJ reported that since 1992, the five deadliest countries for journalists have been Iraq (174 killed), Syria (94 killed), the Philippines (77 killed), Algeria (60 killed), and Somalia (59 killed). Of those killed, 13 percent died while “on dangerous assignment,” 21 percent were killed in cross fire or combat, and 66 percent were murdered.63 In 2015 and the first half of 2016, 82 journalists and media workers were killed, including 8 in the Charlie Hebdo magazine murders in Paris.
Many journalist deaths in the twenty-first century reported by CPJ came from the war in Iraq. From 2003 to 2011, 225 reporters, media workers, and support staff died in Iraq. For comparison, 63 reporters were killed while covering the Vietnam War, 17 died covering the Korean War, and 69 were killed during World War II.64 Our nation and many others remain dependent on journalists who are willing to do this very dangerous reporting in order to keep us informed about what is going on around the world.
In addition to the physical danger, newsroom cutbacks, and the closing of foreign bureaus, a number of smaller concerns remain as we consider the future of newspapers. For instance, some charge that newspapers have become so formulaic in their design and reporting styles that they may actually discourage new approaches to telling stories and reporting news. Another criticism is that in many one-newspaper cities, only issues and events of interest to middle- and upper- middle-class readers are covered, resulting in the underreporting of the experiences and events that affect poorer and working-class citizens. In addition, given the rise of newspaper chains, the likelihood of including new opinions, ideas, and information in mainstream daily papers may be diminishing. Moreover, chain ownership tends to discourage watchdog journalism and the crusading traditions of newspapers. Like other business managers, many news executives have preferred not to offend investors or outrage potential advertisers by running too many investigative reports—especially business probes. This may be most evident in the fact that reporters have generally not reported adequately on the business and ownership arrangements in their own industry.
Finally, as print journalism shifts to digital culture, the greatest challenge is the upheaval of print journalism’s business model. Most economists say that newspapers need new business models, but some observers think that local papers, ones that are not part of big overleveraged chains, will survive on the basis of local ads and coupons or “big sale” inserts. Increasingly, independent online firms will
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help bolster national reporting through special projects. In 2009, the Associated Press wire service initiated an experiment to distribute investigative reports from several nonprofit groups—including the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica—to its fifteen hundred members as a news source for struggling papers that have cut back on staff. Also in 2009, the news aggregator Huffington Post hired a team of reporters to cover the economic crisis. Back in 2011, AOL (which purchased the Huffington Post for $315 million) had more than thirteen hundred reporters—most of them for Patch, a hyperlocal news initiative with over eight hundred separate editorial units serving small to midsize towns and cities across the United States. The Patch experiment aimed to restore local news coverage to areas that had been neglected due to newsroom cutbacks.65 But by 2014, AOL had not made money, so it cut these local sites from nine hundred to six hundred and entered into a new joint venture controlled by Hale Global.66 Then in mid-2015, Verizon agreed to buy AOL and the Huffington Post for $4.4 billion.
Among the success stories in digital journalism, ProPublica has published more than a hundred investigative stories a year, often teaming up with traditional newspapers or public radio stations from around the country. It then offers these reports to traditional news outlets for free. In 2010, one story won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Regional examples of this kind of public service news include the Voice of San Diego and MinnPost, both nonprofit online news ventures that feature news about the San Diego and the Twin Cities areas, respectively. Many of these news services have tried to provide reports for news outlets that have downsized and no longer have the reporting resources to do certain kinds of major investigations.
As print journalism loses readers and advertisers to digital culture, what will become of newspapers, which do most of the nation’s primary journalistic work? What role will they play in national elections? Will more and more people rely on TV ads, Twitter, Facebook, and ever newer social media for the political and policy information that an informed citizenry needs? In many instances, these newer Web sites deliver their readers to newspaper sites where actual reporting and documentation is still being done. But will their readers be able to distinguish an opinionated, partisan blog from actual evidence-based reporting?
John Carroll presided over thirteen Pulitzer Prize–winning reports at the Los Angeles Times as editor from 2000 to 2005, but he left the paper to protest deep corporate cuts to the newsroom. He has lamented the future of newspapers and their unique role: “Newspapers are doing the reporting in this country. Google and Yahoo! and those people aren’t putting reporters on the street in any numbers at all. Blogs can’t afford it. Network television is taking reporters off the street. Commercial radio is almost nonexistent. And newspapers are the last ones standing, and newspapers are threatened. And reporting is absolutely an essential thing for democratic self-government. Who’s going to do it? Who’s going to pay for the news? If newspapers fall by the wayside, what will we know?”67 In the end, there will be no return to any “golden age” of newspapers. The Internet is transforming journalism and relocating where we get our news; the print era is
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passing the news baton to the digital age.
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8 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the role that media play in a democracy. The newspaper industry has always played a strong role in our democracy by reporting news and investigating stories. Even in the Internet age, newspapers remain our primary source for content. How will the industry’s current financial struggles affect our ability to demand and access reliable news?
With the coming of radio and television, newspapers in the twentieth century surrendered their title as the mass medium shared by the largest audience. However, to this day, newspapers remain the single most important source of news for the nation, even in the age of the Internet. Although today’s readers may cite search engines like Google or social media sites like Facebook as the primary places they search for news, such sites are really directories and aggregators that guide readers to news stories—most often to online newspaper sites. This means that newspaper organizations are still the primary institutions doing the work of gathering and reporting the news. Even with all the newsroom cutbacks across the United States, newspapers remain the only journalistic organization in most towns and cities that still employs a significant staff to report news and tell the community’s stories.
Newspapers link people to what matters in their communities, their nation, and their world. Few other journalistic institutions serve society as well. But with smaller news resources and the industry no longer able to sustain high profit margins, what will become of newspapers? Are digital news sites serving readers in their communities as well as newspapers once did? Who will gather the information needed to sustain a democracy, to serve as the watchdog over our key institutions, to document the comings and goings of everyday life? And perhaps more important, who will act on behalf of the people who don’t have the news media’s access to authorities or the ability to influence them?
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is
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highlighted in the chapter.
partisan press, 254 penny papers, 255 human-interest stories, 255 wire services, 255 yellow journalism, 256 investigative journalism, 256 objective journalism, 259 inverted-pyramid style, 259 interpretive journalism, 260 literary journalism, 261 consensus-oriented journalism, 264 conflict-oriented journalism, 264 underground press, 270 newshole, 272 feature syndicates, 273 newspaper chain, 273 joint operating agreement (JOA), 274 paywall, 279 citizen journalism, 281
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
The Evolution of American Newspapers 1. What are the limitations of a press that serves only partisan
interests? Why did the earliest papers appeal mainly to more privileged readers?
2. How did newspapers emerge as a mass medium during the penny press era? How did content changes make this happen?
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3. What are the two main features of yellow journalism? How have Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst contributed to newspaper history?
Competing Models of Modern Print Journalism 4. Why did “objective” journalism develop? What are its
characteristics? What are its strengths and limitations? 5. Why did interpretive forms of journalism develop in the modern
era? What are the limits of objectivity? 6. How would you define literary journalism? Why did it emerge
in such an intense way in the 1960s? How did literary journalism provide a critique of so-called objective news?
The Business and Ownership of Newspapers 7. What is the difference between consensus- and conflict-oriented
newspapers? 8. What role have ethnic, minority, and oppositional newspapers
played in the United States? 9. Define wire service and syndication.
10. Why did newspaper chains become an economic trend in the twentieth century?
11. What is the impact of a joint operating agreement (JOA) on the business and editorial divisions of competing newspapers?
Challenges Facing Newspapers Today 12. What are the major reasons for the decline in U.S. newspaper
circulation figures? How do these figures compare with circulations in other nations?
13. What major challenges does new technology pose to the newspaper industry?
14. With traditional ownership in jeopardy today, what are some other possible business models for running a newspaper?
15. What is the current state of citizen journalism? 16. What challenges do new online news sites face? Newspapers and Democracy 17. What is a newspaper’s role in a democracy? 18. What makes newspaper journalism different from the journalism
of other mass media?
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QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. What kinds of stories, topics, or issues are not being covered well by mainstream papers?
2. Why do you think people aren’t reading U.S. daily newspapers as frequently as they once did? Why is newspaper readership going up in other countries?
3. Discuss whether newspaper chains are ultimately good or bad for the future of journalism.
4. Do newspapers today play a vigorous role as watchdogs of our powerful institutions? Why or why not? What impact will the downsizing and closing of newspapers have on this watchdog role?
5. Will tablets, or some other format, eventually replace the printed newspaper? Explain your response.
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter. VIDEO: THE MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY This video traces the history of media’s role in democracy from newspapers and television to the Internet.
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9 Magazines in the Age of Specialization
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Robert Caplin/The New York Times/Redux Pictures
WORDS AND PICTURES
COSMOPOLITAN DIDN’T ALWAYS HAVE cover
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photos of women with plunging necklines, or cover lines like “67 New Sex Tricks” and “The Sexiest Things to Do after Sex.” As the magazine itself says, “The story of how a ’60s babe named Helen Gurley Brown (you’ve probably heard of her) transformed an antiquated general-interest mag called Cosmopolitan into the must- read for young, sexy single chicks is pretty damn amazing.”1
In fact, Cosmopolitan had at least four format changes before Helen Gurley Brown came along. The magazine was launched in 1886 as an illustrated monthly for the modern family (meaning it was targeted at married women), with articles on cooking, child care, household decoration, and occasionally fashion, featuring illustrated images of women in the hats and high collars of late-Victorian fashion.2
THE EARLY HISTORY OF MAGAZINES THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN AMERICAN Magazines THE DOMINATION OF SPECIALIZATION THE ORGANIZATION AND ECONOMICS OF MAGAZINES MAGAZINES IN A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
◄ Joanna Coles, who took over as the editor-in- chief for Cosmopolitan in 2012, is a highly regarded editor and entrepreneur. She was recently recognized as Ad Age’s Editor of the
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Year and received the inaugural Gamechanger Award from the Fragrance Foundation. In addition to her work on Cosmopolitan, Coles is currently working on a TV show based on her life for ABC Freeform called Issues, as well as a reality TV series on E! called Cosmo Life based on the working lives of Cosmopolitan editors.
But the magazine was thin on content and almost folded. Cosmopolitan was saved in 1889, when journalist and entrepreneur John Brisben Walker gave it a second chance as an illustrated magazine of literature and insightful reporting.
The magazine featured writers like Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling, and Theodore Dreiser and serialized entire books, including H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. And Walker, seeing the success of contemporary newspapers in New York, was not above stunt reporting. When Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World sent reporter Nellie Bly to travel the world in less than eighty days in 1889 (challenging the premise of Jules Verne’s 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days), Walker sent reporter Elizabeth Bisland around the world in the opposite direction for a more literary travel account.3 Walker’s leadership turned Cosmopolitan into a respected magazine with increased circulation and a strong advertising base.
Walker sold Cosmopolitan at a profit to William Randolph Hearst (Pulitzer’s main competitor) in 1905. Under Hearst, Cosmopolitan had its third rebirth—this time as a muckraking magazine. As magazine historians explain, Hearst was a U.S. representative who “had his eye on the presidency and planned to use his newspapers and the recently bought Cosmopolitan to stir up further discontent over the trusts and big business.”4 Cosmopolitan’s first big muckraking series, David Graham Phillips’s “The Treason of the Senate” in 1906, didn’t help Hearst’s political career, but it did boost the circulation of the magazine by 50 percent and was reprinted in Hearst newspapers for even more exposure.
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The Advertising Archives
But by 1912, the progressive political movement that had given impetus to muckraking journalism was waning. Cosmopolitan, in its fourth incarnation, became a version of its former self—an illustrated literary monthly targeted to women, with short stories and serialized novels by such popular writers as Damon Runyon, Sinclair Lewis, and Faith Baldwin.
Cosmopolitan had great success as an upscale literary magazine, but by the early 1960s, the format had become outdated, and readership and advertising had declined. At this point, the magazine had its most radical makeover. In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown, one of the country’s top advertising copywriters, wrote the best- selling book Sex and the Single Girl. When she proposed a magazine modeled on the book’s vision of strong, sexually liberated women, the Hearst Corporation hired her in 1965 as editor in chief to reinvent Cosmopolitan. The new Cosmopolitan helped spark a sexual revolution and was marketed to the “Cosmo Girl”: a woman aged eighteen to thirty-four with an interest in love, sex, fashion, and her career.
Brown maintained a pink corner office in the Hearst Tower in New York until her death in 2012, but her vision of Cosmo continues today. It’s the top women’s fashion magazine—surpassing competitors like Glamour, Marie Claire, and Vogue — and has wide global influence, with sixty-one international editions. Although its present format is far from its origins, Cosmopolitan endures based on successful reinventions for over 129 years.
SINCE THE 1740S, magazines have played a key role in our social and cultural lives, becoming America’s earliest national mass medium. They created some of the first spaces for discussing the broad issues of the age, including public
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education, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, literacy, and the Civil War.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
In the nineteenth century, magazines became an educational forum for women, who were barred from higher education and from the nation’s political life. At the turn of the twentieth century, magazines’ probing reports paved the way for investigative journalism, while their use of engraving and photography provided a hint of the visual culture to come. Economically, magazines brought advertised products into households, hastening the rise of a consumer society.
Today, more than twenty thousand commercial, alternative, and noncommercial magazines are published in the United States annually. Like newspapers, radio, movies, and television, magazines reflect and construct portraits of American life. They are catalogues for daily events and experiences, but they also show us the latest products, fostering our consumer culture. We read magazines to learn something about our community, our nation, our world, and ourselves.
In this chapter, we will:
Investigate the history of the magazine industry, highlighting the colonial and early American eras, the arrival of national magazines, and the development of photojournalism Focus on the age of muckraking and the rise of general-interest and consumer magazines in the modern American era Look at the decline of mass market magazines, the impact of TV and the Internet, and how magazines have specialized in order to survive in a fragmented and converged market Investigate the organization and economics of magazines and their function in a democracy
As you think about the evolution of magazine culture, consider your own experiences. When did you first start reading magazines, and what magazines were they? What sort of magazines do you read today—popular mainstream magazines like Cosmo or Sports Illustrated, or niche publications that target very specific subcultures? How do you think printed magazines can best adapt to the age of the Internet? For more questions to help you think through the role of magazines in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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THE EARLY HISTORY OF MAGAZINES
The first magazines appeared in seventeenth-century France in the form of bookseller catalogues and notices that book publishers inserted in newspapers. In fact, the word magazine derives from the French term magasin, meaning “storehouse.” The earliest magazines were “storehouses” of writing and reports taken mostly from newspapers. Today, the word magazine broadly refers to collections of articles, stories, and advertisements appearing in nondaily (such as weekly or monthly) periodicals that are published in the smaller tabloid style rather than the larger broadsheet newspaper style.
magazine a nondaily periodical that comprises a collection of articles, stories, and ads.
The First Magazines The first political magazine, called the Review, appeared in London in 1704.
Edited by political activist and novelist Daniel Defoe (author of Robinson Crusoe), the Review was printed sporadically until 1713. Like the Nation, the National Review, and the Progressive in the United States today, early European magazines were channels for political commentary and argument. These periodicals looked like newspapers of the time, but they appeared less frequently and were oriented toward broad domestic and political commentary rather than recent news.
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COLONIAL MAGAZINES The first issue of Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine and Historical Chronicle appeared in January 1741. Although it lasted only six months, Franklin found success in other publications, like his annual Poor Richard’s Almanac, which first appeared in 1732 and lasted twenty-five years.
Regularly published magazines or pamphlets, such as the Tatler and the Spectator, also appeared in England around this time. They offered poetry, politics, and philosophy for London’s elite, and they served readerships of a few thousand. The first publication to use the term magazine was Gentleman’s Magazine, which appeared in London in 1731 and consisted of reprinted articles from newspapers, books, and political pamphlets. Later, the magazine began publishing original work by such writers as Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Alexander Pope.
Magazines in Colonial America Without a substantial middle class, widespread literacy, or advanced printing technology, magazines developed slowly in colonial America. Like the partisan newspapers of the time, these magazines served politicians, the educated, and the merchant classes. Paid circulations were low—between one hundred and fifteen hundred copies. However, early magazines did serve the more widespread purpose of documenting a new nation coming to terms with issues of taxation, state versus federal power, Indian treaties, public education, and the end of colonialism. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Hancock all wrote for early magazines, and Paul Revere worked as a magazine illustrator for a time.
The first colonial magazines appeared in Philadelphia in 1741, about fifty years after the first newspapers. Andrew Bradford started it all with American Magazine, or A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies. Three days later, Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine and Historical Chronicle appeared. Bradford’s magazine lasted only three monthly issues, due to circulation and postal obstacles that Franklin, who had replaced Bradford as Philadelphia’s postmaster, put in its way. For instance, Franklin mailed his magazine without paying the high postal rates that he subsequently charged others. Franklin’s magazine primarily duplicated what was already available in local papers. After six months it, too, stopped publication.
Nonetheless, following the Philadelphia experiments, magazines began to emerge in the other colonies, beginning in Boston in the 1740s. The most successful magazines simply reprinted articles from leading London periodicals, keeping readers abreast of European events. These magazines included New York’s Independent Reflector and the Pennsylvania Magazine, edited by activist Thomas Paine, which helped rally the colonies against British rule. By 1776, about a hundred colonial magazines had appeared and disappeared. Although historians consider them dull and uninspired for the most part, these magazines helped launch
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a new medium that caught on after the American Revolution.
U.S. Magazines in the Nineteenth Century After the revolution, the growth of the magazine industry in the newly independent United States remained slow. Delivery costs remained high, and some postal carriers refused to carry magazines because of their weight. Only twelve magazines operated in 1800. By 1825, about a hundred magazines existed, although about another five hundred had failed between 1800 and 1825. Nevertheless, during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, most communities had their own weekly magazines. These magazines sold some advertising but were usually in precarious financial straits because of their small circulations.
As the nineteenth century progressed, the idea of specialized magazines devoted to certain categories of readers developed. Many early magazines were overtly religious and boasted the largest readerships of the day. Literary magazines also emerged at this time. The North American Review, for instance, established the work of important writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain. In addition to religious and literary magazines, specialty magazines that addressed various professions, lifestyles, and topics also appeared, including the American Farmer, the American Journal of Education, the American Law Journal, Medical Repository, and the American Journal of Science. Such specialization spawned the modern trend of reaching readers who share a profession, a set of beliefs, cultural tastes, or a social identity.
COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS first became popular in the fashion sections of women’s magazines in the mid- nineteenth century. The color for this fashion image from Godey’s Lady’s Book was added to the illustration by hand. Northwind Picture Archives
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The nineteenth century also saw the birth of the first general-interest magazine aimed at a national audience. In 1821, two young Philadelphia printers, Charles Alexander and Samuel Coate Atkinson, launched the Saturday Evening Post, which became the longest-running magazine in U.S. history. Like most magazines of the day, the early Post included a few original essays but “borrowed” many pieces from other sources. Eventually, however, the Post grew to incorporate news, poetry, essays, play reviews, and more. The Post published the writings of such prominent popular authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Although the Post was a general-interest magazine, it also was the first major magazine to appeal directly to women, via its “Lady’s Friend” column, which addressed women’s issues.
National, Women’s, and Illustrated Magazines With increases in literacy and public education, the development of faster printing technologies, and improvements in mail delivery (due to rail transportation), a market was created for more national magazines, like the Saturday Evening Post. Whereas in 1825 one hundred magazines struggled for survival, by 1850 nearly six hundred magazines were being published regularly. (Thousands of others lasted less than a year.)
Besides the move to national circulation, other important developments in the magazine industry were under way. In 1828, Sarah Josepha Hale started the first magazine directed exclusively to a female audience: the Ladies’ Magazine. In addition to carrying general-interest articles, the magazine advocated for women’s education, work, and property rights. After nine years and marginal success, Hale merged her magazine with its main rival, Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–1898), which she edited for the next forty years. By 1850, Godey’s, known for its colorful fashion illustrations in addition to its advocacy, achieved a circulation of 40,000— at the time, the biggest distribution ever for a U.S. magazine. By 1860, circulation swelled to 150,000. Hale’s magazine played a central role in educating working- and middle-class women, who were denied access to higher education throughout the nineteenth century.
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CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY Famed portrait photographer Mathew Brady commissioned many photographers to help him document the Civil War. (Although all the resulting photos were credited “Photograph by Brady,” he did not take them all.) This effort allowed people at home to see and understand the true carnage of the war. Photo critics now acknowledge that some of Brady’s photos were posed or reenactments. Bettmann/Getty Images
The other major development in magazine publishing during the mid- nineteenth century was the arrival of illustration. Like the first newspapers, early magazines were totally dependent on the printed word. By the mid-1850s, drawings, engravings, woodcuts, and other forms of illustration had become a major feature of magazines. During the Civil War, many readers relied on Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for its elaborate battlefield sketches. Publications like Harper’s married visual language to the printed word, helping transform magazines into a mass medium. Bringing photographs into magazines took a bit longer. Mathew Brady and his colleagues, whose thirty-five hundred photos documented the Civil War, helped popularize photography by the 1860s. But it was not until the 1890s that magazines and newspapers possessed the technology to reproduce photos in print media.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN AMERICAN MAGAZINES
In 1870, about twelve hundred magazines were produced in the United States; by 1890, that number had reached forty-five hundred; and by 1905, more than six thousand magazines existed (see Figure 9.1). Part of this surge in titles and readership was facilitated by the Postal Act of 1879, which assigned magazines lower postage rates and put them on an equal footing with newspapers delivered by mail, reducing distribution costs. Meanwhile, faster presses and advances in mass- production printing, conveyor systems, and assembly lines reduced production costs and made large-circulation national magazines possible.5
FIGURE 9.1 THE GROWTH OF MAGAZINES PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES Data from: Association of Magazine Media, 2015 Magazine Media Factbook, www.magazine.org/sites/default/files/2015MagazineMediaFactbook.pdf.
The combination of reduced distribution and production costs enabled publishers to slash magazine prices. As prices dropped from thirty-five cents to fifteen cents and then to ten cents, the working class was gradually able to purchase national publications. By 1905, there were about twenty-five national magazines, available from coast to coast and serving millions of readers.6 As jobs and the population began shifting from farms and small towns to urban areas, magazines helped readers imagine themselves as part of a nation rather than as individuals with only local or regional identities. In addition, the dramatic growth of drugstores and dime stores, supermarkets, and department stores offered new venues and shelf space for selling consumer goods, including magazines.
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As magazine circulation began to skyrocket, advertising revenue soared. The economics behind the rise of advertising was simple: A magazine publisher could dramatically expand circulation by dropping the price of an issue below the actual production cost for a single copy. The publisher recouped the loss through ad revenue, guaranteeing large readerships to advertisers who were willing to pay to reach more readers. The number of ad pages in national magazines proliferated. Harper’s, for instance, devoted only seven pages to ads in the mid-1880s, nearly fifty pages in 1890, and more than ninety pages in 1900.7
Social Reform and the Muckrakers Better distribution and lower costs had attracted readers, but to maintain sales, magazines had to change content as well. Whereas printing the fiction and essays of the best writers of the day was one way to maintain circulation, many magazines also engaged in one aspect of yellow journalism — crusading for social reform on behalf of the public good. In the 1890s, for example, Ladies’ Home Journal (LHJ) and its editor, Edward Bok, led the fight against unregulated patent medicines (which often contained nearly 50 percent alcohol), while other magazines joined the fight against phony medicines, poor living and working conditions, and unsanitary practices in various food industries.
The rise in magazine circulation coincided with rapid social change in America. While hundreds of thousands of Americans moved from the country to the city in search of industrial jobs, millions of new immigrants poured in. Thus the nation that journalists had long written about had grown increasingly complex by the turn of the century. Many newspaper reporters became dissatisfied with the simplistic and conventional style of newspaper journalism and turned to magazines, where they were able to write at greater length and in greater depth about broader issues. They wrote about such topics as corruption in big business and government, urban problems faced by immigrants, labor conflicts, and race relations.
In 1902, McClure’s Magazine (1893–1933) touched off an investigative era in magazine reporting with a series of probing stories, including Ida Tarbell’s “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” which took on John D. Rockefeller’s oil monopoly, and Lincoln Steffens’s “Shame of the Cities,” which tackled urban problems. In 1906, Cosmopolitan joined the fray with a series called “The Treason of the Senate,” and Collier’s magazine (1888–1957) developed “The Great American Fraud” series, focusing on patent medicines (whose ads accounted for 30 percent of the profits made by the American press by the 1890s). Much of this new reporting style was critical of American institutions. Angry with so much negative reporting, in 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt dubbed these investigative reporters muckrakers because they were willing to crawl through society’s muck to uncover a story. Muckraking was a label that Roosevelt used with disdain, but it was worn with pride by reporters such as Ray Stannard Baker, Frank Norris, and Lincoln Steffens.
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muckrakers reporters who useda style of early-twentieth-century investigative journalism that emphasized a willingness to crawl around in society’s muck to uncover a story.
Bettmann/Getty Images
Influenced by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle—a fictional account of Chicago’s meatpacking industry—and by the muckraking reports of Collier’s and LHJ, in 1906 Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Other reforms stemming from muckraking journalism and the politics of the era include antitrust laws for increased government oversight of business, a fair and progressive income tax, and the direct election of U.S. senators.
The Rise of General-Interest Magazines The heyday of the muckraking era lasted into the mid-1910s, when America was drawn into World War I. After the war and through the 1950s, general-interest magazines were the most prominent publications, offering occasional investigative articles but also covering a wide variety of topics aimed at a broad national audience. A key aspect of these magazines was photojournalism—the use of
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photos to document the rhythms of daily life (see “Case Study: The Evolution of Photojournalism” on pages 298–299). High-quality photos gave general-interest magazines a visual advantage over radio, which was the most popular medium of the day. In 1920, about fifty-five magazines fit the general-interest category; by 1946, more than one hundred such magazines competed with radio networks for the national audience.
general-interest magazines types of magazines that address a wide variety of topics and are aimed at a broad national audience.
photojournalism the use of photos to document events and people’s lives.
Saturday Evening Post Although it had been around since 1821, the Saturday Evening Post concluded the nineteenth century as only a modest success, with a circulation of about ten thousand. In 1897, Cyrus Curtis, who had already made Ladies’ Home Journal the nation’s top magazine, bought the Post and remade it into the first widely popular general-interest magazine. Curtis’s strategy for reinvigorating the magazine included printing popular fiction and romanticizing American virtues through words and pictures (a Post tradition best depicted in the three-hundred-plus cover illustrations by Norman Rockwell). Curtis also featured articles that celebrated the business boom of the 1920s. This reversed the journalistic direction of the muckraking era, in which business corruption was often the focus. By the 1920s, the Post had reached two million in circulation, the first magazine to hit that mark.
Reader’s Digest The most widely circulated general-interest magazine during this period was Reader’s Digest. Started in a Greenwich Village basement in 1922 by Dewitt Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace, Reader’s Digest championed one of the earliest functions of magazines: printing condensed versions of selected articles from other magazines. With its inexpensive production costs, low price, and popular pocket-size format, the magazine’s circulation climbed to over one million during the Great Depression, and by 1946, it was the nation’s most popular magazine. By the mid-1980s, it was the most popular magazine in the world, with a circulation of 20 million in America and 10 to 12 million abroad. However, by 2014 it was recovering from bankruptcy, and its circulation base had dropped to about 4.2 million, less than a quarter of its circulation thirty years earlier.
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IDA TARBELL (1857–1944) is best known for her work “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” which appeared as a nineteen-part series in McClure’s Magazine between November 1902 and October 1904. Tarbell once remarked on why she dedicated years of her life to investigating the company: “They had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me.” For muckrakers and investigative journalists like Tarbell, exposing such corruption was a driving force behind their work. Granger, NYC—All rights reserved.
LIFE MAGAZINE originally ran from 1883 to 1972 and was known for its iconic photo covers. Following nearly a century as a weekly, the magazine has since been occasionally published as a monthly, a commemorative publication, a newspaper supplement, and an online archive.
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Cass Bird/The LIFE Premium Collection/Getty Images.
Time During the general-interest era, national newsmagazines such as Time were also major commercial successes. Begun in 1923 by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, Time developed a magazine brand of interpretive journalism, assigning reporter- researcher teams to cover stories, after which a rewrite editor would put the article in narrative form with an interpretive point of view. Time had a circulation of 200,000 by 1930, increasing to more than 3 million by the mid-1960s. Time’s success encouraged prominent imitators, including Newsweek (established in 1933); U.S. News & World Report (1948); and, more recently, The Week (2001). By 2014, economic decline, competition from the Web, and a shrinking number of readers and advertisers took their toll on the three top newsweeklies. Time’s circulation stagnated at 3.2 million, while U.S. News became a monthly magazine in 2008 and switched to an all-digital format in 2010 (and is now most famous for its “America’s Best Colleges” reports).
Life Despite the commercial success of Reader’s Digest and Time in the twentieth century, the magazines that really symbolized the general-interest genre during this era were the oversized pictorial weeklies Look and Life. More than any other magazine of its day, Life developed an effective strategy for competing with popular radio by advancing photojournalism. Launched as a weekly by Henry Luce in 1936, Life appealed to the public’s fascination with images (invigorated by the movie industry), radio journalism, and advertising and fashion photography. By the end of the 1930s, Life had a pass-along readership—the total number of people who come into contact with a single copy of a magazine—of more than seventeen million, rivaling the ratings of popular national radio programs.
pass-along readership the total number of people who come into contact with a single copy of a magazine.
Life’s first editor, Wilson Hicks—formerly a picture editor for the Associated Press—built a staff of renowned photographer-reporters who chronicled the world’s ordinary and extraordinary events from the late 1930s through the 1960s. Among Life’s most famous photojournalists were Margaret Bourke-White, the first female war correspondent to fly combat missions during World War II, and Gordon Parks, who later became Hollywood’s first African American director of
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major feature films. Today, Life’s photographic archive is hosted online by Google (images.google.com/hosted/life).
MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE (1904–1971) was a photojournalist of many “firsts”: first female photographer for Life magazine, first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union, first to shoot the cover photo for Life, and first female war correspondent. Bourke-White (near left) was well known for her photos of WWII—including concentration camps— but also for her documentation of the India-Pakistan partition, including a photo of Gandhi at his spinning wheel (far left). Margaret Bourke-White/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
CASE STUDY
The Evolution of Photojournalism BY CHRISTOPHER R. HARRIS
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W hat we now recognize as photojournalism began with the assignment of photographer Roger Fenton, of the Sunday Times of London, to document the Crimean War in 1856. However, technical
limitations did not allow direct reproduction of photodocumentary images in the publications of the day. Woodcut artists had to interpret the photographic images as black-and-white-toned woodblocks that could be reproduced by the presses of the period. Images interpreted by artists therefore lost the inherent qualities of photographic visual documentation: an on-site visual representation of facts for those who weren’t present. Woodcuts remained the basic method of press reproduction until 1880, when New York Daily Graphic photographer Stephen Horgan invented halftone reproduction using a dot-pattern screen. This screen enabled metallic plates to directly represent photographic images in the printing process; now periodicals could bring exciting visual reportage to their pages.
JACOB RIIS The Tramp, c. 1890. Riis, who emigrated from Denmark in 1870, lived in poverty in New York for several years before becoming a photojournalist. He spent much of his later life chronicling the lives of the poor in New York City. The Museum of the City of New York/Art Resource, N.Y.
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In the mid-1890s, Jimmy Hare became the first photographer recognized as a photojournalist in the United States. Taken for Collier’s Weekly, Hare’s photoreportage on the sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898 near Havana, Cuba, established his reputation as a newsman traveling the world to bring back images of news events. Hare’s images fed into growing popular support for Cuban independence from Spain and eventual U.S. involvement in the Spanish-American War. In 1888, George Eastman brought photography to the working and middle classes when he introduced the first flexible-film camera from Kodak, his company in Rochester, New York. Gone were the bulky equipment and fragile photographic plates of the past. Now families and journalists could more easily and affordably document gatherings and events. As photography became easier and more widespread, photojournalism began to take on an increasingly important social role. At the turn of the century, the documentary photography of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine captured the harsh living and working conditions of the nation’s many child laborers, including crowded ghettos and unsafe mills and factories. Reaction to these shockingly honest photographs resulted in public outcry and new laws against the exploitation of children. Photographs also brought the horrors of World War I to people far from the battlefields. In 1923, visionaries Henry Luce and Briton Hadden published Time, the first modern photographic newsweekly; Life and Fortune soon followed. From coverage of the Roaring Twenties to the Great Depression, these magazines used images that changed the way people viewed the world. Life, with its spacious 10-by-13-inch format and large photographs, became one of the most influential magazines in America, printing what are now classic images from World War II and the Korean War. Often, Life offered images that were unavailable anywhere else: Margaret Bourke-White’s photographic proof of the unspeakably horrific concentration camps; W. Eugene Smith’s gentle portraits of the humanitarian Albert Schweitzer in Africa; David Duncan’s gritty images of the faces of U.S. troops fighting in Korea.
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CAMILLE LEPAGE, a twenty-six-year-old French photojournalist, was killed in May 2014 while covering the chaotic civil war in the Central African Republic, which reignited in 2012. Her photos exposed the everyday life of civilians and soldiers in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, from refugees and the gravely injured in hospitals to African fashion- show models trying to maintain some sense of normalcy. Her work appeared in news media around the world, including the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, and Al Jazeera. Camille LePage/AFP/Getty Images
Television photojournalism made its quantum leap into the public mind as it documented the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. In televised images that were broadcast and rebroadcast, the public witnessed the actual assassination and the confusing aftermath, including live coverage of both the murder of alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and President Kennedy’s funeral procession. Photojournalism also provided visual documentation of the turbulent 1960s, including aggressive photographic coverage of the Vietnam War —its protesters and supporters. Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer Eddie Adams shook the emotions of the American public with his photographs of a South Vietnamese general’s summary execution of a suspected Vietcong terrorist. Closer to home, shocking images of the Civil Rights movement culminated in pictures of Birmingham police and police dogs attacking Civil Rights protesters. In the 1970s, new computer technologies emerged and were embraced by print and television media worldwide. By the late 1980s, computers could transform images into digital form and easily manipulate them with sophisticated software programs. Today, a reporter can take a picture and within minutes send it to news offices in Tokyo, Berlin, and New York; moments later, the image can be used in a late-breaking TV story or sent directly to that organization’s Twitter followers. Such digital technology has revolutionized photojournalism, perhaps even more than the advent of roll film did in the late nineteenth century.
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Today’s photojournalists post entire interactive photo slide shows alongside stories, sometimes adding audio explaining their artistic and journalistic process. Their photographs live on through online news archives and through photojournalism blogs, such as the Lens of the New York Times, where photojournalists are able to gain recognition for their work and find new audiences. However, there is a dark side to all this digital technology. Because of the absence of physical film, there is a loss of proof, or veracity, of the authenticity of images. Original film has qualities that make it easy to determine whether it has been tampered with. Digital images, by contrast, can be easily altered, and such alteration can be very difficult to detect. An egregious example of image-tampering involved the Ralph Lauren fashion model Filippa Hamilton. She appeared in a drastically Photoshopped advertisement that showed her hips as being thinner than her head—like a Bratz doll. The ad, published only in Japan, received intense criticism when the picture went viral. The five-foot-ten, 120- pound model was subsequently dropped by the fashion label because, as Hamilton explained, “they said I was overweight and I couldn’t fit in their clothes anymore.”1 In today’s age of Photoshop, it is common practice to make thin female models look even thinner and make male models look unnaturally muscled. “Every picture has been worked on, some twenty, thirty rounds,” Ken Harris, a fashion magazine photo- retoucher said; “going between the retoucher, the client, and the agency … [photos] are retouched to death.”2 And since there is no disclaimer saying these images have been retouched, it can be hard for viewers to know the truth. Photojournalists and news sources are confronted today with unprecedented concerns over truth-telling. In the past, trust in documentary photojournalism rested solely on the verifiability of images (“what you see is what you get”). This is no longer the case. Just as we must evaluate the words we read, now we must also take a more critical eye to the images we view. Christopher R. Harris is a professor in the Department of Electronic Media Communication at Middle Tennessee State University.
The Fall of General-Interest Magazines The decline of weekly general-interest magazines, which had dominated the industry for thirty years, began in the 1950s. By 1957, both Collier’s (founded in 1888) and Woman’s Home Companion (founded in 1873) had folded. Each magazine had a national circulation of more than four million the year it died. No
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magazine with this kind of circulation had ever shut down before. Together, the two publications brought in advertising revenues of more than $26 million in 1956. Although some critics blamed poor management, both magazines were victims of changing consumer tastes, rising postal costs, falling ad revenues, and, perhaps most important, television, which began usurping the role of magazines as the preferred family medium.
TV Guide Is Born While other magazines were just beginning to make sense of the impact of television on their readers, TV Guide appeared in 1953. Taking its cue from the pocket-size format of Reader’s Digest and the supermarket sales strategy used by women’s magazines, TV Guide—started by Walter Annenberg’s Triangle Publications—soon rivaled the success of Reader’s Digest by addressing the nation’s growing fascination with television by publishing TV listings. The first issue sold a record 1.5 million copies in ten urban markets. Because many newspapers were not yet listing TV programs, by 1962 the magazine became the first weekly to reach a circulation of 8 million, with its seventy regional editions tailoring its listings to TV channels in specific areas of the country. (See Table 9.1 for circulation figures of the Top 10 U.S. magazines.)
In 1988, media baron Rupert Murdoch acquired Triangle Publications for $3 billion. Murdoch’s News Corp. owned the new Fox network, and buying the then influential TV Guide ensured that the fledgling network would have its programs listed. In 2005, after years of declining circulation (TV schedules in local newspapers had increasingly undermined its regional editions), TV Guide became a full-size entertainment magazine, dropping its smaller digest format and its 140 regional editions. In 2008, TV Guide, once the most widely distributed magazine, was sold to a private venture capital firm for $1—less than the cost of a single issue. The TV Guide Network and TVGuide.com—both deemed more valuable assets—were sold to the film company Lionsgate Entertainment for $255 million in 2009. As TV Guide fell out of favor, Game Informer—a magazine about digital games—became a top title, as it chronicled the rise of another mass media industry.
TABLE 9.1 THE TOP 10 MAGAZINES (RANKED BY PAID U.S. CIRCULATION AND SINGLE- COPY SALES, 1972 VERSUS 2014) Data from: Alliance for Audited Media, www.auditedmedia.com/news/blog/2014/august/top- 25-us-consumer-magazines-for-june-2014.aspx.
1972 2014
Rank/Publication Circulation Rank/Publication Circulation
1 Reader’s Digest 17,825,661 1 AARP The Magazine 22,837,736
2 TV Guide 16,410,858 2 AARP Bulletin 22,183,316
3 Woman’s Day 8,191,731 3 Better Homes and Gardens 7,639,661
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4 Better Homes and Gardens 7,996,050 4 Game Informer 7,099,452
5 Family Circle 7,889,587 5 Good Housekeeping 4,315,330
6 McCall’s 7,516,960 6 Family Circle 4,015,728
7 National Geographic 7,260,179 7 National Geographic 3,572,348
8 Ladies’ Home Journal 7,014,251 8 People 3,510,533
9 Playboy 6,400,573 9 Reader’s Digest 3,393,573
10 Good Housekeeping 5,801,446 10 Woman’s Day 3,288,335
THE RISE AND FALL OF LOOK With large pages, beautiful photographs, and compelling stories on celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Look entertained millions of readers from 1937 to 1971, emphasizing photojournalism to compete with radio. By the late 1960s, however, television lured away national advertisers, postal rates increased, and production costs rose, forcing Look to fold despite a readership of more than eight million. The Advertising Archives
Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Look Expire Although Reader’s Digest and women’s supermarket magazines were not greatly
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affected by television, other general-interest magazines were. The Saturday Evening Post folded in 1969, Look in 1971, and Life in 1972. At the time, all three magazines were rated in the Top 10 in terms of paid circulation, and each had a readership that exceeded six million per issue. (A look at today’s top-selling magazines—see Table 9.1—indicates just how large a readership this was.) Why did these magazines fold? First, to maintain these high circulation figures, their publishers were selling the magazines for far less than the cost of production.
Second, the national advertising revenue pie that helped make up the cost differences for Life and Look now had to be shared with network television—and magazines’ slices were getting smaller. Life’s high pass-along readership meant that it had a larger audience than many prime-time TV shows. But it cost more to have a single full-page ad in Life than it did to buy a minute of ad time during evening television. National advertisers were often forced to choose between the two, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s, television seemed a better buy to advertisers looking for the biggest audience.
Third, dramatic increases in postal rates had a particularly negative effect on oversized publications (those larger than the 8-by-10.5-inch standard). In the 1970s, postal rates increased by more than 400 percent for these magazines. The Post and Life cut their circulations drastically to save money. The economic rationale here was that limiting the number of copies would reduce production and postal costs, enabling the magazines to lower their ad rates to compete with network television. But in fact, with decreased circulation, these magazines became less attractive to advertisers trying to reach the largest general audience.
The general-interest magazines that survived the competition for national ad dollars tended to be women’s magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Woman’s Day. These publications had smaller formats and depended primarily on supermarket sales rather than on expensive mail-delivered subscriptions (like Life and Look). However, the most popular magazines, TV Guide and Reader’s Digest, benefited not only from supermarket sales but also from their larger circulations (twice that of Life), their pocket size, and their small photo budgets. The failure of the Saturday Evening Post, Look, and Life as oversized general-audience weeklies ushered in a new era of specialization.
People Puts Life Back into Magazines In March 1974, Time Inc. launched People, the first successful mass market magazine to appear in decades. With an abundance of celebrity profiles and human-interest stories, People showed a profit in two years and reached a circulation of more than two million within five years. People now ranks first in revenue from advertising and circulation sales—more than $1.5 billion a year— and ranks eighth in the United States in terms of circulation (see Table 9.1).
The success of People is instructive, particularly because only two years earlier television had helped kill Life by draining away national ad dollars. Instead of using a bulky oversized format and relying on subscriptions, People downsized and
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generated most of its circulation revenue from newsstand and supermarket sales. For content, it took its cue from our culture’s fascination with celebrities. Supported by plenty of photos, its short articles are about one-third the length of the articles in a typical newsmagazine.
If People is viewed, as one argument suggests, as a specialty magazine rather than a mass market magazine, its financial success makes much more sense. It also helps explain the host of magazines that try to emulate it, including Us Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, In Touch Weekly, Star, and OK! People has even spawned its own spin-offs, including People en Español and People StyleWatch; the latter is a low-cost fashion magazine that began in 2007 and features celebrity styles at discount prices.
Convergence: Magazines Confront the Digital Age Although the Internet was initially viewed as the death knell of print magazines, the industry now embraces it. The Internet has become the place where print magazines like Time and Entertainment Weekly can extend their reach, where magazines like FHM and PCWorld can survive when their print version ends, or where online magazines like Salon, Slate, and Wonderwall can exist exclusively.
Magazines Move Online Given the costs of paper, printing, and postage, and the flexibility of the Web and mobile devices, magazines are increasingly being distributed in digital formats.
For example, Wired magazine has a print circulation of about 886,000. On its Web (Wired.com) and tablet (app) editions, Wired gets an average of 24 million unique visitors per month. Links through social media are another way magazine content reaches an audience, and Wired reports 16 million readers through social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest.
The Web and app formats give magazines unlimited space—which is at a premium in their printed versions—and the opportunity to do things that print cannot do. Many online magazines now include blogs, original video and audio podcasts, social networks, games, virtual fitting rooms, and 3-D “augmented reality” (AR) components that could never work in print. For example, PopularMechanics.com has added interactive 3-D models for do-it-yourself projects, so that a reader can go over plans to make an Adirondack chair, examining joints and parts from every angle. Additionally, many digital magazines (including Lucky, Seventeen, GQ, Teen Vogue, Brides, Popular Science, and Maxim) offer mobile-specific scanning apps that enable 3-D involvement on every page, not just those pages with a QR code (the square scannable bar codes that link to video and Web pages). Although QR codes are still a primary part of the mobile activation experience, they are more associated with promotions and coupons, whereas augmented reality is a vehicle for a stronger branding experience.
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SALON, launched in 1995, is now a leading Internet entertainment magazine. Though it was created by former newspaper staffers, its mixture of topics and article lengths, as well as its national scope, makes it more akin to a general-interest magazine.
Paperless: Magazines Embrace Digital Content Webzines such as Salon and Slate, which are magazines that appear exclusively online, were pioneers in making the Web a legitimate site for breaking news and discussing culture and politics. Salon was founded in 1995 by five former reporters from the San Francisco Examiner who wanted to break from the traditions of newspaper publishing and build “a different kind of newsroom” in order to create well-developed stories and commentary.8 Salon is a leading online magazine, claiming 17.6 million unique monthly visitors in 2016. Its main online competitor, Slate—founded in 1996 and now owned by the Graham Holdings Company— draws about 25 million unique monthly visitors.
Webzine a magazine that publishes on the Internet.
Other online-only magazines have tried to reinvent the idea of a magazine, instead of just adapting the print product to the Web. For example, Lonny (www.lonnymag.com), an interior design magazine, enables readers to flip through digital pages and then click on items (such as pillows, chairs, or fabrics) for
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purchase. As magazines create apps for smartphones and touchscreen tablets, editorial content is even more tightly woven with advertising. Readers can now, for example, read Entertainment Weekly’s top music recommendations on their iPhone or iPad and then click through to buy a song or album on iTunes. Entertainment Weekly, owned by Time Inc., then gets a cut of the sale it generated for iTunes, and the reader gets music almost instantly.
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THE DOMINATION OF SPECIALIZATION
The general trend away from mass market publications and toward specialty magazines coincided with radio’s move to specialized formats in the 1950s. With the rise of television, magazines ultimately reacted the same way radio and movies did: They adapted. Radio developed formats for older and younger audiences, for rock fans and classical music fans. At the movies, filmmakers focused on more adult subject matter that was off-limits to television’s image as a family medium. And magazines traded their mass audience for smaller, discrete audiences that could be guaranteed to advertisers. This specialization continues today as the magazine industry adapts to the Internet. At least six of the nation’s top twenty-five magazines in circulation are now linked to membership in a specialized organization: AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin (for members of AARP), Game Informer (for a Pro membership card at GameStop stores), AAA Living (for members of the automobile organization, AAA), American Rifleman (one of four magazines for members of the National Rifle Association), and American Legion Magazine (for members of the American Legion veterans organization). Linking a magazine subscription to organizational membership helps ensure audience loyalty to the magazine in the face of the Internet’s many competing media options.
Magazines are now divided by advertiser type: consumer magazines (O: The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan), which carry a host of general consumer product ads; business or trade magazines (Advertising Age, Progressive Grocer), which include ads for products and services for various occupational groups; and farm magazines (Dairy Herd Management, Dakota Farmer), which contain ads for agricultural products and farming lifestyles. Grouping by advertiser type further distinguishes commercial magazines from noncommercial magazine-like periodicals. The noncommercial category includes everything from activist newsletters and scholarly journals to business newsletters created by companies for distribution to employees. Magazines such as Ms., Consumer Reports, and Cook’s Illustrated, which rely solely on subscription and newsstand sales, also accept no advertising and fit into the noncommercial periodical category.
In addition to grouping magazines by advertising style, we can categorize popular consumer magazine styles by the demographic characteristics of their target audience—such as gender, age, or ethnic group—or by an audience interest area, such as entertainment, sports, literature, or tabloids.
Men’s and Women’s Magazines One way the magazine industry competed with television was to reach niche audiences that were not being served by the new medium, creating magazines focused on more adult subject matter. Playboy, launched in 1953 by Hugh Hefner, was the first magazine to do this by undermining the conventional values of pre–
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World War II America and emphasizing previously taboo subject matter. Scraping together $7,000, Hefner published his first issue, which contained a nude calendar reprint of the actress Marilyn Monroe, along with male-focused articles that criticized alimony payments and gold-digging women. With the financial success of that first issue, which sold more than fifty thousand copies, Hefner was in business.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Magazine Specialization Today Editors discuss motivations for magazine specialization and how the Internet is changing the industry.
Discussion: How have the types of magazines you read changed over the past ten years? Have their formats changed, too?
T R A C K I N G T E C H N O L O G Y
Paper Still Dominates Magazines in the Digital Age
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A funny thing happened on the way to print magazines becoming
obsolete: Publishers are still printing them, and people are still reading them.
The Association of Magazine Media (formerly the Magazine Publishers of America) reported that the number of U.S.
consumer print magazines actually increased from 2004 to 2014, from 7,188 titles to 7,289 titles. The 96 new magazine launches in 2014 were far less than the year before (231), but one new magazine, Cannabis Business Times, reminds us that magazines continue to reflect the latest business trends of our evolving culture.1
Leading magazine researcher Dr. Samir Husni of the University of Mississippi School of Journalism (so much of an expert he has the trademarked name “Mr. Magazine”) cheered the magazine launches in spring 2015 from established magazine publishers, including Meredith’s Parents Latina, Rodale’s Organic Life, National Geographic’s History, and Smithsonian’s Journeys. “Large-scale publishers … show no fear in the face of cynics who still decry the value of print in today’s world,” Husni said. “Print is on the rise; was there ever any doubt?”2
Still, some things have changed from when print was the only format for magazines. Single-issue purchases—the impulse buys made at a newsstand, bookstore, or grocery store checkout line—have been declining, down by 11.9 percent in the first half of 2014. The industry is banking on subscriptions to digital editions, but while digital editions have been increasing in popularity (to about 4 percent of total circulation by 2015), it hasn’t been enough to make up the difference.3 Magazine circulation is still driven by print subscriptions, which means the main “technology” of the medium remains the one that gave birth to it: paper.
Ironically, high-profile digital companies are increasingly becoming publishers of beautiful, glossy paper magazines. For example, Angie’s List, the online subscription service for crowdsourced local business reviews, has its own magazine, also called Angie’s List. Airbnb, the private lodging service, has launched Pineapple magazine; Uber, the private car transportation service, publishes Momentum magazine; and Net-a-porter.com, the designer fashion site, produces Porter magazine.
Why would digital companies, with their entire business model fueled by apps and the Web, want to publish traditional print magazines? The magazine industry’s own data might suggest an answer: because people really like magazines. According to the Association of Magazine
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Media, magazines are “more trusted, inspiring and influential than other media,” including Web sites and ad-supported TV networks. The industry’s research also concludes that magazines generate more positive emotions—happiness, confidence, excitement, and hopefulness —than other media, such as televisions, radios/other audio, computers, mobile devices, and tablets.4 In a marketing study, respondents rated magazines much higher than Web sites and television on statements like “touches me deep down,” “a way to learn about new products,” “inspires me in my own life,” “gets me to try new things,” and “gives me something to talk about”—all things that magazine publishers, whether they are traditional publishers or new digital companies, hope to accomplish.5
The May/June 2015 premier issue of Rodale’s Organic Life magazine, published by Rodale, Inc. Cover photo by Gentl & Hyers. Uber Technologies, Inc.
Playboy’s circulation peaked in the 1960s at more than seven million, but it fell gradually throughout the 1970s as the magazine faced competition from imitators and video, as well as criticism for “packaging” and objectifying women for the enjoyment of men. Playboy and similar publications continue to publish, but newer men’s magazines have shifted their focus to include health (Men’s Health) and lifestyle (Details and Maxim). In an attempt to create new interest in the magazine, Playboy announced it would stop publishing nude pictures of women beginning in early 2016.
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Women’s magazines had long demonstrated that gender-based publications were highly marketable, but during the era of specialization, the magazine industry sought the enormous market of magazine-reading women even more aggressively. Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Woman’s Day focused on cultivating the image of women as homemakers and consumers. In the conservative 1950s and early 1960s, this formula proved to be enormously successful, but as the women’s movement advanced in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, women’s magazines grew more contemporary and sophisticated, incorporating content related to feminism (such as in Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine, which first appeared in 1972), women’s sexuality (such as in Cosmopolitan, which became a young women’s magazine under the editorship of Helen Gurley Brown in the 1960s), and career and politics—topics previously geared primarily toward men. Even so, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and Woman’s Day are all still in the Top 10 list of U.S. highest-circulation magazines (see Table 9.1).
Sports, Entertainment, and Leisure Magazines In the age of specialization, magazine executives have developed multiple magazines for fans of soap operas, running, tennis, golf, hunting, quilting, antiquing, surfing, and video games, to name only a few. Within categories, magazines specialize further, targeting older or younger runners, men or women golfers, duck hunters or bird-watchers, and midwestern or southern antique collectors.
The most popular sports and leisure magazine is Sports Illustrated, which took its name from a failed 1935 publication. Launched in 1954 by Henry Luce’s Time Inc., Sports Illustrated was initially aimed at well-educated middle-class men. It has since become the most successful general sports magazine in history, covering everything from major-league sports and mountain climbing to foxhunting and snorkeling. Although frequently criticized for its immensely profitable but exploitative yearly swimsuit edition, Sports Illustrated has also done major investigative pieces—for example, on racketeering in boxing and on land conservation. Its circulation held steady at three million in 2015. Sports Illustrated competes directly with ESPN The Magazine and indirectly with dozens of leisure and niche sports magazines, like Golf Digest, Outside, and Pro Football Weekly.
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SPECIALIZED MAGAZINES target a wide range of interests, from mainstream sports to hobbies like making model airplanes. Some of the more successful specialized magazines include National Geographic and Sports Illustrated. Jason/Alamy Sports Illustrated/Getty Images
Founded in 1888 by Boston lawyer Gardiner Green Hubbard and his famous son-in-law, Alexander Graham Bell, National Geographic promoted “humanized geography” and helped pioneer color photography in 1910. It was also the first publication to publish both undersea and aerial color photographs. In addition, many of National Geographic’s nature and culture specials on television, which began in 1965, rank among the most popular programs in the history of public television. National Geographic’s popularity grew slowly and steadily throughout the twentieth century, reaching 1 million in circulation in 1935 and 10 million in the 1970s. In the late 1990s, its circulation of paid subscriptions slipped to under 9 million. Other media ventures (for example, a cable channel and atlases) provided new revenue as circulation for the magazine continued to slide, falling to 4 million in 2015 (but with 3 million in international distribution). Despite its falling circulation, National Geographic is often recognized as one of the country’s best magazines for its reporting and photojournalism. Today, National Geographic competes with other travel and geography magazines, such as Discover, Smithsonian, Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, and its own National Geographic Traveler.
Magazines for the Ages In the age of specialization, magazines have further delineated readers along ever-
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narrowing age lines, appealing more and more to very young readers and older readers, groups often ignored by mainstream television.
The first children’s magazines appeared in New England in the late eighteenth century. Ever since, magazines such as Youth’s Companion, Boy’s Life (the Boy Scouts’ national publication since 1912), Highlights for Children, and Ranger Rick have successfully targeted preschool and elementary-school children. The ad-free and subscription-only Highlights for Children topped the children’s magazine category in 2015, with a circulation of more than two million. In the popular arena, the leading female teen magazines have shown substantial growth; the top magazine for thirteen- to nineteen-year-olds is Seventeen, with a circulation of two million in 2015. (For a critical take on women’s fashion magazines, see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Uncovering American Beauty” on page 307.)
In targeting audiences by age, the most dramatic success has come from magazines aimed at readers over fifty, America’s fastest-growing age segment. These publications have tried to meet the cultural interests of older Americans, who historically have not been prominently featured in mainstream consumer culture. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and its magazine, AARP The Magazine, were founded in 1958 by retired California teacher Ethel Percy Andrus. Subscriptions to the bimonthly AARP The Magazine and the monthly AARP Bulletin come free when someone joins AARP and pays the modest membership fee ($16 in 2015). By the early 1980s, AARP The Magazine’s circulation approached seven million. However, with AARP signing up thirty thousand new members each week by the late 1980s, both AARP The Magazine and the newsletter overtook TV Guide and Reader’s Digest as the top circulated magazines. By 2014, both had circulations of over twenty-two million, far surpassing the circulations of all other magazines (see Table 9.1). Article topics in the magazine cover a range of lifestyle, travel, money, health, and entertainment issues, such as sex at age fifty-plus, secrets for spectacular vacations, and how poker can create a sharper mind.
Elite Magazines Although long in existence, elite magazines grew in popularity during the age of specialization. Elite magazines are characterized by their combination of literature, criticism, humor, and journalism and by their appeal to highly educated audiences, often living in urban areas. Among the numerous elite publications that grew in stature during the twentieth century were the Atlantic Monthly (now the Atlantic), Vanity Fair, and Harper’s.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Uncovering American Beauty
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How does the United States’ leading fashion magazine define beauty? One way to explore this question is by critically analyzing the covers of Cosmopolitan.
1 DESCRIPTION If you review a number of Cosmopolitan covers, you’ll notice that they typically feature a body shot of a female model surrounded by blaring headlines often featuring the words Hot and Sex to usher a reader inside the magazine. The cover model is dressed provocatively and is positioned against a solid-color background. She looks confident. Everything about the cover is loud and brassy.
2 ANALYSIS Looking at the covers over the last decade, and then the decade before it, what are some significant patterns? One thing you’ll notice is that all the models look incredibly alike, particularly when it comes to race: There is a disproportionate number of white cover models. But you’ll notice that things are improving somewhat in this regard; Cosmo has used several Hispanic and African American cover models in recent years, but still they are few and far between. However, there is an even more consistent pattern regarding body type. Of cover model Hilary Duff, Cosmo said, “With long honey-colored locks, a smokin’ bod, and killer confidence, Hilary’s looking every bit the hot Hollywood starlet.” In Cosmo-speak, “smokin’ bod” means ultrathin (sometimes made even more so with digital modifications).
3 INTERPRETATION What does this mean? Although Cosmo doesn’t provide height and weight figures for its models, the magazine is probably selling an unhealthy body weight (in fact, photos can be digitally altered to make the models look even thinner). In its guidelines for the fashion industry, the Academy for Eating Disorders suggests “for women and men over the age of 18, adoption of a minimum body mass index threshold of 18.5 kg/m2 (e.g., a female model who is 5’9" [1.75 m] must weigh more than 126 pounds [57.3 kg]), which
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recognizes that weight below this is considered underweight by the World Health Organization.”1
4 EVALUATION Cosmopolitan uses thin cover models as aspirational objects for its readers— that is, as women its readers would like to look like. Thus, these cover models become the image of what a “terrific” body is for its readers, who— by Cosmopolitan’s own account—are women age eighteen to twenty-four. Cosmo also notes that it’s been the best-selling women’s magazine in college bookstores for twenty-five years. But that target audience also happens to be the one most susceptible to body issues. As the Academy for Eating Disorders notes, “About one in 20 young women in the community has an eating disorder,” which can include anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating.2
5 ENGAGEMENT Contact Cosmo’s editor in chief, Joanna Coles, and request representation of healthy body types on the magazine’s covers. You can contact her and the editorial department via e-mail (cosmo@hearst.com), telephone (212-649- 3570), or U.S. mail: Joanna Coles, Editor, Cosmopolitan, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019. Your voice can be effective: In 2012, a thirteen-year-old girl started a petition on change.org and successfully got Seventeen to respond to the way it Photoshops images of models.
However, the most widely circulated elite magazine is the New Yorker. Launched in 1925 by Harold Ross, the New Yorker became the first city magazine aimed at a national upscale audience. Over the years, the New Yorker has featured many of the twentieth century’s most prominent biographers, writers, reporters, and humorists, including A. J. Liebling, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Ross, John Updike, E. B. White, and Garrison Keillor, as well as James Thurber’s cartoons and Ogden Nash’s poetry. It introduced some of the finest literary journalism of the twentieth century, devoting an entire issue to John Hersey’s Hiroshima and serializing Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. By the mid-1960s, the New Yorker’s circulation hovered around 500,000; by 2015, its print circulation stayed steady at over 1 million, and its digital circulation was healthy at more than 86,000 readers.
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SELECTA is an upscale fashion magazine targeted at Hispanic women. The magazine is published in Spanish, although it maintains Twitter and Instagram feeds in English. Other popular magazines aimed at this audience include Latina and People en Español. Courtesy of Selecta Magazine
Minority-Targeted Magazines Minority-targeted magazines, like newspapers, have existed since before the Civil War, including the African American antislavery magazines Emancipator, Liberator, and Reformer. One of the most influential early African American magazines, the Crisis, was founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910 and is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In the modern age, the major magazine publisher for African Americans has been John H. Johnson, a former Chicago insurance salesman, who started Negro Digest in 1942 on $500 borrowed against his mother’s furniture. By 1945, the Digest had a circulation of more than 100,000, and its profits enabled Johnson and a small group of editors to start Ebony, a picture-text magazine modeled on Life but serving black readers. The Johnson Publishing Company also successfully
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introduced Jet, a pocket-size supermarket magazine, in 1951. By 2015, Ebony’s circulation rose to 1.3 million. Essence, the first major magazine geared toward African American women, debuted in 1969, and by 2015, it had a circulation of over 1 million. Jet, trailing the other two African American market magazines, announced in 2014 that it would begin publishing in a digital-only format.
Other minority groups also have magazines aimed at their own interests. The Advocate, founded in 1967 as a twelve-page newsletter, was the first major magazine to address issues of interest to gay men and lesbians, and it has in ensuing years published some of the best journalism about antigay violence, policy issues affecting the LGBT community, and AIDS—topics often not well covered by the mainstream press. Out is the top gay style magazine. Both are owned by Here Media, which also owns Here TV and several LGBT Web sites.
With increases in the Hispanic population and immigration, magazines appealing to Spanish-speaking readers have developed rapidly since the 1980s. In 1983, the De Armas Spanish Magazine Network began distributing Spanish- language versions of mainstream American magazines, including Cosmopolitan en Español; Harper’s Bazaar en Español; and Ring, the prominent boxing magazine. Latina magazine was founded in 1996 and is the most successful English-language publication for Hispanic women. The new magazines target the most upwardly mobile segments of the growing American Hispanic population, which numbered more than fifty-three million—about 17.4 percent of the U.S. population—by 2015. Today, People en Español, Latina, and Vanidades rank as the top three Hispanic magazines by ad revenue.
Although national magazines aimed at other minority groups were slow to arrive, there are magazines now that target virtually every race, culture, and ethnicity, including Asian Week, Native Peoples, and Tikkun.
Supermarket Tabloids With headlines like “Sex Secrets of a Russian Spy,” “Extraterrestrials Follow the Teachings of Oprah Winfrey,” and “Al-Qaeda Breeding Killer Mosquitoes,” supermarket tabloids push the limits of both decency and credibility. Tabloid history can be traced to newspapers’ use of graphics and pictorial layouts in the 1860s and 1870s, but the modern U.S. tabloid began with the founding of the National Enquirer by William Randolph Hearst in 1926. The Enquirer struggled until it was purchased in 1952 by Generoso Pope, who originally intended to use it to “fight for the rights of man” and “human decency and dignity.”9 In the interest of profit, though, Pope settled on the “gore formula” to transform the paper’s anemic weekly circulation of seven thousand: “I noticed how auto accidents drew crowds and I decided that if it was blood that interested people, I’d give it to them.”10
supermarket tabloids
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newspapers that feature bizarre human-interest stories, gruesome murder tales, violent accident accounts, unexplained phenomena stories, and malicious celebrity gossip.
By the mid-1960s, the Enquirer’s circulation had jumped to over one million through the publication of bizarre human-interest stories, gruesome murder tales, violent accident accounts, unexplained-phenomena stories, and malicious celebrity gossip. By 1974, the magazine’s weekly circulation had topped four million. Its popularity inspired the creation of other tabloids—like Globe (founded in 1954) and Star (founded by News Corp. in 1974)—and the adoption of a tabloid style by general-interest magazines such as People and Us Weekly. Today, tabloid magazine sales are down from their peak in the 1980s, but they continue to be popular.
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THE ORGANIZATION AND ECONOMICS OF MAGAZINES
Given the great diversity in magazine content and ownership, it is hard to offer a common profile of a successful magazine. However, large or small, online or in print, most magazines deal with the same basic functions: production, content, ads, and sales. In this section, we discuss how magazines operate, the ownership structure behind major magazines, and how smaller publications fulfill niche areas that even specialized magazines do not reach.
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Narrowcasting in Magazines
Magazine editors explain the benefits and consequences of narrowcasting.
Discussion: Think of magazines that might be considered a good example of narrowcasting. What makes them a good example, and would you consider them successful? Why or why not?
Magazine Departments and Duties Unlike a broadcast station or a daily newspaper, a small newsletter or magazine can begin cheaply via computer-based desktop publishing, which enables an aspiring publisher-editor to write, design, lay out, and print or post online a modest publication. For larger operations, however, the work is divided into departments.
desktop publishing a computer technology that enables an aspiring publisher/editor to inexpensively write, design, lay out, and even print a small newsletter or magazine.
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Editorial and Production The lifeblood of a magazine is the editorial department, which produces its content, excluding advertisements. Like newspapers, most magazines have a chain of command that begins with a publisher and extends to the editor in chief, the managing editor, and a variety of subeditors. These subeditors oversee such editorial functions as photography, illustrations, reporting and writing, copyediting, layout, and print and multimedia design. Magazine writers generally include contributing staff writers, who are specialists in certain fields, and freelance writers: nonstaff professionals who are assigned to cover particular stories or a region of the country. Many magazines, especially those with small budgets, also rely on well-written unsolicited manuscripts to fill their pages. Most commercial magazines, however, reject more than 95 percent of unsolicited pieces.
Despite the rise of inexpensive desktop publishing, most large commercial magazines still operate several departments, which employ hundreds of people. The production and technology department maintains the computer and printing hardware necessary for mass market production. Because magazines are printed weekly, monthly, or bimonthly, it is not economically practical for most magazine publishers to maintain expensive print facilities. As with USA Today, many national magazines digitally transport magazine copy to various regional printing sites for the insertion of local ads and for faster distribution.
Advertising and Sales The advertising and sales department of a magazine secures clients, arranges promotions, and places ads. Like radio stations, network television stations, and basic cable television stations, consumer magazines are heavily reliant on advertising revenue. Magazines provide their advertisers with rate cards, which indicate how much they charge for a certain amount of advertising space on a page. A top-rated consumer magazine like People might charge more than $357,000 for a full-page color ad and about $115,000 for a third of a page black-and-white ad. However, in today’s competitive world, most rate cards are not very meaningful: Almost all magazines offer 25 to 50 percent rate discounts to advertisers, particularly when they buy ads in multiple issues. Although fashion and general- interest magazines carry a higher percentage of ads than do political or literary magazines, the average magazine contains about 45 percent ad copy and 55 percent editorial material, a figure that has remained fairly constant for the past decade.
The traditional display ad has been the staple of magazine advertising for more than a century. As magazines move to tablet editions, the options for ad formats have grown immensely. For example, Condé Nast magazines offer static display ads with a link for their editions on the iPad, Kindle Fire, Nexus 7, and Texture app. But they offer almost thirty other premium ad types, which can include audio, video, tap and reveal, and panoramic views. A single-issue Web-enabled ad in tablet editions of titles like GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and Vogue
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costs $5,000. A premium ad with effects such as animation or a slide show costs $25,000, while a premium plus ad with effects like a virtual tour or full interactivity costs around $45,000.
A few contemporary magazines, such as Highlights for Children, have decided not to carry ads and rely solely on subscriptions and newsstand sales instead. To protect the integrity of their various tests and product comparisons, Consumer Reports and Cook’s Illustrated carry no advertising. To strengthen its editorial independence, Ms. magazine abandoned ads in 1990 after years of pressure from the food, cosmetics, and fashion industries to feature recipes and more complementary copy.
Some advertisers and companies have canceled ads when a magazine featured an unflattering or critical article about a company or an industry.11 In some instances, this practice has put enormous pressure on editors not to offend advertisers. The cozy relationships between some advertisers and magazines have led to a dramatic decline in investigative reporting, once central to popular magazines during the muckraking era.
As television advertising siphoned off national ad revenues in the 1950s, publishers began introducing different editions of their magazines to attract advertisers. Regional editions are national magazines whose content is tailored to the interests of different geographic areas. For example, Sports Illustrated often prints several different regional versions of its College Football Preview and March Madness Preview editions, picturing regional stars on each of the covers. In split-run editions, the editorial content remains the same, but the magazine includes a few pages of ads purchased by local or regional companies. Most editions of Time and Sports Illustrated, for example, contain a number of pages reserved for regional ads. Demographic editions, meanwhile, are editions of magazines targeted at particular groups of consumers. In this case, market researchers identify subscribers primarily by occupation, class, and zip code. Time magazine, for example, developed special editions of its magazine to target high- income professional/managerial households. Demographic editions guarantee advertisers a particular magazine audience, one that enables them to pay lower rates for their ads because the ads will be run in only a limited number of copies of the magazine. The magazine can then compete with advertising in regional television or cable markets and in newspaper supplements.
regional editions national magazines whose content is tailored to the interests of different geographic areas.
split-run editions editions of national magazines that tailor ads to different geographic areas.
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demographic editions national magazines whose advertising is tailored to subscribers and readers according to occupation, class, and zip code.
Circulation and Distribution In the era in which magazines came only in the paper format, the focus of circulation and distribution departments were single-copy and subscription sales. These days, paper is still a leading format, but subscriptions account for more than 90 percent of print magazine distribution, as sales of more expensive single copies at retailers have declined.
TEXTURE, launched in 2012, is a Netflix-like app for magazines. It allows users to access an array of digital magazines, from People to National Geographic to Sports Illustrated. Users can choose between a Basic plan and the more expensive Premium access, which includes a wider selection of magazines.
One tactic used by magazines’ circulation departments to increase subscription revenue is to encourage consumers to renew well in advance of their actual renewal dates. Magazines can thus invest and earn interest on early renewal money as a hedge against consumers who drop their subscriptions. Other strategies include evergreen subscriptions—those that automatically renew on a credit card account unless subscribers request that the automatic renewal be stopped—and controlled circulations, providing readers with a magazine at no charge by targeting captive audiences, such as airline passengers or association members. These magazines’ financial support comes solely from advertising or corporate sponsorship.
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evergreen subscriptions magazine subscriptions that automatically renew on the subscriber’s credit card.
The biggest trend in magazine sales is the migration to digital distribution (see Figure 9.2 on page 312). By 2015, combined print and digital editions accounted for about 60 percent of the magazine audience. Mobile editions (usually via apps) attract about 22 percent of the industry’s audience, while Web versions of magazines (via desktops and laptops) account for 16 percent.12 Other models for magazine distribution, such as the Texture app, offer a Netflix-like plan, with more than 170 weekly and monthly titles accessible for $14.99 a month. (A subscription of $9.99 a month provides access to monthly magazines only.)
Major Magazine Chains In terms of ownership, the commercial magazine industry most closely resembles the cable television business, which patterned its specialized channels on the consumer magazine market. Even though more than two hundred new commercial magazine titles appear each year—many of them independently owned—it is a struggle to survive in the competitive magazine marketplace.
Time Inc. is the largest U.S. magazine chain (by circulation), with twenty-four print titles in the United States—including People, Time, Sports Illustrated, and InStyle—and about fifty international titles, plus sixty Web sites.13 In 2014, Time Inc. became an independent company, spun off from the media conglomerate Time Warner because of its weak financial performance. (It wasn’t the first time Time Warner reduced its holdings; it spun off both Time Warner Cable and AOL in 2009.) Time Inc.’s fortunes reflect the difficult digital transition for the magazine industry: In 2015, it had a loss of $1 billion, compared to earnings of $1 billion about ten years earlier.
The Hearst Corporation, the leading magazine (and newspaper) chain in the early twentieth century, still remains a formidable publisher, with titles like Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle, and O: The Oprah Magazine. Long a force in upscale consumer magazines, Condé Nast is a division of Advance Publications, which operates the Newhouse newspaper chain. The Condé Nast group controls several key magazines, including Vanity Fair, GQ, and Vogue. The Meredith Corporation, based in Des Moines, Iowa, specializes in women’s and home-related magazines (Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle). Other important commercial players include Rodale, a family-owned company that publishes health and wellness titles, such as Prevention and Men’s Health.
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FIGURE 9.2 MAGAZINE BRAND AUDIENCE BY DISTRIBUTION FORMAT, 2015 Data from: Magazine Media Factbook 2015, Association of Magazine Media, www.magazine.org/insights-resources/magazine-media-factbook-2015.
In addition, a number of American magazines have carved out market niches worldwide. Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, National Geographic, and Time, for example, all produce international editions in several languages. In general, though, most American magazines are local, regional, or specialized and therefore less exportable than movies and television. Of the twenty thousand titles, only about two hundred magazines from the United States circulate routinely in the world market. Such magazines, however—like exported American TV shows and films—play a key role in determining the look of global culture.
Many major publishers, including Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc., and Rodale, generate additional revenue through custom publishing divisions, producing limited-distribution publications, sometimes called magalogs, which combine glossy magazine style with the sales pitch of retail catalogues. Magalogs are often used to market goods or services to customers or employees. For example, Rodale produces the biannual Whole Foods Market Magazine magalog, and Time produces the quarterly My Ford, distributed by the automobile company to buyers of its vehicles and also available digitally via the iTunes App Store.
magalog a combination of a glossy magazine and retail catalogue that is often used to market goods or services to customers or employees.
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Alternative Voices Only eighty-five of the twenty thousand American magazines have circulations that top a million (see Figure 9.3), so most alternative magazines struggle to satisfy small but loyal groups of readers. At any given time, there are over two thousand alternative magazines in circulation, with many failing and others starting up every month.
Alternative magazines have historically defined themselves in terms of politics —published by either the Left (the Progressive, In These Times, the Nation) or the Right (the National Review, American Spectator, the Weekly Standard). However, what constitutes an alternative magazine has broadened over time to include just about any publication considered outside the mainstream, ranging from environmental magazines to alternative lifestyle magazines to punk-zines—the magazine world’s answer to punk rock. (Zines, pronounced “zeens,” is a term used to describe self-published magazines.) Utne Reader, widely regarded as “the Reader’s Digest of alternative magazines,” has defined alternative as any sort of “thinking that doesn’t reinvent the status quo, that broadens issues you might see on TV or in the daily paper.”
zines self-published magazines produced on personal computer programs or on the Internet.
Occasionally, alternative magazines have become marginally mainstream. For example, during the conservative Reagan era in the 1980s, William F. Buckley’s National Review saw its circulation swell to more than 100,000—enormous by alternative standards. By 2015, the magazine continued to be the leading conservative publication, with a circulation of about 150,000. On the Left, Mother Jones (named after labor organizer Mary Harris Jones), which champions muckraking and investigative journalism, had a circulation of 215,200 in 2015.
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FIGURE 9.3 THE CIRCULATION REACH OF LEADING AMERICAN MAGAZINES U.S. population data from U.S. Census Bureau, www.census.gov.
Most alternative magazines, however, are content to swim outside the mainstream. These are the small magazines that typically include diverse political, cultural, religious, international, and environmental subject matter, such as Against the Current, Y’all, Buddhadharma, Home Education Magazine, Jewish Currents, Small Farmer’s Journal, and Humor Times.
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MAGAZINES IN A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
Like other mass media, magazines are a major part of the cluttered media landscape. To keep pace, the magazine industry has become fast-paced and high- risk. Of the seven hundred to one thousand new magazines that start up each year, fewer than two hundred will survive longer than a year.
As an industry, magazine publishing—like advertising and public relations— has played a central role in transforming the United States from a producer society to a consumer society. Since the 1950s, though, individual magazines have not had the powerful national voice they once possessed, uniting separate communities around important issues such as abolition and suffrage. Today, with so many specialized magazines appealing to distinct groups of consumers, magazines play a much-diminished role in creating a sense of national identity.
Contemporary commercial magazines provide essential information about politics, society, and culture, thus helping us think about ourselves as participants in a democracy. Unfortunately, however, these magazines have often identified their readers as consumers first and citizens second. With magazines growing increasingly dependent on advertising, and some of them being primarily about the advertising, controversial content sometimes has difficulty finding its way into print. More and more, magazines define their readers merely as viewers of displayed products and purchasers of material goods.
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ZINES— mini-magazines that are often self-published or homemade—can give a voice to marginalized populations or subcultures. Zine Club (pictured) is an organization that publishes both print and online articles by amateur writers who, according to Zine Club, “are generally suppressed by popular media, society, exclusive publications, or plain fear.”
At the same time, magazines have arguably had more freedom than other media to encourage and participate in democratic debates. More magazine voices circulate in the marketplace than do broadcast or cable television channels. Moreover, many new magazines still play an important role in uniting dispersed groups of readers, often giving cultural minorities or newly arrived immigrants or alternative groups a sense of membership in a broader community. In addition, because magazines are distributed weekly, monthly, or bimonthly, they are less restricted by the deadline pressures experienced by newspaper publishers or radio and television broadcasters. Good magazines can usually offer more analysis of and insight into society than other media outlets can. In the midst of today’s swirl
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of images, magazines and their advertisements certainly contribute to the commotion. But good magazines also maintain our connection to words, sustaining their vital role in an increasingly electronic and digital culture.
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9 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the commercial nature of mass media. The magazine industry is an unusual example of this. Big media corporations control some of the most popular magazines, and commercialism runs deep in many consumer magazines. At the same time, magazines are one of the most democratic mass media. How can that be?
There are more than twenty thousand magazine titles in the United States. But the largest and most profitable magazines are typically owned by some of the biggest media corporations. Advance Publications, for example, counts GQ, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue among its holdings. Even niche magazines that seem small are often controlled by chains. Supermarket tabloids like Star and the National Enquirer are owned by Florida-based American Media, which also publishes Muscle & Fitness, Men’s Fitness, and Flex.
High-revenue magazines, especially those focusing on fashion, fitness, and lifestyle, can also shamelessly break down the firewall between the editorial and business departments. “Fluff” story copy serves as a promotional background for cosmetic, clothing, and gadget advertisements. Many titles in the new generation of online and tablet magazines further break down that firewall—with a single click on a story or image, readers are linked to an e-commerce site where they can purchase the item they clicked on. Digital retouching makes every model and celebrity thinner or more muscular, and always blemish-free. This altered view of their “perfection” becomes our ever-hopeful aspiration, spurring us to purchase the advertised products.
Yet the huge number of magazine titles—more than the number of radio stations, TV stations, cable networks, or yearly Hollywood releases—means that magazines span a huge range of activities and thought. Each magazine sustains a community—although some may think of readers more as consumers, others view them as citizens—and several hundred new launches each year bring new voices to the marketplace and search for their own community to serve.
So there is the glitzy, commercial world of the big magazine industry, with Time’s Person of the Year, the latest Cosmo girl, and the band on the cover of Rolling Stone. But many smaller magazines—like the Georgia Review, Bitch, and E—The Environmental Magazine—account for the majority of magazine titles and the broad, democratic spectrum of communities that are their readers.
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KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
magazine, 291 muckrakers, 295 general-interest magazines, 296 photojournalism, 296 pass-along readership, 297 Webzines, 302 supermarket tabloids, 308 desktop publishing, 309 regional editions, 310 split-run editions, 310 demographic editions, 310 evergreen subscriptions, 311 magalogs, 312 zines, 312
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REVIEW QUESTIONS
The Early History of Magazines 1. Why did magazines develop later than newspapers in the
American colonies? 2. Why did most of the earliest magazines have so much trouble
staying financially solvent? 3. How did magazines become national in scope?
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The Development of Modern American Magazines 4. What was the social impact of the most popular women’s
magazines in the nineteenth century? 5. What role did magazines play in social reform at the turn of the
twentieth century? 6. When and why did general-interest magazines become so
popular? 7. Why did some of the major general-interest magazines fail in the
twentieth century? 8. What are the advantages of magazines’ movement to digital
formats? The Domination of Specialization
9. What triggered the move toward magazine specialization? 10. What are the differences between regional and demographic
editions? 11. What are the most useful ways to categorize the magazine
industry? Why? The Organization and Economics of Magazines 12. What are the four main departments at a typical consumer
magazine? 13. How do digital editions of magazines change the format of
magazine advertising? 14. What are some of the models for digital distribution of
magazines? 15. What are the major magazine chains, and what is their impact on
the mass media industry in general? Magazines in a Democratic Society 16. How do magazines serve a democratic society? 17. How does advertising affect what gets published in the editorial
side of magazines?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. What role did magazines play in America’s political and social shift from being colonies of Great Britain to becoming an independent nation?
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2. Why is the muckraking spirit—so important in popular magazines at the turn of the twentieth century—generally missing from magazines today?
3. If you were the marketing director at your favorite magazine, how would you increase circulation through the use of digital editions?
4. Think of stories, ideas, and images (illustrations and photos) that do not appear in mainstream magazines. Why do you think this is so? (Use the Internet, LexisNexis, or the library to compare your list with Project Censored, an annual list of the year’s most underreported stories.)
5. Discuss whether your favorite magazines define you primarily as a consumer or as a citizen. Do you think magazines have a responsibility to educate their readers as both? What can they do to promote responsible citizenship?
6. Do you think touchscreen tablet editions will become the dominant format for magazines? Why or why not?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter.
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10 Books and the Power of Print
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WORDS AND PICTURES
Consider these descriptions of three different
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events:
1. “Throngs of screaming teenage girls packed the … auditorium.”
2. “Deafening screams filled the … hall.”
3. “He walked on stage and the teenage girls in the crowd went wild. Shouts of, ‘I love you, John,’ were scattered through the high-pitched squeals that filled the room. Spilled tears dribbled out of some tweens’ eyes.”1
Now guess what they describe: Movie star appearances? Blockbuster film premieres? A concert from the biggest band in the world? In fact, none of these answers are correct. The huge crowds of mostly teenage girls were there for book authors.
THE HISTORY OF BOOKS, FROM PAPYRUS TO PAPERBACKS MODERN PUBLISHING AND THE BOOK INDUSTRY TRENDS AND ISSUES IN BOOK PUBLISHING THE ORGANIZATION AND OWNERSHIP OF THE BOOK INDUSTRY BOOKS AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY
In a world where authors generally aren’t visible celebrities, authors of young-adult (YA) books have become big attractions for live events. The descriptions refer to, in order, (1) a 2015 appearance by Paper Towns book author John Green (who, to be fair, did have two
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actors from the film version of the book with him, as well as the director, screenwriter, and composer); (2) a 2014 appearance by Divergent trilogy author Veronica Roth; and (3) a 2014 solo appearance by John Green, just prior to the film version release of his book The Fault in Our Stars.
◄ Veronica Roth and other authors of the young- adult (YA) genre have contributed to a huge boost in reading among young people in middle school through college, and beyond.
All of the author appearances were at BookCon, a fan event inspired by the annual comic conventions and trade shows around the world. BookCon was launched in 2014 to highlight “where storytelling and pop culture collide” as part of the otherwise staid BookExpo America, the largest book industry trade show in North America.2
As it turns out, storytelling and pop culture tend to collide frequently in the flourishing young-adult book segment of the publishing industry. Think of some of the biggest film franchises in recent years: Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, and Divergent.
John Green’s books aren’t a series, but Hollywood has noticed that they connect with a lot of teens, particularly young women. The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns have both been made into successful films, and his first book, the award- winning Looking for Alaska (2005), is in production as a movie, too. Green has experienced a downside to having so many exuberant fans, particularly as movie studios buy the rights to his books and begin to make their own choices about casting. In a May 19, 2015, Twitter message (as Looking for Alaska was reported to be casting), he wrote, “I. Do. Not. Cast. Movie. Adaptations. Of. My. Books. I am not a casting director. Please stop threatening to kill me.” Green followed with another tweet: “If I could cast the Looking for Alaska movie, @amyschumer would play every character, Nutty Professor–style. But I don’t make the decisions.”
As for what makes a book a “young-adult” book, YA author Seth Fishman argues, “YA really just means a teen protagonist. Oftentimes we see first person, or settings based on ‘reality’ (high school, death match arenas) but just as often we
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see abnormal (high school with vampires, death match arenas with vampires). In other words, just like adult books.”3
Young-adult books are now leading the book industry’s best-seller lists. Of the six print books to sell more than one million copies in the United States in 2014, four of them were young-adult books, led by The Fault in Our Stars and Veronica Roth’s series installations: Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant.4 The success of YA literature in the industry led one publishing company to recently form a new division to release classic YA books from the 1930s through the 1980s to new generations of readers.5 There is a certain irony to young-adult books being the biggest sellers. As a writer for the Huffington Post noted, “Young people are often criticized for their supposed short attention span and general fickle-mindedness— and yet YA literature is one of the most buoyant segments in publishing.”6 Like all mass media, the book-publishing world is undergoing digital changes, but its ability to attract and obsess young audiences is a reminder that books can be as powerful as ever.
IN THE 1950s AND 1960s, cultural forecasters thought that the popularity of television might spell the demise of a healthy book industry, just as they thought television would replace the movie, sound recording, radio, newspaper, and magazine industries. Obviously, this did not happen. In 1950, more than 11,000 new book titles were introduced, and by 2014, publishers were producing over seventeen times that number—more than 192,000 titles per year (see Table 10.1). Despite the absorption of small publishing houses by big media corporations, thousands of publishers—mostly small independents—issue at least one title a year in the United States alone.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
Our oldest mass medium is also still our most influential and diverse one. The portability and compactness of books make them the preferred medium in many situations (e.g., relaxing at the beach, resting in bed, traveling on buses or commuter trains), and books are still the main repository of history and everyday experience, passing along stories, knowledge, and wisdom from generation to generation.
In this chapter, we consider the long and significant relationship between books and culture. We will:
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Trace the history of books, from Egyptian papyrus to downloadable e-books Examine the development of the printing press and investigate the rise of the book industry, from early publishers in Europe and colonial America to the development of publishing houses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Review the various types of books and explore recent trends in the industry—including audio books, the convergence of books onto online platforms, and book digitization Consider the economic forces facing the book industry as a whole, from the growth of bookstore chains to pricing struggles in the digital age Explore how books play a pivotal role in our culture by influencing everything from educational curricula to popular movies
TABLE 10.1 ANNUAL NUMBERS OF NEW BOOK TITLES PUBLISHED, SELECTED YEARS
Year Number of Titles
1778 461
1798 1,808
1880 2,076
1890 4,559
1900 6,356
1910 13,470 (peak until after World War II)
1919 5,714 (low point as a result of World War I)
1930 10,027
1935 8,766 (Great Depression)
1940 11,328
1945 6,548 (World War II)
1950 11,022
1960 15,012
1970 36,071
1980 42,377
1990 46,473
1996* 68,175
2001 114,487
2004* 164,020
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2010 186,344
2014 200,768
Figures through 1945 from John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972–81); figures after 1945 from various editions of The Bowker Annual Library and Book Trade Almanac (Information Today, Inc.) and Bowker press releases.
*Changes in the Almanac’s methodology in 1997 and for years 2004–07 resulted in additional publications being assigned ISBNs and included in the counts.
As you read through this chapter, think about the pivotal role books have played in your own life. What are your earliest recollections of reading? Is there a specific book that considerably influenced the way you think? How do you discover new books? Do you envision yourself reading more books on a phone or tablet in the future? Or do you prefer holding a paper copy and leafing through the pages? For more questions to help you understand the role of books in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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THE HISTORY OF BOOKS, FROM PAPYRUS TO PAPERBACKS
Before books, or writing in general, oral cultures passed on information and values through the wisdom and memories of a community’s elders or tribal storytellers. Sometimes these rich traditions were lost. Print culture and the book, however, gave future generations different and often more enduring records of authors’ words.
Ever since the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians began experimenting with alphabets some five thousand years ago, people have found ways to preserve their written symbols. These first alphabets mark the development stage for books. Initially, pictorial symbols and letters were drawn on wood strips or pressed with a stylus into clay tablets, then tied or stacked together to form the first “books.” As early as 2400 bce, the Egyptians wrote on papyrus (from which the word paper is derived), made from plant reeds found along the Nile River. They rolled these writings into scrolls, much as builders do today with blueprints. This method was adopted by the Greeks in 650 bce and by the Romans (who imported papyrus from Egypt) in 300 BCE. Gradually, parchment—treated animal skin—replaced papyrus in Europe. Parchment was stronger, smoother, more durable, and less expensive because it did not have to be imported from Egypt.
papyrus one of the first substances to hold written language and symbols; produced from plant reeds found along the Nile River.
parchment treated animal skin that replaced papyrus as an early pre- paper substance on which to document written language.
At about the same time the Egyptians began using papyrus, the Babylonians recorded business transactions, government records, favorite stories, and local history on small tablets of clay. Around 1000 BCE, the Chinese also began creating booklike objects, using strips of wood and bamboo tied together in bundles. Although the Chinese began making paper from cotton and linen around 105 CE, paper did not replace parchment in Europe until the thirteenth century because of questionable durability.
The first protomodern book was probably produced in the fourth century by the
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Romans, who created the codex, a type of book made of sheets of parchment and sewn together along the edge, then bound with thin pieces of wood and covered with leather. Whereas scrolls had to be wound, unwound, and rewound, a codex could be opened to any page, and its configuration allowed writing on both sides of a page.
codex an early type of book in which paperlike sheets were cut and sewed together along an edge, then bound with thin pieces of wood and covered with leather.
The Development of Manuscript Culture During the Middle Ages (400–1500 CE), the Christian clergy strongly influenced what is known as manuscript culture, a period in which books were painstakingly lettered, decorated, and bound by hand. This period also marks the entrepreneurial stage in the evolution of books. During this time, priests and monks advanced the art of bookmaking; in many ways, they may be considered the earliest professional editors. Known as scribes, they transcribed most of the existing philosophical tracts and religious texts of the period, especially versions of the Bible. Through tedious and painstaking work, scribes became the chief caretakers of recorded history and culture, promoting ideas they favored and censoring ideas that were out of line with contemporary Christian thought.
manuscript culture a period during the Middle Ages when priests and monks advanced the art of bookmaking.
Many books from the Middle Ages were illuminated manuscripts. Often made for churches or wealthy clients, these books featured decorative, colorful designs and illustrations on each page. Their covers were made from leather, and some were embedded with precious gems or trimmed with gold and silver. During this period, scribes developed rules of punctuation, making distinctions between small and capital letters and placing space between words to make reading easier. (Older Roman writing used all capital letters, and the words ran together on a page, making reading a torturous experience.) Hundreds of illuminated manuscripts still survive today in the rare-book collections of museums and libraries.
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illuminated manuscripts books from the Middle Ages that featured decorative, colorful designs and illustrations on each page.
The Innovations of Block Printing and Movable Type While the work of the scribes in the Middle Ages led to advances in written language and the design of books, it did not lead to the mass proliferation of books, simply because each manuscript had to be painstakingly created one copy at a time. To make mechanically produced copies of pages, Chinese printers developed block printing—a technique in which sheets of paper were applied to blocks of inked wood with raised surfaces depicting hand-carved letters and illustrations—as early as the third century. This constituted the basic technique used in printing newspapers, magazines, and books throughout much of modern history. Although hand-carving each block, or “page,” was time consuming, this printing breakthrough enabled multiple copies to be printed and then bound together. The oldest dated printed book still in existence is China’s Diamond Sutra by Wang Chieh, from 868 CE. It consists of seven sheets pasted together and rolled up in a scroll. In 1295, explorer Marco Polo introduced these techniques to Europe after his excursion to China. The first block-printed books appeared in Europe during the fifteenth century, and demand for them began to grow among the literate middle-class populace emerging in large European cities.
block printing a printing technique developed by early Chinese printers that entails hand-carving characters and illustrations into a block of wood, applying ink to the block, and then printing copies on multiple sheets of paper.
The next step in printing was the radical development of movable type, first invented in China around the year 1000. Movable type featured individual characters made from reusable pieces of wood or metal, rather than entire hand- carved pages. Printers arranged the characters into various word combinations, greatly speeding up the time it took to create block pages. This process, also used in Korea as early as the thirteenth century, developed independently in Europe in the fifteenth century.
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The Gutenberg Revolution: The Invention of the Printing Press A great leap forward in printing was developed by Johannes Gutenberg. In Germany, between 1453 and 1456, Gutenberg used the principles of movable type to develop a mechanical printing press, which he adapted from the design of wine presses. Gutenberg’s staff of printers produced the first so-called modern books, including two hundred copies of a Latin Bible, twenty-one copies of which still exist. The Gutenberg Bible (as it’s now known) required six presses, many printers, and several months to produce. It was printed on a fine calfskin-based parchment called vellum. The pages were hand-decorated, and the use of woodcuts made illustrations possible. Gutenberg and his printing assistants had not only found a way to make books a mass medium but also formed the prototype for all mass production.
printing press a fifteenth-century invention whose movable metallic type spawned modern mass communication by creating the first method for mass production; it not only reduced the size and cost of books—making them the first mass medium affordable to less affluent people—but provided the impetus for the Industrial Revolution, assembly-line production, modern capitalism, and the rise of consumer culture.
vellum a handmade paper made from treated animal skin, used in the Gutenberg Bibles.
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ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS were handwritten by scribes and illustrated with colorful and decorative images and designs. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY
Printing presses spread rapidly across Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales became the first English work to be printed in book form. Many early books were large, elaborate, and expensive, taking months to illustrate and publish. They were usually purchased by aristocrats, royal families, religious leaders, and ruling politicians. Printers, however, gradually reduced the size of books and developed less expensive grades of paper, making books cheaper so that more people could afford them.
The social and cultural transformations ushered in by the spread of printing presses and books cannot be overestimated. As historian Elizabeth Eisenstein has noted, when people could learn for themselves by using maps, dictionaries, Bibles, and the writings of others, they could differentiate themselves as individuals; their social identities were no longer solely dependent on what their leaders told them or on the habits of their families, communities, or social class. The technology of printing presses permitted information and knowledge to spread outside local jurisdictions. Gradually, individuals had access to ideas far beyond their isolated experiences, and this permitted them to challenge the traditional wisdom and customs of their tribes and leaders.7
The Birth of Publishing in the United States In colonial America, English locksmith Stephen Daye set up a print shop in the late
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1630s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1640, Daye and his son Matthew printed the first colonial book, The Whole Booke of Psalms (known today as The Bay Psalm Book), marking the beginning of book publishing in the colonies. This collection of biblical psalms quickly sold out its first printing of 1,750 copies, even though fewer than 3,500 families lived in the colonies at the time. By the mid- 1760s, all thirteen colonies had printing shops.
In 1744, Benjamin Franklin, who had worked in printing shops, imported Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) from Britain, the first novel reprinted and sold in colonial America. Both Pamela and Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1747), connected with the newly emerging and literate middle classes—especially women, who were just beginning to gain a social identity as individuals apart from their fathers, husbands, and employers. Richardson’s novels portrayed women in subordinate roles; however, they also depicted women triumphing over tragedy, so he is credited as one of the first popular writers to take the domestic life of women seriously.
PULP FICTION The weekly paperback series Tip Top Weekly, which was published between 1896 and 1912, featured stories of the most popular dime novel hero of the day, the
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fictional Yale football star and heroic adventurer Frank Merriwell. This issue, from 1901, follows Frank’s exploits in the wilds of the Florida Everglades. The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY
By the early nineteenth century, the demand for books was growing. To meet this demand, the cost of producing books needed to be reduced. By the 1830s, machine-made paper replaced more expensive handmade varieties, cloth covers supplanted more expensive leather ones, and paperback books with cheaper paper covers (introduced from Europe) helped make books more accessible to the masses. Further reducing the cost of books, Erastus and Irwin Beadle introduced paperback dime novels (so called because they sold for five or ten cents) in 1860. Ann Stephens authored the first dime novel, Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, a reprint of a serialized story Stephens wrote in 1839 for the Ladies’ Companion magazine.8 By 1870, dime novels had sold seven million copies. By 1885, one-third of all books published in the United States were popular paperbacks and dime novels, sometimes identified as pulp fiction—a reference to the cheap, machine-made pulp paper they were printed on.
paperback books books made with less expensive paper covers, introduced in the United States in the mid-1800s.
dime novels sometimes identified as pulp fiction, these cheaply produced and low-priced novels were popular in the United States beginning in the 1860s.
pulp fiction a term used to describe many late-nineteenth-century popular paperbacks and dime novels, which were constructed of cheap machine-made pulp material.
In addition, the printing process became quicker and more mechanized. In the 1880s, the introduction of linotype machines enabled printers to save time by setting type mechanically using a typewriter-style keyboard, while the introduction of steam-powered and high-speed rotary presses permitted the production of more books at lower costs. In the early 1900s, the development of offset lithography allowed books to be printed from photographic plates rather than from metal casts, greatly reducing the cost of color and illustrations and accelerating book
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production. With these developments, books disseminated further, preserving culture and knowledge and supporting a vibrant publishing industry.
linotype a technology introduced in the nineteenth century that enabled printers to set type mechanically using a typewriter- style keyboard.
offset lithography a technology that enabled books to be printed from photographic plates rather than metal casts, reducing the cost of color and illustrations and eventually permitting computers to perform typesetting.
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MODERN PUBLISHING AND THE BOOK INDUSTRY
Throughout the nineteenth century, the rapid spread of knowledge and literacy as well as the Industrial Revolution spurred the emergence of the middle class. Its demand for books promoted the development of the publishing industry, which capitalized on increased literacy and widespread compulsory education. Many early publishers were mostly interested in finding quality authors and publishing books of importance. But with the growth of advertising and the rise of a market economy in the latter half of the nineteenth century, publishing gradually became more competitive and more concerned with sales.
The Formation of Publishing Houses The modern book industry developed gradually in the nineteenth century with the formation of the early “prestigious” publishing houses: companies that tried to identify and produce the works of good writers.9 Among the oldest American houses established at the time (all are now part of major media conglomerates) were J. B. Lippincott (1792); Harper & Bros. (1817), which became Harper & Row in 1962 and HarperCollins in 1990; Houghton Mifflin (1832); Little, Brown (1837); G. P. Putnam (1838); Scribner’s (1842); E. P. Dutton (1852); Rand McNally (1856); and Macmillan (1869).
Between 1880 and 1920, as the center of social and economic life shifted from rural farm production to an industrialized urban culture, the demand for books grew. The book industry also helped assimilate European immigrants to the English language and American culture. In fact, 1910 marked a peak year in the number of new titles produced: 13,470, a record that would not be challenged until the 1950s. These changes marked the emergence of the next wave of publishing houses, as entrepreneurs began to better understand the marketing potential of books. These houses included Doubleday & McClure Company (1897), the McGraw-Hill Book Company (1909), Prentice-Hall (1913), Alfred A. Knopf (1915), Simon & Schuster (1924), and Random House (1925).
Despite the growth of the industry in the early twentieth century, book publishing sputtered from 1910 into the 1950s, as profits were adversely affected by the two world wars and the Great Depression. Radio and magazines fared better because they were generally less expensive and could more immediately cover topical issues during times of crisis. But after World War II, the book publishing industry bounced back.
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SCRIBNER’S— known more for its magazines in the late nineteenth century than for its books— became the most prestigious literary house of the 1920s and 1930s, publishing F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925) and Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, 1926). Granger, NYC—All rights reserved
Types of Books The divisions of the modern book industry come from economic and structural categories developed both by publishers and by trade organizations, such as the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), and the American Booksellers Association (ABA). The categories of book publishing that exist today include trade books (both adult and juvenile), professional books, elementary through high school (often called “el-hi”) and college textbooks, religious books, and university press books. (For sales figures for the book types, see Figure 10.1 on page 326.)
Trade Books One of the most lucrative parts of the industry, trade books include hardbound and paperback books aimed at general readers and sold at commercial retail outlets. The industry distinguishes among adult trade books (including hardbound and paperback fiction; current nonfiction and biographies; literary classics; books on
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hobbies, art, and travel; popular science, technology, and computer publications; self-help books; and cookbooks), juvenile books (ranging from preschool picture books to young-adult or young-reader books), and, beginning in 2003, comics and graphic novels. In the changing world of modern trade publishing, young-adult books and graphic novels have boosted the industry. The Harry Potter series alone created record-breaking first-press runs: 10.8 million for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005), and 12 million for the final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007).
trade books the most visible book industry segment, featuring hardbound and paperback books aimed at general readers and sold at bookstores and other retail outlets.
FIGURE 10.1 ESTIMATED U.S. BOOK REVENUE, 2014 Data from: Jim Milliot, “The Verdict on 2014: Sales Up 4.6%,” Publishers Weekly, June 12, 2015, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial- reporting/article/67131-the-verdict-on-2014-sales-up-4-6.html.
Since the release of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God in 1978, which is generally credited as the first graphic novel, interest in graphic novels has grown; in 2006, their sales surpassed those of comic books. Given their strong stories and visual nature, many comics and graphic novels, including X-Men, The Dark Knight, Watchmen, and Captain America, have inspired movies. But graphic novels aren’t only about warriors and superheroes. Maira Kalman’s Principles of
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Uncertainty and Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? are both acclaimed graphic novels, but their characters are regular mortals in real settings (see “Case Study: Comic Books: Alternative Themes, but Superheroes Prevail” on pages 328–329).
Professional Books The counterpart to professional trade magazines, professional books target various occupational groups and are not intended for the general consumer market. This area of publishing capitalizes on the growth of professional specialization that has characterized the job market, particularly since the 1960s. Traditionally, the industry has subdivided professional books into the areas of law, business, medicine, and technical-scientific works, with books in other professional areas accounting for a very small segment. These books are sold through mail order, the Internet, or sales representatives knowledgeable about the subject areas.
professional books technical books that target various occupational groups and are not intended for the general consumer market.
Textbooks The most widely read secular book in U.S. history was The Eclectic Reader, an elementary-level reading textbook first written by William Holmes McGuffey, a Presbyterian minister and college professor. From 1836 to 1920, more than 100 million copies of this text were sold. Through stories, poems, and illustrations, The Eclectic Reader taught nineteenth-century schoolchildren to spell and read simultaneously—and to respect the nation’s political and economic systems. Ever since the publication of the McGuffey reader (as it is often nicknamed), textbooks have served a nation intent on improving literacy rates and public education. Elementary school textbooks found a solid market niche in the nineteenth century, while college textbooks boomed in the 1950s, when the GI Bill enabled hundreds of thousands of working- and middle-class men returning from World War II to attend college. The demand for textbooks further accelerated in the 1960s, as opportunities for women and minorities expanded. Textbooks are divided into elementary through high school (el-hi) texts, college texts, and vocational texts.
textbooks books made for the el-hi (elementary and high school) and college markets.
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FIGURE 10.2 WHAT TEXTBOOK FORMATS STUDENTS ARE BUYING While e-textbook sales are on the rise, online learning software is seeing the greatest growth in the textbook industry. E-textbook sales were up 6 percent between 2012 and 2013, and used textbook sales were down 7 percent, but online learning platforms grew nearly 18 percent in the same period. While e-textbooks and print textbooks can have a similar look and feel, online learning platforms include the textbook content and can incorporate additional content from instructors and students. As a result, many publishers are shifting their focus from print textbooks and e-textbooks to software development in order to compete in this growing segment of the market. Data from: Dian Schaffhauser, “What’s Next for E-Textbooks?” Campus Technology, December 3, 2014, http://publishers.org/sites/default/files/uploads/HigherEd/campustechnologyarticle12.2014.pdf
In about half of the states, local school districts determine which el-hi textbooks are appropriate for their students. In the other half of the states, including Texas and California—the two largest states—statewide adoption policies determine which texts can be used. If individual schools choose to use books other than those mandated, they are not reimbursed by the state for their purchases.
Unlike el-hi texts, which are subsidized by various states and school districts, college texts are paid for by individual students (and parents). The cost of textbooks, the markup on used books, and the profit margins of local college bookstores (which in many cases face no on-campus competition) have caused disputes on most college campuses. Yet the price of an academic year’s worth of textbooks has been dropping due to the lower cost of digital textbooks and greater access to online retailers and used books. Surveys indicate that each college student spent an average of $563 annually on required course texts in 2014–15, down from $701 in the 2007–08 academic year.10 (For more on textbook habits,
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A
see Figure 10.2.) As an alternative, some enterprising students have developed Web sites to trade, resell, and rent textbooks. Other students have turned to online purchasing, through e-commerce sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, eBay, eCampus.com, and textbooks.com, or renting digital or physical books through companies like Chegg or CampusBookRentals.
Religious Books The best-selling book of all time is the Bible, in all its diverse versions. Over the years, the success of Bible sales has created a large industry for religious books. After World War II, sales of religious books soared. Historians attribute the sales boom to economic growth and a nation seeking peace and security while facing the threat of “godless communism” and the Soviet Union.11 By the 1960s, though, the scene had changed dramatically. The impact of the Civil Rights struggle, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and the youth rebellion against authority led to declines in formal church membership. Not surprisingly, sales of some types of religious books dropped as well. To compete, many religious-book publishers extended their offerings to include serious secular titles on such topics as war and peace, race, poverty, gender, and civic responsibility.
CASE STUDY
Comic Books: Alternative Themes, but Superheroes Prevail BY MARK C. ROGERS
t the precarious edge of the book industry are comic books, which are sometimes called graphic novels or simply comix.
Comics have long integrated print and visual culture, and they are perhaps the medium most open to independent producers—anyone with
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a pencil and access to a photocopier can produce mini-comics. Nevertheless, two companies—Marvel and DC—have dominated the commercial industry for more than thirty years, publishing the routine superhero stories that have been so marketable.
Comics are relatively young, first appearing in their present format in the 1920s in Japan and in the 1930s in the United States. They began as simple reprints of newspaper comic strips, but by the mid-1930s, most comic books featured original material. Comics have always been published in a variety of genres, but their signature contribution to American culture has been the superhero. In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman for DC comics. Bob Kane’s Batman character arrived the following year. In 1941, Marvel Comics introduced Captain America to fight Nazis, and except for a brief period in the 1950s, the superhero genre has dominated the history of comics.
After World War II, comic books moved away from superheroes and began experimenting with other genres, most notably crime and horror (e.g., Tales from the Crypt). With the end of the war, the reading public was ready for more moral ambiguity than was possible in the simple good-versus-evil world of the superhero. Comics became increasingly graphic and lurid as they tried to compete with other mass media, especially television.
In the early 1950s, the popularity of crime and horror comics led to a moral panic about their effects on society. Fredric Wertham, a prominent psychiatrist, campaigned against them, claiming they led to juvenile delinquency. Wertham was joined by many religious and parent groups, and Senate hearings were held on the issue. In October 1954, the Comics Magazine Association of America adopted a code of acceptable conduct for publishers of comic books. One of the most restrictive examples of industry self-censorship in mass media history, the code kept the government from legislating its own code or restricting the sale of comic books to minors.
The code had both immediate and long-term effects on comics. In the short run, the number of comics sold in the United States declined sharply. Comic books lost many of their adult readers because the code confined comics’ topics to those suitable for children. Consequently, comics have rarely been taken seriously as a mass medium or as an art form; they remain stigmatized as the lowest of low culture—a sort of literature for the subliterate.
In the 1960s, Marvel and DC led the way as superhero comics regained their dominance. This period also gave rise to underground comics,
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which featured more explicit sexual, violent, and drug themes—for example, R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural and Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead. These alternative comics, like underground newspapers, originated in the 1960s counterculture and challenged the major institutions of the time. Instead of relying on newsstand sales, underground comics were sold through record stores, at alternative bookstores, and in a growing number of comic-book specialty shops.
In the 1970s, responding in part to the challenge of the underground form, “legitimate” comics began to increase the political content and relevance of their story lines. In 1974, a new method of distributing comics—direct sales—developed, catering to the increasing number of comic-book stores. This direct-sales method involved selling comics on a nonreturnable basis but with a higher discount than was available to newsstand distributors, who bought comics only on the condition that they could return unsold copies. The percentage of comics sold through specialty shops increased gradually, and by the early 1990s, more than 80 percent of all comics were sold through direct sales.
MANDEL NGAN/Getty Images
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Everett Collection, Inc
The shift from newsstand to direct sales enabled comics to once again approach adult themes and also created an explosion in the number of comics available and in the number of companies publishing comics. Comic books peaked in 1993, generating more than $850 million in sales. That year, the industry sold about 45 million comic books per month, but it then began a steady decline that led Marvel to declare bankruptcy in the late 1990s. After comic-book sales fell to $250 million in 2000 and Marvel reorganized, the industry rebounded. Today, the industry releases 70 to 80 million comics a year. Marvel and DC control about 64 percent of comic-book sales, but challengers like Image, Dark Horse, and IDW plus another 150 small firms keep the industry vital by providing innovation and identifying new talent.
Meanwhile, the two largest firms focus on the commercial synergies of particular characters or superheroes. DC, for example, is owned by Time Warner, which has used the DC characters, especially Superman and Batman, to build successful film and television properties through its Warner Brothers division. Marvel, which was bought by Disney in 2009, has had enormous success creating blockbuster films and television programs featuring superhero characters from what is often called the “Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
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Book Cover, Copyright © 1986 by Art Spiegelman from MAUS I: A Survivor’s Tale/My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Comics, however, are again about more than just superheroes. In 1992, comics’ flexibility was demonstrated in Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman, cofounder and editor of Raw (an alternative magazine for comics and graphic art). The first comic-style book to win a Pulitzer Prize, Spiegelman’s two-book fable merged print and visual styles to recount his complex relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor.
More recently, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), a memoir of her complicated family life as a lesbian youth, was adapted to the musical stage. The show was a Pulitzer Prize for drama finalist in 2014, and the Broadway production won a Tony Award for best musical in 2015.
As other writers and artists continue to adapt the form to both fictional and nonfictional stories, comics endure as part of popular and alternative culture.
Mark C. Rogers teaches communication at Walsh University. He writes about television and the comic-book industry.
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Throughout this period of change, the publication of fundamentalist and evangelical literature remained steady. It then expanded rapidly during the 1980s, when the Republican Party began making political overtures to conservative groups and prominent TV evangelists. After a record year in 2004 (twenty-one thousand new titles), there has been a slight decline in the religious-book category. However, it continues to be an important part of the book industry, especially during turbulent social times.
University Press Books The smallest division in the book industry is the nonprofit university press, which publishes scholarly works for small groups of readers interested in intellectually specialized areas, such as literary theory and criticism, history of art movements, and contemporary philosophy. Professors often try to secure book contracts from reputable university presses to increase their chances for tenure, a lifetime teaching contract. University presses range in size from very small, often producing fewer than a dozen titles a year, to the largest, Oxford University Press, which publishes more than six thousand titles a year.
university press the segment of the book industry that publishes scholarly books in specialized areas.
University presses have not traditionally faced pressure to produce commercially viable books, preferring to encourage books about highly specialized topics by innovative thinkers. In fact, most university presses routinely lose money and are subsidized by their university. Even when they publish more commercially accessible titles, the lack of large marketing budgets prevents such books from reaching mass audiences. While large commercial trade houses are often criticized for publishing only blockbuster books, university presses often suffer the opposite criticism—that they produce mostly obscure books that only a handful of scholars read. To offset costs and increase revenue, some presses are trying to form alliances with commercial houses to help promote and produce academic books that have wider appeal.
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TRENDS AND ISSUES IN BOOK PUBLISHING
Ever since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold fifteen thousand copies in fifteen days back in 1852 (and three million total copies prior to the Civil War), many American publishers have stalked the best-seller, or blockbuster (just like in the movie business). While most authors are professional writers, the book industry also reaches out to famous media figures, who may pen a best-selling book (Tina Fey, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Clinton) or a commercial failure (Whoopi Goldberg, Jay Leno). Other ways publishers attempt to ensure popular success include acquiring the rights to license popular film and television programs or experimenting with formats like audio books and e-books. In addition to selling new books, other industry issues include the preservation of older books and the history of banned books and censorship.
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Based On: Making Books into Movies Writers and producers discuss the process that brings a book to the big screen.
Discussion: How is the creative process of writing a novel different from making a movie? Which would you rather do, and why?
Influences of Television and Film There are two major facets in the relationship among books, television, and film: how TV can help sell books and how books serve as ideas for TV shows and movies. Through TV exposure, books by or about talk-show hosts, actors, and politicians such as Stephen Colbert, Julie Andrews, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton sell millions of copies—enormous sales in a business in which 100,000 in sales constitutes remarkable success. In national polls conducted from the 1980s through today, nearly 30 percent of respondents said they had read a book after seeing the story or a promotion on television.
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One of the most influential forces in promoting books on TV was Oprah Winfrey. Even before the development of Oprah’s Book Club in 1996, Oprah’s afternoon talk show had become a major power broker in selling books. In 1993, for example, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel appeared on Oprah. Afterward, his 1960 memoir, Night, which had been issued as a Bantam paperback in 1982, returned to the best-seller lists. In 1996, novelist Toni Morrison’s nineteen-year-old book Song of Solomon became a paperback best- seller after Morrison appeared on Oprah. In 1998, after Winfrey brought Morrison’s Beloved to movie screens, the book version was back on the best-seller lists. Each Oprah’s Book Club selection became an immediate best-seller, generating tremendous excitement within the book industry. The Oprah Winfrey Show ended in 2011, but the book club was revived online in 2012.
THE DIVERGENT SERIES: ALLEGIANT is the third film based on Veronica Roth’s hit young-adult science-fiction series of novels. The film’s star, Shailene Woodley, has built a career on book-to-film adaptations: Her starring roles in the Divergent series, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Spectacular Now all originated in books. Everett Collection, Inc
The film industry gets many of its story ideas from books (more than 1,450
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feature-length movie adaptations in the United States since 1980), which results in enormous movie-rights revenues for the book industry and its authors.12 Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), Nicholas Sparks’s The Choice (2007), Veronica Roth’s Allegiant (2013), Roald Dahl’s The BFG (1982), Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011), and Dan Brown’s Inferno (2013) are just a few classic and recent books made into movies in 2016. The most profitable movie successes for the book industry in recent years emerged from fantasy works. J. K. Rowling’s best-selling Harry Potter books have become hugely popular movies, as has Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s enduringly popular The Lord of the Rings (first published in the 1950s). The Twilight movie series has created a huge surge in sales of Stephenie Meyer’s four-book saga, a success repeated by Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy. Books have also inspired popular television programs, including Game of Thrones on HBO and Pretty Little Liars on Freeform, formerly ABC Family. In each case, the television shows boosted the sales of the original books, too. Newer adaptations of books to television include Lemony Snicket’s (real name Daniel Handler) A Series of Unfortunate Events books, featuring Neil Patrick Harris, for Netflix; and Stephen King’s 11.22.63, starring James Franco, for Hulu.
Audio Books Another major development in publishing has been the merger of sound recording with publishing. Audio books generally feature actors or authors reading entire works or abridged versions of popular fiction and nonfiction trade books. Indispensable to many sightless readers and older readers whose vision is diminished, audio books are also popular among readers who do a lot of commuter driving or who want to listen to a book at home while doing something else—like exercising. The number of audio books borrowed from libraries soared in the 1990s and early 2000s, and small bookstore chains developed to cater to the audio book niche. Audio books are now readily available on the Internet for downloading to smartphone and other portable devices. Amazon owns Audible, the largest provider of audio books.
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Books in the New Millennium Authors, editors, and bookstore owners
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discuss the future of book publishing.
Discussion: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of books in an age of computers and e-readers?
Convergence: Books in the Digital Age In 1971, Michael Hart, a student computer operator at the University of Illinois, typed up the text of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and thus the idea of the e-book—a digital book read on a computer or a digital reading device—was born. Hart soon founded Project Gutenberg, which now offers more than forty thousand public domain books (older texts with expired copyrights) for free at www.gutenberg.org. Yet the idea of commercial e-books—putting copyrighted books like current best-sellers in digital form—took a lot longer to gain traction.
e-book a digital book read on a computer or on an electronic reading device.
Print Books Move Online Early portable reading devices from RCA and Sony in the 1990s were criticized for being too heavy, too expensive, or too difficult to read, while their e-book titles were scarce and had little cost advantage over full-price hardcover books. It is no surprise that these e-readers and e-books didn’t catch on. Then, in 2007, Amazon, the largest online bookseller, developed an e-reader (the Kindle) and an e-book store that seemed inspired by Apple’s music industry–changing iPod and iTunes. The first Kindle had an easy-on-the-eyes electronic paper display, held more than two hundred books, and did something no other device could do before: wirelessly download e-books from Amazon’s online bookstore. Moreover, most Kindle e- books sold for $9.99, less than half the price of most new hardcovers. This time, e- books caught on quickly, and Amazon couldn’t make Kindles fast enough to keep up with demand.
Amazon has continued to refine its e-reader, and in 2011 it introduced the Kindle Fire, a color touchscreen tablet with Web browsing, access to all the media on Amazon, and the Amazon Appstore. Amazon has expanded its offerings even further with the release of the Kindle Fire HDX in 2013 and the Kindle Voyage in 2014. The Kindle devices are the best-selling products ever on Amazon. Of course, the Kindle is no longer the only portable reading device on the market. Apps have transformed the iPod Touch, the iPhone, and other smartphones into e-readers. In
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2010, Apple introduced the iPad, a color touchscreen tablet that quickly outsold the Kindle. The immediate initial success of the iPad (introduced at a starting price of $499 and up), which sold three million units in less than three months, spurred other e-readers to drop their prices below $200. Like Amazon’s Kindle Fire, other devices have mimicked the iPad by adding color, e-mail, and an app store.
By 2015, e-books accounted for 29 percent of adult book sales in the United States.13 As the market grows, several companies are vying to be the biggest seller of e-books. Apple’s iBook Store serves the iPad, iPod, and iPhone exclusively. Amazon and Barnes & Noble sell e-books for their readers but also have apps for other devices so that, for example, an iPad user could buy e-books from their stores. Google started an e-book store (now Google Play) that enables customers to access its cloud-based e-books anywhere via any device, a feature added by Amazon and Apple.
The Future of E-Books E-books are demonstrating how digital technology can help the oldest mass medium adapt and survive. Distributors, publishers, and bookstores also use digital technology to print books on demand, reviving books that would otherwise go out of print and avoiding the inconveniences of carrying unsold books. But perhaps the most exciting part of e-books is their potential for reimagining what a book can be. Computers or tablet touchscreens such as an iPad can host e-books with embedded video, hyperlinks, and dynamic content, enabling, for example, a professor to reorganize, add, or delete content of an e-textbook to tailor it to the needs of a specific class. Children’s books may also never be the same. An Alice in Wonderland e-book developed for the iPad uses the device’s motion and touchscreen technologies to make “the pop-up book of the 21st-century.” Such developments are changing the reading experience: “Users don’t just flip the ‘pages’ of the e-book—they’re meant to shake it, turn it, twist it, jiggle it, and watch the characters and settings in the book react.”14 E-books have also made the distribution of long-form journalism and novellas easier with products like the inexpensive Kindle Singles.
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E-BOOKS have opened up many new possibilities for children’s books and are even going so far as to redefine how a book looks and acts. The classic Alice in Wonderland has been reimagined into a fully interactive experience. You can tilt your iPad to make Alice grow bigger or smaller, and shake your iPad to make the Mad Hatter even madder. Sam Abell/National Geographic/Getty Images
Preserving and Digitizing Books Another recent trend in the book industry involves the preservation of older books, especially those from the nineteenth century printed on acid-based paper, which gradually deteriorates. At the turn of the twentieth century, research initiated by libraries concerned with losing valuable older collections provided evidence that acid-based paper would eventually turn brittle and self-destruct. The paper industry, however, did not respond, so in the 1970s, leading libraries began developing techniques to halt any further deterioration (although this process could not restore books to their original state). Finally, by the early 1990s, motivated almost entirely by economics rather than by the cultural value of books, the paper industry began producing acid-free paper. Libraries and book conservationists,
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however, still focused attention on older, at-risk books. Some institutions began photocopying original books onto acid-free paper and made the copies available to the public. Libraries then stored the originals, which were treated to halt further wear.
Another way to preserve books is through digital imaging. The most extensive digitization project, Google Books, which began in 2004, features partnerships with the New York Public Library and about twenty major university research libraries—including Harvard, Michigan, Oxford, and Stanford—to scan millions of books and make them available online. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers initially sued Google for digitizing copyrighted books without permission. Google argued that displaying only a limited portion of the books was legal under fair-use rules. After years of legal battles, a U.S. Court of Appeals sided with Google’s fair-use arguments in 2013 and dismissed the lawsuit. The Authors Guild vowed to appeal the decision. An alternative group, dissatisfied by Google Books’ restriction of its scanned book content from use by other commercial search services, started a nonprofit service in 2007. The Internet Archive’s Open Library works with the Boston Public Library, several university libraries, Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo! to digitize millions of books with expired copyrights and make them freely available at openlibrary.org. In 2008, another group of universities formed the HathiTrust Digital Library to further archive and share digital collections. In 2010, these nonprofit archives joined other libraries to create the Digital Public Library of America.
Censorship and Banned Books Over time, the wide circulation of books gave many ordinary people the same opportunities to learn that were once available to only a privileged few. However, as societies discovered the power associated with knowledge and the printed word, books were subjected to a variety of censors. Imposed by various rulers and groups intent on maintaining their authority, the censorship of books often prevented people from learning about the rituals and moral standards of other cultures. Political censors sought to banish “dangerous” books that promoted radical ideas or challenged conventional authority. In various parts of the world, some versions of the Bible, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989) have all been banned at one time or another. In fact, one of the triumphs of the Internet is that it allows the digital passage of banned books into nations where printed versions have been outlawed. (For more on banned books, see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Banned Books and ‘Family Values’” above.)
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GLOBAL VILLAGE
Buenos Aires, the World’s Bookstore Capital
uenos Aires, Argentina, has more bookstores per capita than any other city in the world. According to a 2015 study by the World
Cities Cultural Forum, Buenos Aires has 734 bookstores, or about 25 per 100,000 people.1 By comparison, Madrid has 16 bookstores per 100,000 people, Tokyo has 13, London has 10, Paris and New York each have 9, Amsterdam and Berlin each have 7, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro each have 5, Mumbai has 4, and Singapore has 3.
Buenos Aires also has some of the best bookstores in the world, including El Ateneo Grand Splendid. A former theater palace built in 1919, the ornate building was repurposed as a bookstore in 2007. The main floor and balconies are filled with bookshelves, the former theater boxes are now reading nooks, and the stage, framed by a crimson curtain, is a café. Juan Pablo Marciani, manager of El Ateneo, says books are a significant part of Argentinian culture: “Books represent us like the tango. We have a culture very rooted in print.”2 So how did Buenos Aires come to have such a bookish culture?
Partly it’s due to chance; the country’s literary community grew and flourished with the influx of Spanish writers and publishers who fled to Argentina during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. It is also because of choice: Argentina doesn’t charge sales tax on books. Heavy taxes on e-readers and tablets have kept e-book use low, too.3 The local bookstore industry is also helped by the fact that Amazon.com doesn’t have a retail Web site in Argentina. Even if Argentina did have Amazon, it’s likely that the company wouldn’t gain the dominant
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foothold it now has in the United States and the United Kingdom in digital and print book sales.
The main reason behind the country’s thriving bookstore culture, though, is that Argentina has fixed book pricing (FBP). Thirteen other countries have FBP as well: Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, and Spain. FBP rules among countries vary, but generally they require bookstores to limit price discounts during the first six months to two years following the release of a book. The rules usually apply to digital books as well. The effect is that all bookstores in a country sell the latest titles for roughly the same price, even digital books. Countries without FBP tend to have large book chains and Internet retailers, which can offer deep discounts on new releases and easily dominate the market.4 In the United States, Amazon used the Internet to change the distribution rules and undercut the brick-and-mortar bookstores.
The effect of FBP can be seen when comparing the number of independent bookstores in various countries. Since 1991, the United States has lost more than half of its independent bookstores, which represent less than 4 percent of the market. The United Kingdom, which gave up FBP in the late 1990s, has lost one-third of its bookstores since 2005, and independents represent only about 4 percent of the bookseller market. In France, however (which has FBP), independent booksellers represent 22 percent of the market. France has about twenty-five hundred booksellers, more than the nineteen hundred booksellers in the United States, even though France is five times smaller in population.5
Catherine Blache of the French Publishers Association explains that in France, “booksellers compete not on price, therefore, but in terms of the variety of books they offer, their location and the quality of their customer service.”6 This is what the Buenos Aires bookselling market looks like, too. Travel + Leisure magazine recommends this special feature of life in Argentina’s capital. “Buenos Aires is bursting with bookstores…. Enjoy the land that Amazon forgot.”7
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MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Banned Books and “Family Values”
In Free Speech for Me—but Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other, Nat Hentoff writes that “the lust to suppress can come from any direction.” Indeed, Ulysses by James Joyce, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee have all been banned by some U.S. community, school, or library at one time or another. In fact, the most censored book in U.S. history is Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the 1884 classic that still sells tens of thousands of copies each year. Often, the impulse behind calling for a book’s banishment is to protect children in the name
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of a community’s “family values.”
1 DESCRIPTION Identify two contemporary books that have been challenged or banned in two separate communities. (Check the American Library Association Web site [www.ala.org/advocacy/banned] for information on the most frequently challenged and banned books, or use the LexisNexis database.) Describe the communities involved and what sparked the challenges or bans. Describe the issues at stake and the positions students, teachers, parents, administrators, citizens, religious leaders, and politicians took with regard to the books. Discuss what happened and the final outcomes.
2 ANALYSIS What patterns emerge? What are the main arguments given for censoring the books? What are the main arguments of those defending these particular books? Are there any middle-ground positions or unusual viewpoints raised in your book controversies? Did these communities take similar or different approaches when dealing with these books?
3 INTERPRETATION Why did these issues arise? What do you think are the actual reasons why people would challenge or ban a book? (For example, can you tell if people seem genuinely concerned about protecting young readers or are just personally offended by particular books?) How do people handle book banning and issues raised by First Amendment protections of printed materials?
4 EVALUATION Who do you think is right and wrong in these controversies? Why?
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Read the two banned books. Then write a book review and publish it in a student or local paper, on a blog, or on Facebook. Through social media, link to the ALA’s list of banned books and challenge other people to read and review them.
FIGURE 10.3 CHALLENGED AND BANNED BOOKS Data from: American Library Association, www.ala.org/bbooks/.
Each year, the American Library Association (ALA) compiles a list of the most challenged books in the United States. Unlike an enforced ban, a book challenge is a formal request to have a book removed from a public or school library’s collection. Common reasons for challenges include sexually explicit passages, offensive language, occult themes, violence, homosexual themes, promotion of a religious viewpoint, nudity, and racism. (The ALA defends the right of libraries to offer material with a wide range of views and does not support removing material on the basis of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.) Some of the most challenged books of the past decade include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Forever by Judy Blume, the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, and the Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey (see Figure 10.3).
book challenge a formal complaint to have a book removed from a public or school library’s collection.
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THE ORGANIZATION AND OWNERSHIP OF THE BOOK INDUSTRY
Compared with the revenues earned by other mass media industries, the steady growth of book publishing has been relatively modest. From the mid-1980s to 2015, total revenues went from $9 billion to about $27.78 billion.15 Within the industry, the concept of who or what constitutes a publisher varies widely. A publisher may be a large company that is a subsidiary of a global media conglomerate and occupies an entire office building, or a one-person home office operation that uses a laptop computer.
Ownership Patterns Like most mass media, commercial publishing is dominated by a handful of major corporations with ties to international media conglomerates. Mergers and consolidations have driven the book industry. For example, one of the largest publishing conglomerates is Germany’s Bertelsmann. Beginning in the late 1970s with its purchase of Dell for $35 million and its 1980s purchase of Doubleday for $475 million, Bertelsmann has been building a publishing dynasty. In 1998, Bertelsmann shook up the book industry by adding Random House, the largest U.S. book publisher, to its fold for $1.4 billion. Bertelsmann’s book company subsidiaries include Ballantine Bantam Dell, Doubleday Broadway, Alfred A. Knopf, and the Random House Publishing Group. In 2013, Random House merged with Penguin Books (owned by Pearson PLC, a British corporation), creating Penguin Random House and gaining control of about one-quarter of the book industry (see Table 10.2).
TABLE 10.2 WORLD’S TEN LARGEST BOOK PUBLISHERS (REVENUE IN MILLIONS OF DOLLARS), 2015
Rank/Publishing Company (Group or Division) Home Country
Revenue in $ Millions
1 Pearson U.K. $7,072
2 Thomson Reuters Canada $5,760
3 RELX Group U.K./NL/U.S. $5,362
4 Wolters Kluwer NL $4,455
5 Penguin Random House (Bertelsmann & Pearson)
Germany/U.K. $4,046
6 Phoenix Publishing and Media Company China $2,840
7 China South Publishing and Media Group China $2,579
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8 Hachette Livre (Lagardère) France $2,439
9 McGraw-Hill Education U.S. $2,190
10 Holtzbrinck Germany $2,000
Data from: “The World’s 57 Largest Book Publishers, 2015,” Publishers Weekly, June 26, 2015, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book- news/article/67224-the-world-s-57-largest-book-publishers-2015.html.
Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster (owned by CBS), Hachette (owned by French-based Lagardère), HarperCollins (owned by News Corp.), and Macmillan (owned by German-based Holtzbrinck) are the five largest trade book publishers in the United States. From a corporate viewpoint, executives have argued that large companies can financially support a number of smaller firms or imprints while allowing their editorial ideas to remain independent from the parent corporation. With thousands of independent presses competing with bigger corporations, book publishing continues to produce volumes on an enormous range of topics. Still, the largest trade book publishers and independents alike find themselves struggling in the face of the industry’s digital upheaval and the dominance of Amazon in the distribution of e-books.
The Structure of Book Publishing A small publishing house may have a staff of a few to twenty people. Medium-size and large publishing houses employ hundreds of people. In the larger houses, divisions usually include acquisitions and development; copyediting, design, and production; marketing and sales; and administration and business. Unlike daily newspapers but similar to magazines, most publishing houses contract independent printers to produce their books.
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BOOK MARKETING In addition to traditional advertising and in-store placements, publishers take part in the annual BookExpo America (BEA) convention to show off their books to buyers who decide what titles bookstores will purchase and sell. BookCon, a popular offshoot of BEA, brings book fans to the convention to meet their favorite authors. Brent N. Clarke/FilmMagic/Getty Images
FIGURE 10.4 HOW A BOOK’S REVENUE IS DIVIDED E-books are changing the nature of business expenses, profits, and costs to consumers. Here’s where the money goes on a $26 printed trade book, a $12.99 e- book, and a $5.99 self-published e-book. Data from: Ken Auletta, “Publish or Perish: Can the iPad Topple the Kindle, and Save the Book Business?” New Yorker, April 26, 2010, pp. 24–31. Also, Laura Owen, “In Amazon/Hachette Deal, eBook Agency Pricing Is a Winner,” GigaOm, November 14, 2014, https://gigaom.com/2014/11/14/in-amazonhachette-deal-ebook-agency-pricing-is-a-winner/. Note: Publishers and booksellers must pay other expenses, such as employees and office/retail space, from their revenue share.
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Most publishers employ acquisitions editors to seek out and sign authors to contracts. For fiction, this might mean discovering talented writers through book agents or reading unsolicited manuscripts. For nonfiction, editors might examine manuscripts and letters of inquiry or match a known writer to a project (such as a celebrity biography). Acquisitions editors also handle subsidiary rights for an author—that is, selling the rights to a book for use in other media, such as the basis for a screenplay.
acquisitions editors in the book industry, editors who seek out and sign authors to contracts.
subsidiary rights in the book industry, selling the rights to a book for use in other media forms, such as a mass market paperback, a CD- ROM, or the basis for a movie screenplay.
As part of their contracts, writers sometimes receive advance money, an early payment that is subtracted from royalties earned from book sales (see Figure 10.4). Typically, an author’s royalty is between 5 and 15 percent of the net price of the book. Amazon and book publishers have been experimenting with different price points for e-books—low enough to ensure good online sales but high enough to make publishing still profitable. Thus, an author’s royalty percentage may be much higher for e-books, but it’s a percentage of a lower book price. New authors may receive little or no advance from a publisher, but commercially successful authors can receive millions. For example, author J. K. Rowling hauled in an estimated $7 million advance from Little, Brown & Company/Hachette for The Casual Vacancy (2012), her first novel after the Harry Potter series. Nationally recognized authors, such as political leaders, sports figures, comedians, or movie stars, can also command large advances from publishers who are banking on the well-known person’s commercial potential. For example, Amy Schumer received a reported $9 million advance from an imprint of Simon & Schuster for her 2016 book The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo.
After a contract is signed, the acquisitions editor may turn the book over to a developmental editor, who provides the author with feedback, makes suggestions for improvements, and, in educational publishing, obtains advice from knowledgeable members of the academic community. If a book contains images, editors work with photo researchers to select photographs and pieces of art. Then the production staff enters the picture. While copy editors attend to specific
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problems in writing or length, production and design managers work on the look of the book, making decisions about type style, paper, cover design, and layout.
developmental editor in book publishing, the editor who provides authors with feedback, makes suggestions for improvements, and obtains advice from knowledgeable members of the academic community.
copy editors the people in magazine, newspaper, and book publishing who attend to specific problems in writing, such as style, content, and length.
design managers publishing industry personnel who work on the look of a book, making decisions about type style, paper, cover design, and layout.
Simultaneously, plans are under way to market and sell the book. Decisions need to be made concerning the number of copies to print, ways to reach potential readers, and costs for promotion and advertising. For trade books and some scholarly books, publishing houses may send advance copies of a book to appropriate magazines and newspapers with the hope of receiving favorable reviews that can be used in promotional material. Prominent trade writers typically have book signings and travel the radio and TV talk-show circuit to promote their books. Unlike trade publishers, college textbook firms rarely sell directly to bookstores. Instead, they contact instructors through direct-mail brochures or sales representatives assigned to geographic regions.
To help create a best-seller, trade houses often distribute large illustrated cardboard bins, called dumps, to thousands of stores to display a book in bulk quantity. Like food merchants who buy eye-level shelf placement for their products in supermarkets, large trade houses buy shelf space from major chains to ensure prominent locations in bookstores. Similarly, publishers are required to pay (co-op payments) for featured treatment on Amazon. Publishers also buy ad space in newspapers and magazines and on buses, billboards, television, radio, and the Web —all in an effort to generate interest in a new book.
Selling Books: Brick-and-Mortar Stores, Clubs,
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and Mail Order Traditionally, the final part of the publishing process involves the business and order fulfillment stages—shipping books to thousands of commercial outlets and college bookstores. Warehouse inventories are monitored to ensure that enough copies of a book will be available to meet demand. Anticipating such demand, though, is a tricky business. No publisher wants to be caught short if a book becomes more popular than originally predicted or get stuck with books it cannot sell, as publishers must absorb the cost of returned books. Independent bookstores, which tend to order more carefully, return about 20 percent of books ordered; in contrast, mass merchandisers such as Walmart, Sam’s Club, Target, and Costco, which routinely overstock popular titles, often return up to 40 percent. Returns this high can have a serious impact on a publisher’s bottom line. For years, publishers have talked about doing away with the practice of allowing bookstores to return unsold books to the publisher for credit.
Today, about 15,000 outlets sell books in the United States, including traditional bookstores, department stores, drugstores, used-book stores, and toy stores. Shopping-mall bookstores boosted book sales beginning in the late 1960s. But it was the development of book superstores in the 1980s that really reinvigorated the business. Following the success of a single Borders store established in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1971, a number of book chains began developing book superstores that catered to suburban areas and to avid readers. A typical Barnes & Noble superstore stocks up to 200,000 titles. As superstores expanded, they began to sell music and coffee. Borders grew from 14 superstores in 1991 to more than 508 superstores and 173 Waldenbooks in 2010, but the company declared bankruptcy and closed its last brick-and-mortar store in 2011. Since the shuttering of Borders, Barnes & Noble is the last national bookstore retail chain in the United States, operating 640 bookstores after spinning off its more than 700 college bookstores into a separate business in 2015.
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INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORES City Lights Books in San Francisco is both an independent bookstore and an independent publisher, publishing nearly two hundred titles since launching in 1955, including poet Allen Ginsberg’s revolutionary work Howl. Customers from around the world now come to browse through the landmark store’s three floors and to see the place where beatniks like Ginsberg got their start. © James Kirkikis/age fotostock
The rise of book superstores (and later, online bookstores) severely cut into independent bookstore business.16 The number of independent bookstores dropped from 5,100 in 1991 to about 2,000 today. Independent bookstores and superstore chains are being squeezed from multiple sides: online and e-book sales; discount retailers such as Walmart, Sam’s Club, Target, and Costco; and specialty retailers like Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters that sell “lifestyle” books.17 But many independent stores continue to thrive by offering stronger service and special events.
Book clubs and mail-order services are two other traditional methods of selling books. Originally, these two tactics helped the industry when local bookstores were rarer and the Internet did not yet exist. The Book-of-the-Month Club and the
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Literary Guild both started in 1926. Using popular writers and literary experts to recommend new books, the clubs were immediately successful. Book clubs have long served as editors for their customers, screening thousands of titles and recommending key books in particular genres. During the 1980s, book clubs began a long decline in sales. Today, twenty remaining book clubs—including the Book- of-the-Month Club, the Literary Guild, and Doubleday—are consolidated by a single company, Pride Tree Holdings, which also owns DVD and music clubs.
Mail-order bookselling was pioneered in the 1950s by magazine publishers. They created special sets of books, including Time-Life Books, focusing on such areas as science, nature, household maintenance, and cooking. These series usually offered one book at a time and sustained sales through direct-mail flyers and other advertising. Although such sets are more costly due to advertising and postal charges, mail-order books still appeal to customers who prefer mail to the hassle of shopping or to those who prefer the privacy of mail order (particularly if they are ordering sexually explicit books or magazines). Today, mail-order bookselling is used primarily by trade, professional, and university press publishers.
Selling Books Online Since the late 1990s, online booksellers have created an entirely new book distribution system on the Internet. The strength of online sellers lies in their convenience and low prices, and especially their ability to offer backlist titles and the works of less famous authors that retail stores aren’t able to carry on their shelves. Online customers are also drawn to the interactive nature of these sites, which allow readers to post their own book reviews, read those of fellow customers, and receive book recommendations based on book searches and past purchases.
The trailblazer is Amazon, established in 1995 by then thirty-year-old Jeff Bezos, who left Wall Street to start a Web-based business. Bezos realized books were an untapped and ideal market for the Internet, with more than three million publications in print and plenty of distributors to fulfill orders. He moved to Seattle and started Amazon, so named because search engines like Yahoo! listed categories in alphabetical order, putting Amazon near the top of the list. In 1997, Barnes & Noble, the leading retail store bookseller, launched its own online book site, BN.com. The site’s success, however, remains dwarfed by Amazon.
Amazon’s bigger objective for the book industry was to transform the entire industry itself, from one based on bound paper volumes to one based on digital files. The introduction of the Kindle in 2007 made Amazon the fastest book delivery system in the world. Instead of going to a bookstore or ordering from Amazon and waiting for the book to be delivered in a box, one could buy a digital version in a few seconds from the Amazon store. Amazon quickly grew to control 90 percent of the e-book market, which it used as leverage to force book publishers to comply with its low prices or risk getting dropped from Amazon’s bookstore (something that has happened to several independent book publishers who
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complained).18 Amazon has done the same in print book sales, where it is also a major player.
Amazon’s price slashing caused most of the major trade book publishing corporations to endorse Apple’s agency-model pricing, in which the publishers set the book prices and the digital bookseller gets a 30 percent commission. When the U.S. Department of Justice ruled in 2013 that Apple and the major publishers had colluded to set book prices (thus denying consumers the lower prices that Amazon’s deep discounts might offer), the booksellers responded that government investigators should be more concerned about Amazon. Of particular concern to publishers is that Amazon has been expanding into the domain of traditional publishers with the establishment of Amazon Publishing, which has grown rapidly since 2009. With a publishing arm that can sign authors to book contracts, the Amazon store’s distribution, and millions of Kindle devices in the hands of readers, Amazon is becoming a vertically integrated company and a too-powerful entity, traditional publishers fear. Amazon ultimately agreed with the five major book publishers in 2014 and let them set e-book prices. At the same time, Amazon began undercutting the major publishers’ e-books (often costing $12.99 to $14.99) with e-books from independent publishers or from its own in-house publishing business, which typically cost from $2.99 to $5.99.
Amazon’s biggest rivals in the digital book business are those with their own tablet devices. Apple has its iBook Store, which is available for iPads and iPhones through an app in the iTunes store. Google Play, Google’s digital media store, combines newly released and backlist books, along with the out-of-print titles that Google has been digitizing since 2004. Google also introduced its Nexus 7 tablet in 2012 to promote its store. Barnes & Noble has been less successful in shoring up its flagging brick-and-mortar bookstores with its Nook device and online store. The Kobo e-book device, introduced in 2010 by a Toronto-based company, has become the most popular e-book device in Canada and is making some inroads with independent booksellers in the United States.
By 2015, Amazon still dominated the e-book market, with a 74 percent share of sales, while Apple iBooks accounted for 11 percent; B&N Nook, 8 percent; Kobo, 3 percent; and Google Play Books, 2 percent.19 Moreover, Amazon dominates in print books, selling at least 25 percent of all new trade print books, and about 66 percent of all trade print books, which includes millions of older titles.20
Alternative Voices Even though the book industry is dominated by large book publishers and one big online retailer (Amazon), there are still alternatives for both publishing and selling books. One idea is to make books freely available to everyone. This idea is not a new one; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrialist Andrew Carnegie used millions of dollars from his vast steel fortune to build more than twenty-five hundred public libraries in the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. Carnegie believed that libraries created great learning opportunities
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for citizens, especially for immigrants like himself. One Internet source, NewPages, is working on another alternative to
conglomerate publishing and chain bookselling by trying to bring together a vast array of alternative and university presses, independent bookstores, and guides to literary and alternative magazines. The site’s listing of independent publishers, for example, includes hundreds, mostly based in the United States and Canada, ranging from Academy Chicago Publishers (which publishes a range of fiction and nonfiction books) to Zephyr Press (which “publishes literary titles that foster a deeper understanding of cultures and languages”).
Finally, because e-books make publishing and distribution costs low, e- publishing has enabled authors to sidestep traditional publishers. A new breed of large Internet-based publishing houses, such as Xlibris, iUniverse, Hillcrest Media, Amazon’s CreateSpace, and Author Solutions, design and distribute books for a comparatively small price for aspiring authors who want to self-publish a title, which can even be formatted for the Kindle or iPad. Although sales are typically low for such books, the low overhead costs allow higher royalty rates for the authors and lower retail prices for readers.
e-publishing Internet-based publishing houses that design and distribute books for comparatively low prices for authors who want to self-publish a title.
Sometimes self-published books make it to the best-seller lists. British writer E. L. James’s blockbuster erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey was first written as fan fiction, posted to a busy Twilight fan forum beginning in 2009, where thousands read and commented on it. In 2012, Vintage bought the rights to the Fifty Shades trilogy for more than $1 million. Some traditional publishers are considering the straight-to-e-book route themselves. Little, Brown & Company released Pete Hamill’s They Are Us in digital format only.
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BOOKS AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY
As we enter the digital age, the book-reading habits of children and adults have become a social concern. After all, books have played an important role not only in spreading the idea of democracy but also in connecting us to new ideas beyond our local experience. The impact of our oldest mass medium—the book—remains immense. Without the development of printing presses and books, the idea of democracy would be hard to imagine. From Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which helped bring an end to slavery in the 1860s, to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which led to reforms in the pesticide industry in the 1960s, books have made a difference. They have told us things that we wanted—and needed—to know, and inspired us to action. And, despite what some people might believe, Americans are still reading books. A Pew Research Center study found that 76 percent of Americans age eighteen and older reported that they read at least one book in the past year. Moreover, they experience books across several formats: 69 percent read a book in print, 28 percent read an e-book, and 14 percent listened to an audio book. Among all Americans, the average number of books read per year is twelve, and the median is five (that is, half of adults read more than five books, half read fewer). Although some might conclude that the proliferation of digital devices has drawn readers away from books, Pew reported that the rate of book reading in the United States has not changed significantly from previous years. Although reading e-books is on the rise, only 4 percent read only e-books. Print books have a more dedicated audience: 52 percent of readers read only print books. Finally, despite the concerns of some that young adults are rejecting reading, the Pew study found “no significant differences by age group for rates of reading overall.” The only difference in age was the tendency toward reading format: Young adults are more likely to read e-books than are those over age sixty-five.21
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AMAZON’S WAREHOUSES go far beyond the stockrooms of a typical brick-and-mortar store, housing more than one hundred employees in each location, of which there are dozens across the United States and around the world. Though Amazon still uses these warehouses to support its massive fulfillment needs, it owns a lot of virtual businesses, too, including cloud storage, e-publishing, e-commerce sites like Zappos, and social media like Goodreads, which Amazon bought in 2013. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Although there is a sustained interest in books, many people are concerned about their quality. Often, editors and executives prefer to invest in commercially successful authors or those who have a built-in television, sports, or movie audience. In his book The Death of Literature, Alvin Kernan argues that serious literary work has been increasingly overwhelmed by the triumph of consumerism. People jump at craftily marketed celebrity biographies and popular fiction, he argues, but seldom read serious works. He contends that cultural standards have been undermined by marketing ploys that divert attention away from serious books and toward mass-produced works that are more easily consumed.22
Yet books and reading have survived the challenge of visual and digital culture. Developments such as digital publishing, audio books, graphic novels, and online services have integrated aspects of print and electronic culture into our daily lives. Most of these new forms carry on the legacy of books, transcending borders to provide personal stories, world history, and general knowledge to all who can read.
Since the early days of the printing press, books have helped us understand ideas and customs outside our own experiences. For democracy to work well, we
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must read. When we examine other cultures through books, we discover not only who we are and what we value but also who others are and what our common ties might be.
CARNEGIE LIBRARIES The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh was first opened in 1895 with a $1 million donation from Andrew Carnegie (at the time, it was called Main Library). In total, eight branches were built in Pittsburgh as Carnegie Libraries. Photo courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
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10 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the commercial nature of mass media. Books have been products of a publishing industry in the United States since at least the early nineteenth century, but with the advent of digital technologies, the structure of the publishing industry is either evolving or dying. Is this a good or bad thing for the future of books?
Since the popularization of Gutenberg’s printing press, there has always been some kind of gatekeeper in the publishing industry. Initially, it was religious institutions (which, for example, determined what would constitute the books of the Bible), then intellectuals, educators, and—with the development of publishing houses in the early nineteenth century—a fully formed commercial publishing industry.
Now, with the digital turn in publishing, anyone can be an author. Clay Shirky, a digital theorist at New York University, argues that this completely undercuts the work of publishers. “Publishing is going away,” Shirky says. “Because the word ‘publishing’ means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says ‘publish,’ and when you press it, it’s done.”23 Indeed, self-publishing is already a huge part of what the industry has become. As the New York Times noted, “Nearly 350,000 new print titles were published in 2011, and 150,000 to 200,000 of them were produced by self-publishing companies.”24 (Table 10.1 indicates that about 200,768 books were published in 2014, so nearly that many more books were self-published in the same year.)
An increase in the number of books in circulation is great for democracy, for the inclusion of more voices. But is there still value to the acquisition, editing, and marketing of books that publishers do? Are these traditional gatekeepers worth keeping around? Is it a legitimate concern that the quality of book content will suffer without publishers to find, develop, and promote the work of the best authors?
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end
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of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
papyrus, 322 parchment, 322 codex, 322 manuscript culture, 322 illuminated manuscripts, 322 block printing, 323 printing press, 323 vellum, 323 paperback books, 324 dime novels, 324 pulp fiction, 324 linotype,324 offset lithography, 324 trade books, 325 professional books, 326 textbooks, 326 university press, 330 e-book, 332 book challenge, 336 acquisitions editors, 338 subsidiary rights, 338 developmental editor, 339 copy editors 339, design managers, 339 e-publishing, 342
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
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REVIEW QUESTIONS
The History of Books, from Papyrus to Paperbacks 1. What distinguishes the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages
from the oral and print eras in communication? 2. Why was the printing press such an important and revolutionary
invention? 3. Why were books particularly important to women readers during
the early periods of American history? Modern Publishing and the Book Industry
4. Why did publishing houses develop? 5. Why is the trade book segment one of the most lucrative parts of
the book industry? 6. What factors have been causing a decline in the cost of an
academic year’s worth of college textbooks? Trends and Issues in Book Publishing
7. What is the relationship between the book and movie industries? 8. Why did the Kindle succeed in the e-book market where other
devices had failed? 9. In what ways have e-books reimagined what a book can be?
10. What are the major issues in the debate over digitizing millions of books for Web search engines?
The Organization and Ownership of the Book Industry 11. What are the general divisions within a typical publishing
house? 12. How have online bookstores and e-books affected bookstores
and the publishing industry? 13. What are the concerns over Amazon’s powerful role in
determining book pricing and having its own publishing division?
14. What is Andrew Carnegie’s legacy in regard to libraries in the United States and elsewhere?
Books and the Future of Democracy 15. Why is an increasing interest in reading a signal for improved
democratic life?
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QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. As books shift to digital formats, what advantages of the bound-book format are we sacrificing?
2. Given the digital turn in the book industry, if you were to self-publish a book, what strategies would you use in marketing and distribution to help an audience find it?
3. Imagine that you are on a committee that oversees book choices for a high school library in your town. What policies do you think should guide the committee’s selection of controversial books?
4. What is the cultural significance of a bound volume, particularly a religious holy book, such as the Bible or Qur’an? If holy books are in digital form, does the format change their meaning?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter. VIDEO: TURNING THE PAGE: BOOKS GO DIGITAL Authors discuss how e-books are changing both the way books are consumed and the way they are written.
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PART 4 The Business of Mass Media
The digital turn has brought about a shift in the locus of power in the mass media. For decades, the mass media have been dominated by giant corporations. Now a new digital market has grown up around them, displacing the way traditional mass media work and breaking down the barriers of entry to start-up media companies:
Changes in the structure of media economics. In just a few short years, legacy media companies have lost some of their power due to the rise of major digital companies, which are the new media conglomerates. Traditional media companies now find themselves in a position in which they have to work with these companies or risk losing their audience. The new digital ecosystem for advertising and public relations. Professional media communicators are negotiating new terrain in the digital age, too, figuring out what kinds of advertising or PR campaigns work best in the age of social media and mobile devices. This new environment can be good and bad. Everyone on the Internet is a potential customer but also a potential public critic. Democracy and the redistribution of power. The digital turn has allowed for more voices participating in the media industries. Now content creators can enter the marketplace more easily: It’s simple to get songs listed in the iTunes store, books placed in the Amazon catalog, and videos posted to YouTube.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture to explore an interactive timeline of the history of mass communication, practice your media literacy skills, test your knowledge of the concepts in the textbook with LearningCurve, explore and discuss current trends in mass communication with Video Activities and Video Tools, and more.
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11 Advertising and Commercial Culture
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Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for Hulu
THE BUSINESS OF MASS MEDIA
THE DIGITAL TURN over the last several years has
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dramatically changed the way that products and advertising are bought, sold, and consumed. By 2016, the only older, or “legacy,” mass medium whose global advertising revenue was not totally disrupted by the Internet was television—both cable and broadcast, which includes ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC. In fact, television’s nearly 38 percent share of world-wide ad revenue in 2015 represented a 2% rise between 2007 and 2015. In second place for 2015 stood Internet and digital ads, which captured almost 29% of worldwide ad revenue, far surpassing the combined total of newspapers (13%) and magazines (6.5%). (Back in 2007, newspapers accounted for 27% and magazines 12.4% of the world’s ad revenue, with the Internet trailing far behind at 9.3%.)1
EARLY DEVELOPMENTS IN AMERICAN ADVERTISING THE SHAPE OF U.S. ADVERTISING TODAY PERSUASIVE TECHNIQUES IN CONTEMPORARY ADVERTISING COMMERCIAL SPEECH AND REGULATING ADVERTISING ADVERTISING, POLITICS, AND DEMOCRACY
◄ Digital streaming services, like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, have provided an opportunity to give new life to shows that have been canceled by TV networks. Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project was canceled by Fox after three seasons in 2015
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but was picked up by Hulu and renewed for several more seasons.
The transition isn’t yet complete. Internet and digital ad spending are expected to catch up with TV, with one forecast giving both TV and Internet/digital 38 percent of the global ad market. In fact, in the first half of 2015, traditional U.S. TV viewing declined almost 10 percent, with Netflix’s digital streaming services accounting for almost half that decline.2 Analyzing data from Advertising Age’s 2015 and 2016 Marketing Fact Packs reveals what’s happening. In 2013, “time spent using digital media overtook time spent watching television” for the first time. In 2015, the average time U.S. adults spent watching TV came in at four hours a day, whereas the average time spent with digital devices and services— from computers to YouTube to smartphones to tablets—amounted to almost six hours a day. And, of course, we are often watching ads on TV and texting on our smartphones at the same time.3
ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC are worried about these trends. While these once- dominant TV networks have started their own digital streaming services—like Hulu—they trail Netflix and Amazon Prime, which remain ad-free, subscription- only services. In 2015 and 2016, spending declined during the TV “upfronts”—that time each spring when advertisers spend about 75 percent of their TV budgets buying ads on popular programs like NBC’s The Voice, which earned the network about $275,000 per thirty-second ad in 2014 but only $233,000 in 2015, or CBS’s Thursday Night Football, which averaged $483,000 for a thirty-second spot in 2014 but only $465,000 in 2015.4
Still, traditional TV has managed to hold on because in a fragmented marketplace, the “mass” prime-time TV audience—only a quarter of what it was in the 1980s— still remains significantly larger than the audience most YouTube videos or a Netflix series can generate. Once in a while, a hit the size of Fox’s Empire will come along and instill faith in the networks’ ability to capture a mass audience. However, the great-grandchildren of those baby boomers who grew up on TV in the 1950s and 1960s will be raised on smartphones and tablets, with no loyalty to (or patience for) ad-based broadcast networks and no memory of gathering with the family to watch a favorite “must-see” network sitcom—and the ads that accompany it—around the electronic hearth.
But people will always want stories; the challenge for the advertising industry is to figure out how its ads can be tied into the consumption of those stories. What will cable and broadcast networks do to get younger viewers to watch those stories on their smartphones? Will Netflix, with 80 million subscribers in 190 countries in mid-2016, look to advertising for another revenue stream? How much of the ad budgets for Procter & Gamble, AT&T, GM, Ford, and Verizon—five of the
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biggest U.S. advertisers—will shift from TV to digital platforms? In short: What will advertisers do to keep people watching ads, especially in a world of digital devices that either let us skip ads or offer ad-free story services like HBO, Amazon Prime, and Netflix?
TODAY, ADVERTISEMENTS ARE EVERYWHERE AND IN EVERY MEDIA FORM. Ads take up more than half the space in most daily newspapers and consumer magazines. They are inserted into trade books and textbooks. They clutter Web sites on the Internet. They fill our mailboxes and wallpaper the buses we ride. Dotting the nation’s highways, billboards promote fast-food and hotel chains, while neon signs announce the names of stores along major streets and strip malls. Ads are even found in the restrooms of malls, restaurants, and bars.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
At local theaters and on DVDs, ads now precede the latest Hollywood movie trailers. Corporate sponsors spend millions for product placement: the purchase of spaces for particular goods to appear in a TV show, movie, or music video. Ads are part of a deejay’s morning patter, and ads routinely interrupt our favorite TV and cable programs. By 2015, nearly sixteen minutes of each hour of prime-time network television carried commercials, program promos, and public service announcements—an increase from thirteen minutes an hour in 1992. In addition, each hour of prime-time network TV carried about eleven minutes of product placements.5 This means that about twenty-six minutes of each hour (or 43 percent) include some sort of paid sponsorship. In addition, according to the Food Marketing Institute, the typical supermarket’s shelves are filled with thirty thousand to fifty thousand different brand-name packages, all functioning like miniature billboards. By some research estimates, the average American comes into contact with five thousand forms of advertising each day.6
product placement the advertising practice of strategically placing products in movies, TV shows, comic books, and video games so that the products appear as part of a story’s set environment.
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Advertising comes in many forms, from classified ads to business-to-business ads, which provide detailed information on specific products. However, in this chapter, we will concentrate on the more conspicuous advertisements that shape product images and brand-name identities. Because so much consumer advertising intrudes into daily life, ads are often viewed in a negative light. Although business managers agree that advertising is the foundation of a healthy media economy—far preferable to government-controlled media—audiences routinely complain about how many ads they are forced to endure, and they increasingly find ways to avoid them, like zipping through television ads with TiVo and blocking pop-up ads with Web browsers. In response, market researchers routinely weigh consumers’ tolerance—how long an ad or how many ads they are willing to tolerate to get “free” media content. Without consumer advertisements, however, mass communication industries would cease to function in their present forms. Advertising is the economic glue that holds most media industries together.
THE “GOT MILK?” advertising campaign was originally designed by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for the California Milk Processor Board in 1993. From 1998 to 2014, the National Milk Processor Board licensed the “got milk?” slogan for its celebrity milk mustache ads, like this one. Milk Processor Education Program
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In this chapter, we will:
Examine the historical development of advertising—an industry that helped transform numerous nations into consumer societies Look at the first U.S. ad agencies; early advertisements; and the emergence of packaging, trademarks, and brand-name recognition Consider the growth of advertising in the last century, such as the increasing influence of ad agencies and the shift to a more visually oriented culture Outline the key persuasive techniques used in consumer advertising Investigate ads as a form of commercial speech, and discuss the measures aimed at regulating advertising Look at political advertising and its impact on democracy
It’s increasingly rare to find spaces in our society that don’t contain advertising. As you read this chapter, think about your own exposure to advertising. What are some things you like or admire about advertising? For example, are there particular ad campaigns that give you enormous pleasure? How and when do ads annoy you? Can you think of any ways you intentionally avoid advertising? For more questions to help you understand the role of advertising in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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EARLY DEVELOPMENTS IN AMERICAN ADVERTISING
Advertising has existed since 3000 BCE, when shop owners in ancient Babylon hung outdoor signs carved in stone and wood so that customers could spot their stores. Merchants in early Egyptian society hired town criers to walk through the streets, announcing the arrival of ships and listing the goods on board. Archaeologists searching Pompeii, the ancient Italian city destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, found advertising messages painted on walls. By 900 CE, many European cities featured town criers who not only called out the news of the day but also directed customers to various stores.
Other early media ads were on handbills, posters, and broadsides (long, newsprint-quality posters). English booksellers printed brochures and bills announcing new publications as early as the 1470s, when posters advertising religious books were tacked onto church doors. In 1622, print ads imitating the oral style of criers appeared in the first English newspapers. Announcing land deals and ship cargoes, the first newspaper ads in colonial America ran in the Boston News- Letter in 1704.
To distinguish their approach from the commercialism of newspapers, early magazines refused to carry advertisements. By the mid-nineteenth century, though, most magazines contained ads, and most publishers started magazines hoping to earn advertising dollars. About 80 percent of these early advertisements covered three subjects: land sales, transportation announcements (stagecoach and ship schedules), and “runaways” (ads placed by farm and plantation owners whose slaves had fled).
The First Advertising Agencies Until the 1830s, little need existed for elaborate advertising, as few goods and products were even available for sale. Before the Industrial Revolution, 90 percent of Americans lived in isolated areas and produced most of their own tools, clothes, and food. The minimal advertising that did exist usually featured local merchants selling goods and services in their own communities. In the United States, national advertising, which initially focused on patent medicines, didn’t begin in earnest until the 1850s, when railroads linking the East Coast to the Mississippi River valley began carrying newspapers, handbills, and broadsides—as well as national consumer goods—across the country.
The first American advertising agencies were newspaper space brokers, individuals who purchased space in newspapers and sold it to various merchants. Newspapers, accustomed to a 25 percent nonpayment rate from advertisers, welcomed the space brokers, who paid up front. Brokers usually received discounts of 15 to 30 percent but sold the space to advertisers at the going rate. In 1841,
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Volney Palmer opened a prototype of the first ad agency in Boston; for a 25 percent commission from newspaper publishers, he sold space to advertisers.
space brokers in the days before modern advertising, individuals who purchased space in newspapers and sold it to various merchants.
Advertising in the 1800s The first full-service modern ad agency, N. W. Ayer & Son, worked primarily for advertisers and product companies rather than for newspapers. Opening in 1869 in Philadelphia, the agency helped create, write, produce, and place ads in selected newspapers and magazines. The traditional payment structure at this time had the agency collecting a fee from its advertising client for each ad placed; the fee covered the price that each media outlet charged for placement of the ad, plus a 15 percent commission for the agency. The more ads an agency placed, the larger the agency’s revenue. Thus, agencies had little incentive to buy fewer ads on behalf of their clients. Nowadays, however, many advertising agencies work for a flat fee, and some will agree to be paid on a performance basis.
Trademarks and Packaging During the mid-1800s, most manufacturers served retail store owners, who usually set their own prices by purchasing goods in large quantities. Manufacturers, however, came to realize that if their products were distinctive and associated with quality, customers would ask for them by name. This would allow manufacturers to dictate prices without worrying about being undersold by stores’ generic products or bulk items. Advertising let manufacturers establish a special identity for their products, separate from those of their competitors.
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PATENT MEDICINES Unregulated patent medicines, such as the one represented in this ad, created a bonanza for nineteenth-century print media in search of advertising revenue. After several muckraking magazine reports about deceptive patent medicine claims, Congress created the Food and Drug Administration in 1906. The Advertising Archives
Like many ads today, nineteenth-century advertisements often created the impression of significant differences among products when in fact very few differences actually existed. But when consumers began demanding certain products—either because of quality or because of advertising—manufacturers were able to raise the prices of their goods. With ads creating and maintaining brand- name recognition, retail stores had to stock the desired brands.
One of the first brand names, Smith Brothers, has been advertising cough drops since the early 1850s. Quaker Oats, the first cereal company to register a trademark, has used the image of William Penn, the Quaker who founded Pennsylvania in 1681, to project a company image of honesty, decency, and hard work since 1877. Other early and enduring brands include Campbell Soup, which came along in 1869; Levi Strauss overalls in 1873; Ivory Soap in 1879; and Eastman Kodak film in 1888. Many of these companies packaged their products in small quantities, thereby distinguishing them from the generic products sold in
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large barrels and bins. Product differentiation associated with brand-name packaged goods represents
the single biggest triumph of advertising. Studies suggest that although most ads are not very effective in the short run, over time they create demand by leading consumers to associate particular brands with quality. Not surprisingly, building or sustaining brand-name recognition is the focus of many product-marketing campaigns. But the costs that packaging and advertising add to products generate many consumer complaints. The high price of many contemporary products results from advertising costs. For example, high-end jeans that cost $150 (or more) today are made from roughly the same inexpensive denim that has outfitted farmworkers since the 1800s. The difference now is that more than 90 percent of the jeans’ cost goes toward advertising and profit.
Patent Medicines and Department Stores By the end of the 1800s, patent medicines and department stores accounted for half of the revenues taken in by ad agencies. Meanwhile, one-sixth of all print ads came from patent medicine and drug companies. Such ads ensured the financial survival of numerous magazines as “the role of the publisher changed from being a seller of a product to consumers to being a gatherer of consumers for the advertisers,” according to Goodrum and Dalrymple in Advertising in America.7 Bearing names like Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, Dr. Lin’s Chinese Blood Pills, and William Radam’s Microbe Killer, patent medicines were often made with water and 15 to 40 percent concentrations of ethyl alcohol. One patent medicine—Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup—actually contained morphine. Powerful drugs in these medicines explain why people felt “better” after taking them; at the same time, they triggered lifelong addiction problems for many customers.
Many contemporary products, in fact, originated as medicines. Coca-Cola, for instance, was initially sold as a medicinal tonic and even contained traces of cocaine until 1903, when it was replaced by caffeine. Early Post and Kellogg’s cereal ads promised to cure stomach and digestive problems. Many patent medicines made outrageous claims about what they could cure, leading to increased public cynicism. As a result, advertisers began to police their ranks and develop industry codes to restore consumer confidence. Partly to monitor patent medicine claims, the Federal Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906.
Along with patent medicine ads, department store ads were also becoming prominent in newspapers and magazines. By the early 1890s, more than 20 percent of ad space was devoted to department stores. At the time, these stores were frequently criticized for undermining small shops and businesses, where shopkeepers personally served customers. The more impersonal department stores allowed shoppers to browse and find brand-name goods themselves. Because these stores purchased merchandise in large quantities, they could generally sell the same products for less.
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WAR ADVERTISING COUNCIL During World War II, the federal government engaged the advertising industry to create messages to support the U.S. war effort. Advertisers promoted the sale of war bonds; conservation of natural resources, such as tin and gasoline; and even saving kitchen waste so it could be fed to farm animals. © Bettmann/Getty Images
Advertising’s Impact on Newspapers With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, “continuous-process machinery” kept company factories operating at peak efficiency, helping produce an abundance of inexpensive packaged consumer goods.8 The companies that produced those goods —Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Heinz, Borden, Pillsbury, Eastman Kodak, Carnation, and American Tobacco—were some of the first to advertise, and they remain major advertisers today (although many of these brand names have been absorbed by larger conglomerates).
The demand for newspaper advertising by product companies and retail stores significantly changed the ratio of copy at most newspapers. Whereas newspapers in the mid-1880s featured 70 to 75 percent news and editorial material and only 25 to 30 percent advertisements, by the early 1900s, more than half the space in daily papers was devoted to advertising. However, newspapers have recently been hit hard: Their advertising revenue has fallen by nearly two-thirds—from a peak of $49 billion in 2005 to $17 billion in 2014—as the number of car, real estate, and help-wanted ads dropped significantly following the 2008–09 financial crisis and as Internet ads continued their ascendance.9 For many newspapers, fewer ads mean
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smaller papers, not room for more articles.
Promoting Social Change and Dictating Values As U.S. advertising became more pervasive, it contributed to major social changes in the twentieth century. First, it significantly influenced the transition from a producer-directed to a consumer-driven society. By stimulating demand for new products, advertising helped manufacturers create new markets and recover product start-up costs quickly. From farms to cities, advertising spread the word— first in newspapers and magazines and later on radio and television. Second, advertising promoted technological advances by showing how new machines— such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and cars—could improve daily life. Third, advertising encouraged economic growth by increasing sales. To meet the demand generated by ads, manufacturers produced greater quantities, which reduced their costs per unit, although they did not always pass these savings along to consumers.
Appealing to Female Consumers By the early 1900s, advertisers and ad agencies believed that women, who constituted 70 to 80 percent of newspaper and magazine readers, controlled most household purchasing decisions. (This is still a fundamental principle of advertising today.) Ironically, more than 99 percent of the copywriters and ad executives at that time were men, primarily based in Chicago and New York. They emphasized stereotyped appeals to women, believing that simple ads with emotional and even irrational content worked best. Thus, early ad copy featured personal tales of “heroic” cleaning products and household appliances. The intention was to help female consumers feel good about defeating life’s problems —an advertising strategy that endured throughout much of the twentieth century.
Dealing with Criticism Although ad revenues fell during the Great Depression in the 1930s, World War II rejuvenated advertising. For the first time, the federal government bought large quantities of advertising space to promote U.S. involvement in a war. These purchases helped offset a decline in traditional advertising, as many industries had turned their attention and production facilities to the war effort.
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PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENTS The Ad Council has been creating public service announcements (PSAs) since 1942. Supported by contributions from individuals, corporations, and foundations, the council’s PSAs are produced pro bono by ad agencies. This PSA is the result of the Ad Council’s long-standing relationship with the National Safety Council. National Safety Council
Also during the 1940s, the industry began to actively deflect criticism that advertising created consumer needs that ordinary citizens never knew they had. Criticism of advertising grew as the industry appeared to be dictating values as well as driving the economy. To promote a more positive image, the industry developed the War Advertising Council—a voluntary group of agencies and advertisers that organized war bond sales, blood donor drives, and the rationing of scarce goods.
The postwar extension of advertising’s voluntary efforts became known as the Ad Council. This organization has earned praise over the years for its Smokey the Bear campaign (“Only you can prevent forest fires”); its fund-raising campaign for the United Negro College Fund (“A mind is a terrible thing to waste”); and its crash test dummy spots for the Department of Transportation, which substantially increased seat belt use. Choosing a dozen worthy causes annually, the Ad Council continues to produce pro bono public service announcements (PSAs) on a wide range of topics, including literacy, homelessness, drug addiction, smoking, and AIDS education.
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Early Ad Regulation The early 1900s saw the formation of several watchdog organizations. Partly to keep tabs on deceptive advertising, advocates in the business community in 1913 created the nonprofit Better Business Bureau, which now has more than one hundred branch offices in the United States. At the same time, advertisers wanted a formal service that tracked newspaper readership, guaranteed accurate audience measures, and ensured that papers would not overcharge ad agencies and their clients. As a result, publishers formed the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) in 1914 (now known as the Alliance for Audited Media).
That same year, the government created the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), in part to help monitor advertising abuses. Thereafter, the industry urged self- regulatory measures to keep government interference at bay. For example, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA)—established in 1917— tried to minimize government oversight by urging ad agencies to refrain from making misleading product claims.
Finally, the advent of television dramatically altered advertising. With this new visual medium, ads increasingly intruded on daily life. Critics also discovered that some agencies used subliminal advertising. This term, coined in the 1950s, refers to hidden or disguised print and visual messages that allegedly register in the subconscious and fool people into buying products. Noted examples of subliminal ads from that time include a “Drink Coca-Cola” ad embedded in a few frames of a movie and alleged hidden sexual activity drawn into liquor ads. Although research suggests that such ads are no more effective than regular ads, the National Association of Broadcasters banned the use of subliminal ads in 1958.
subliminal advertising a 1950s term that refers to hidden or disguised print and visual messages that allegedly register on the subconscious, creating false needs and seducing people into buying products.
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THE SHAPE OF U.S. ADVERTISING TODAY
Until the 1960s, the shape and pitch of most U.S. ads were determined by a slogan, the phrase that attempts to sell a product by capturing its essence in words. With slogans such as “A Diamond Is Forever” (which De Beers first used in 1948), the visual dimension of ads was merely a complement. Eventually, however, through the influence of European design, television, and (now) multimedia devices such as the iPad, images asserted themselves, and visual style became dominant in U.S. advertising and ad agencies.
slogan in advertising, a catchy phrase that attempts to promote or sell a product by capturing its essence in words.
The Influence of Visual Design Just as a postmodern design phase developed in art and architecture during the 1960s and 1970s, a new design era began to affect advertising at the same time. Part of this visual revolution was imported from non-U.S. schools of design; indeed, ad-rich magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair increasingly hired European designers as art directors. These directors tended to be less tied to U.S. word-driven radio advertising because most European countries had government- sponsored radio systems with no ads.
By the early 1970s, agencies had developed teams of writers and artists, thus granting equal status to images and words in the creative process. By the mid- 1980s, the visual techniques of MTV, which initially modeled its style on advertising, influenced many ads and most agencies. MTV promoted a particular visual aesthetic—rapid edits, creative camera angles, compressed narratives, and staged performances. Video-style ads soon saturated television and featured such prominent performers as Paula Abdul, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Elton John, and Madonna. The popularity of MTV’s visual style also started a trend in the 1980s to license hit songs for commercial tie-ins. By the twenty-first century, a wide range of short, polished musical performances and familiar songs—including the work of Train (Samsung), the Shins (McDonald’s), LMFAO (Kia Motors), and classic Louis Armstrong (Apple iPhone)—were routinely used in TV ads to encourage consumers not to click the remote control.
Most recently, the Internet and multimedia devices, such as computers, mobile phones, and portable media players, have had a significant impact on visual design in advertising. As the Web became a mass medium in the 1990s, TV and print
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designs often mimicked the drop-down menu of computer interfaces. In the twenty-first century, visual design has evolved in other ways, becoming more three-dimensional and interactive as full-motion, 3-D animation becomes a high- bandwidth multimedia standard. At the same time, design is also simpler, as ads and logos need to appear clearly on the small screens of smartphones and portable media players, and more international, as agencies need to appeal to the global audiences of many companies by reflecting styles from around the world.
Types of Advertising Agencies About fourteen thousand ad agencies currently operate in the United States. In general, these agencies are classified as either mega-agencies—large ad firms that formed by merging several agencies and that maintain regional offices worldwide —or small boutique agencies, which devote their talents to only a handful of select clients. As a result of the economic crisis, both types of ad agencies suffered revenue declines in 2008 and 2009, but profits slowly improved within about five years.
mega-agencies in advertising, large firms or holding companies that are formed by merging several individual agencies and that maintain worldwide regional offices; they provide both advertising and public relations services and operate in- house radio and TV production studios.
boutique agencies in advertising, small regional ad agencies that offer personalized services.
Mega-Agencies Mega-agencies provide a full range of services, from advertising and public relations to operating their own in-house radio and TV production studios. In 2015, the four global mega-agencies were WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, and Interpublic (see Figure 11.1).
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MAD MEN AMC’s hit series Mad Men depicts the male-dominated world of Madison Avenue in the 1960s, as the U.S. consumer economy kicked into high gear and agencies developed ad campaigns for cigarettes, exercise belts, and presidential candidates. The show ended its run in 2015 after seven seasons and many awards. Jaimie Trueblood/© AMC/Everett Collection
In 2013, Omnicom and Publicis announced a merger that would have created the world’s largest mega-agency. But that plan fell apart in 2014, according to the New York Times, over a “mix of clashing personalities, disagreements about how the companies would be integrated and complications over legal and tax issues.”10 Based in New York, Omnicom in 2015 had more than 74,000 employees operating in more than 100 countries and currently owns the global advertising firms BBDO Worldwide, DDB Worldwide, and TBWA Worldwide. The company also owns three leading public relations agencies: Fleishman-Hillard, Ketchum, and Porter Novelli. The Paris-based Publicis Groupe has a global reach through agencies like Leo Burnett Worldwide, the British agency Saatchi & Saatchi, DigitasLBi, and the public relations firm MSL Group. Publicis employees numbered more than 77,000 worldwide in 2016.
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FIGURE 11.1 GLOBAL REVENUE FOR THE WORLD’S LARGEST AGENCIES (IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS) Data from: Advertising Age Marketing Fact Pack 2016, p. 24.
The London-based WPP Group grew quickly in the 1980s with the purchases of J. Walter Thompson, the largest U.S. ad firm at the time; Hill+Knowlton, one of the largest U.S. public relations agencies; and Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. In the 2000s, WPP Group continued its growth and acquired Young & Rubicam and Grey Global—both major U.S. ad firms. By 2016, WPP had 194,000 employees in 112 countries. The Interpublic Group, based in New York with more than 49,000 employees worldwide, holds global agencies like McCann Erickson (the top U.S. ad agency), FCB, and Lowe and Partners, and public relations firms Golin and Weber Shandwick.
This mega-agency trend has stirred debate among consumer and media watchdog groups. Some consider large agencies a threat to the independence of smaller firms, which are slowly being bought out. An additional concern is that these four firms now control more than half the distribution of advertising dollars globally. As a result, the cultural values represented by U.S. and European ads may undermine or overwhelm the values and products of developing countries. (See Figure 11.2 on page 360 for a look at how advertising dollars are spent by medium.)
Boutique Agencies
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The visual revolutions in advertising during the 1960s elevated the standing of designers and graphic artists, who became closely identified with the look of particular ads. Breaking away from bigger agencies, many of these creative individuals formed small boutique agencies. Offering more personal services, the boutiques prospered, bolstered by innovative ad campaigns and increasing profits from TV accounts. By the 1980s, large agencies had bought up many of the boutiques. Nevertheless, these boutiques continue to operate as fairly autonomous subsidiaries within multinational corporate structures.
One independent boutique agency in Minneapolis, Peterson Milla Hooks (PMH), made its name with a boldly graphic national branding ad campaign for Target department stores. Target moved its business to another agency in 2011, but PMH—which employs only about sixty people—rebounded. By 2015, the agency’s client list included Gap, Kohl’s, Nine West, Mattel, Kmart, Sephora, Rooms To Go, Sleep Number, JCPenney, and Chico’s.11
FIGURE 11.2 WHERE WILL THE ADVERTISING DOLLARS GO? Data from: eMarketer, “US Spending on Paid Media Expected to Climb 5.1% in 2016,” March 25, 2016.
The Structure of Ad Agencies Traditional ad agencies, regardless of their size, generally divide the labor
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of creating and maintaining advertising campaigns among four departments: account planning, creative development, media coordination, and account management. Expenses incurred for producing the ads are part of a separate negotiation between the agency and the advertiser. As a result of this commission arrangement, it generally costs most large-volume advertisers no more to use an agency than it does to use their own staff.
Account Planning, Market Research, and VALS The account planner’s role is to develop an effective advertising strategy by combining the views of the client, the creative team, and consumers. Consumers’ views are the most difficult to understand, so account planners coordinate market research to assess the behaviors and attitudes of consumers toward particular products long before any ads are created. Researchers may study everything from possible names for a new product to the size of the copy for a print ad. Researchers also test new ideas and products with consumers to get feedback before developing final ad strategies. In addition, some researchers contract with outside polling firms to conduct regional and national studies of consumer preferences.
market research in advertising and public relations agencies, the department that uses social science techniques to assess the behaviors and attitudes of consumers toward particular products before any ads are created.
In 1978, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), now called Strategic Business Insights (SBI), instituted its Values and Lifestyles (VALS) strategy. Using questionnaires, VALS researchers measured psychological factors and divided consumers into types. VALS research assumes that not every product suits every consumer and encourages advertisers to vary their sales slants to find market niches.
Values and Lifestyles (VALS) a market-research strategy that divides consumers into types and measures psychological factors, including how consumers think and feel about products and how they achieve (or do not achieve) the lifestyles to which they aspire.
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Over the years, the VALS system has been updated to reflect changes in consumer orientations (see Figure 11.3 on page 362). The most recent system classifies people by their primary consumer motivations: ideals, achievement, or self-expression. The ideals-oriented group, for instance, includes thinkers—people who “plan, research, and consider before they act.” VALS and similar research techniques ultimately provide advertisers with microscopic details about which consumers are most likely to buy which products.
Agencies and clients—particularly auto manufacturers—have relied heavily on VALS to determine the best placement for ads. VALS data suggest, for example, that achievers and experiencers watch more sports and news programs; these groups also prefer luxury cars or sport-utility vehicles. Thinkers, on the other hand, favor TV dramas and documentaries and like the functionality of minivans or the gas efficiency of hybrids.
VALS researchers do not claim that most people fit neatly into one category. But many agencies believe that VALS research can give them an edge in markets where few differences in quality may actually exist among top-selling brands. Consumer groups, wary of such research, argue that too many ads promote only an image and provide little information about a product’s price, its content, or the work conditions under which it was produced.
Creative Development Teams of writers and artists—many of whom regard ads as a commercial art form —make up the nerve center of the advertising business. The creative department outlines the rough sketches for print and online ads and then develops the words and graphics. For radio, the creative side prepares a working script, generating ideas for everything from choosing the narrator’s voice to determining background sound effects. For television, the creative department develops a storyboard, a sort of blueprint or roughly drawn comic-strip version of the potential ad. For digital media, the creative team may develop Web sites, interactive tools, flash games, downloads, and viral marketing—short videos or other content that (marketers hope) quickly gains widespread attention as users share it with friends online or by word of mouth.
storyboard in advertising, a blueprint or roughly drawn comic-strip version of a proposed advertisement.
viral marketing short videos or other content that marketers hope will quickly gain widespread attention as users share it with
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friends online or by word of mouth.
Often the creative side of the business finds itself in conflict with the research side. In the 1960s, for example, both Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) and Ogilvy & Mather downplayed research, instead championing the art of persuasion and what “felt right.” Still, both the creative and the strategic sides of the business acknowledge that they cannot predict with any certainty which ads and which campaigns will succeed. Agencies say ads work best by slowly creating brand- name identities—by associating certain products over time with quality and reliability in the minds of consumers. Some economists, however, believe that much of the money spent on advertising is ultimately wasted because it simply encourages consumers to change from one brand name to another. Such switching may lead to increased profits for a particular manufacturer, but it has little positive impact on the overall economy.
Media Coordination: Planning and Placing Advertising Ad agency media departments are staffed by media planners and media buyers: people who choose and purchase the types of media that are best suited to carry a client’s ads, reach the targeted audience, and measure the effectiveness of those ad placements. For instance, a company like Procter & Gamble, currently the world’s leading advertiser, displays its more than three hundred major brands—most of them household products like Crest toothpaste and Pampers diapers—on TV shows viewed primarily by women. To reach male viewers, however, media buyers encourage beer advertisers to spend their ad budgets on cable and network sports programming, evening talk radio, or sports magazines.
media buyers in advertising, the individuals who choose and purchase the types of media that are best suited to carry a client’s ads and reach the targeted audience.
Along with commissions or fees, advertisers often add incentive clauses to their contracts with agencies, raising the fee if sales goals are met and lowering it if goals are missed. Incentive clauses can sometimes encourage agencies to conduct repetitive saturation advertising, in which a variety of media are inundated with ads aimed at target audiences. The initial Miller Lite beer campaign (“Tastes great, less filling”), which used humor and retired athletes to reach its male audience, became one of the most successful saturation campaigns in media history. It ran from 1973 to 1991 and included television and radio spots, magazine and
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newspaper ads, and billboards and point-of-purchase store displays. The excessive repetition of the campaign helped light beer overcome a potential image problem: being viewed as watered-down beer unworthy of “real” men.
saturation advertising the strategy of inundating a variety of print and visual media with ads aimed at target audiences.
FIGURE 11.3 VALS TYPES AND CHARACTERISTICS Data from: Strategic Business Insights, 2016, strategicbusinessinsights.com/vals/ustypes.shtml. VALSTM Types and Characteristics Innovators Typically, Innovators are always taking in information, are confident enough to experiment, make the highest number of financial transactions, are skeptical about advertising, have international exposure, are future oriented, are self-directed consumers, believe science and R&D are credible, are most receptive to new ideas and technologies, enjoy the challenge of problem solving, and have the widest variety of interests and activities. Thinkers Typically, Thinkers have “ought” and “should” benchmarks for social conduct; have a tendency toward analysis paralysis; plan, research, and consider before they act; enjoy a historical perspective; are financially established; are not
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influenced by what’s hot; use technology in functional ways; prefer traditional intellectual pursuits; and buy proven products. Achievers Typically, Achievers have a “me first, my family first” attitude; believe money is the source of authority; are committed to family and job; are fully scheduled; are goal oriented; are hardworking; are moderate; act as anchors of the status quo; are peer conscious; are private; are professional; and value technology that provides a productivity boost. Experiencers Typically, Experiencers want everything, are first in and first out of trend adoption, go against the current mainstream, are up on the latest fashions, love physical activity, are sensation seeking, see themselves as very sociable, believe that friends are extremely important, are spontaneous, and have a heightened sense of visual stimulation. Believers Typically, Believers believe in basic rights and wrongs to lead a good life, rely on spirituality and faith to provide inspiration, want friendly communities, watch TV and read romance novels to find an escape, want to know where things stand and have no tolerance for ambiguity, are not looking to change society, find advertising a legitimate source of information, value constancy and stability and can appear to be loyal, and have strong me-too fashion attitudes. Strivers Typically, Strivers have revolving employment and high temporary unemployment, use video and video games as a form of fantasy, are fun loving, are imitative, rely heavily on public transportation, are at the center of low-status street culture, desire to better their lives but have difficulty realizing their desire, and wear their wealth. Makers Typically, Makers are distrustful of government; have a strong interest in all things automotive; have strong outdoor interests, like hunting and fishing; believe in sharp gender roles; want to protect what they perceive to be theirs; see themselves as straightforward and appear to others as anti-intellectual; and want to own land. Survivors Typically, Survivors are cautious and risk averse; are the oldest consumers; are thrifty; are not concerned about appearing traditional or trendy; take comfort in routine, familiar people, and familiar places; are heavy TV viewers; are loyal to brands and products; spend most of their time alone; are the least likely to use the Internet; and are the most likely to have a landline-only household.
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CREATIVE ADVERTISING The New York ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach created a famous series of print and television ads for Volkswagen beginning in 1959 (above, left) and helped usher in an era of creative advertising that combined a single-point sales emphasis with bold design, humor, and honesty. Arnold Worldwide, a Boston agency, continued the highly creative approach with its clever, award-winning “Drivers wanted” campaign for the New Beetle (above).
The cost of advertising, especially on network television, increases each year. The Super Bowl remains the most expensive program for purchasing TV advertising, with thirty seconds of time costing an average of $5 million in 2016 on CBS—up from $4 million in 2014 on Fox. Running a thirty-second ad during a national prime-time TV show can cost anywhere from $50,000 to more than $500,000, depending on the popularity and ratings of the program. The prime-time average for a thirty-second TV spot was $107,000 in 2015, down from an all-time high of $129,600 in the prerecession year 2005.12 (See “Case Study: Super Bowl, Supersized: $4.5 Billion in Ad Spending over 50 Years,” page 368.)
Trends in Online Advertising The earliest form of Web advertising appeared in the mid-1990s and featured banner ads, the printlike display ads that load across the top or side of a Web page. Since that time, other formats have emerged, including video ads, sponsorships, and “rich media”—like pop-up ads, pop-under ads, flash multimedia ads, and interstitials, which pop up in new screen windows as a user clicks to a new Web page. Other forms of Internet advertising include classified ads and e-mail ads. Unsolicited commercial e-mail—known as spam—accounted for more than 85 percent of e-mail messages by 2010.
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interstitials advertisements that pop up in a screen window as a user attempts to access a new Web page.
spam a computer term referring to unsolicited e-mail.
Paid search advertising has become the dominant format of Web advertising. Even though their original mission was to provide impartial search results, search sites such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing morphed over time into advertising companies, selling sponsored links associated with search terms and distributing online ads to affiliated Web pages.13 In 2016, Google revealed Analytics 360, its latest multiscreen strategy for helping advertisers better target consumers. According to the New York Times, “Analytics 360 involves figuring out someone’s habits over numerous screens, including desktop web surfing, television, and the web and app parts of smartphones. There are ways to tailor page designs for many of these screens, and place ads using both Google properties and third-party services.”14
Back in 2004, digital ads accounted for just over 4 percent of global ad spending. By 2007, that share had more than doubled to 9.3 percent. And by 2015, the Internet held a 29 percent share of worldwide ad spending, making it the second-largest global advertising medium, behind only television/cable. In the United States, the Internet accounted for 28.3 percent of ad spending in 2015, trailing only TV/cable at 36.5 percent.15
FIGURE 11.4
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SHARE OF GLOBAL AD SPENDING BY MEDIUM Data from: ZenithOptimedia, “Executive Summary: Advertising Expenditure Forecasts, June 2015,” www.zenithoptimedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Adspend-forecasts-June- 2015-executive-summary.pdf.
Online Advertising Challenges Traditional Media Because Internet advertising is the leading growth area, advertising mega-agencies have added digital media agencies and departments to develop and sell ads online. For example, WPP has 24/7 Media and Xaxis, Omnicom owns Proximity Worldwide, Publicis has DigitasLBi and Razorfish, and Interpublic operates R/GA. Realizing the potential of their online ad businesses, major Web services have also aggressively expanded into the advertising market by acquiring smaller Internet advertising agencies. Google bought DoubleClick, the biggest online ad server; Yahoo! purchased Right Media, which auctions online ad space; and Microsoft acquired aQuantive, an online ad server and network that enables advertisers to place ads on multiple Web sites with a single buy. Google, as the top search engine, has surpassed the traditional mega–ad agencies in revenue, earning $74 billion in 2015, with almost all of that coming from advertising. Facebook, the top social networking site, is not yet in Google’s league but remains a strong challenger, with over 1.5 billion users worldwide. Facebook earned nearly $18 billion in 2015, most of that profit also coming from ads.16
Facebook has made its biggest strides in mobile advertising. While Google accounted for the largest share of mobile ad revenue in 2014, earning $10 billion (and estimated to earn $16 billion in mobile ad revenue by 2017), Facebook finished second with nearly $6 billion in mobile ad sales (and that revenue is expected to top $10 billion by 2017). A distant third place in the 2014 mobile ad wars was Twitter, earning $700 million (and estimated to make $2.2 billion by 2017).17
As the Internet draws people’s attention away from traditional mass media, leading advertisers are moving more of their ad campaigns and budget dollars to digital media. For example, back in 2010, the CEO of consumer product giant Unilever—a company with more than four hundred brands (including Dove, Hellmann’s, and Lipton) and a multibillion-dollar advertising budget—doubled its spending on digital media, since customers were spending much more time on the Internet and mobile phones. “I think you need to fish where the fish are,” the Unilever CEO said. “So I’ve made it fairly clear that I’m driving Unilever to be at the leading edge of digital marketing.”18 With the average time of mobile use at one hour and thirty minutes per day in 2012, and set to rise to more than three hours per day by 2017, expect more and more ad dollars to chase those devices.19
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SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING is growing rapidly. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram gather a huge amount of information from their users every day, allowing advertisers to reach specific users by displaying ads for products related to those users’ unique preferences and behaviors. Courtesy of Facebook
Online Marketers Target Individuals Compared to ads in traditional media outlets, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, Internet ads offer many advantages to advertisers. Perhaps the biggest advantage—and potentially the most disturbing part for citizens—is that marketers can develop consumer profiles that direct targeted ads to specific Web site visitors. They do this by collecting information about each Internet user through cookies (see Chapter 2 for more on cookies) and online surveys. For example, when an ESPN.com contest requires you to fill out a survey to be eligible to win sports tickets, or when washingtonpost.com requires that you create an account for free access to the site, marketers use that information to build a profile about you. The cookies they attach to your profile allow them to track your activities on a certain site. They can also add to your profile by tracking what you search for and even by mining your profiles and data on social networking sites. Agencies can also add online and retail sales data (what you bought and where) to user profiles to create an unprecedented database, largely without your knowledge. Such data mining is a boon to marketers, but it is very troubling to consumer privacy advocates.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
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ADVERTISING IN THE DIGITAL AGE This video discusses how ads evolve to overcome resistance to advertising. Discussion: Do you recall many ads from the last few times you used the Internet? What do you think this might mean for advertisers?
Internet advertising agencies can also track ad impressions (how often ads are seen) and click-throughs (how often ads are clicked on). This provides advertisers with much more specific data on the number of people who not only viewed the ad but also showed real interest by clicking on it. For advertisers, online ads are more beneficial because they are more precisely targeted and easily measured. For example, an advertiser can use Google AdWords to create small ads that are linked to selected key words and geographic targeting (from global coverage to a small radius around a given location). AdWords tracks and graphs the performance of the ad’s key words (through click-through and sales rates) and lets the advertiser update the campaign at any time. This kind of targeted advertising enables smaller companies with a $500 ad budget, for example, to place their ads in the same location as larger companies with multimillion-dollar ad budgets.
Beyond computers, smartphones—the “third screen” for advertisers—are of increasing importance. Smartphones offer effective targeting to individuals, as does Internet advertising, but they also offer advertisers the bonus of tailoring ads according to either a specific geographic location (e.g., a restaurant ad goes to someone in close proximity) or the user’s demographic, since wireless providers already have that information. Google has also developed unique applications for mobile advertising and searching. For example, the Google Goggles smartphone app enables the user to take a photo of an object—such as a book cover, a landmark, a logo, or text—and then have Google return related search results. Google’s Voice Search app lets users speak their search terms. Such apps are designed to maintain Google’s dominant search engine position on mobile platforms as ad dollars move there and away from computer Web sites.
Advertising Invades Social Media Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, provide a wealth of data for advertisers to mine. These sites and apps create an unprecedented public display of likes, dislikes, locations, and other personal information. And advertisers are using such information to further refine their ability to send targeted ads that might interest users. Facebook and other sites (like Hulu) go even further by asking
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users if they like a particular ad. For example, clicking off a display ad in Facebook results in the question “Why didn’t you like it?” followed by the choices “uninteresting,” “misleading,” “offensive,” “repetitive,” and “other.” All that information goes straight back to advertisers so they can revise their advertising and try to engage you the next time. Beyond allowing advertisers to target and monitor their ad campaigns, most social media encourage advertisers to create their own online identity. For example, by 2016, the Ben & Jerry’s Facebook page had more than eight million “likes.” Despite appearances, such profiles and identities still constitute a form of advertising and serve to promote products to a growing online audience for virtually no cost.
SNAPCHAT’S 3V (“Vertical Video Views”) advertising strategy seeks to harness the app’s key strengths: its dominance on mobile devices and its ability to reach the highly sought-after thirteen- to twenty-four-year-old demographic. The smartphone- friendly ad strategy has proven effective. According to a 2016 study by research firm Millward Brown Digital, Snapchat users who saw 3V ads for the film Furious 7 were three times more likely to see the film than users who did not see the ad.
Companies and organizations also buy traditional paid advertisements on social media sites. A major objective of their paid media is to get earned media, or to convince online consumers to promote products on their own. Imagine that the National Resources Defense Council buys an ad on Facebook that attracts your interest. That’s a successful paid media ad for the council, but it’s even more effective if it becomes earned media—that is, when you mark that you “Like” it, you essentially give the organization a personal endorsement. Knowing you like the ad, your friends view it; as they pass it along, it gets more earned media and eventually becomes viral—an even greater advertising achievement. As the Nielsen Media rating service says about online earned media, “Study after study has shown that consumers trust their friends and peers more than anyone else when
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it comes to making a purchase decision.”20 Social media are helping advertisers use such personal endorsements to further their own products and marketing messages —basically, letting consumers do the work for them.
A recent controversy in online advertising is whether people have to disclose if they are being paid to promote a product. For example, bloggers often review products or restaurants as part of their content. Some bloggers with large followings have been paid (either directly or by gifts of free products or trips) to give positive reviews or promote products on their site. When such instances, dubbed “blog-ola” by the press, came to light in 2008 and 2009, the bloggers argued that they did not have to reveal that they were being compensated for posting their opinions. At the time, they were right. However, in 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released new guidelines that require bloggers to disclose when an advertiser is compensating them to discuss a product. In 2010, a similar controversy erupted when the FTC revealed that celebrities were being paid to tweet about their “favorite” products. In 2016, the FTC found Lord & Taylor in violation of the disclosure rules when the clothing company hired fifty bloggers (or “influencers”) to wear the same designer dress within days of one another: “The dress not only sold out, but these sponsored posts reached 11.4 million Instagram users.”21 The bloggers did not disclose that their posts were sponsored, that the expensive dresses had been “gifted” to them, and that in addition they earned between $1,000 and $4,000 each. The FTC fined Lord & Taylor an undisclosed amount.
One of Facebook’s more recent “ad ventures” is called “sponsored stories.” The way this works, according to the New York Times, is that companies, including Amazon, “pay Facebook to generate … automated ads” when a user clicks on the “Like” button for a Facebook participating brand partner or “references [the partner] in some other way.” Sponsors and product companies like this service because they save money, since “no creative work is involved.” However, in 2012, this practice resulted in Facebook’s settling a state of California class action suit out of court. The lead plaintiff in the case, a costume designer from Seattle, innocently clicked the “Like” button for an online language course offered by Rosetta Stone. Then several months later, according to the Times, “she showed up in an ad for Rosetta Stone on her friends’ Facebook pages.”22 Part of the case involved her resentment about not consenting to be used in an ad or receiving any compensation. As new ways to advertise or sponsor products through social media continue to develop, consumers need to keep a critical eye out for what is truly a friendly recommendation from a friend and what is advertising.
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PERSUASIVE TECHNIQUES IN CONTEMPORARY ADVERTISING
Ad agencies and product companies often argue that the main purpose of advertising is to inform consumers about available products in a straightforward way. Most consumer ads, however, merely create a mood or tell stories about products without revealing much else. A one-page magazine ad, a giant billboard, or a thirty-second TV spot gives consumers little information about how a product was made, how much it costs, or how it compares with similar brands. In managing space and time constraints, advertising agencies engage in a variety of persuasive techniques.
Conventional Persuasive Strategies One of the most frequently used advertising approaches is the famous-person testimonial, in which a product is endorsed by a well-known person. Famous endorsers include Justin Timberlake for Bud Light, Taylor Swift for Diet Coke, and Beyoncé for Pepsi. Athletes earn some of the biggest endorsement contracts. For example, in 2015, Golden State Warrior guard Steph Curry made $12 million in endorsements for Under Armour, Degree, Kaiser Permanente, and Brita, among other companies. When JPMorgan Chase also added Curry in 2016 (after buying the naming rights for Golden State’s new arena), the NBA’s top scorer was expected to challenge the Cleveland Cavalier’s LeBron James as the top-earning athlete, with more than $48 million in 2016.23
famous-person testimonial an advertising strategy that associates a product with the endorsement of a well-known person.
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FAMOUS-PERSON TESTIMONIALS Major stars used to be somewhat wary of appearing in ads (at least in the United States), but many brands now use celebrity endorsements. This recent Revlon campaign, for example, featured actress Emma Stone. Image Courtesy of The Advertising Archives
Another technique, the plain-folks pitch, associates a product with simplicity. Over the years, Volkswagen (“Drivers wanted”), General Electric (“We bring good things to life”), and Microsoft (“I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea”) have each used slogans that stress how new technologies fit into the lives of ordinary people. In a way, the Facebook technique of sponsored stories fits this model, since it depends on friends’ endorsements of products rather than the words or images of stars or athletes.
plain-folks pitch an advertising strategy that associates a product with simplicity and the common person.
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By contrast, the snob-appeal approach attempts to persuade consumers that using a product will maintain or elevate their social status. Advertisers selling jewelry, perfume, clothing, and luxury automobiles often use snob appeal. For example, the pricey bottled water brand Fiji ran ads in Esquire and other national magazines that said, “The label says Fiji because it’s not bottled in Cleveland”—a jab intended to favorably compare the water bottled in the South Pacific to the drinking water of an industrial city in Ohio. (Fiji ended up withdrawing the ad after the Cleveland Water Department released test data showing that its water was more pure than Fiji water.)
snob-appeal approach an advertising strategy that attempts to convince consumers that using a product will enable them to maintain or elevate their social station.
Another approach, the bandwagon effect, points out in exaggerated claims that everyone is using a particular product. Brands that refer to themselves as “America’s favorite” or “the best” imply that consumers will be left behind if they ignore these products. A different technique, the hidden-fear appeal, plays on consumers’ sense of insecurity. Deodorant, mouthwash, and shampoo ads frequently invoke anxiety, pointing out that only a specific product could relieve embarrassing personal hygiene problems and restore a person to social acceptability.
bandwagon effect an advertising strategy that uses exaggerated claims that everyone is using a particular product to encourage consumers to not be left behind.
hidden-fear appeal an advertising strategy that plays on a sense of insecurity, trying to persuade consumers that only a specific product can offer relief.
A final ad strategy, used more in local TV and radio campaigns than in national ones, has been labeled irritation advertising: creating product-name recognition by being annoying or obnoxious. Although both research and common sense
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suggest that irritating ads do not work very well, there have been exceptions. In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, an aspirin company ran a TV ad illustrating a hammer pounding inside a person’s brain. Critics and the product’s own agency suggested that people bought the product, which sold well, to get relief from the ad as well as from their headaches. On the regional level, irritation ads are often used by appliance discount stores or local car dealers, who dress in outrageous costumes and yell at the camera.
irritation advertising an advertising strategy that tries to create product-name recognition by being annoying or obnoxious.
The Association Principle Historically, American car advertisements have shown automobiles in natural settings—on winding roads that cut through rugged mountain passes or across shimmering wheat fields—but rarely on congested city streets or in other urban settings where most driving actually occurs. Instead, the car—an example of advanced technology—merges seamlessly into the natural world.
This type of advertising exemplifies the association principle, a widely used persuasive technique that associates a product with a positive cultural value or image even if it has little connection to the product. For example, many ads displayed visual symbols of American patriotism in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in an attempt to associate products and companies with national pride. Media critic Leslie Savan noted that in trying “to convince us that there’s an innate relationship between a brand name and an attitude,” advertising may associate products with nationalism, happy families, success at school or work, natural scenery, freedom, or humor.24
association principle in advertising, a persuasive technique that associates a product with some cultural value or image that has a positive connotation but may have little connection to the actual product.
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CASE STUDY
Super Bowl, Supersized: $4.5 Billion in Ad Spending over 50 Years Stats on Advertising in the Big Game from 1967 through 2016 BY BRADLEY JOHNSON
ow much money has been spent on advertising in the first fifty years of the Super Bowl? A total of $4.5 billion, according to
Ad Age’s analysis. Advertising’s biggest game gets more supersized every year. Ad spending for commercials during the game on Feb. 7’s Super Bowl 50 broadcast on CBS totaled a record $377 million, according to Ad Age Datacenter’s estimate. That’s more than was spent on the Super Bowl in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s combined ($299 million).
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More big game punting:
Total ad spending on commercials during the Super Bowl from 1967 through 2016, adjusted for inflation: $5.9 billion. Super Bowl 50’s estimated share of 2016 U.S. broadcast network TV ad spending: a record 2.4%, double the level in 2010 (1.2%), four times the level in 1995 (0.6%), and six times the level in 1990 (0.4%). Average cost for a 30-second commercial during Super Bowl 50: $4.8 million. Average cost of 30 seconds during Super Bowl I: $40,000 ($289,000, adjusted for inflation). Price per second for a 2016 spot: $160,000. That’s 120 times the average cost for a second during Super Bowl I ($1,333). Amount spent per viewer in 2015 on in-game advertising, based on estimated total ad spending divided by Nielsen’s average number of viewers: $3.02. Number of years that Super Bowl commercial prices fell: five (1971, 1996, 2003, 2007, and 2010). Biggest percentage increases in price of a commercial: 1968 (35%), the second year of the Super Bowl; and 2000 (31%), when Pets.com and sixteen other Internet upstarts shoveled cash from venture capital and stock offerings into the game
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amid the dot-com bubble.
Milestones in the price of a 30-second Super Bowl commercial:
1973: topped $100,000 1985: reached $500,000 1995: topped $1 million 2000: topped $2 million 2009: reached $3 million 2013: reached $4 million
Source: Adapted from Bradley Johnson, “Super Bowl, Supersized: $4.5 Billion in Ad Spending over 50 Years,” Advertising Age, January 26, 2016,
http://adage.com/article/news/super-bowl-supersized-4-5-b-ad-spending-50- years/302180/.
One of the more controversial uses of the association principle has been the linkage of products to stereotyped caricatures of women. In numerous instances, women have been portrayed either as sex objects or as clueless housewives who, during many a daytime TV commercial, need the powerful off-screen voice of a male narrator to instruct them in their own homes.
Another popular use of the association principle is to claim that products are “real” and “natural”—possibly the most familiar adjectives associated with advertising. For example, Coke sells itself as “the real thing,” and the cosmetics industry offers synthetic products that promise to make women look “natural.” The adjectives real and natural saturate American ads yet almost always describe
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processed or synthetic goods. Green marketing has a similar problem, as it is associated with goods and services that aren’t always environmentally friendly.
Philip Morris’s Marlboro brand has used the association principle to completely transform its product image. In the 1920s, Marlboro began as a fashionable women’s cigarette. Back then, the company’s ads equated smoking with a sense of freedom, attempting to appeal to women who had just won the right to vote. Marlboro, though, did poorly as a women’s product, and new campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s transformed the brand into a man’s cigarette. Powerful images of active, rugged men dominated the ads. Often, Marlboro associated its product with nature, displaying an image of a lone cowboy roping a calf, building a fence, or riding over a snow-covered landscape. In 2015, the branding consultancy BrandZ (a division of WPP) named Marlboro the world’s tenth “most valuable global brand,” having an estimated worth of $80 billion. (Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Visa ranked as the top five brand names in 2015.)
Disassociation as an Advertising Strategy As a response to corporate mergers and public skepticism toward impersonal and large companies, a disassociation corollary emerged in advertising. The nation’s largest winery, Gallo, pioneered the idea in the 1980s by establishing a dummy corporation, Bartles & Jaymes, to sell jug wine and wine coolers, thereby avoiding the use of the Gallo corporate image in ads and on its bottles. The ads featured Frank and Ed, two low-key, grandfatherly types, as “co-owners” and ad spokesmen. On the one hand, as a BusinessWeek article observed, the ad was “a way to connect with younger consumers who yearn for products that are handmade, quirky, and authentic.”25 On the other hand, this technique, by concealing the Gallo tie-in, allowed the wine giant to disassociate from the negative publicity of the 1970s—a period when labor leader Cesar Chavez organized migrant workers in a long boycott of Gallo.
Advertising as Myth and Story Another way to understand ads is to use myth analysis, which provides insights into how ads work at a general cultural level. Here, the term myth does not refer simply to an untrue story or outright falsehood. Rather, myths help us define people, organizations, and social norms. According to myth analysis, most ads are narratives with stories to tell and social conflicts to resolve. Three common mythical elements are found in many types of ads:
myth analysis a strategy for critiquing advertising that provides insights into how ads work on a cultural level; according to this strategy, ads are narratives with stories to tell and social
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conflicts to resolve.
1. Ads incorporate myths in mini-story form, featuring characters, settings, and plots.
2. Most stories in ads involve conflicts, pitting one set of characters or social values against another.
3. Such conflicts are negotiated or resolved by the end of the ad, usually by applying or purchasing a product. In advertising, the product and those who use it often emerge as the heroes of the story.
Even though the stories that ads tell are usually compressed into thirty seconds or onto a single page, they still include the traditional elements of narrative. For instance, many SUV ads ask us to imagine ourselves driving out into the raw, untamed wilderness, to a quiet, natural place that only, say, a Jeep can reach. The audience implicitly understands that the SUV can somehow, almost magically, take us out of our fast-paced, freeway-wrapped urban world, plagued with long commutes, traffic jams, and automobile exhaust. This implied conflict between the natural world and the manufactured world is apparently resolved by the image of the SUV in a natural setting. Although SUVs typically clog our urban and suburban highways, get low gas mileage, and create tons of air pollution particulates, the ads ignore those facts. Instead, they offer an alternative story about the wonders of nature, and the SUV amazingly becomes the vehicle that negotiates the conflict between city/suburban blight and the unspoiled wilderness.
Most advertisers do not expect consumers to accept without question the stories or associations they make in ads. As media scholar Michael Schudson observed in his book Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion, they do not “make the mistake of asking for belief.”26 Instead, ads are most effective when they create attitudes and reinforce values. Then they operate like popular fiction, encouraging us to suspend our disbelief. Although most of us realize that ads create a fictional world, we often get caught up in their stories and myths. Indeed, ads often work because the stories offer comfort about our deepest desires and conflicts—between men and women, nature and technology, tradition and change, the real and the artificial. Most contemporary consumer advertising does not provide much useful information about products. Instead, it tries to reassure us that through the use of familiar brand names, everyday tensions and problems can be managed (see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: The Branded You” on page 372).
Product Placement Product companies and ad agencies have become adept in recent years at product placement: strategically placing ads or buying space in movies, TV shows, comic books, video games, blogs, and music videos so that products appear as part of a
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story’s set environment. For example, a 2015 episode of Modern Family was told entirely through a character’s MacBook Pro and apps filmed on Apple devices, though the idea came from the show rather than from Apple. In 2013, the Superman movie Man of Steel had the most product placements ever for a film up to that time, with two-hundred-plus marketing partners in deals worth $160 million, including those with Hardee’s, Gillette, Sears, Nikon, Nokia, 7-Eleven, IHOP, and the National Guard.
For many critics, product placement has gotten out of hand. What started out as subtle appearances in realistic settings—like Reese’s Pieces in the 1982 movie E.T. —has turned into Coca-Cola’s being almost an honorary cast member on Fox’s American Idol set. The practice is now so pronounced that it was a subject of Hollywood parody in the 2006 film Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, starring Will Ferrell.
PRODUCT PLACEMENT in movies and television is more prevalent than ever. On television, placement is often most visible in reality shows, while scripted series and films tend to be more subtle—but not all the time. In the pictured scene from Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, a bag of Funyuns (a brand owned by Frito-Lay) featured prominently. Jessica Miglio/© Netflix/Everett Collection
In 2005, watchdog organization Commercial Alert asked both the FTC and the FCC to mandate that consumers be warned about product placement on television. The FTC rejected the petition, whereas the FCC proposed product placement rules but had still not approved them by the fall of 2016. In contrast, in 2007 the European Union approved product placement for television but required programs to alert viewers of such paid placements. In Britain, for example, the letter P must appear in the corner of the screen at commercial breaks and at the beginning and end of a show to signal product placements.27
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EXAMINING ETHICS
Do Alcohol Ads Encourage Binge Drinking?
ith clear evidence that cigarettes caused lung cancer, the tobacco industry in the early 1970s chose to pull all TV ads
for cigarettes, in part to ward off the planned increase in public service ads that the government and nonprofit agencies were airing about the dangers of smoking. Similarly, for decades ads for hard liquor (called “distilled spirits” by the industry) were not shown in TV markets across the United States for fear of igniting anti-alcohol public service spots warning about alcoholism and heavy drinking, and countering TV commercials. Some ads for hard liquor have reappeared in recent years, but not all channels or shows will air them; often they appear on late- night or specialized programming.
Beer ads, however, have never been interrupted and remain ubiquitous, usually associating beer drinking with young people, sex appeal, and general good times. As such, the debates over alcohol ads continue, especially in light of the ritual of binge drinking that has bedeviled universities throughout the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than forty-five hundred deaths a year result from underage and binge drinking, the latter of which is generally defined as six drinks or more in one sitting.
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BUD LIGHT attracted negative attention with a campaign about “turning no into yes,” evoking the language of sexual assault.
A Dartmouth University study released in 2015 and published in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics demonstrated that “alcohol ads have led to a risk in underage drinking and binge drinking.”1 The study, “Cued Recall of Alcohol Advertising on Television and Underage Drinking Behavior,” surveyed more than twenty-five hundred young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three in 2011 and then reinterviewed fifteen hundred of them in 2013.
In 2013, 66 percent of high school students said they had tried alcohol, whereas only 21 percent said they had engaged in binge drinking. However, 29 percent of the fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds reinterviewed after exposure to alcohol ads reported binge drinking. One coauthor of the study said, “It’s very strong evidence that underage drinkers are not only exposed to television advertising, but they also assimilate the messages. That process moves them forward in their drinking behavior.”2 Although the study argues that the efforts by hard liquor advertisers to protect young people from the messages in their ads are ineffective, the Distilled Spirits Council disagrees, saying that the Dartmouth study was “driven by advocacy, not science.”3
One ethical question raised by the 2015 study has to do with those who work in the ad business and the work they are asked to do. Many reputable ad agencies will ask new or potential employees if there are clients and products that they would not represent. Some agencies might specifically ask newly hired account executives if they would be willing to work for a tobacco or liquor company—or, given what they know about childhood obesity and the low nutrition content in many fast foods, sugared cereals, and popular sodas, if they could represent
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these types of products.
It might be a useful exercise, then, to ask yourself, Are there products or companies you would not work for or represent in some capacity? Why or why not? Would you be willing to represent tobacco companies that wanted to place ads in magazines or a hard liquor product that wanted to advertise on TV? Why or why not?
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
The Branded You
To what extent are you influenced by brands?
1 DESCRIPTION Take a look around your home or dormitory room and list all the branded products you’ve purchased, including food, electronics, clothes, shoes, toiletries, and cleaning products.
2 ANALYSIS Now organize your branded items into categories. For example, how many items of clothing are branded with athletic, university, or designer logos? What patterns emerge, and what kind of psychographic profile do these brands suggest about you? (As a reference, use the VALS chart on page 362).
3 INTERPRETATION Why did you buy each particular product? Was it because you thought it was of superior quality? Because it was cheaper? Because your parents used this
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product (so it was tried, trusted, and familiar)? Because it made you feel a certain way about yourself and you wanted to project this image toward others? Have you ever purchased items without brands or removed logos once you bought the product? Why?
4 EVALUATION As you become more conscious of our branded environment (and your participation in it), what is your assessment of U.S. consumer culture? Is there too much conspicuous branding? What is good and bad about the ubiquity of brand names in our culture? How does branding relate to the common American ethic of individualism?
5 ENGAGEMENT Visit Adbusters (www.adbusters.org) and read about action projects that confront commercialism, including Buy Nothing Day, Media Carta, TV Turnoff, the Culturejammers Network, the Blackspot nonbrand sneaker, and Unbrand America. Also visit the home page for the advocacy organization Commercial Alert (www.commercialalert.org) to learn about the most recent commercial incursions into everyday life and what can be done about them. Or write a letter to a company about a product or ad that you think is a problem. How does the company respond?
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http://www.commercialalert.org
COMMERCIAL SPEECH AND REGULATING ADVERTISING
In 1791, Congress passed and the states ratified the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, promising, among other guarantees, to “make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Over time, we have developed a shorthand label for the First Amendment, misnaming it the free-speech clause. The amendment ensures that citizens and journalists can generally say and write what they want, but it says nothing directly about commercial speech—any print or broadcast expression for which a fee is charged to organizations and individuals buying time or space in the mass media.
commercial speech any print or broadcast expression for which a fee is charged to the organization or individual buying time or space in the mass media.
Whereas freedom of speech refers to the right to express thoughts, beliefs, and opinions in the abstract marketplace of ideas, commercial speech is about the right to circulate goods, services, and images in the concrete marketplace of products. For most of the history of mass media, only very wealthy citizens established political parties, and only multinational companies could routinely afford to purchase speech that reached millions. The Internet, however, has helped level that playing field. Political speech, like a cleverly edited mash-up video, or entertaining speech, like a music video by California teenager Rebecca Black singing about the weekend (the infamous “Friday” video on YouTube), can go viral and quickly reach millions, rivaling the most expensive commercial speech.
Although the mass media have not hesitated to carry product and service- selling advertisements and have embraced the concepts of infomercials and cable home-shopping channels, they have also refused certain issue-based advertising that might upset their traditional advertisers. For example, although corporations have easy access in placing paid ads, many labor unions have had their print and broadcast ads rejected as “controversial.” The nonprofit Adbusters Media Foundation, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, has had difficulty getting networks to air its “uncommercials.” One of its spots promotes the Friday after Thanksgiving (traditionally, the beginning of the holiday shopping season) as Buy Nothing Day.
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ADBUSTERS MEDIA FOUNDATION This nonprofit organization based in Canada says its spoof ads, like the one shown here, are designed to “put out a better product and beat the corporations at their own game” (see www.adbusters.org). Besides satirizing the advertising appeals of the fashion, tobacco, alcohol, and food industries, the Adbusters Media Foundation sponsors Buy Nothing Day, an anticonsumption campaign that annually falls on the day after Thanksgiving—one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Courtesy of adbusters.org
Critical Issues in Advertising In his 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard expressed concern that advertising was manipulating helpless consumers, attacking our dignity, and invading “the privacy of our minds.”28 According to this view, the advertising industry was all-powerful. Although consumers have historically been regarded as dupes by many critics, research reveals that the consumer mind is not as easy to predict as some advertisers once thought. One of the most disastrous campaigns of all time featured the now-famous “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile” spots, which began running in 1989 and starred celebrities like former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr and his daughter. Oldsmobile (which became part of General Motors in 1908) and its ad agency, Leo Burnett, decided to market to a younger generation after sales declined from a high of 1.1 million vehicles in 1985 to only 715,000 in 1988. But the campaign backfired, apparently alienating its older loyal customers
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(who may have felt abandoned by Olds and its catchy new slogan) and failing to lure younger buyers (who probably still had trouble getting past the name Olds). In 2000, Oldsmobile sold only 260,000 cars; and by 2005, GM had phased out its Olds division.29
As this example illustrates, most people are not easily persuaded by advertising. Over the years, studies have suggested that between 75 and 90 percent of new consumer products typically fail because they are not embraced by the buying public.30 But despite public resistance to many new products, the ad industry has made contributions, including raising the American standard of living and financing most media industries. Yet serious concerns over the impact of advertising remain. Watchdog groups worry about the expansion of advertising’s reach, and critics continue to condemn ads that stereotype or associate products with sex appeal, youth, and narrow definitions of beauty. Some of the most serious concerns involve children, teens, and health.
Children and Advertising Children and teenagers, living in a culture dominated by TV ads, are often viewed as “consumer trainees.” For years, groups such as Action for Children’s Television (ACT) worked to limit advertising aimed at children. In the 1980s, ACT fought particularly hard to curb program-length commercials: thirty-minute cartoon programs (such as G.I. Joe, My Little Pony and Friends, The Care Bear Family, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe) developed for television syndication primarily to promote a line of toys. This commercial tradition continued with programs such as Pokémon and SpongeBob SquarePants.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Advertising and Effects on Children Scholars and advertisers analyze the effects of advertising on children. Discussion: In the video, some argue that using cute, kid-friendly imagery in ads can lead children to begin drinking; others dispute this claim. What do you think, and why?
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In addition, parent groups have worried about the heavy promotion of sugar- coated cereals and similar products during children’s programs. Pointing to European countries, where children’s advertising is banned, these groups have pushed to minimize advertising directed at children. Congress, hesitant to limit the protection that the First Amendment offers to commercial speech, and faced with lobbying by the advertising industry, has responded weakly. The Children’s Television Act of 1990 mandated that networks provide some educational and informational children’s programming, but the act has been difficult to enforce and has done little to restrict advertising aimed at kids.
Because children and teenagers influence nearly $500 billion a year in family spending—on everything from snacks to cars—they are increasingly targeted by advertisers.31 A Stanford University study found that a single thirty-second TV ad can influence the brand choices of children as young as age two. Still, the pull to use these methods for marketing to children is becoming increasingly seductive as product placement and merchandising tie-ins become more prevalent. Most recently, companies have used seemingly innocuous online games to sell products like breakfast cereal to children.
Advertising in Schools A controversial development in advertising was the introduction of Channel One into thousands of schools during the 1989–90 school year. The brainchild of Whittle Communications, Channel One offered “free” video and satellite equipment (tuned exclusively to Channel One) in exchange for a twelve-minute package of current events programming that included two minutes of commercials. Public pressure managed to get most junk-food ads removed from Channel One schools by 2006.
Over the years, the National Dairy Council and other organizations have also used schools to promote products, providing free filmstrips, posters, magazines, folders, and study guides adorned with corporate logos. Teachers, especially in underfunded districts, have usually been grateful for the support. Early on, however, Channel One was viewed as a more intrusive threat, violating the implicit cultural border between an entertainment situation (watching commercial television) and a learning situation (going to school). One study showed that schools with a high concentration of low-income students were more than twice as likely as affluent schools to receive Channel One.32
Texas and Ohio contain the highest concentrations of Channel One contracts, but many individual school districts and some state systems, including New York and California, have banned Channel One News. These school systems have argued that Channel One provides students with only slight additional knowledge about current affairs, and fear that students deem the products advertised— sneakers, clothing, cereal, and controversial sugar-flavored juices like SunnyD—
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more worthy of purchase because they are advertised in educational environments.33 A 2006 study found that students remember “more of the advertising than they do the news stories shown on Channel One.”34 Though it has changed owners several times over the past ten years, Channel One still reaches approximately five million students each school day.
Health and Advertising
Eating Disorders. Advertising has a powerful impact on the standards of beauty in our culture. A long-standing trend in advertising is the association of certain products with ultrathin female models, promoting a style of “attractiveness” that girls and women are invited to emulate. Even today, despite the popularity of fitness programs, most fashion models are much thinner than the average woman. Some forms of fashion and cosmetics advertising actually pander to individuals’ insecurities and low self- esteem by promising the ideal body. Such advertising suggests standards of style and behavior that may be not only unattainable but also harmful, leading to eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia and an increase in cosmetic surgeries.
If advertising has been criticized for promoting skeleton-like beauty, it has also been blamed for the tripling of obesity rates in the United States since the 1980s, with more than two-thirds of adult Americans identified in 2015 as being overweight or obese. Corn syrup–laden soft drinks, fast food, and processed food are the staples of media ads and are major contributors to the nationwide weight problem. More troubling is that because an obese nation is good for business (creating a multibillion-dollar market for diet products, exercise equipment, and self-help books), media outlets see little reason to change current ad practices. The food and restaurant industry at first denied any connection between ads and the rise of U.S. obesity rates, instead blaming individuals who make bad choices. Increasingly, however, fast-food chains are offering healthier meals and calorie counts on various food items.
Tobacco. One of the most sustained criticisms of advertising is its promotion of tobacco consumption. Opponents of tobacco advertising have become more vocal in the face of grim statistics: Each year, an estimated 400,000 Americans die from diseases related to nicotine addiction and poisoning. Tobacco ads disappeared from television in 1971, under pressure from Congress and the FCC. However, over the years, numerous ad campaigns have targeted teenage consumers of cigarettes. In 1988, for example, R. J. Reynolds, a subdivision of RJR Nabisco, updated its Joe Camel cartoon character, outfitting him with hipper clothes and sunglasses. Spending $75 million annually, the company put Joe on billboards and store posters and in sports stadiums and magazines. One study revealed that before 1988, fewer than 1 percent of teens under age eighteen smoked Camels. After the ad
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blitz, however, 33 percent of this age group preferred Camels. In addition to young smokers, the tobacco industry has targeted other groups.
In the 1960s, for instance, the advertising campaigns for Eve and Virginia Slims cigarettes (reminiscent of ads during the suffrage movement in the early 1900s) associated their products with women’s liberation, equality, and slim fashion models. And in 1989, R. J. Reynolds introduced a cigarette called Uptown, targeting African American consumers. The ad campaign fizzled due to public protests by black leaders and government officials. When these leaders pointed to the high concentration of cigarette billboards in poor urban areas and the high mortality rates among black male smokers, the tobacco company withdrew the brand.
The government’s position regarding the tobacco industry began to change in the mid-1990s, when new reports revealed that tobacco companies had known that nicotine was addictive as early as the 1950s and had withheld that information from the public. In 1998, after four states won settlements against the tobacco industry and the remaining states threatened to bring more expensive lawsuits against the companies, the tobacco industry agreed to an unprecedented $206 billion settlement, which carried significant limits on the advertising and marketing of tobacco products.
LIFESTYLE AD APPEALS TBWA (now a unit of Omnicom) introduced Absolut Vodka’s distinctive
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advertising campaign in 1980. The campaign marketed a little-known Swedish vodka as an exclusive lifestyle brand, an untraditional approach that parlayed it into one of the world’s best-selling spirits. The long-running ad campaign ended in 2006, with more than 1,450 ads serving to maintain the brand’s premium status by referencing fashion, artists, and contemporary music. The Advertising Archives
The agreement’s provisions banned cartoon characters in advertising, thus ending the use of the Joe Camel character; prohibited the industry from targeting young people in ads and marketing and from giving away free samples, tobacco- brand clothing, and other merchandise; and ended outdoor billboard and transit advertising. The agreement also banned tobacco company sponsorship of concerts and athletic events, and strictly limited its other corporate sponsorships. These provisions, however, do not apply to tobacco advertising abroad (but see “Global Village: Tough New Laws on Tobacco Advertising Lauded by WHO” on page 376).
Alcohol. In 2013 and 2014 in the United States, nearly ninety thousand people died from alcohol-related or alcohol-induced diseases, and another ten thousand died in car crashes involving drunk drivers. As you can guess, many of the same complaints regarding tobacco advertising are being directed at alcohol ads. (The hard liquor industry had voluntarily banned TV and radio ads for decades.) For example, one of the most popular beer ad campaigns of the late 1990s, featuring the Budweiser frogs (which croak “Budweis-errrr”), has been accused of using cartoonlike animal characters to appeal to young viewers. In fact, the Budweiser ads would be banned under the tough standards of the tobacco industry settlement, which prohibits the attribution of human characteristics to animals, plants, or other objects.
Alcohol ads have also targeted minority populations. Malt liquors, which contain higher concentrations of alcohol than beers do, have been touted in high- profile television ads for such labels as Colt 45 and Magnum. There is also a trend toward marketing high-end liquors to African American and Hispanic male populations. In a recent marketing campaign, Hennessy targeted young African American men with ads featuring hip-hop star Nas and sponsored events in Times Square and at the Governors Ball and Coachella music festivals. Hennessy also sponsored VIP parties with Latino deejays and hip-hop acts in Miami and Houston.
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B
Smoking Up the Global Market
y 2000, the status of tobacco companies and their advertising in the United States had hit a low point. A $206 billion settlement
in 1998 between tobacco companies and state attorneys general ended tobacco advertising on billboards and severely limited the ways in which cigarette companies can promote their products in the United States. Advertising bans and antismoking public service announcements contributed to tobacco’s growing disfavor in America, with smoking rates dropping from a high of 42.5 percent of the population in 1965 to just 18 percent fifty years later.
As Western cultural attitudes have turned against tobacco, the large tobacco multinationals have shifted their global marketing focus, targeting Asia in particular. Of the world’s more than 1 billion smokers, 120 million adults smoke in India, 125 million adults smoke in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam), and 350 million people smoke in China.1 Underfunded government health programs and populations that generally admire American and European cultural products make Asian nations ill-equipped to resist cigarette marketing efforts. For example, in spite of China’s efforts to control smoking (several Chinese cities have banned smoking in public places), recent studies have shown that nearly two-thirds of Chinese men and 10 percent of Chinese women are addicted to tobacco. Chinese women, who are now starting to smoke at increasing rates, are associating smoking with slimness, feminism, and independence.2
John van Hasselt–Corbis/Getty Images
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Advertising bans have actually forced tobacco companies to find alternative and, as it turns out, better ways to promote smoking. Philip Morris, the largest private tobacco company, and its global rival, British American Tobacco (BAT), practice “brand stretching”—linking their logos to race-car events, soccer leagues, youth festivals, concerts, TV shows, and popular cafés. The higher price for Western cigarettes in Asia has increased their prestige and has made packs of Marlboros symbols of middle-class aspiration.
The unmistakable silhouette of the Marlboro Man is ubiquitous throughout developing countries, particularly in Asia. In Hanoi, Vietnam, almost every corner boasts a street vendor with a trolley cart, the bottom half of which carries the Marlboro logo or one of the other premium foreign brands. Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City has two thousand such trolleys. Children in Malaysia are especially keen on Marlboro clothing, which, along with watches, binoculars, radios, knives, and backpacks, they can win by collecting a certain number of empty Marlboro packages. (It is now illegal to sell tobacco-brand clothing and merchandise in the United States.)
Sporting events have proved to be an especially successful brand- stretching technique with men. In addition to Philip Morris’s sponsorship of the Marlboro soccer league in China in the mid to late 1990s, cigarette ads flourished on Chinese television (in the United States, such ads have been banned by FCC rules since 1971). For the last twenty years, however, cigarette ads have been banned in China on TV and radio and in newspapers and magazines. But in 2014, the powerful government-controlled Chinese tobacco industry blocked a complete ban, according to Reuters, still permitting “cigarette product launches, and tobacco sponsorship for sporting events and schools.”3
Critics suggest that the same marketing strategies will make their way into the United States and other Western countries, but that’s unlikely. Tobacco companies are mainly interested in developing regions like Asia for two reasons. First, the potential market is staggering: Only one in twenty cigarettes now sold in China is a foreign brand, and women are just beginning to develop the habit. Second, many smokers in countries like China are unaware that smoking causes lung cancer. In fact, a million Chinese people die each year from tobacco-related health problems—around 50 percent of Chinese men will die before they are sixty-five years old, and lung cancer among Chinese women has increased by 30 percent in the past few years.4 Smoking is projected to cause about eight million deaths a year by 2030.5
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College students, too, have been heavily targeted by alcohol ads, particularly by the beer industry. Although colleges and universities have outlawed “beer bashes” hosted and supplied directly by major brewers, both Coors and Miller still employ student representatives to help “create brand awareness.” These students notify brewers of special events that might be sponsored by and linked to a specific beer label. The images and slogans in alcohol ads often associate the products with power, romance, sexual prowess, or athletic skill. In reality, though, alcohol is a chemical depressant; it diminishes athletic ability and sexual performance, triggers addiction in roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population, and factors into many domestic abuse cases. One national study demonstrated “that young people who see more ads for alcoholic beverages tend to drink more.”35
Prescription Drugs. Another area of concern is the surge in prescription drug advertising. Spending
on direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs increased from $266 million in 1994 to $4.5 billion in 2014—largely due to the growth in television advertising, which today accounts for about two-thirds of such ads. The ads have made household names of prescription drugs such as Nexium, Claritin, Paxil, and Viagra. The ads are also very effective: One survey found that nearly one in three adults has talked to a doctor, and one in eight has received a prescription in response to seeing an ad for a prescription drug.36 Between 2007 and 2011, direct- to-consumer TV advertising for prescription drugs dropped 23 percent—from $3.1 billion in 2007 to $2.3 billion in 2011—due both to doctors’ concerns about being pressured by patients who see the TV ads for new drugs and to notable recalls of heavily advertised drugs like Vioxx, a pain reliever that was later found to have harsh side effects. Still, in 2011, Pfizer spent $156 million on TV ads for Lipitor (a cholesterol-lowering drug that reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke), the highest amount spent for any prescription drug that year. But then, in 2012, spending rose again to over $3 billion.37
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CELEBRITY SPOKESPEOPLE In 2014, actress Nicole Kidman endorsed the “Ladymatic” watch by Omega. This Swiss luxury watchmaker frequently runs ad campaigns featuring celebrities—also including George Clooney, Daniel Craig, and Eddie Redmayne—which help maintain Omega’s public image as a sophisticated and elegant brand. George Rose/Getty Images
The tremendous growth of prescription drug ads brings the potential for false and misleading claims, particularly because a brief TV advertisement can’t possibly communicate all the relevant cautionary information. More recently, direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising has appeared in text messages and on Facebook. Pharmaceutical companies have also engaged in “disease awareness” campaigns to build markets for their products. As of 2014, the United States and New Zealand were the only two nations to allow prescription drugs to be advertised directly to consumers.
Watching Over Advertising A few nonprofit watchdog and advocacy organizations—Commercial Alert, as well as the Better Business Bureau and the National Consumers League— compensate in many ways for some of the shortcomings of the Federal Trade Commission and other government agencies in monitoring the excesses of commercialism and false and deceptive ads.
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Excessive Commercialism Since 1998, Commercial Alert—a nonprofit organization founded in part by longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader and based in Portland, Oregon—has been working to “limit excessive commercialism in society” by informing the public about the ways that advertising has crept out of its “proper sphere.” For example, Commercial Alert highlights the numerous deals for cross-promotion made between Hollywood studios and fast-food companies. These include Warner Brothers’ partnership with Hardee’s for Man of Steel, and DreamWorks Animation’s partnership with McDonald’s for family-friendly flicks like The Croods and How to Train Your Dragon 2.
These deals have not only helped movie studios make money in an era of reduced DVD sales but also helped movies reach audiences that traditional advertising can’t. As Jeffrey Godsick, president of consumer products at 21st Century Fox, has said, “We want to hit all the lifestyle points for consumers. Partners get us into places that are nonpurchasable (as media buys). McDonald’s has access to tens of millions of people on a daily basis—that helps us penetrate the culture.”38
Commercial Alert is a lonely voice in checking the commercialization of U.S. culture. Its other activities have included challenges to specific marketing tactics, such as HarperCollins Children’s Books’ creation of the Mackenzie Blue series— written by the founder of a marketing group aimed at teens—which included “dynamic corporate partnerships” in the form of product placements woven into the stories. In constantly questioning the role of advertising in democracy, the organization has aimed to strengthen noncommercial culture and limit the amount of corporate influence on publicly elected government bodies.
The FTC Takes on Puffery and Deception Since the days when Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound promised “a sure cure for all female weakness,” false and misleading claims have haunted advertising. Over the years, the FTC, through its truth-in-advertising rules, has played an investigative role in substantiating the claims of various advertisers. A certain amount of puffery—ads featuring hyperbole and exaggeration—has usually been permitted, particularly when a product says it is “new and improved.” However, ads become deceptive when they are likely to mislead reasonable consumers based on statements in the ad or because they omit information. Moreover, when a product claims to be “the best,” “the greatest,” or “preferred by four out of five doctors,” FTC rules require scientific evidence to back up those claims.
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GREEN ADVERTISING In response to increased consumer demand, companies have been developing and advertising green, or environmentally conscious, products to attract customers who want to lessen their environmental impact. How effective is this ad for you? What shared values do you look for or respond to in advertising? Rudi Von Briel/Photo Edit
Some famous examples of deceptive advertising have included the Campbell Soup TV ad in which marbles in the bottom of a soup bowl forced more bulky ingredients—and less water—to the surface. In another instance, a 1990 Volvo commercial featured a monster truck driving over a line of cars and crushing all but the Volvo; the company later admitted that the Volvo had been specially reinforced and the other cars’ support columns had been weakened. Finally, a more subtle form of deception featured the Klondike Lite ice cream bar—“the 93 percent fat- free dessert with chocolate-flavored coating.” The bars were indeed 93 percent fat- free—but only after the chocolate coating was removed.39
In 2003, the FTC brought enforcement actions against companies marketing the herbal weight-loss supplement ephedra. Ephedra has a long-standing connection to elevated blood pressure, strokes, and heart attacks and has contributed to numerous deaths. Nevertheless, companies advertised ephedra as a safe and miraculous weight-loss supplement and, incredibly, as “a beneficial treatment for hypertension and coronary disease.” According to the FTC, one
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misleading ad said, “Teacher loses 70 pounds in only eight weeks…. This is how over one million people have safely lost millions of pounds! No calorie counting! No hunger! Guaranteed to work for you too!” As the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection summed up, “There is no such thing as weight loss in a bottle. Claims that you’ll lose substantial amounts of weight and still eat everything you want are simply false.”40 In 2004, the United States banned ephedra.
When the FTC discovers deceptive ads, it usually requires advertisers to change them or remove them from circulation. The FTC can also impose monetary civil penalties for companies, and it occasionally requires an advertiser to run spots to correct the deceptive ads.
Alternative Voices One of the provisions of the government’s multibillion-dollar settlement with the tobacco industry in 1998 established a nonprofit organization with the mission to counteract tobacco marketing and reduce youth tobacco use. That mission became a reality in 2000, when the American Legacy Foundation launched its antismoking/anti–tobacco industry ad campaign called “Truth.”
ALTERNATIVE ADS In 2005, “Truth,” the national youth smoking prevention campaign, won an Emmy Award in the National Public Service Announcement category. “Truth” ads were created by the ad firms of Arnold Worldwide of Boston and Crispin Porter & Bogusky of Miami. Courtesy TRUTH/American Legacy Foundation
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Working with a coalition of ad agencies, a group of teenage consultants, and a $300 million budget, the foundation created a series of stylish, gritty print and television ads that deconstruct the images that have long been associated with cigarette ads—macho horse country, carefree beach life, sexy bar scenes, and daring skydives. These ads show teens dragging, piling, or heaving body bags across the beach or onto a horse, and holding up signs that say “What if cigarette ads told the Truth?” Other ads show individuals with lung cancer (“I worked where people smoked. I chose not to. But I got lung cancer anyway”) or illustrate how many people are indirectly touched by tobacco deaths (“Yeah, my grandfather died April last year”).
The TV and print ads prominently reference the foundation’s Web site, www.thetruth.com, which offers statistics, discussion forums, and outlets for teen creativity. For example, the site provides facts about addiction (more than 80 percent of all adult smokers started smoking before they turned eighteen) and tobacco money (tobacco companies make $1.8 billion from underage sales) and urges site visitors to organize the facts in their own customized folders. By 2007, with its jarring messages and cross-media platform, the “Truth” anti-tobacco campaign was recognized by 80 percent of teens and was ranked in the Top 10 “most memorable teen brands.”41 The “Truth” campaign at least partly explains the reported decline in teen smoking. Back in 2000, according to University of Michigan studies, 23 percent of all teens said they smoked. In 2016, that figure was down to 7 percent.42
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ADVERTISING, POLITICS, AND DEMOCRACY
Advertising as a profession came of age in the twentieth century, facilitating the shift of U.S. society from production-oriented small-town values to consumer- oriented urban lifestyles. With its ability to create consumers, advertising became the central economic support system for our mass media industries. Through its seemingly endless supply of pervasive and persuasive strategies, advertising today saturates the cultural landscape. Products now blend in as props or even as “characters” in TV shows and movies. In addition, almost every national consumer product now has its own Web site to market itself to a global audience 365 days a year. With today’s digital technology, ad images can be made to appear in places where they don’t really exist. For example, advertisements can be superimposed on the backstop wall behind the batter during a nationally televised baseball broadcast. Viewers at home see the ads, but fans at the game do not.
Advertising’s ubiquity, especially in the age of social media, raises serious questions about our privacy and the ease with which companies can gather data on our consumer habits. But an even more serious issue is the influence of ads on our lives as democratic citizens. With fewer and fewer large media conglomerates controlling advertising and commercial speech, what is the effect on free speech and political debate? In the future, how easy will it be to get heard in a marketplace where only a few large companies control access to that space?
Advertising’s Role in Politics Since the 1950s, political consultants have been imitating market-research and advertising techniques to sell their candidates, giving rise to political advertising, the use of ad techniques to promote a candidate’s image and persuade the public to adopt a particular viewpoint. In the early days of television, politicians running for major offices either bought or were offered half-hour blocks of time to discuss their views and the issues of the day. As advertising time became more valuable, however, local stations and the networks became reluctant to give away time in large chunks. Gradually, TV managers began selling thirty-second spots to political campaigns, just as they sold time to product advertisers.
political advertising the use of ad techniques to promote a candidate’s image and persuade the public to adopt a particular viewpoint.
During the 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, third-party candidate Ross
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Perot restored the use of the half-hour time block when he ran political infomercials on cable and the networks. In 2008, Barack Obama also ran a half- hour infomercial; and in the 2012 presidential race, both major candidates and various political organizations supporting them ran many online infomercials that were much longer than the standard thirty- to sixty-second TV spot. However, only very wealthy or well-funded candidates can afford such promotional strategies, and television does not usually provide free airtime to politicians. Questions about political ads continue to be asked: Can serious information on political issues be conveyed in thirty-second spots? Do repeated attack ads, which assault another candidate’s character, so undermine citizens’ confidence in the electoral process that they stop voting?43 And how does a democratic society ensure that alternative political voices, which are not well financed or commercially viable, still receive a hearing?
Although broadcasters use the public’s airwaves, they have long opposed providing free time for political campaigns and issues, since political advertising is big business for television stations. In the historic 2008 election, more than $5.28 billion was spent on advertising by all presidential and congressional candidates and interest groups. In 2012 (with a total of $6.28 billion spent on all elections), more than $1.1 billion alone went to local broadcast TV stations in the twelve most highly contested states, with local cable raking in another $200 million in those states.44 In 2016, estimates suggested that nearly $10 billion would be spent on political advertising during the election season, with $7 billion going to broadcast and cable TV alone and another $1 billion-plus going to digital ads.45
The Future of Advertising Although commercialism—through packaging both products and politicians—has generated cultural feedback that is often critical of advertising’s pervasiveness, the growth of the industry has not diminished. Ads continue to fascinate. Many consumers buy magazines or watch the Super Bowl just for the advertisements. Adolescents decorate their rooms with their favorite ads and identify with the images certain products convey. In 2014, the fifth straight year of increases, advertising spending in the United States totaled more than $140 billion.46
A number of factors have made possible advertising’s largely unchecked growth. Many Americans tolerate advertising as a “necessary evil” for maintaining the economy, but many dismiss advertising as not believable and trivial. As a result, unwilling to admit its centrality to global culture, many citizens do not think advertising is significant enough to monitor or reform. Such attitudes have ensured advertising’s pervasiveness and suggest the need to escalate our critical vigilance.
As individuals and as a society, we have developed an uneasy relationship with advertising. Favorite ads and commercial jingles remain part of our cultural world for a lifetime, yet we detest irritating and repetitive commercials. We realize that without ads, many mass media would need to reinvent themselves. At the same time, we should remain critical of what advertising has come to represent: the
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overemphasis on commercial acquisitions and images of material success, and the disparity between those who can afford to live comfortably in a commercialized society and those who cannot.
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11 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the commercial nature of mass media. The U.S. media system, due to policy choices made in the early and mid-twentieth century, was built largely on a system of commercial sponsorship. Consumers’ acceptance of this arrangement was based on a sense that media content and sponsors should remain independent of each other. In other words, sponsors and product companies should not control and create media content. Today, is that line between media content and advertising shifting—or even completely disappearing?
Although media consumers have not always been comfortable with advertising, they developed a resigned acceptance of it because it “pays the bills” of the media system. Yet media consumers have their limits. Moments in which sponsors stepped over the usual borders of advertising into the realm of media content— including the TV quiz-show and radio payola scandals, complimentary newspaper reports about advertisers’ businesses, product placement in TV shows and movies, and now “sponsored stories” on Facebook—have generated the greatest legal and ethical debates about advertising.
Still, as advertising has become more pervasive and consumers have become more discriminating, ad practitioners have searched for ways to weave their work more seamlessly into the cultural fabric. Products now blend in as props or even as “characters” in TV shows and movies. Search engines deliver paid placements along with regular search results. Product placements are woven into video games. Advertising messages can also be the subject of viral videos—and consumers do the work of distributing the message.
Among the more intriguing efforts to become enmeshed in the culture are the ads that exploit, distort, or transform the political and cultural meanings of popular music. When Nike used the Beatles’ song “Revolution” (1968) to promote Nike shoes in 1987 (“Nike Air is not a shoe … it’s a revolution,” the ad said), many music fans were outraged to hear the Beatles’ music being used for the first time to sell products.
That was more than twenty-five years ago. These days, having a popular song
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used in a TV commercial is considered a good career move for musicians—even better than radio airplay. Similarly, while product placement in TV shows and movies was hotly debated in the 1980s and 1990s, the explosive growth of paid placements in video games hardly raises an eyebrow today. Even the lessons of the quiz-show scandals, which forced advertisers out of TV program production in the late 1950s, are forgotten or ignored today as advertisers have been warmly invited to help develop TV programs.
Are we as a society giving up on trying to set limits on the never-ending onslaught of advertising? Are we weary of trying to keep advertising out of media production? How do we feel about the growing encroachment of ads into social networks like Facebook and Twitter? Why do we now seem less concerned about the integration of advertising into the core of media culture?
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
product placement, 353 space brokers, 354 subliminal advertising, 357 slogan, 357 mega-agencies, 358 boutique agencies, 358 market research, 360 Values and Lifestyles (VALS), 360 storyboard, 361 viral marketing, 361 media buyers, 361 saturation advertising, 363 interstitials, 363 spam, 366 famous-person testimonial, 366 plain-folks pitch, 367 snob-appeal approach, 367 bandwagon effect, 367
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hidden-fear appeal, 367 irritation advertising, 367 association principle, 367 myth analysis, 369 commercial speech, 372 political advertising, 380
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
Early Developments in American Advertising 1. Whom did the first ad agents serve? 2. How did packaging and trademarks influence advertising? 3. Explain why patent medicines and department stores figured so
prominently in advertising in the late nineteenth century. 4. What role did advertising play in transforming America into a
consumer society? The Shape of U.S. Advertising Today
5. What influences did visual culture exert on advertising? 6. What are the differences between boutique agencies and mega-
agencies? 7. What are the major divisions at most ad agencies? What is the
function of each department? 8. What are the advantages of Internet and mobile advertising over
traditional media, like newspapers and television? Persuasive Techniques in Contemporary Advertising
9. How do the common persuasive techniques used in advertising work?
10. How does the association principle work, and why is it an effective way to analyze advertising?
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11. What is the disassociation corollary? 12. What is product placement? Cite examples. Commercial Speech and Regulating Advertising 13. What is commercial speech? 14. What are four serious contemporary issues regarding health and
advertising? Why is each issue controversial? 15. What is the difference between puffery and deception in
advertising? How can the FTC regulate deceptive ads? Advertising, Politics, and Democracy 16. What are some of the major issues involving political
advertising? 17. What role does advertising play in a democratic society?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. What is your earliest recollection of watching a television commercial? Do you think the ad had a significant influence on you?
2. Why are so many people critical of advertising? 3. If you were (or are) a parent, what strategies would you use to explain
an objectionable ad to your child or teenager? Use an example. 4. Should advertising aimed at children be regulated? Support your
response. 5. Should tobacco or alcohol advertising be prohibited? Why or why
not? How would you deal with First Amendment issues regarding controversial ads?
6. Would you be in favor of regular advertising on public television and radio as a means of financial support for these media? Explain your answer.
7. Is advertising at odds with the ideals of democracy? Why or why not?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses
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gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter. VIDEO: BLURRING THE LINES: MARKETING PROGRAMS ACROSS PLATFORMS An executive for MTV New Media explores how recent television programs blur the line between scripted and reality shows—and how MTV markets online to reach today’s younger viewers.
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12 Public Relations and Framing the Message
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Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Parkwood Entertainment/Getty Images
THE BUSINESS OF MASS MEDIA
TRADITIONALLY, PUBLIC RELATIONS (PR)
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professionals try to influence audiences, often by attempting to gain positive coverage in the news media. Social media like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Tumblr have shortened the path of communication; now PR pros can communicate directly with their audience—as can many of their famous clients. Celebrities have more carefully developed incredibly strong followings through social media. Taylor Swift has 74.8 million Facebook “Likes,” 77.2 million Twitter followers, and almost 77 million Instagram fans. Fellow diva Beyoncé has 64.4 million Facebook “Likes,” 14 million Twitter followers, and more than 70 million Instagram fans.
EARLY DEVELOPMENTS IN PUBLIC RELATIONS THE PRACTICE OF PUBLIC RELATIONS TENSIONS BETWEEN PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE PRESS PUBLIC RELATIONS AND DEMOCRACY
◄ With the help of a skilled PR team and due in part to the popularity of The Fast and the Furious franchise, Vin Diesel, pictured here, is ranked the third-biggest celebrity on Facebook.
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And then there’s Vin Diesel. Although he doesn’t quite have the same standing in traditional media as does, say, Taylor Swift, he qualifies as a superstar on social media. On Facebook, he is the world’s third-biggest celebrity, with more than 99 million “Likes,” trailing only World Cup soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo and singer Shakira. Diesel doesn’t do Twitter, but he has 21.1 million Instagram followers and a popular Web site, vindiesel.com. Diesel’s social media popularity provides some clues about the incredible popularity of the Fast and Furious movie franchise. The huge success of the seventh installment’s opening in April 2015 took many industry watchers by surprise. In just seventeen days, the movie earned more than $1 billion worldwide, a record pace in crossing that mark at the time. To get demand high, the movie studio, Universal, and many stars of the franchise had built a growing community of fans. It didn’t hurt that the cast itself was a rare one, in that it “reflected the reality of our country’s racial makeup,” as noted by Entertainment Weekly.1 A wide range of audience members can identify with the racial and ethnic backgrounds of the large ensemble cast, which includes Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Jason Statham, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Tatchakorn Yeerum, Sung Kang, and Romeo Santos. Many of these stars had also been building a fan base at least since the first film, The Fast and the Furious, in 2001. For example, after Vin Diesel (#3 on the Facebook list) comes a number of other Facebook stars: Dwayne Johnson (#22), Jason Statham (#25), and Wiz Khalifa (#41, who performed the film’s theme song, “See You Again,” which became a No. 1 hit). Romeo Santos and Tyrese Gibson each have more than 30 million followers, enough to land them in the top 100 Facebook celebrity rankings. It is likely that no other film has had a cast with as many top Facebook celebrities. Among movie sites on Facebook, the Fast and Furious page ranked #2, with more than 57 million “Likes.” With such a built-in fan base and long-running characters, it should not have been surprising that the seventh film did so well at the box office. But it wasn’t an easy journey. Tragedy hit the production of the movie with an off- set car accident in November 2013 that killed star Paul Walker. As the Guardian recounted, Walker’s death left Universal in a difficult position in finishing the film and also handling his passing with sensitivity. The studio’s strategy was to use social media to reach out to fans:
Universal issued three messages via social media during a seven-month period immediately after Walker’s death, until Fast & Furious 7 wrapped in July 2014. The correspondence was respectful and illustrated the uncommon dialogue the studio, Vin Diesel, and other cast members have enjoyed with the films’ audience. Fast and Furious had built up a cinematic superpower over 14 years, a borderless social media tribe of millions.2
In 2015, Furious 7 surpassed $1.5 billion in international box-office receipts, while the franchise’s box-office earnings totaled more than $3.8 billion. And the
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franchise continues, with more sequels planned for release in 2017, 2019, and 2021.3 Universal didn’t build this franchise on a big star; rather, it built it on a big audience, one that it and the movie’s cast had been developing for years through social media.
THE VIN DIESEL STORY ILLUSTRATES A MAJOR DIFFERENCE between advertising and public relations: Advertising is controlled publicity that a company or an individual buys; public relations attempts to secure favorable media publicity (which is more difficult to control) to promote a company or client.
Public relations covers a wide array of practices, such as shaping the public image of a politician or celebrity, establishing or repairing communication between consumers and companies, and promoting government agencies and actions, especially during wartime. Broadly defined, public relations refers to the total communication strategy conducted by a person, a government, or an organization attempting to reach and persuade an audience to adopt a point of view.4 While public relations may sound very similar to advertising, which also seeks to persuade audiences, it is a different skill in a variety of ways. Advertising uses simple and fixed messages (e.g., “our appliance is the most efficient and affordable”) that are transmitted directly to the public through the purchase of ads. Public relations involves more complex messages that may evolve over time (e.g., a political campaign or a long-term strategy to dispel unfavorable reports about “fatty processed foods”) and that may be transmitted to the public indirectly, often through the news media.
public relations the total communication strategy conducted by a person, a government, or an organization attempting to reach and persuade its audiences to adopt a point of view.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
The social and cultural impact of public relations has been immense. In its infancy, PR helped convince many American businesses of the value of nurturing the public, whose members became purchasers rather than producers of their own goods after the Industrial Revolution. PR set the tone for the corporate image-
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building that characterized the economic environment of the twentieth century and for the battles of organizations taking sides on today’s environmental, energy, and labor issues. Perhaps PR’s most significant effect, however, has been on the political process, in which individuals and organizations—on both the Right and the Left—hire spin doctors to shape their media images.
In this chapter, we will:
Study the impact of public relations and the historical conditions that affected its development as a modern profession Look at nineteenth-century press agents and the role that railroad and utility companies played in developing corporate PR Consider the rise of modern PR, particularly the influences of former reporters Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays Explore the major practices and specialties of public relations Examine the reasons for the long-standing antagonism between journalists and members of the PR profession, and the social responsibilities of public relations in a democracy
As you read through this chapter, think about what knowledge you might already have about what public relations practitioners do, given that PR is an immensely powerful media industry and yet remains largely invisible. Can you think of a company or an organization, either national (like BP) or local (like your university or college), that might have engaged the help of a public relations team to handle a crisis? What did the team do to make the public trust the organization more? When you see political campaign coverage, are you sometimes aware of the spin doctors who are responsible for making sure their candidate says or does the “right” thing at the “right” time to foster the most favorable public image that will gain the candidate the most votes? For more questions to help you understand the role of public relations in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
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EARLY DEVELOPMENTS IN PUBLIC RELATIONS
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States shifted to a consumer- oriented, industrial society, which fostered the development of new products and services as people moved to cities to find work. During this transformation from farm to factory, advertising and PR emerged as professions. While advertising drew attention and customers to new products, PR began in part to help businesses fend off increased scrutiny from the muckraking journalists and emerging labor unions of the time.5
The first PR practitioners were simply theatrical press agents: those who sought to advance a client’s image through media exposure, primarily via stunts staged for newspapers. The advantages of these early PR techniques soon became obvious. For instance, press agents were used by people like Daniel Boone, who engineered various land-grab and real estate ventures, and Davy Crockett, who in addition to performing heroic exploits was involved in the massacre of Native Americans. Such individuals often wanted press agents to repair and reshape their reputations as cherished frontier legends or as respectable candidates for public office.
press agent the earliest type of public relations practitioner, who seeks to advance a client’s image through media exposure.
P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill The most notorious press agent of the nineteenth century was Phineas Taylor (P. T.) Barnum, who used gross exaggeration, fraudulent stories, and staged events to secure newspaper coverage for his clients, his American Museum, and later his circus. Barnum’s circus, dubbed “The Greatest Show on Earth,” included the “midget” General Tom Thumb, Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, Jumbo the Elephant, and Joice Heth (who Barnum claimed was the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington but who was actually 80 when she died). These performers became some of the earliest nationally known celebrities because of Barnum’s skill in using the media for promotion. Decrying outright fraud and cheating, Barnum understood that his audiences liked to be tricked. In newspapers and on handbills, he later often revealed the strategies behind his more elaborate hoaxes.
From 1883 to 1916, William F. Cody, who once killed buffalo for the railroads, promoted himself and his traveling show: “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” Cody’s troupe—which featured bedouins,
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Cossacks, and gauchos, as well as “cowboys and Indians”—re-created dramatic gunfights, the Civil War, and battles of the Old West. The show employed sharpshooter Annie Oakley and Lakota medicine man Sitting Bull, whose legends were partially shaped by Cody’s nine press agents. These agents were led by John Burke, who successfully promoted the show for its entire thirty-four-year run. Burke was one of the first press agents to use a wide variety of media channels to generate publicity: promotional newspaper stories, magazine articles and ads, dime novels, theater marquees, poster art, and early films. Burke and Buffalo Bill shaped many of the lasting myths about rugged American individualism and frontier expansion that were later adopted by books, radio programs, and Hollywood films depicting the American West. Along with Barnum, they were among the first to use publicity—a type of PR communication that uses various media messages to spread information about a person, a corporation, an issue, or a policy—to elevate entertainment culture to an international level.
publicity in public relations, the positive and negative messages that spread controlled and uncontrolled information about a person, a corporation, an issue, or a policy in various media.
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EARLY PUBLIC RELATIONS Originally called “P. T. Barnum’s Great Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Hippodrome,” Barnum’s circus merged with Bailey’s circus in 1881 and again with the Ringling Bros. in 1919. Even with the ups and downs of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus over the decades, Barnum’s original catchphrase, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” endures to this day. The Advertising Archives
Big Business and Press Agents As P. T. Barnum, Buffalo Bill, and John Burke demonstrated, utilizing the press brought with it enormous power to sway the public and to generate business. So it is not surprising that during the nineteenth century, America’s largest industrial companies—particularly the railroads—also employed press agents to win favor in the court of public opinion.
The railroads began to use press agents to help them obtain federal funds. Initially, local businesses raised funds to finance the spread of rail service. Around 1850, however, the railroads began pushing for federal subsidies, complaining that local fund-raising efforts took too long. For example, Illinois Central was one of the first companies to use government lobbyists (people who try to influence the voting of lawmakers) to argue that railroad service between the North and the South was in the public interest and would ease tensions, unite the two regions, and prevent a war.
The railroad press agents successfully gained government support by developing some of the earliest publicity tactics. Their first strategy was simply to buy favorable news stories about rail travel from newspapers through direct bribes. Another practice was to engage in deadheading—giving reporters free rail passes with the tacit understanding that they would write glowing reports about rail travel. Eventually, wealthy railroads received the federal subsidies they wanted and increased their profits, while the American public shouldered much of the financial burden of rail expansion.
Having obtained construction subsidies, the larger rail companies turned their attention to bigger game—persuading the government to control rates and reduce competition, especially from smaller, aggressive regional lines. Railroad lobbyists argued that federal support would lead to improved service and guaranteed quality because the government would be keeping a close watch. These lobbying efforts, accompanied by favorable publicity, led to passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, the first federal law to regulate private industry, which required railroads to publicize their shipping rates, banned special lower rates for certain freights or passengers, and established a commission to oversee enforcement of the law.6 Historians have argued that, ironically, the PR campaign’s success actually led to the decline of the railroads: Artificially maintained higher rates and burdensome government regulations forced smaller firms out of business and eventually drove many customers to other modes of transportation.
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The Birth of Modern Public Relations By the first decade of the twentieth century, reporters and muckraking journalists were investigating the promotional practices behind many companies. As an informed citizenry paid more attention, it became increasingly difficult for large firms to fool the press and mislead the public. With the rise of the middle class, increasing literacy among the working classes, and the spread of information through print media, democratic ideals began to threaten the established order of business and politics—and the elite groups who managed them. Two pioneers of public relations—Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays—emerged in this atmosphere to popularize an approach that emphasized shaping the interpretation of facts and “engineering consent.”
Ivy Ledbetter Lee Most nineteenth-century corporations and manufacturers cared little about public sentiment. By the early 1900s, though, executives had realized that their companies could sell more products if they were associated with positive public images and values. Into this public space stepped Ivy Ledbetter Lee, considered one of the founders of modern public relations. Lee understood that the public’s attitude toward big corporations had changed. He counseled his corporate clients that honesty and directness were better PR devices than the deceptive practices of the nineteenth century, which had fostered suspicion and an anti-big-business sentiment.
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IVY LEE, a founding father of public relations (above), did more than just crisis work with large companies and business magnates. His PR work also included clients like transportation companies in New York City (above right) and aviator Charles Lindbergh. Bettmann/Getty Images
A minister’s son, an economics student at Princeton University, and a former reporter, Lee opened one of the first PR firms in the early 1900s with George Park. Lee quit the firm in 1906 to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad, which, following a rail accident, hired him to help downplay unfavorable publicity. Lee’s advice, however, was that Penn Railroad admit its mistake, vow to do better, and let newspapers in on the story. These suggestions ran counter to the then standard practice of hiring press agents to manipulate the media, yet Lee argued that an open relationship between business and the press would lead to a more favorable public image. In the end, Penn and subsequent clients, notably John D. Rockefeller, adopted Lee’s successful strategies.
By the 1880s, Rockefeller controlled 90 percent of the nation’s oil industry and suffered from periodic image problems, particularly after Ida Tarbell’s powerful muckraking series about the ruthless business tactics practiced by Rockefeller and his Standard Oil Company appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1904. The Rockefeller and Standard Oil reputations reached a low point in April 1914, when tactics to stop union organizing erupted in tragedy at a coal company in Ludlow, Colorado. During a violent strike, fifty-three workers and their family members died, including thirteen women and children.
Lee was hired to contain the damaging publicity fallout. He immediately distributed a series of “fact” sheets to the press, telling the corporate side of the
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story and discrediting the tactics of the United Mine Workers, who had organized the strike. As he had done for Penn Railroad, Lee also brought in the press and staged photo opportunities. John D. Rockefeller Jr., who now ran the company, donned overalls and a miner’s helmet and posed with the families of workers and union leaders. This was probably the first use of a PR campaign in a labor-versus- management dispute. Over the years, Lee completely transformed the wealthy family’s image, urging the discreet Rockefellers to publicize their charitable work. To improve his image, the senior Rockefeller took to handing out dimes to children wherever he went—a strategic ritual that historians attribute to Lee.
Called “Poison Ivy” by corporate foes and critics within the press, Lee had a complex understanding of facts. For Lee, facts were elusive and malleable, begging to be forged and shaped. “Since crowds do not reason,” he noted in 1917, “they can only be organized and stimulated through symbols and phrases.”7 In the Ludlow case, for instance, Lee noted that the women and children who died while retreating from the charging company-backed militia had overturned a stove, which caught fire and caused their deaths. One of his PR fact sheets implied that they had, in part, been victims of their own carelessness.
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EDWARD BERNAYS with his business partner and wife, Doris Fleischman (left). Bernays worked on behalf of the American Tobacco Company to make smoking socially acceptable for women. For one of American Tobacco’s brands, Lucky Strike, Bernays was also asked to change public attitudes toward the color green. (Women weren’t buying the brand because surveys indicated that the forest green package clashed with their wardrobes.) Bernays and Fleischman organized events such as green fashion shows and sold the idea of a new trend in green to the press. By 1934, green had become the fashion color of the season, making Lucky Strike cigarettes the perfect accessory for the female smoker. Interestingly, Bernays forbade his own wife to smoke, flushing her cigarettes down the toilet and calling smoking a nasty habit. Bettmann/Getty Images
Edward Bernays The nephew of Sigmund Freud, former reporter Edward Bernays inherited the public relations mantle from Ivy Lee. Beginning in 1919, when he opened his own office, Bernays was the first person to apply the findings of psychology and sociology to public relations, referring to himself as a “public relations counselor” rather than a “publicity agent.” Over the years, Bernays’s client list included General Electric, the American Tobacco Company, General Motors, Good Housekeeping and Time magazines, Procter & Gamble, RCA, the government of India, the city of Vienna, and President Coolidge.
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Bernays also worked for the Committee on Public Information (CPI) during World War I, developing propaganda that supported America’s entry into that conflict and promoting the image of President Woodrow Wilson as a peacemaker. Both efforts were among the first full-scale governmental attempts to mobilize public opinion. In addition, Bernays made key contributions to public relations education, teaching the first class called “public relations”—at New York University in 1923—and writing the field’s first textbook, Crystallizing Public Opinion. For many years, his definition of PR was the standard: “Public relations is the attempt, by information, persuasion, and adjustment, to engineer public support for an activity, cause, movement, or institution.”8
In the 1920s, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to develop a campaign to make smoking more publicly acceptable for women. Among other strategies, Bernays staged an event: placing women smokers in New York’s 1929 Easter parade. He labeled cigarettes “torches of freedom” and encouraged women to smoke as a symbol of their newly acquired suffrage and independence from men. He also asked the women he placed in the parade to contact newspaper and newsreel companies in advance—to announce their symbolic protest. The campaign received plenty of free publicity from newspapers and magazines. Within weeks of the parade, men-only smoking rooms in New York theaters began opening up to women.
Through much of his writing, Bernays suggested that emerging freedoms threatened the established hierarchical order. He thought it was important for experts and leaders to control the direction of American society: “The duty of the higher strata of society—the cultivated, the learned, the expert, the intellectual—is therefore clear. They must inject moral and spiritual motives into public opinion.”9 For the cultural elite to maintain order and control, they would have to win the consent of the larger public. As a result, he described the shaping of public opinion through PR as the “engineering of consent.” Like Ivy Lee, Bernays thought that public opinion was malleable and not always rational: In the hands of the right experts, leaders, and PR counselors, public opinion could be shaped into forms people could rally behind.10 However, journalists like Walter Lippmann, who wrote the famous book Public Opinion in 1922, worried that PR professionals with hidden agendas, as opposed to journalists with professional detachment, held too much power over American public opinion.
Throughout Bernays’s most active years, his business partner and later wife, Doris Fleischman, worked on many of his campaigns as a researcher and coauthor. Beginning in the 1920s, she was one of the first women to work in public relations, and she introduced PR to America’s most powerful leaders through a pamphlet she edited called Contact. Because she opened up the profession to women from its inception, PR emerged as one of the few professions—apart from teaching and nursing—accessible to women who chose to work outside the home at that time. Today, women outnumber men by more than three to one in the profession.
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THE PRACTICE OF PUBLIC RELATIONS
Today, there are more than seven thousand PR firms in the United States, plus thousands of additional PR departments within corporate, government, and nonprofit organizations.11 Since the 1980s, the formal study of public relations has grown significantly at colleges and universities. By 2016, the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) had more than eleven thousand members and over three hundred chapters in colleges and universities. As certified PR programs have expanded (often requiring courses or a minor in journalism), the profession has relied less and less on its traditional practice of recruiting journalists for its workforce. At the same time, new courses in professional ethics and issues management have expanded the responsibility of future practitioners. In this section, we discuss the differences between public relations agencies and in-house PR services and the various practices involved in performing PR.
Approaches to Organized Public Relations The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) offers this simple and useful definition of PR: “Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.” To carry out this mutual communication process, the PR industry uses two approaches. First, there are independent PR agencies whose sole job is to provide clients with PR services. Second, most companies, which may or may not also hire independent PR firms, maintain their own in-house PR staffs to handle routine tasks, such as writing press releases, managing various media requests, staging special events, and dealing with internal and external publics.
Many large PR firms are owned by, or are affiliated with, multinational communications holding companies, such as Publicis, Omnicom, WPP, and Interpublic (see Table 12.1). Three of the largest PR agencies—Burson-Marsteller, Hill+Knowlton Strategies, and Ogilvy Public Relations—generated part of the $27 billion in revenue earned by their parent corporation, the WPP Group, in 2016. Founded in 1953, Burson-Marsteller has 158 offices and affiliate partners in 110 countries and lists Facebook, Adidas, Coca-Cola, Ford, and the United Arab Emirates among its clients. Hill+Knowlton, founded in 1927, has about 80 offices in 49 countries and includes Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, Proctor & Gamble, Canon, and Latvia on its client list. Most independent PR firms are smaller and operate locally or regionally. New York–based Edelman, the largest independent firm, is an exception, with global operations and clients like Starbucks, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, and Unilever.
TABLE 12.1 THE TOP 10 PUBLIC RELATIONS FIRMS, 2015 (BY WORLDWIDE REVENUE, IN MILLIONS OF U.S. DOLLARS)
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Data from: “CRM/Direct and Public Relations,” Advertising Age, May 2, 2016, p. 21.
Rank Agency Parent Firm Headquarters Revenue
1 Edelman Independent Chicago $847
2 Weber Shandwick Interpublic New York $677
3 Fleishman-Hillard Omnicom St. Louis $587
4 Ketchum Omnicom New York $490
5 MSL Group Publicis Paris $473
6 Burson-Marstellar WPP New York $466
7 Hill+Knowlton Strategies
WPP New York $375
8 Ogilvy Public Relations WPP New York $316
9 Brunswick Group Independent London $264
10 BlueDigital BlueFocus Communication Group
Beijing $215
WORLD WAR II
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was a time when the U.S. government used propaganda and other PR strategies to drum up support for the war. One of the more iconic posters at the time asked women to join the workforce. MPI/Getty Images
In contrast to these external agencies, most PR work is done in-house at companies and organizations. Although America’s largest companies typically retain external PR firms, almost every company involved in the manufacturing and service industries has an in-house PR department. Such departments are also a vital part of many professional organizations, such as the American Medical Association, the AFL-CIO, and the National Association of Broadcasters, as well as large nonprofit organizations, such as the American Cancer Society, the Arthritis Foundation, and most universities and colleges.
Performing Public Relations Public relations, like advertising, pays careful attention to the needs of its clients— politicians, small businesses, industries, and nonprofit organizations—and to the perspectives of its targeted audiences: consumers and the general public, company employees, shareholders, media organizations, government agencies, and community and industry leaders. To do so, PR involves providing a multitude of services, including publicity, communication, public affairs, issues management, government relations, financial PR, community relations, industry relations, minority relations, advertising, press agentry, promotion, media relations, social networking, and propaganda. This last service, propaganda, is communication strategically placed, either as advertising or as publicity, to gain public support for a special issue, program, or policy, such as a nation’s war effort.
propaganda in advertising and public relations, a communication strategy that tries to manipulate public opinion to gain support for a special issue, program, or policy, such as a nation’s war effort.
In addition, PR personnel (both PR technicians, who handle daily short-term activities, and PR managers, who counsel clients and manage activities over the long term) produce employee newsletters, manage client trade shows and conferences, conduct historical tours, appear on news programs, organize damage control after negative publicity, analyze complex issues and trends that may affect a client’s future, manage Twitter and other social media accounts, and much more.
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Basic among these activities, however, are formulating a message through research, conveying the message through various channels, sustaining public support through community and consumer relations, and maintaining client interests through government relations.
Research: Formulating the Message One of the most essential practices in the PR profession is doing research. Just as advertising is driven today by demographic and psychographic research, PR uses similar strategies to project messages to appropriate audiences. Because it has historically been difficult to determine why particular PR campaigns succeed or fail, research has become the key ingredient in PR forecasting. Like advertising, PR makes use of mail, telephone, and Internet surveys; focus group interviews; and social media analytics tools—such as Google Analytics, Klear, Keyhole, and Twitter Analytics—to get a fix on an audience’s perceptions of an issue, a policy, a program, or a client’s image.
Research also helps PR professionals focus a campaign message. For example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wanted to curb smoking among young African Americans, young Hispanics, and other minority teenagers, who have a higher risk of tobacco addiction and suffer disproportionately from tobacco-related diseases later in life. The FDA’s campaign conducted focus groups and determined that its message had to tap into the values and ideals of hip-hop culture, with an emphasis on being in control. The final campaign—“Fresh Empire: Keep It Fresh. Live Tobacco-Free”—is all about taking control (“I’m in charge. Cigarettes? That’s not my thing. No way”) and taps into personal stories of tobacco-related disease from up-and-coming hip-hop performers.
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MESSAGE FORMULATION The Web site for the “Fresh Empire” campaign appeals to urban teenagers with a social mash-up of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube posts and a message to salute “those who represent Hip Hop, stay on their grind, and live tobacco-free.”
The $128 million campaign (funded by tobacco-industry fees) launched nationally in conjunction with the BET Hip-Hop Awards in 2015 and targets teens at hip-hop concerts and other live events. Students report that the Fresh Empire campaign message feels authentic, with one stating, “It’s like we’re seeing ourselves on TV,” and others saying that watching their role models talk about control has had a positive impact on the way they think about tobacco.12
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TWITTER MAKES A NEWS STORY About 10 percent of U.S. adults get their news directly from Twitter, but more than half of journalists follow Twitter to get news tips. A tweet can be just as successful as a complete press release in gaining news media coverage. In this example, the digital game company Electronic Arts released a tweet with a mysterious nine- second video to tease the next day’s announcement of the new Battlefield 1 video game. The tweet generated more than four thousand retweets and more than six thousand “Likes,” and was covered by news media worldwide in anticipation of the game’s premiere the following day.
Conveying the Message One of the chief day-to-day functions in public relations is creating and distributing PR messages for the news media or the public. There are several possible message forms, including press releases, VNRs, and various online options.
Press releases, or news releases, are announcements written in the style of news reports that present new information about an individual, a company, or an organization and pitch a story idea to the news media. In issuing press releases, PR agents hope that their client information will be picked up by the news media and transformed into news reports. Through press releases, PR firms manage the flow of information, controlling which media get what material in which order. (A PR agent may even reward a cooperative reporter by strategically releasing information.) News editors and broadcasters sort through hundreds of releases daily to determine which ones contain the most original ideas or are the most current. Most large media institutions rewrite and double-check the releases, but small media companies often use them verbatim because of limited editorial resources. Usually, the more closely a press release resembles actual news copy, the more likely it is to be used. Twitter has also become a popular format for releasing information—140 characters or less—to the news media.
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press releases in public relations, announcements—written in the style of news reports—that give new information about an individual, a company, or an organization, and pitch a story idea to the news media.
Since the introduction of portable video equipment in the 1970s, PR agencies and departments have also been issuing video news releases (VNRs)—thirty- to ninety-second visual press releases designed to mimic the style of a broadcast news report. Although networks and large TV news stations do not usually broadcast VNRs, news stations in small TV markets regularly use material from VNRs. On occasion, news stations have been criticized for using video footage from a VNR without acknowledging the source. In 2005, the FCC mandated that broadcast stations and cable operators must disclose the source of the VNRs they air.
video news releases (VNRs) in public relations, the visual counterparts to press releases; they pitch story ideas to the TV news media by mimicking the style of a broadcast news report.
The equivalent of VNRs for nonprofits are public service announcements (PSAs): fifteen- to sixty-second audio or video reports that promote government programs, educational projects, volunteer agencies, or social reform. As part of their requirement to serve the public interest, broadcasters have been encouraged to carry free PSAs. Since the deregulation of broadcasting began in the 1980s, however, there has been less pressure and no minimum obligation for TV and radio stations to air PSAs. When PSAs do run, they are frequently scheduled between midnight and 6:00 A.M., a less commercially valuable time slot.
public service announcements (PSAs) reports or announcements, carried free by radio and TV stations, that promote government programs, educational projects, voluntary agencies, or social reform.
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the Internet is an essential avenue for distributing PR messages. Companies upload or e-mail press releases, press kits, and VNRs for targeted groups. Social media have also transformed traditional PR communications. For example, a social media press release pulls together “remixable” multimedia elements, such as text, graphics, video, podcasts, and hyperlinks, giving journalists ample material to develop their own stories.
CASE STUDY
The NFL’s Concussion Crisis
he stylized violence of hard-hitting is a favored American football tradition. Broadcasts of games repeat the most violent
tackles with instant replay, often using slow motion to enhance the drama of the hit. Over the years, NFL Films has created several video collections featuring hours of player collisions, with titles like Crunch Course, Moment of Impact, and NFL’s Hardest Hits.
But this celebration of big hits has begun to seem callous and cruel, as decades of professional football popularity have produced retired players in their thirties, forties, fifties, and older who are experiencing the trauma of brain damage. The diagnosis is CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which can leave its victims with problems like hearing loss, memory loss, aggression, depression, and overall dementia. The concussion problem for football players is caused not only by the big concussions that knock them unconscious but also by what researchers call “subconcussions”—the hits to the head that happen many times during a game, and that can number in the hundreds and thousands over the course of a career.
CTE can best be confirmed upon death, when the interior of the brain
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can be examined to show the buildup of a protein that strangles neurons. Several distraught players suffering the symptoms of CTE have committed suicide. Dave Duerson, who played in the NFL in the 1980s and 1990s, killed himself in 2011 at age fifty, leaving a message to his family requesting that his brain be studied for CTE; researchers verified that he had the condition. In 2012, just two years after retiring from the field, NFL star Junior Seau committed suicide at age forty-three; as with Duerson, researchers checked his brain and confirmed that he had CTE.
In the 2013 book League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth, ESPN investigative reporters (and brothers) Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru explain that the NFL spent years responding to the crisis of concussions with dubious public relations tactics: first covering it up, then denying it, and then generating its own scientific studies to dispute the independent research. (The book inspired the 2015 movie Concussion, starring Will Smith.) The NFL’s response mirrors the deceptive tactics used by big tobacco companies for decades to deny smoking’s link to cancer.
The NFL has a lot to protect. Its business is a $10 billion industry, and the very nature of the game requires hulking players to knock their heads and bodies into other very large players, often running at full speed.1 As a result, more than four thousand retired players have sued the NFL to cover their head trauma expenses. These stories have begun to change the country’s attitude toward the game. News stories about the effects of football concussions are increasingly common, and youth football league participation has dropped nearly 10 percent in the past two years, as parents have grown scared of the impact of the game on their children’s health.
More recently, the NFL has responded by trying to change the conversation, acknowledging a concussion problem but emphasizing that the game has continuously evolved toward more safety in rules and technology (suggesting, perhaps, that it’s just a matter of time before this forward march solves the concussion crisis). Indeed, the NFL hired a public relations counsel to help develop the NFLevolution.com site (motto: Forever Forward Forever Football). The NFL’s Corporate Communications Department also courted “mommy bloggers” to promote football as a healthy, safe activity for their children.
Yet as players continue to come forward with fears or diagnoses of CTE, and as long as the game (and business) of football continues to be played this way, the NFL’s public relations crisis will likely persist. As Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru write, “There has never been anything like this in the history of sports: a public health crisis that emerged from the
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playing fields of our twenty-first-century pastime.”2
Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/MCT via Getty Images
Media Relations PR managers specializing in media relations promote a client or an organization by securing publicity or favorable coverage in the news media. This often requires an in-house PR person to speak on behalf of an organization or to direct reporters to experts who can provide information. Media-relations specialists also perform damage control or crisis management when negative publicity occurs. Occasionally, in times of crisis—such as a scandal at a university or a safety recall by a car manufacturer—a PR spokesperson might be designated as the only source of information available to news media. Although journalists often resent being cut off from higher administrative levels and leaders, the institution or company wants to ensure that rumors and inaccurate stories do not circulate in the media. In these situations, a game often develops between PR specialists and the media in which reporters attempt to circumvent the spokesperson and induce a knowledgeable insider to talk off the record, providing background details without being named directly as a source.
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LEONARDO DICAPRIO established the nonprofit Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation in 1998 to raise awareness of, and donate money to, environmental causes. In addition to conservation, the foundation addresses humanitarian issues, such as access to clean water. DiCaprio often invites other celebrities (like Sylvester Stallone, pictured) to foundation events to raise additional publicity. Handout/Getty Images
PR agents who specialize in media relations also recommend advertising to their clients when it seems appropriate. Unlike publicity, which is sometimes outside a PR agency’s control, paid advertising may help focus a complex issue or a client’s image. Publicity, however, carries the aura of legitimate news and thus has more credibility than advertising. In addition, media specialists cultivate associations with editors, reporters, freelance writers, and broadcast news directors to ensure that press releases or VNRs are favorably received (see “Examining Ethics: Public Relations and Bananas” on page 398).
Special Events and Pseudo-Events Another public relations practice involves coordinating special events to raise the profile of corporate, organizational, or government clients. typical special-events publicity often includes a corporate sponsor aligning itself with a cause or an organization that has positive stature among the general public. For example, John Hancock Financial has been the primary sponsor of the Boston Marathon since 1986 and funds the race’s prize money. The company’s corporate communications department also serves as the PR office for the race, operating the pressroom and creating the marathon’s media guide and other press materials. Eighteen other sponsors—including Adidas, Gatorade, Clif Bar, and JetBlue Airways—also pay to affiliate themselves with the Boston Marathon. At the local level, companies often sponsor a community parade or a charitable fund-raising activity.
In contrast to a special event, a pseudo-event is any circumstance created for
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the sole purpose of gaining coverage in the media. Historian Daniel Boorstin coined the term in his influential book The Image when pointing out the key contributions of PR and advertising in the twentieth century. Typical pseudo- events are press conferences, TV and radio talk-show appearances, or any other staged activity aimed at drawing public attention and media coverage. The success of such events depends on the participation of clients, sometimes on paid performers, and especially on the media’s attention to the event. In business, pseudo-events extend at least as far back as P. T. Barnum’s publicity stunts, such as parading Jumbo the Elephant across the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1880s. In politics, Theodore Roosevelt’s administration set up the first White House pressroom and held the first presidential press conferences in the early 1900s. By the twenty-first century, presidential pseudo-events involved a multimillion-dollar White House Communications Office. One of the most successful pseudo-events in recent years was a record-breaking space-diving project. On October 14, 2012, a helium balloon took Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner twenty-four miles into the stratosphere. He jumped from the capsule and went into a free dive for about four minutes, reaching a speed of 833.9 mph before deploying his parachute. Red Bull sponsored the project, which took more than five years of preparation.
pseudo-events in public relations, circumstances or events created solely for the purpose of obtaining coverage in the media.
EXAMINING ETHICS
Public Relations and Bananas
oing public relations on behalf of bananas doesn’t sound particularly
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D necessary. After all, bananas are the number-one fresh fruit eaten in the
United States, having long ago displaced apples in the top position. Yet the seemingly uncomplicated banana figures into
the history of public relations, and not always in a good way.
In the early twentieth century, huge banana plantations were established in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras. United Fruit (the predecessor of today’s Chiquita Brands) was the dominant grower and importer of bananas, and was particularly powerful in the small nations of Central America—in fact, too powerful. In 1951, Jacobo Árbenz, the new democratically elected president of Guatemala, proposed a number of reforms to raise the status of poor agrarian Guatemalans. One of the reforms included redistributing idle, cultivatable lands to peasants to lift them from poverty. United Fruit owned some of those lands (which it had been given years earlier and on which it didn’t pay property taxes). Unwilling to tolerate any limits on its control, United Fruit hired public relations pioneer Edward Bernays to work behind the scenes to build U.S. public opinion against the liberal Árbenz government, branding it as “communist.” In one of the worst moments for public relations and U.S. foreign policy, the CIA led a covert operation that deposed Guatemala’s democratically elected administration in 1954 and installed a right-wing military dictator who was more to United Fruit’s liking. Guatemala then endured decades of war, while the CIA repeated similar covert interventions on behalf of U.S. business interests in several Latin American countries, giving rise to the term banana republic—a country in which a single dominant industry controls business and politics.
In another black eye for the banana industry, Dole and Del Monte, two of today’s largest banana producers, were sued in 2012 by more than one thousand banana plantation workers for using a pesticide that had been banned in the United States in 1979. Bloomberg reported that the pesticide, dibromochloropropane (DBCP), “has been linked to sterility, miscarriages, birth defects, cancer, eye problems, skin disorders and kidney damage,” and that workers argued they had not been informed of the dangers or issued protective equipment.1
Now the good news for bananas and public relations: In 2001, Dole Food Company responded to increasing consumer interest by producing organic bananas for the first time. Although it still produces bananas that are not certified as organic, it is now the leading producer of organic bananas in the world. In 2007, Dole improved communication of its organic program by launching doleorganic.com and labeling each bunch of organic bananas with a sticker that identifies the farm that produced the bananas. The sticker reads, “Visit the Farm at
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doleorganic.com,” and includes the country of origin and a three-digit farm code. The Web site includes information about the banana farm in question; a Google map (viewers can zoom in on the satellite view to see the expanse of the farm); and photo albums containing shots of workers, plants, and facilities. The company says its doleorganic.com site “reflects Dole’s dedication to transparency, sustainability and corporate responsibility.”2 Considering the lack of transparency in the history of public relations for bananas, this is a good thing—for the countries where Dole does business, the company’s workers, and its consumers.
Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images
Community and Consumer Relations Another responsibility of PR is to sustain goodwill between an agency’s clients and the public. The public is often seen as two distinct audiences: communities and consumers. Companies have learned that sustaining close ties with their communities and neighbors not only enhances their image and attracts potential customers but also promotes the idea that the companies are good citizens. As a result, PR firms encourage companies to participate in community activities, such as hosting plant tours and open houses, making donations to national and local charities, and participating in town events like parades and festivals. In addition, more progressive companies may also get involved in unemployment and job- retraining programs, or donate equipment and workers to urban revitalization projects, such as Habitat for Humanity.
Government Relations and Lobbying
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While sustaining good relations with the public is a priority, so is maintaining connections with government agencies that have some say in how companies operate in a particular community, state, or nation. Both PR firms and the PR divisions within major corporations are especially interested in making sure that government regulation neither becomes burdensome nor reduces their control over their businesses.
Government PR specialists monitor new and existing legislation, create opportunities to ensure favorable publicity, and write press releases and direct-mail letters to persuade the public about the pros and cons of new regulations. In many industries, government relations has developed into lobbying: the process of attempting to influence lawmakers to support and vote for an organization’s or industry’s best interests. In seeking favorable legislation, some lobbyists contact government officials on a daily basis. In Washington, D.C., alone, there are about twelve thousand registered lobbyists—and thousands more government-relations workers who aren’t required to register under federal disclosure rules. Lobbying expenditures targeting the federal government were at $3.22 billion in 2015, down from a peak in 2010 but far above the $2.44 billion spent ten years earlier (see Figure 12.1).13
lobbying in governmental public relations, the process of attempting to influence the voting of lawmakers to support a client’s or an organization’s best interests.
FIGURE 12.1 TOTAL LOBBYING SPENDING AND NUMBER OF LOBBYISTS (2000–
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2015) Data from: Figures are calculations by the Center for Responsive Politics based on data from the Senate Office of Public Records, accessed May 14, 2016, www.opensecrets.org/lobby. *The number of unique, registered lobbyists who have actively lobbied.
Lobbying can often lead to ethical problems, as in the case of earmarks and astroturf lobbying. Earmarks are specific spending directives that are slipped into bills to accommodate the interests of lobbyists and are often the result of political favors or outright bribes. In 2006, lobbyist Jack Abramoff (dubbed “the Man Who Bought Washington” in Time) and several of his associates were convicted of corruption related to earmarks, leading to the resignation of leading House members and a decline in the use of earmarks.
Astroturf lobbying is phony grassroots public affairs campaigns engineered by public relations firms. PR firms deploy massive phone banks and computerized mailing lists to drum up support and create the impression that millions of citizens back their client’s side of an issue. For instance, the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), an organization that appears to serve the interests of consumers, is actually a creation of the Washington, D.C.–based PR firm Berman & Co. and is funded by the restaurant, food, alcohol, and tobacco industries. According to SourceWatch, which tracks astroturf lobbying, anyone who criticizes tobacco, alcohol, processed food, fatty food, soda pop, pharmaceuticals, animal testing, overfishing, or pesticides “is likely to come under attack from CCF.”14
astroturf lobbying phony grassroots public affairs campaigns engineered by public relations firms; coined by Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, it was named after AstroTurf, the artificial-grass athletic field surface.
Public relations firms do not always work for the interests of corporations, however. They also work for other clients, including consumer groups, labor unions, professional groups, religious organizations, and even foreign governments. In 2005, for example, the California Center for Public Health Advocacy—a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization—hired the small California PR firm of Brown-Miller Communications to rally support for landmark legislation that would ban junk food and soda sales in the state’s public schools. Brown-Miller helped state legislators see obesity not as a personal choice issue but as a public policy issue, cultivated the editorial support of newspapers to compel legislators to sponsor the bills, and ultimately succeeded in getting a bill passed.
Presidential administrations also use public relations—with varying degrees of success—to support their policies. From 2002 to 2008, the Bush administration’s
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https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby
Defense Department operated a “Pentagon Pundit” program, secretly cultivating more than seventy retired military officers to appear on radio and television talk shows in order to shape public opinion about the Bush agenda. In 2008, the New York Times exposed the unethical program, and its story earned a Pulitzer Prize.15 President Obama pledged to be more transparent on day one of his administration, but in 2014, an Associated Press analysis concluded that “the administration has made few meaningful improvements in the way it releases records.”16
Public Relations Adapts to the Internet Age Historically, public relations practitioners have tried to earn news media coverage (as opposed to buying advertising) to communicate their clients’ messages to the public. While that is still true, the Internet, with its instant accessibility, offers public relations professionals a number of new routes for communicating with the public.
A company or an organization’s Web site has become the home base of public relations efforts. Companies and organizations can upload and maintain their media kits (including press releases, VNRs, images, executive bios, and organizational profiles), giving the traditional news media access to the information at any time. And because everyone can access these corporate Web sites, the barriers between the organization and the groups that PR professionals ultimately want to reach are broken down.
The Web also enables PR professionals to have their clients interact with audiences on a more personal, direct basis through social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Wikipedia, and blogs. Now people can be “friends” and “followers” of companies and organizations. Corporate executives can share their professional and personal observations and seem downright chummy through a blog (e.g., Whole Foods Market’s blog by CEO John Mackey). Executives, celebrities, and politicians can seem more accessible and personable through a Twitter feed. But social media’s immediacy can also be a problem, especially for those who send messages into the public sphere without considering the ramifications.
Another concern about social media is that sometimes such communications appear without complete disclosure, which is an unethical practice. Some PR firms have edited Wikipedia entries for their clients’ benefit, a practice Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has repudiated as a conflict of interest. A growing number of companies also compensate bloggers to subtly promote their products, unbeknownst to most readers. Public relations firms and marketers are particularly keen on working with “mom bloggers,” who appear to be independent voices in discussions about consumer products but may receive gifts in exchange for their opinions. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission instituted new rules requiring online product endorsers to disclose their connections to companies.
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PR AND SOCIAL MEDIA In the playful run-up to the 2015 NFC Championship game between the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks, Bainbridge Island (near Seattle) banned cheese —a sharp insult to Wisconsin cheeseheads. Hiebing, a Madison, Wisconsin–based PR and marketing firm, responded quickly with an award-winning social media campaign titled #LegalizeCheese for its client Toppers Pizza, which uses only Wisconsin cheese on its pizza.
Public Relations during a Crisis Since the Ludlow strike, one important duty of PR has been helping a corporation handle a public crisis or tragedy, especially if the public assumes the company is at fault. Disaster management may reveal the best and the worst attributes of the company and its PR firm (see “Case Study: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis” on page 396). Let’s look at two contrasting examples of crisis management and the different ways they were handled.
One of the largest environmental disasters so far in the twenty-first century occurred in 2010. BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 10 of that year, killing eleven workers. The oil gushed from the ocean floor for months, spreading into a vast area of the Gulf of Mexico, killing wildlife, and washing tar balls onto beaches. Although the company, formerly British Petroleum, officially changed its name to BP in 2001, adopting the motto Beyond Petroleum and a sunny new yellow and green logo in an effort to appear more “green-friendly,” the disaster linked the company back to the hazards of its main business in oil. BP’s many public relations missteps included its multiple underestimations of the amount of oil leaking, the chairman’s reference to the “small people” of the Gulf region, the CEO’s wish that he could “get his life back,” and the CEO’s attendance at an elite yacht race in England even as the oil leak persisted. In short, many people felt that BP failed to show enough remorse or compassion for the affected people and wildlife. BP tried to salvage its reputation by vowing to clean up the damaged areas, establishing a $20 billion fund to reimburse those economically
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affected by the spill, and creating a campaign of TV commercials to communicate its efforts. Nevertheless, harsh criticism persisted, and BP’s ads were overwhelmed by online parodies and satires of its efforts. Years later, entire communities of fishermen and rig workers continue to be affected, and BP made its first $1 billion payment for Gulf restoration projects.
A decidedly different approach was taken in the 1982 tragedy involving Tylenol pain-relief capsules. Seven people died in the Chicago area after someone tampered with several bottles and laced them with poison. Discussions between the parent company, Johnson & Johnson, and its PR representatives focused on whether or not withdrawing all Tylenol capsules from store shelves might send a signal that corporations could be intimidated by a single deranged person. Nevertheless, Johnson & Johnson’s chairman, James E. Burke, and the company’s PR agency, Burson-Marsteller, opted for full disclosure to the media and the immediate recall of the capsules nationally, costing the company an estimated $100 million and cutting its market share in half. As part of its PR strategy to overcome the negative publicity and to restore Tylenol’s market share, Burson-Marsteller tracked public opinion nightly through telephone surveys and organized satellite press conferences to debrief the news media. In addition, emergency phone lines were set up to take calls from consumers and health-care providers. When the company reintroduced Tylenol three months later, it did so with tamper-resistant bottles that were soon copied by almost every major drug manufacturer. Burson- Marsteller, which received PRSA awards for its handling of the crisis, found that the public thought Johnson & Johnson had responded admirably to the crisis and did not hold Tylenol responsible for the deaths. In less than three years, Tylenol had recaptured its former (and dominant) share of the market.
RALPH LAUREN
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attracted media scrutiny when it was discovered that the 2012 U.S. Olympic Team uniforms the company designed were manufactured in China. After lawmakers publicly chastised the decision to outsource the uniforms, Lauren released a statement promising to produce the 2014 U.S. Olympic Team’s uniforms in the United States. Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux Pictures
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TENSIONS BETWEEN PUBLIC RELATIONS AND THE PRESS
In 1932, Stanley Walker, an editor at the New York Herald Tribune, identified public relations agents as “mass-mind molders, fronts, mouthpieces, chiselers, moochers, and special assistants to the president.”17 Walker added that newspapers and PR firms would always remain enemies, even if PR professionals adopted a code of ethics (which they did in the 1950s) to “take them out of the red-light district of human relations.”18 Walker’s tone captures the spirit of one of the most mutually dependent—and antagonistic—relationships in all of mass media.
Much of this antagonism, directed at public relations from the journalism profession, is historical. Journalists have long considered themselves part of a public service profession, but some regard PR as having emerged as a pseudo- profession created to distort the facts that reporters work hard to gather. Over time, reporters and editors developed the derogatory term flack to refer to a PR agent. The term, derived from the military word flak, meaning an antiaircraft artillery shell or a protective military jacket, symbolizes for journalists the protective barrier PR agents insert between their clients and the press. Today, the Associated Press manual for editors defines flack simply as “slang for press agent.” Yet this antagonism belies journalism’s dependence on public relations. Many editors, for instance, admit that more than half of their story ideas each day originate with PR people. In this section, we take a closer look at the relationship between journalism and public relations, which can be both adversarial and symbiotic.
flack a derogatory term that, in journalism, is sometimes applied to a public relations agent.
Elements of Professional Friction The relationship between journalism and PR is important and complex. Although journalism lays claim to independent traditions, the news media have become ever more reliant on public relations because of the increasing amount of information now available. Newspaper staff cutbacks, combined with television’s need for local news events, have expanded the news media’s need for PR story ideas.
Another cause of tension is that PR firms often raid the ranks of reporting for new talent. Because most press releases are written to imitate news reports, the PR profession has always sought good writers who are well connected to sources and
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savvy about the news business. For instance, the fashion industry likes to hire former style or fashion news writers for its PR staff, and university information offices seek reporters who once covered higher education. However, although reporters frequently move into PR, public relations practitioners seldom move into journalism; the news profession rarely accepts prodigal sons or daughters back into the fold once they have left reporting for public relations. Nevertheless, the professions remain codependent: PR needs journalists for publicity, and journalism needs PR for story ideas and access.
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Give and Take: Public Relations and Journalism This video debates the relationship between public relations and journalism.
Discussion: Are the similarities between public relations and journalism practices a good thing for the public? Why or why not?
Undermining Facts and Blocking Access Journalism’s most prevalent criticism of public relations is that it works to counter the truths reporters seek to bring to the public. Modern public relations redefined and complicated the notion of what “facts” are. PR professionals demonstrated that the facts can be spun in a variety of ways, depending on what information is emphasized and what is downplayed. As Ivy Lee noted in 1925: “The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to achieve what is humanly impossible; all I can do is to give you my interpretation of the facts.”19 With practitioners like Lee showing the emerging PR profession how the truth could be interpreted, the journalist’s role as a custodian of accurate information became much more difficult.
Journalists have also objected that PR professionals block press access to key business leaders, political figures, and other newsworthy people. Before the prevalence of PR, reporters could talk to such leaders directly and obtain quotable information for their news stories. Now, however, journalists complain that PR agents insert themselves between the press and the newsworthy, thus disrupting the journalistic tradition in which reporters would vie for interviews with top government and business leaders. Journalists further argue that PR agents are now
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able to manipulate reporters by giving exclusives to journalists who are likely to cast a story in a favorable light or by cutting off a reporter’s access to one of their newsworthy clients altogether if that reporter has written unfavorably about the client in the past.
Promoting Publicity and Business as News Another explanation for the professional friction between the press and PR involves simple economics. As Michael Schudson noted in his book Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers, PR agents help companies “promote as news what otherwise would have been purchased in advertising.”20 Accordingly, Ivy Lee wrote to John D. Rockefeller after he gave money to Johns Hopkins University: “In view of the fact that this was not really news, and that the newspapers gave so much attention to it, it would seem that this was wholly due to the manner in which the material was ‘dressed up’ for newspaper consumption. It seems to suggest very considerable possibilities along this line.”21 News critics worry that this type of PR is taking media space and time away from those who do not have the financial resources or sophistication to become visible in the public eye. There is another issue: If public relations can secure news publicity for clients, the added credibility of a journalistic context gives clients a status that the purchase of advertising cannot offer.
Another criticism is that PR firms with abundant resources clearly get more client coverage from the news media than their lesser-known counterparts. For example, a business reporter at a large metro daily sometimes receives as many as a hundred press releases a day—far outnumbering the fraction of handouts generated by organized labor or grassroots organizations. Workers and union leaders have long argued that the money that corporations allocate to PR leads to more favorable coverage for management positions in labor disputes. Therefore, standard news reports may feature subtle language choices, with “rational, coolheaded management making offers” and “hotheaded workers making demands.” Walter Lippmann saw such differences in 1922 when he wrote, “If you study the way many a strike is reported in the press, you will find very often that [labor] issues are rarely in the headlines, barely in the leading paragraph, and sometimes not even mentioned anywhere.”22 This imbalance is particularly significant in that the great majority of workers are neither managers nor CEOs, and yet these workers receive little if any media coverage on a regular basis. Most newspapers now have business sections that focus on the work of various managers, but few have a labor, worker, or employee section.23
Shaping the Image of Public Relations Dealing with a tainted past and journalism’s hostility has led to the development of several image-enhancing strategies. In 1947, the PR industry formed its own professional organization, the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America). The
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PRSA is the largest organization devoted to the professional development of communications professionals. It is the recognized voice on ethics and professional standards, and provides learning and networking opportunities for its members. It also offers operational support to the Universal Accreditation Board (UAB), a diverse group of educators and professionals. In addition to the PRSA, independent agencies devoted to uncovering shady or unethical public relations activities publish their findings in publications like Public Relations Tactics, PR Week, and PRWatch. Ethical issues have become a major focus of the profession, with self- examination of these issues routinely appearing in public relations textbooks and professional newsletters (see Table 12.2).
TABLE 12.2 PUBLIC RELATIONS SOCIETY OF AMERICA ETHICS CODE In 2000, the PRSA approved a completely revised Code of Ethics, which included core principles, guidelines, and examples of improper conduct. Here is one section of the code. Data from: The full text of the PRSA Code of Ethics is available at www.prsa.org.
PRSA Member Statement of Professional Values
This statement presents the core values of PRSA members and, more broadly, of the public relations profession. These values provide the foundation for the Member Code of Ethics and set the industry standard for the professional practice of public relations. These values are the fundamental beliefs that guide our behaviors and decision-making process. We believe our professional values are vital to the integrity of the profession as a whole.
ADVOCACY We serve the public interest by acting as responsible advocates for those we represent. We provide a voice in the marketplace of ideas, facts, and viewpoints to aid informed public debate.
HONESTY We adhere to the highest standards of accuracy and truth in advancing the interests of those we represent and in communicating with the public.
EXPERTISE We acquire and responsibly use specialized knowledge and experience. We advance the profession through continued professional development, research, and education. We build mutual understanding, credibility, and relationships among a wide array of institutions and audiences.
INDEPENDENCE We provide objective counsel to those we represent. We are accountable for our actions.
LOYALTY We are faithful to those we represent, while honoring our obligation to serve the public interest.
FAIRNESS We deal fairly with clients, employers, competitors, peers, vendors, the media, and the general public. We respect all opinions and support the right of free expression.
Over the years, as PR has subdivided itself into specialized areas, it has used more positive phrases—such as institutional relations, corporate communications,
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https://www.prsa.org
and news and information services—to describe what it does. Public relations’ best press strategy, however, may be the limitations of the journalism profession itself. For most of the twentieth century, many reporters and editors clung to the ideal that journalism is, at its best, an objective institution that gathers information on behalf of the public. Reporters have only occasionally turned their pens, computers, and cameras on themselves to examine their own practices or their vulnerability to manipulation. Thus, by not challenging PR’s more subtle strategies, many journalists have allowed PR professionals to interpret “facts” to their clients’ advantage.
THE INVISIBILITY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS is addressed in a series of books by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.
Alternative Voices Because public relations professionals work so closely with the press, their practices are not often the subject of media reports or investigations. Indeed, the multibillion-dollar industry remains virtually invisible to the public, most of whom
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have never heard of Burson-Marsteller, Hill+Knowlton, or Edelman. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) in Madison, Wisconsin, is concerned about the invisibility of PR practices and has sought to expose the hidden activities of large PR firms since 1993. Its PRWatch publication reports on the PR industry, with the goal of “investigating and countering PR campaigns and spin by corporations, industries and government agencies.”24 (See “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: The Invisible Hand of PR” on page 406.)
CMD staff members have also written books targeting public relations practices having to do with the Republican Party’s lobbying establishment (Banana Republicans), U.S. propaganda on the Iraq War (The Best War Ever), industrial waste (Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!), mad cow disease (Mad Cow USA), and PR uses of scientific research (Trust Us, We’re Experts!). Their work helps bring an alternative angle to the well-moneyed battles over public opinion. “You know, we feel that in a democracy, it’s very, very critical that everyone knows who the players are, and what they’re up to,” said CMD founder and book author John Stauber.25
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PUBLIC RELATIONS AND DEMOCRACY
From the days of PR’s origins in the early twentieth century, many people— especially journalists—have been skeptical of communications originating from public relations professionals. The bulk of the criticism leveled at public relations argues that the crush of information produced by PR professionals overwhelms traditional journalism. However, PR’s most significant impact may be on the political process, especially when organizations hire spin doctors to favorably shape or reshape a candidate’s media image. In one example, former president Richard Nixon, who resigned from office in 1974 to avoid impeachment hearings regarding his role in the Watergate scandal, hired Hill+Knowlton to restore his postpresidency image. Through the firm’s guidance, Nixon’s writings, mostly on international politics, began appearing in Sunday op-ed pages. Nixon himself started showing up on television news programs like Nightline and spoke frequently before such groups as the American Newspaper Publishers Association and the Economic Club of New York. In 1984, after a media blitz by Nixon’s PR handlers, the New York Times announced, “After a decade, Nixon is gaining favor,” and USA Today trumpeted, “Richard Nixon is back.” Before his death in 1994, Nixon, who never publicly apologized for his role in Watergate, saw a large portion of his public image shift from that of an arrogant, disgraced politician to that of a revered elder statesman.26 Many media critics have charged that the press did not counterbalance this PR campaign and treated Nixon too reverently. In 2014, on the fortieth anniversary of the Watergate scandal, former CBS news anchor Dan Rather remembered Nixon’s administration as a “criminal presidency” but added, “There has been an effort to change history, and in some ways it has been successful the last 40 years, saying well, it wasn’t all that bad.”27
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
The Invisible Hand of PR
John Stauber, founder of the Center for Media and Democracy and its publication PRWatch, has described the PR industry as “a huge, invisible industry … that’s really only available to wealthy individuals, large multinational corporations,
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politicians and government agencies.”1 How true is this? Is the PR industry so invisible?
1 DESCRIPTION Test the so-called invisibility of the PR industry by seeing how often, and in what way, PR firms are discussed in the print media. Using LexisNexis, search U.S. newspapers—over the last six months—for any mention of three prominent PR firms: Edelman, Weber Shandwick, and Fleishman-Hillard.
2 ANALYSIS What patterns emerge from the search? Possible patterns may have to do with personnel: Someone was hired or fired. (These articles may be extremely brief, with only a quick mention of the firms.) Or these personnel-related articles may reveal connections between politicians or corporations and the PR industry. What about specific PR campaigns or articles that quote “experts” who work for Edelman, Weber Shandwick, or Fleishman-Hillard?
3 INTERPRETATION What do these patterns tell you about how the PR industry is covered by the news media? Was the coverage favorable? Was it critical or analytical? Did you learn anything about how the industry operates? Is the industry itself, its influencing strategies, and its wide reach across the globe visible in your search?
4 EVALUATION PR firms—such as the three major firms in this search—have enormous power when it comes to influencing the public image of corporations, government bodies, and public policy initiatives in the United States and abroad. PR firms also have enormous influence over news content. Yet the U.S. media are silent on this influence. Public relations firms aren’t likely to reveal their power, but should journalism be more forthcoming about its role as a publicity vehicle for PR?
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5 ENGAGEMENT Visit the Center for Media and Democracy’s Web site (prwatch.org) and begin to learn about the unseen operations of the public relations industry. (You can also visit SpinWatch.org for similar critical analyses of PR in the United Kingdom.) Follow the CMD’s Twitter feed. Read some of the organization’s books, join forum discussions, or attend a PRWatch event. Visit the organization’s wiki site, SourceWatch (sourcewatch.org), and if you can, do some research of your own on PR and contribute an entry.
In terms of its immediate impact on democracy, the information crush delivered by public relations is at its height during national election campaigns. At the time of this writing, the 2012 presidential election was the most expensive in history, with President Barack Obama’s and Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s campaigns spending a combined $2.34 billion. Although much of that money was spent on television advertising, public relations helped hone each campaign’s message. PR professionals assembled by PR Week magazine generally agreed that Obama’s reelection campaign succeeded because it was able to change the focus of the campaign from a referendum on Obama’s first term (the Romney campaign’s goal) to a choice between candidates with two very different philosophies. They also acknowledged that there were unexpected events that aided Obama with his message. One was Romney’s infamous comment at a private $50,000-a-person fund-raiser. Romney told his supporters, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what” because they are “dependent on government,” “believe that they are victims,” and “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing…. My job is not to worry about those people.” His comment was secretly videotaped by a bartender, and when it became a viral sensation, Romney had difficulty recovering. The other unexpected event was Superstorm Sandy, a hurricane that hit the Atlantic coast a week before the election. As president and commander in chief, Obama dominated news headlines in responding to the storm and received praise for his actions from Republican New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Christie later experienced his own public relations nightmare with the George Washington Bridge lane closure scandal. Several of his staff members and appointees ended up losing their jobs for conspiring to close lanes on a busy New Jersey toll plaza for several days in 2013, creating huge traffic jams. Christie denied any involvement in the bridge lane closings and hired a law firm that produced a report exonerating him, but the continuing cloud of scandal followed him during his unsuccessful 2016 presidential candidacy. In March 2016, the Economist magazine estimated that “political candidates, parties, and outside groups will spend at least $5 billion on the 2016 election, more than double the cost of the 2012 campaign.”28
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Another critical area for public relations and democracy is how organizations integrate environmental claims into their public communications. In 1992, the Federal Trade Commission first issued its “Green Guides”—guidelines to ensure that environmental marketing practices don’t run afoul of its prohibition against unfair or deceptive acts or practices, sometimes called greenwashing. As concern about global warming has grown in recent years, green marketing and public relations now extend into nearly every part of business and industry: product packaging (buzzwords include recyclable, biodegradable, compostable, refillable, sustainable, and renewable), buildings and textiles, renewable energy certificates, carbon offsets (funding projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in one place to offset carbon emissions produced elsewhere), labor conditions, and fair trade. Although there have been plenty of companies that make claims about providing green products and services, only some have infused environmentally sustainable practices throughout their corporate culture, and being able to tell the difference is essential to the public’s understanding of environmental issues.
Though public relations often provides political information and story ideas, the PR profession bears only part of the responsibility for “spun” news; after all, it is the job of a PR agency to get favorable news coverage for the individual or group it represents. PR professionals police their own ranks for unethical or irresponsible practices, but the news media should also monitor the public relations industry, as they do other government and business activities. Journalism itself also needs to institute changes that will make it less dependent on PR and more conscious of how its own practices play into the hands of spin strategies. A positive example of change on this front is that many major newspapers and news networks now offer regular critiques of the facts and falsehoods contained in political advertising. This media vigilance should be on behalf of citizens, who are entitled to robust, well-rounded debates on important social and political issues.
Like advertising and other forms of commercial speech, PR campaigns that result in free media exposure raise a number of questions regarding democracy and the expression of ideas. Large companies and PR agencies, like well-financed politicians, have money to invest to figure out how to obtain favorable publicity. The question is not how to prevent that but how to ensure that other voices—less well financed and less commercial—also receive an adequate hearing. To that end, journalists need to become less willing conduits in the distribution of publicity. PR agencies, for their part, need to show clients that participating in the democratic process as responsible citizens can serve them well and enhance their image.
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12 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads in Chapter 1 is the role that media play in a democracy. One key ethical contradiction that can emerge in PR is that (according to the PRSA Code of Ethics) PR should be honest and accurate in disclosing information while being loyal and faithful to clients and their requests for confidentiality and privacy. In this case, how does the general public know when public communications are the work of paid advocacy, particularly when public relations plays such a strong role in U.S. politics?
Public relations practitioners who are members of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) are obligated to follow the PRSA Code of Ethics. Members are asked to sign a pledge to conduct themselves “professionally, with truth, accuracy, fairness, and responsibility to the public.”
Yet the code is not enforceable, and many public relations professionals simply ignore the PRSA. For example, only 14 of PR giant Burson-Marsteller’s 2,200 worldwide employees are PRSA members.29 Most lobbyists in Washington have to register with the House and Senate, so that there is some public record of their activities to influence politics. Conversely, public relations professionals working to influence the political process don’t have to register, so unless they act with the highest ethical standards and disclose what they are doing and who their clients are, they operate in relative secrecy.
According to National Public Radio (NPR), public relations professionals in Washington, D.C., work to engineer public opinion in advance of lobbying efforts to influence legislation. As NPR reported, “For PR folks, conditioning the legislative landscape means trying to shape public perception. So their primary target is journalists like Lyndsey Layton, who writes for the Washington Post. She says she gets about a dozen emails or phone calls in a day.”30
Less ethical work includes assembling phony “astroturf” front groups to engage in communication campaigns to influence legislators, spreading unfounded rumors about an opposing side, and entertaining government officials in violation of government reporting requirements—all things the PRSA code prohibits. Yet these are all-too-frequent practices in the realm of political public relations.
PRSA CEO Rosanna Fiske decries this kind of unethical behavior in her profession. “It’s not that ethical public relations equals good public relations,” Fiske says. “It is, however, that those who do not practice ethical public relations
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affect all of us, regardless of the environment in which we work, and the causes we represent.”31
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
public relations, 387 press agents, 388 publicity, 388 propaganda, 394 press releases, 395 video news releases (VNRs), 395 public service announcements (PSAs), 395 pseudo-event, 397 lobbying, 399 astroturf lobbying, 400 flack, 402 greenwashing, 407
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
Early Developments in Public Relations 1. What did people like P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody
contribute to the development of modern public relations in the twentieth century?
2. How did railroads give the early forms of corporate public relations a bad name?
3. What contributions did Ivy Lee make toward the development of
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modern PR? 4. How did Edward Bernays affect public relations?
The Practice of Public Relations 5. What are two approaches to organizing a PR firm? 6. What are press releases, and why are they important to
reporters? 7. Why have research and lobbying become increasingly important
to the practice of PR? 8. What are some socially responsible strategies that a PR specialist
can use during a crisis to help a client manage unfavorable publicity?
Tensions between Public Relations and the Press 9. Explain the historical background of the antagonism between
journalism and public relations. 10. How did PR change old relationships between journalists and
their sources? 11. In what ways is conventional news like public relations? Public Relations and Democracy 12. In what ways does the profession of public relations serve the
process of election campaigns? In what ways can it impede election campaigns?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. What do you think of when you hear the term public relations? What images come to mind? Where did these impressions come from?
2. What steps can reporters and editors take to monitor PR agents who manipulate the news media?
3. Considering the BP, Tylenol, and NFL concussion cases cited in this chapter, what are some key things an organization can do to respond effectively once a crisis hits?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
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REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter. VIDEO: GOING VIRAL: POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS AND VIDEO Online video has changed political campaigning forever. In this video, Peggy Miles of Intervox Communications discusses how politicians use the Internet to reach out to voters.
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13 Media Economics and the Global Marketplace
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THE BUSINESS OF MASS MEDIA
IT STARTED AS A MODEST IDEA IN 1997. Two
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software engineers in California developed a company, Netflix, to rent movie DVDs online and ship them through the mail. The idea was that customers would pay a flat monthly fee, rent and return as many videos as they liked each month, and incur no late fees (unlike at its biggest competitor, Blockbuster video stores). By its own admission, the company struggled the first five years, even unsuccessfully offering to sell itself to Blockbuster and Amazon during that time.1
ANALYZING THE MEDIA ECONOMY THE TRANSITION TO AN INFORMATION ECONOMY SPECIALIZATION, GLOBAL MARKETS, AND CONVERGENCE SOCIAL ISSUES IN MEDIA ECONOMICS THE MEDIA MARKETPLACE AND DEMOCRACY
◄ At the Netflix headquarters, based in Los Gatos, California, about an hour south of San Francisco, employees enjoy many perks, including free breakfast, lunch, and popcorn daily, a car borrowing service, and a flexible vacation schedule.
Eventually, though, DVD-rental-by-mail caught on, and Netflix continued to grow its customer base. Then, in 2007, Netflix developed a better movie distribution system: Internet streaming, which proved to be immensely popular, as there was no
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need to wait for a new DVD by mail or to drive over to the local video store. (Ironically, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and Amazon is the company that provides the cloud computing service that streams Netflix videos.) In 2010, Netflix began expanding to a number of global markets, which now include Canada, Latin American, Europe, Japan, and Australia.
In 2013, Netflix came up with another significant innovation when it began creating its own original series. Some of the company’s biggest and most critically acclaimed hits include House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, BoJack Horseman, Master of None, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Bloodline.
By 2015, Netflix generated about $6.8 billion in annual revenue, making it “the world’s leading Internet television network with over 75 million streaming members in over 190 countries enjoying more than 125 million hours of TV shows and movies per day, including original series, documentaries and feature films.”2
Netflix has changed TV culture. By releasing entire seasons of its own original programming and licensing series such as Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Nurse Jackie, Mad Men, The Office, and The West Wing, Netflix gave rise to the practice of binge-watching.3 The ubiquity of watching Netflix at home with someone else also gave rise to the slang saying “Netflix and chill.”
The key to Netflix’s success has been providing excellent content and a superior user experience (easy access, reasonable price) that has continuously improved on what was already being offered. In doing so, not only did Netflix kill the video store, but it’s also in the process of killing regular broadcast and cable television.
Netflix itself argues that it is leading this transformation:
People love TV content, but they don’t love the linear TV experience, where channels present programs only at particular times on non-portable screens with complicated remote controls. Now Internet TV—which is on-demand, personalized, and available on any screen—is replacing the linear TV experience. Changes of this magnitude are rare…. Linear video in the home was a huge advance over radio, and very large firms emerged to meet consumer desires over the last 60 years. The new era of Internet TV is likely to be very big and enduring also, given the flexibility and ubiquity of the Internet around the world.4
As media citizens, we have witnessed these media transformations before. For example, in 1999, Napster offered a better way to access music: on the Internet, with a quick (and illegal) download. The new format marked the beginning of the death of the CD album. Apple improved the user experience a few years later, with a large (and legal) music catalog on the iTunes store and new iPod devices on which to play the music. Now, music streaming and Internet radio businesses like Spotify and Pandora have offered better user experiences for accessing music. In the newspaper industry, eBay and craigslist offered a better and less expensive way of placing classified ads, disrupting a newspaper business model that was more
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than a century old.
Netflix’s leading position in the transition from linear to Internet TV puts the company in the position to join the top five digital conglomerates: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. With annual revenues of $6.8 billion (2015), Netflix is still much smaller than the largest, Apple, with $231.28 billion in annual revenue (2015). Yet Netflix’s potential for growth over the next decade is enormous as new generations of binge-watchers emerge, demanding TV and movies on small digital screens—and on their own time.
THE MEDIA TAKEOVERS, MULTIPLE MERGERS, AND CORPORATE CONSOLIDATION over the last two decades have made our modern world very distinct from that of earlier generations—at least in economic terms. What’s at the heart of this “brave new media world” is a media landscape that has been forever altered by the emergence of the Internet and a changing of the guard, from traditional media giants like Comcast and Time Warner to new digital giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. As the Netflix venture demonstrates, the media industry is marked by shifting and unpredictable terrain. In usurping the classified ads of newspapers and altering distribution for music, movies, and TV programs, the Internet has forced almost all media businesses to rethink not only the content they provide but also the entire economic structure within which our capitalist media system operates.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
In this chapter, we examine the economic impact of business strategies on various media. We will:
Explore the issues and tensions that are part of the current media economy Examine the rise of the Information Age, distinguished by flexible, specialized, and global markets Investigate the breakdown of economic borders, focusing on media consolidation, corporate mergers, synergy, deregulation, and the emergence of an economic global village Address ethical and social issues in media economics, investigating
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the limits of antitrust laws, the concept of consumer control, and the threat of cultural imperialism Examine the rise of new digital media conglomerates Consider the impact of media consolidation on democracy and on the diversity of the marketplace
As you read through this chapter, think about the different media you use on a daily basis. What media products or content did you consume over the past week? Do you know who owns them? How important is it to know this? Do you consume popular culture or read news from other countries? Why or why not? For more questions to help you understand the role of media economics in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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ANALYZING THE MEDIA ECONOMY
Given the sprawling scope of the mass media, the study of their economic conditions poses a number of complicated questions:
What role does the government need to play in determining who owns the mass media and what kinds of media products are manufactured? Should it be a strong role, or should the government step back and let competition and market forces dictate what happens to mass media industries? Should citizen groups play a larger part in demanding that media organizations help maintain the quality of social and cultural life? Does the influence of American popular culture worldwide smother or encourage the growth of democracy and local cultures? Does the increasing concentration of economic power in the hands of several international corporations too severely restrict the number of players and voices in the media?
Answers to such questions span the economic and social spectrums. On the one hand, critics express concerns about the increasing power and reach of large media conglomerates. On the other hand, many free-market advocates maintain that as long as these structures ensure efficient operation and generous profits, they measure up as quality media organizations.
In order to probe these issues fully, we need to understand key economic concepts across two broad areas: media structure and media performance.5
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FIGURE 13.1 MEDIA INDUSTRY STRUCTURES
The Structure of the Media Industry Media industries are typically structured in one of three ways: as a monopoly, an oligopoly (the most common structure), or a limited competition (typical of the radio and newspaper industries).6 For a detailed explanation of these structures, refer to Figure 13.1.
monopoly in media economics, an organizational structure that occurs when a single firm dominates production and distribution in a particular industry, either nationally or locally.
oligopoly in media economics, an organizational structure in which a few firms control most of an industry’s production and distribution resources.
limited competition in media economics, a market with many producers and sellers but only a few differentiable products within a particular category; sometimes called monopolistic competition.
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The Business of Media Organizations Media organizations develop or distribute content, set prices, and generate profit. They are often asked to live up to society’s expectations as well—that is, to operate with a sense of social responsibility in their role as mass communicators. These two main activities—maximizing profits while being socially responsible—are sometimes contradictory functions.
Maximizing Profits Media companies make money in two main ways. First, they generate revenue when consumers buy a book, song, game, movie, newspaper, magazine, or subscription—whether directly through them or through a retailer. This monetary transaction used to rely on brick-and-mortar stores or the mail, and we used to be able to hold a media product—like a magazine or a music CD—in our hands. Now we buy much of our media online, often through the devices of media companies themselves (such as a Kindle), and most of our media purchases are digital.
The other way media companies generate revenue is through advertisements that support the product, such as TV and radio shows, most magazines, newspapers, and many Web sites. These media products seem free to us, but actually advertisers are paying for our attention as we engage with the content. As consumers of advertising based media, we actually have to work for the “free” content by giving our time and attention to commercial sponsors. Advertisers pay more depending on how many of us are getting exposed to the ads, and our potential buying power as an audience, often determined by demographics and psychographics and other data collected about us (see Chapter 11). This is the main revenue structure for “free” over-the-air radio and TV broadcasting and most Web sites. Media companies similarly make money through product placement advertising in movies, television, and video games.
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OPRAH WINFREY has built a remarkable media empire over the course of her long career. From book publishing to filmmaking and television, where she got her start, Oprah has established an expansive sphere of influence. After ending her talk show, she launched the cable TV network OWN in 2011, which, after a slow start, moved toward stability on the strength of scripted television programs. Don Arnold/Getty Images
Media corporations generate the most money when they can get us to buy a media product or pay for a subscription (like a cable TV package or a newspaper or magazine subscription) and subsequently to be the target audience for advertising that comes with that media product.
Balancing Profits and the Public Good The harshest critics of capitalism suggest that running a business is all about maximizing profits, which often means keeping wages low and production high. The resulting impact on social responsibility for media corporations is twofold. First, in their own operations, should they compensate their workers with a fair and sustaining wage? Second, should they produce media content that is more than just profitable and contributes to society in some positive way?
In regard to fair wages, the 2016 election cycle featured many private and public debates about raising the minimum wage, with opponents saying that the strategy results in having to cut jobs, and advocates arguing that a higher wage means that workers can buy more products, bringing more hiring and an improved economy. Yet in 2016, the U.S. Department of Labor cited a letter signed by “more than 600 economists, including 7 Nobel Prize winners,” that made the following argument: “In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market.
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Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulative effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front.”7
In addition, many business executives have argued that there is an obligation in flourishing democracies to balance earning profits with serving the larger public. Recent decisions of billionaires like Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway and Jeff Bezos of Amazon to buy struggling newspapers resonate with the founders’ belief that a robust free press has a central role in helping democracy work well. Media corporations can also serve the public good in not only providing information necessary for democracy but also creating content that reflects the full diversity of their audience. For example, television producers in recent years have increased the diversity of their stories and representations both to make more money by attracting younger audiences and “because it’s the right thing to do,” as one television critic put it.8 In examining business strategies, what are other ways media businesses can balance profit motives and public-good obligations?
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THE TRANSITION TO AN INFORMATION ECONOMY
The twentieth century can be divided in two. The first half of the century emphasized mass production, assembly lines, the rise of manufacturing plants, and the intense rivalry between U.S.-based businesses and businesses from other nations that produced competing products. By the 1950s, however, the U.S. economy was beginning a transition to a new cooperative global economy, as the machines that drove the Industrial Age changed gears for the new Information Age. Offices slowly displaced factories as major work sites; centralized mass production declined and often gave way to internationalized, decentralized, and lower-paid service work; and the information-based economy became driven by computers and data.
ANTITRUST REGULATION During the late nineteenth century, John D. Rockefeller Sr., considered the richest businessman in the world, controlled more than 90 percent of the U.S. oil refining business. But antitrust regulations were used in 1911 to bust up Rockefeller’s powerful Standard Oil into more than thirty separate companies. He later hired PR guru Ivy Lee to refashion his negative image as a greedy corporate mogul.
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Bettmann/Getty Images
As part of the shift to an information-based economy, various mass media industries began marketing music, movies, television programs, and computer software on a global level. The emphasis on mass production (e.g., television programs targeted to mass audiences, or magazines designed to appeal to a broad cross section of the U.S. population) slowly shifted to the cultivation of specialized niche media markets. The political and economic forces swung from regulating media industries (and industries in general) in the first half of the twentieth century to deregulating them in the second half. Decades of deregulation have led to media mergers and acquisitions, resulting in media powerhouses and more concentrated ownership in nearly every media sector.
From Regulation to Deregulation During the rise of industry in the nineteenth century, entrepreneurs such as John D. Rockefeller in oil, Cornelius Vanderbilt in shipping and railroads, and Andrew Carnegie in steel created monopolies in their respective industries. There was so little regulation of these newly powerful industries that the companies became notorious for their exploitative labor practices (including child labor), corrupt corporate conduct, and manipulation of the competitive landscape. Corporations and their business partners were often organized as “trusts,” but soon the word trust became equated with any large corporation—particularly large, unethical corporations that would try to drive out fair competition. Congress responded by passing three significant antitrust laws between 1890 and 1950 to increase competition between companies and prevent any one company from having too much control over the market:
1890—Sherman Antitrust Act Outlawed monopoly practices and corporate trusts that often fixed prices to force competitors out of business.
1914—Clayton Antitrust Act Prohibited manufacturers from selling only to dealers and contractors who agree to reject the products of business rivals.
1950—The Celler-Kefauver Act Limited any corporate mergers and joint ventures that reduced competition.
Today, the Federal Trade Commission (established in 1914) and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice are responsible for enforcing these laws.
Deregulation Spurs Formation of Media Conglomerates Corporations chafed under antitrust rules and other regulations, and with the rise of
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public relations tactics and aggressive lobbying campaigns from the 1920s onward, they worked to turn the anticorporate rhetoric so prominent throughout the first half of the twentieth century (particularly in light of the Great Depression) into a commonsense narrative that government regulation was bad for business and bad for America.9 Although the administration of President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) actually initiated deregulation, most controls on business were drastically weakened under President Ronald Reagan (1981–1989). Deregulation led to easier mergers, corporate diversifications, and increased tendencies in some sectors toward oligopolies (especially in air travel, energy, finance, and communications).10
One of the media sectors most visibly deregulated was broadcasting. In 1953, as television was expanding across the country, the FCC adopted the 7-7-7 Rule, limiting companies to owning no more than seven AM radio stations, seven FM radio stations, and seven television stations.11 For more than thirty years, these ownership limitations helped ensure a diversity of broadcast media ownership— and, with it, diverse and alternative viewpoints. However, by the 1980s, the ownership limits had been slowly whittled away. In 1984, the FCC expanded the ownership rule to 12-12-12; it was increased to 18-18-12 in 1992, and then to 20- 20-12 in 1994.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (signed by President Bill Clinton) brought unprecedented deregulation to a broadcast industry that had been closely regulated for more than sixty years. From 1996 onward, the following held true:
A single company could now own an almost unlimited number of radio and TV stations. Telephone companies could now own TV and radio stations. Cable companies could now compete in the local telephone business. Cable companies could freely raise rates.
For more on deregulation’s effect on broadcast ownership consolidation, see Figure 13.2 on page 420. For the current status of broadcast ownership diversity, see “Case Study: Blacks Own Just Ten U.S. Television Stations. Here’s Why” on page 430.
Proponents of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 argued that the new competition would lower consumer prices. Instead, ever-larger corporations now control cable, telephone, and broadband service to households, and they have charged ever-increasing prices. For example, the average monthly price of basic cable service grew to $66.61 by 2014, a price increase almost triple the rate of inflation since 1995.12 Since then, the average cable bill climbed to more than $100 per month in 2016. Of course, cable, telephone, and satellite companies are delivering even more channels to consumers. But because the industry “bundles” channels, most consumers pay for far more channels than they watch. The steep cost of cable has spurred consumer groups to push for “à la carte” cable, which
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would allow customers to pay for only the channels they use. An even bigger problem for cable, however, has been the much cheaper costs of streaming services offered by Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. More and more young people have “cut the cable cord,” willing to wait and binge-watch their favorite shows on a streaming service, whose subscription costs are often paid by their parents, with whom they share their streaming passwords. In fact, in 2016 the average monthly subscription costs for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu Plus combined was around $25.13
Media Powerhouses: Consolidation, Partnerships, and Mergers Despite their strength, the antitrust laws of the twentieth century have been unevenly applied, especially in terms of the media. When International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) tried to acquire ABC in the 1960s, loud protests and government investigations sank the deal. But in the mid-1980s, just as the Justice Department was breaking up AT&T’s century-old monopoly—creating telephone competition—the government was authorizing a number of mass media mergers that consolidated power in the hands of a few large companies. For example, when General Electric set out to purchase RCA-NBC in the 1980s, the FTC, the FCC, and the Justice Department had few objections. When NBC Universal changed hands again—in its 2011 purchase by cable giant Comcast, which created the nation’s largest traditional media conglomerate—the New York Times reported that “Comcast said it faced few onerous restrictions” from federal regulatory agencies and no requirements to sell any assets.14
In 1995, Disney acquired ABC for $19 billion. To ensure its rank as the world’s largest media conglomerate, Time Warner countered and bought Turner Broadcasting in 1995 for $7.5 billion. In 2001, AOL acquired Time Warner for $164 billion—the largest media merger in history at the time. The company was originally called AOL–Time Warner. However, when the online giant saw its subscription service decline in the face of new high-speed broadband services from cable firms, the company went back to the Time Warner name and spun off AOL in 2009. Time Warner’s failed venture in the volatile world of the Internet proved disastrous. The companies together were valued at $350 billion in 2000 but only at $50 billion in 2010. After suffering losses of over $700 million in 2010, AOL in 2011 bought the Huffington Post for $315 million in an attempt to reverse its decline. AOL itself was bought by Verizon in 2015 for $4.4 billion.
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Also, a single person or company could only own one radio station per market. But ownership rules relaxed during the 1980s, and by 1994, the following was allowed:
After the Telecommunications Act of 1996, several radio corporations quickly ballooned to include hundreds of stations. As a result, radio and television ownership became increasingly consolidated. The largest radio company since 1996 is iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel Communications).
FIGURE 13.2 U.S. BROADCAST OWNERSHIP DEREGULATION
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From 1953 to 1984, the FCC enacted rules that prohibited a single company from owning more than seven AM radio stations, seven FM radio stations, and seven TV stations (called the 7-7-7 Rule): Bettmann/Getty Images
MEDIA ACQUISITIONS like Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal enable a distribution company (Comcast) to also control the production (by NBC Universal) of much of its content. Comcast, the largest cable and broadband provider in the United States, now owns many of the channels that appear on its cable systems. Yet this does not guarantee NBC Universal production a spot on one of those channels. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, originally intended for NBC, was sold instead to Netflix, where it became a success for the streaming company. NBC Universal can make money even when it doesn’t air its own shows. Everett Collection, Inc
Also in 2001, the federal government approved a $72 billion deal uniting AT&T’s cable division with Comcast, creating a cable company twice the size of its nearest competitor. (AT&T quickly left the merger, selling its cable holdings to Comcast for $47 billion in late 2001.) In 2009, Comcast struck a deal with GE to purchase a majority stake in NBC Universal, stirring up antitrust complaints from some consumer groups. In 2010, Congress began hearings on whether uniting a major cable company and a major broadcasting network under a single owner would decrease healthy competition between cable and broadcast TV and thus hurt consumers. In 2011, the FCC approved the deal.
Until the 1980s, antitrust rules attempted to ensure diversity of ownership among competing businesses. Sometimes this happened, as in the breakup of AT&T, and sometimes it did not, as in the cases of cable monopolies and the mergers just discussed. What has occurred consistently, however, is media competition being usurped by media consolidation. Today, the same
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anticompetitive mind-set exists that allowed a few utility and railroad companies to control their industries in the days before antitrust laws.
Most media companies have skirted monopoly charges by purchasing diverse types of mass media rather than trying to control just one medium. For example, rather than trying to dominate one area, Disney provides programming to TV, cable, and movie theaters. In 1995, then-CEO Michael Eisner defended the company’s practices, arguing that as long as large companies remain dedicated to quality—and as long as Disney did not try to buy the phone lines and TV cables running into homes—such mergers benefit America.
But Eisner’s position raises questions: How is the quality of cultural products determined? If companies cannot make money on quality products, what happens? If ABC News cannot make a substantial profit, should Disney’s managers cut back its national or international news staff? What are the potential effects of such layoffs on the public mission of the news media and, consequently, on our political system? How should the government and citizens respond?
Business Tendencies in Media Industries In addition to the consolidation trend, a number of other factors characterize the economics of mass media businesses. These are general trends or tendencies that cut across most business sectors and demonstrate how contemporary global economies operate.
Flexible Markets and the Decline of Labor Unions Geographer David Harvey has observed that today’s information culture is characterized by what business executives call flexibility—a tendency to emphasize “the new, the fleeting … and the contingent in modern life, rather than the more solid values implanted” during Henry Ford’s day, when relatively stable mass production drove mass consumption.15 The new elastic economy features the expansion of the service sector (most notably in health care, banking, real estate, fast food, Internet ventures, and computer software) and the need to serve individual consumer preferences. This type of economy has relied on cheap labor —sometimes exploiting poor workers in sweatshops—and on quick, high-volume sales to offset the costs of making so many niche products for specialized markets.
Given that 80 to 90 percent of new consumer and media products typically fail, a flexible economy has demanded rapid product development and efficient market research. Companies need to score a few hits to offset investments in failed products. For instance, during the peak summer movie season, studios premiere dozens of new feature films, such as 2015’s Jurassic World, San Andreas, and Trainwreck. A few are big hits but many more miss, and studios hope to recoup their losses via merchandising tie-ins and movie rentals and sales. Similarly, TV networks introduce scores of new programs each year but quickly replace those that fail to attract a large audience or the “right” kind of affluent viewers. Of course, this flexible media system heavily favors large companies with greater
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access to capital over small businesses that cannot easily absorb the losses incurred from failed products.
The era of flexible markets also coincided with the decline in the number of workers who belonged to labor unions. Having made strong gains on behalf of workers after World War II, labor unions, at their peak in 1954, represented 34.8 percent of U.S. workers. Then manufacturers and other large industries began to look for ways to cut labor costs, which had increased as then-powerful labor unions successfully bargained for middle-class wages. With the shift to an information economy, many jobs—such as the manufacture of computers, stereo systems, TV sets, and DVD players—were exported to avoid the high price of U.S. unionized labor. (See “Global Village: Designed in California, Assembled in China,” in Chapter 2, which describes the conditions in which the Chinese company Foxconn currently makes electronic devices for Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, and a number of other electronics brands.) As large companies bought up small companies across national boundaries, commerce developed rapidly at the global level. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, union membership fell to 20.1 percent in 1983 and 11.3 percent three decades later, flattening out at the lowest rate in more than seventy years.16
Downsizing and the Wage Gap With the apparent advantage to large companies in this flexible age, who is disadvantaged? From the beginning of the recession in December 2007 through 2009, the United States lost more than 8.4 million jobs (affecting 6.1 percent of all employers), creating the highest unemployment contraction since the Great Depression.17 The unemployment rate began to recede in 2009, but from 2009 to 2012, as the economy slowly recovered, 95 percent of postrecession income growth was captured by the top 1 percent—those Americans with the greatest income.18
Inequality in the United States between the richest and everyone else has been growing since the 1970s. This is apparent in the skyrocketing rate of executive compensation and the growing ratio between executive pay and the typical pay of workers in corresponding industries. In 1965, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20:1 (i.e., the typical CEO earned twenty times the salary of the typical worker in that industry). By 2013, the ratio had climbed to 295.9:1 (see Figure 13.3).19 Media corporations are among those with the highest wage gaps. In 2015, Leslie Moonves of CBS ($56.4 million), Philippe P. Dauman of Viacom ($54.1 million), Robert Iger of Disney ($43.5 million), and Jeffrey Bewkes of Time Warner ($31.5 million) were among the highest-paid CEOs of publicly traded companies in the United States.20
Corporate downsizing, which is supposed to make companies more flexible and more profitable, has served CEOs well but has not served workers well. This trend, spurred by government deregulation and a decline in worker protections, means that many employees today scramble for jobs, often working two or three part-time positions. Increasingly, the available positions have substandard pay. The
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National Employment Law Project reported that “more than one in four private sector jobs (26%) were low-wage positions paying less than $10 per hour.”21 This translates to a salary of about $20,000 a year or less. And the flexible economy keeps moving in that direction. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated in 2012 that 70 percent of the leading growth occupations for the next decade are low-wage ones.22 Even as most big businesses had recovered from the recession and experienced record profits by 2011, their low-wage workers’ wages still suffered. For example, at the top fifty low-wage employers, including Target, McDonald’s, Panera, Macy’s, and Abercrombie & Fitch, the highest-paid executives earned an average of $9.4 million a year. At that rate, they earned about $4,520 an hour, an amount it would take more than six hundred minimum-wage employees to earn in the same time period.23 Based on Leslie Moonves’s 2015 annual compensation of $56.4 million, it would take 3,740 minimum-wage CBS employees to earn as much as he earns in a year.
FIGURE 13.3 CEO-TO-WORKER WAGE GAP, 1965 AND 2013 Data from: Lawrence Mishel and Alyssa Davis, “CEO Pay Continues to Rise as Typical Workers Are Paid Less,” Economic Policy Institute, June 12, 2014, www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/.
Economics, Hegemony, and Storytelling
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https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/
To understand why our society hasn’t (until recently) participated in much public discussion about wealth disparity and salary gaps, it is helpful to understand the concept of hegemony. The word hegemony has roots in ancient Greek, but in the 1920s and 1930s, Italian philosopher and activist Antonio Gramsci worked out a modern understanding of hegemony: how a ruling class in a society maintains its power—not simply by military or police force but more commonly by citizens’ consent and deference to power. He explained that people who are without power —the disenfranchised, the poor, the disaffected, the unemployed, the exploited workers—do not routinely rise up against those in power because “the rule of one class over another does not depend on economic or physical power alone but rather on persuading the ruled to accept the system of beliefs of the ruling class and to share their social, cultural, and moral values.”24 Hegemony, then, is the acceptance of the dominant values in a culture by those who are subordinate to those who hold economic and political power.
hegemony the acceptance of the dominant values in a culture by those who are subordinate to those who hold economic and political power.
How, then, does this process actually work in our society? How do lobbyists, the rich, and our powerful two-party political system convince regular citizens that they should go along with the status quo? Edward Bernays, one of the founders of modern public relations (see Chapter 12), wrote in his 1947 article “The Engineering of Consent” that companies and rulers couldn’t lead people—or get them to do what the ruling class wanted—until the people consented to what those companies or rulers were trying to do, whether it was convincing the public to support women smoking cigarettes or to go to war. To pull this off, Bernays would convert a client’s goals into “common sense”; that is, he tried to convince consumers and citizens that his clients’ interests were the “natural” way things worked.
So in convincing consumers and voters that the interests of the powerful were common sense and therefore normal and natural, companies and politicians created an atmosphere and context in which there was less chance for challenge and criticism. Common sense, after all, repels self-scrutiny (“that’s just plain common sense—end of discussion”). In this case, status quo values and conventional wisdom (e.g., hard work and religious belief are rewarded with economic success) and political arrangements (e.g., the traditional two-party system serves democracy best) become accepted as normal and natural ways to organize and see the world.
To argue that a particular view or value is common sense is often an effective strategy for stopping conversation and debate. Yet common sense is socially and
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symbolically constructed and shifts over time. For example, it was once common sense that the world was flat and that people who were not property-owning white males shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Common sense is particularly powerful because it contains no analytical strategies for criticizing elite or dominant points of view and therefore certifies class, race, or sexual orientation divisions or mainstream political views as natural and given.
To buy uncritically into concepts presented as common sense inadvertently serves to maintain such concepts as natural, shutting down discussions about the ways in which economic divisions or political hierarchies are not natural and given. So when Democratic and Republican candidates run for office, the stories they tell about themselves espouse their connection to Middle American common sense and down-home virtues—for example, a photo of Mitt Romney eating a Subway sandwich or a video of Barack Obama playing basketball in a small Indiana high school gym. These ties to ordinary commonsense values and experience connect the powerful to the everyday, making their interests and ours appear to be seamless.
To understand how hegemony works as a process, let’s examine how common sense is practically and symbolically transmitted. Here it is crucial to understand the central importance of storytelling to culture. The narrative—as the dominant symbolic way we make sense of experience and articulate our values—is often a vehicle for delivering common sense. Therefore, ideas, values, and beliefs can be carried in our mainstream stories—the stories we tell and find in daily conversations; in the local paper; in political ads; on the evening news; in books, magazines, movies, and favorite TV shows; and online. The narrative, then, is the normal and familiar structure that aids in converting ideas, values, and beliefs to common sense—normalizing them into “just the way things are.”
The reason that common narratives work is that they identify with a culture’s dominant values; Middle American virtues include allegiances to family, honesty, hard work, religion, capitalism, health, democracy, moderation, loyalty, fairness, authenticity, modesty, and so forth. These kinds of Middle American virtues are the ones that our politicians most frequently align themselves with in the political ads that tell their stories. These virtues lie at the heart of powerful American Dream stories that for centuries have told us that if we work hard and practice such values, we will triumph and be successful. Hollywood, too, distributes these shared narratives, celebrating characters and heroes who are loyal, honest, and hardworking. Through this process, the media (and the powerful companies that control them) provide the commonsense narratives that keep the economic status quo relatively unchallenged and leave little room for alternatives.
In the end, hegemony helps explain why we occasionally support economic plans and structures that may not be in our best interest. We may do this out of altruism, as when wealthy people or companies favor higher taxes because of a sense of obligation to support those who are less fortunate. But more often, the American Dream story is so powerful in our media and popular culture that many of us believe we have an equal chance of becoming rich and therefore successful and happy. So why would we do anything to disturb the economic structures that
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the dream is built on? In fact, in many versions of our American Dream story— from Hollywood films to political ads—the government often plays the role of villain, seeking to raise our taxes or undermine rugged individualism and hard work. Pitted against the government in these stories, the protagonist is the little guy, at odds with burdensome regulations and bureaucratic oversight. However, many of these stories are produced and distributed by large media corporations and political leaders who rely on the rest of us to consent to the American Dream narrative in order to keep their privileged place in the status quo and reinforce this “commonsense” story as the way the world works.
AMERICAN DREAM STORIES are distributed through our media. This was especially true of television shows in the 1950s and 1960s like The Donna Reed Show, which idealized the American nuclear family as central to the American Dream.
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SPECIALIZATION, GLOBAL MARKETS, AND CONVERGENCE
In today’s complex and often turbulent economic environment, global firms have sought greater profits by moving labor to less economically developed countries that need jobs but have poor health and safety regulations for workers. The continuous outsourcing of many U.S. jobs and the breakdown of global economic borders accompanied this transformation. Bolstered by the passage of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) in 1947, the signing of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994, and the formation of the WTO (World Trade Organization, which succeeded GATT in 1995), global cooperation fostered transnational media corporations and business deals across international terrain.
But in many cases, this global expansion by U.S. companies ran counter to America’s early-twentieth-century vision of itself. Henry Ford, for example, followed his wife’s suggestion to lower prices so workers could afford Ford cars. In many countries today, however, most workers cannot even afford the computers and TV sets they are making primarily for U.S. and European markets.
The Rise of Specialization and Synergy The new globalism coincided with the rise of specialization. The magazine, radio, and cable industries sought specialized markets both in the United States and overseas, in part to counter television’s mass appeal. By the 1980s, however, even television—confronted with the growing popularity of home video and cable— began niche marketing, targeting affluent eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old viewers, whose buying habits are not as stable or predictable as those of older consumers. Younger and older audiences, abandoned by the networks, were sought by other media outlets and advertisers. Magazines such as J-14 and AARP The Magazine now flourish. Cable channels such as Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network serve the under-eighteen market, while the Hallmark Channel and Lifetime address female viewers over age fifty; in addition, cable channel BET targets young African Americans, helping define them as a consumer group.
Beyond specialization, though, what really distinguishes current media economics is the extension of synergy to international levels. Synergy typically refers to the promotion and sale of different versions of a media product across the various subsidiaries of a media conglomerate (e.g., a Weather Channel segment on NBC’s Today Show, or an NBC News reporter appearing on MSNBC for election coverage—all part of Comcast and its NBC Universal subsidiary). However, it also refers to global companies like Sony buying up popular culture—in this case, movie studios and record labels—to play on its various electronic products. Today, synergy is an important goal for large media corporations and is often the reason given for expensive mergers and acquisitions. But historically, half of all mergers
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and acquisitions are failures, and synergies are never realized.25 (Consider, for example, the disastrous AOL–Time Warner merger of 2001 or News Corp.’s expensive bad bet on the success of Myspace in 2005.)
synergy in media economics, the promotion and sale of a product (and all its versions) throughout the various subsidiaries of a media conglomerate.
Disney: A Postmodern Media Conglomerate The Walt Disney Company is one of the most successful companies in leveraging its many properties to create synergies. For example, in 2014, ABC broadcast the prime-time special The Story of “Frozen”: Making a Disney Animated Classic to promote the Disney movie studio’s enormous hit movie and soundtrack—and to hype ABC’s Once Upon a Time series (which would soon feature a character from Frozen) along with Disney’s next animated film, Big Hero 6. Frozen (as noted in Chapter 7) also tapped into a huge array of licensed merchandise and even Frozen- themed vacation trips by Disney’s tour company and cruise line. Such promotional events and merchandise helped maintain interest in the story and characters while Frozen 2 awaited its 2017 release. To fully understand the contemporary story of media economics and synergy, we need only examine the transformation of Disney from a struggling cartoon creator to one of the world’s largest media conglomerates.
The Early Years After Walt Disney’s first cartoon company, Laugh-O-gram, went bankrupt in 1922, Disney moved to Hollywood and found his niche. He created Mickey Mouse (originally named Mortimer) for the first sound cartoons in the late 1920s and developed the first feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, completed in 1937.
For much of the twentieth century, the Disney company set the standard for popular cartoons and children’s culture. The Silly Symphonies series (1929–1939) established the studio’s reputation for high-quality hand-drawn cartoons. Although Disney remained a minor studio, Fantasia and Pinocchio each made more than $40 million. Nonetheless, the studio barely broke even because cartoon projects took time—four years for Snow White—and commanded the company’s entire attention.
Around the time of the demise of the cartoon film short in movie theaters, Disney expanded into other areas with its first nature documentary short, Seal Island (1949); its first live-action feature, Treasure Island (1950); and its first
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feature documentary, The Living Desert (1953). Disney was also among the first film studios to embrace television, launching a
long-running prime-time show in 1954. Then, in 1955, Disneyland opened in Southern California. Eventually, Disney’s theme parks would produce the bulk of the studio’s revenues. (Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, began operation in 1971.)
In 1953, Disney started Buena Vista, a distribution company. This was the first step in making the studio into a major player. The company also began exploiting the power of its early cartoon features. Snow White, for example, was successfully rereleased in theaters to new generations of children before eventually going to videocassette and much later to DVD.
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Disney’s Global Brand Watch a clip from Frozen, one of Disney’s biggest movies ever.
Discussion: What elements of Frozen might have contributed to its global popularity?
Global Expansion The death of Walt Disney in 1966 triggered a period of decline for the studio. But in 1984, a new management team, led by Michael Eisner, initiated a turnaround. The newly created Touchstone movie division reinvented the live-action cartoon
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for adults as well as for children in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). A string of hand-drawn animated hits followed, including The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994), Mulan (1998), and Lilo & Stitch (2002). Disney also distributed a string of computer-animated blockbusters from Pixar Animation Studios, including Toy Story (1995), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), and The Incredibles (2004); it later acquired Pixar outright and released movies including Up (2009), Toy Story 3 (2010), and Brave (2012). Disney’s in-house animation studio eventually got into the computer-animation business and had several major successes with Wreck-It Ralph (2012), Frozen (2013), and Big Hero 6 (2014).
FOR ABOUT A DECADE, DISNEY ANIMATION WAS DEFINED more by Pixar, the computer-animation studio it purchased in 2006, than by its original in- house animation studio. But Disney’s original studio has seen a resurgence in recent years with movies like Tangled (2010), Wreck-It Ralph (2012), and Frozen (2013). The latter became an international phenomenon, grossing over $1 billion worldwide, and won the Academy Award for best animated feature. Dolls of the Frozen characters sold out at stores around the world. © Walt Disney Pictures/Everett Collection
In the mid-1990s, Disney changed from a media company to a media
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conglomerate. Through its purchase of ABC in 1995, Disney became the owner of the cable sports channels ESPN and ESPN2, and later expanded the brand with ESPNEWS, ESPN Classic, and ESPNU channels; ESPN The Magazine; ESPN Radio; and ESPN.go.com, beginning an era of sports monopolization. Disney also came to epitomize the synergistic possibilities of media consolidation. It can produce an animated feature for both theatrical release and DVD distribution. With its ABC network, it can promote Disney movies and television shows on programs like Good Morning America. A book version can be released through Disney’s publishing arm, Disney Publishing Worldwide, and “the-making-of” versions can appear on cable’s Disney Channel or ABC Family (now called Freeform). Characters can become attractions at Disney’s theme parks, which themselves have spawned Hollywood movies, such as the lucrative Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. In New York City, Disney renovated several theaters and launched versions of Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Spider-Man as successful Broadway musicals.
FIGURE 13.4 SYNERGY
Building on the international appeal of its cartoon features, Disney extended its global reach by opening Tokyo Disney Resort in 1983 and Disneyland Paris in 1991. Disney opened more venues in Asia, with Hong Kong Disneyland Resort in 2005 and Shanghai Disney Resort in 2016. Disney exemplifies the formula for becoming a “great media conglomerate” as defined in the book Global Dreams: “Companies able to use visuals to sell sound, movies to sell books, or software to sell hardware [will] become the winners in the new global commercial order.”26
Disney Today Even as Disney grew into the world’s No. 2 media conglomerate by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the cartoon pioneer experienced the multiple shocks of a recession, failed films and Internet ventures, and declining theme park attendance. By 2005, Disney had fallen to No. 5 among movie studios in U.S. box-
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office sales—down from No. 1 in 2003. The new course for Disney was to develop (through acquisitions) new stories for movies and its other corporate offerings. In 2006, new CEO Robert Iger merged Disney and Pixar. In 2009, Disney purchased Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion, bringing Iron Man, Spider-Man, and X-Men into the Disney family; in 2012, it purchased Lucasfilm and, with it, the rights to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies and characters. This means that Disney now has access to whole casts of “new” characters—not just for TV programs, feature films, and animated movies, but also for its multiple theme parks.
Global Audiences Expand Media Markets As Disney’s story shows, international expansion has allowed media conglomerates some advantages, including secondary markets in which to earn profits and advance technological innovations. First, as media technologies get cheaper and more portable (think Walkman to iPod), American media proliferate both inside and outside national boundaries. Today, greatly facilitated by the Internet, media products easily reach the eyes and ears of the world. Second, this globalism permits companies that lose money on products at home to profit abroad. Roughly 80 percent of U.S. movies, for instance, do not earn back their costs in U.S. theaters and depend on foreign circulation and video revenue to make up for losses.
In addition, satellite transmission has made North American and European TV available at the global level. Cable services such as CNN and MTV quickly took their national acts to the international stage, and by the twenty-first century, CNN and MTV were available in more than two hundred countries. Today, of course, the streaming of music, TV shows, and movies on the Internet through services like Spotify and Netflix (and through illegal file-sharing) has expanded the global flow of popular culture even further. (See “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Cultural Imperialism and Movies” on page 432 for more on the dominance of the American movie industry.)
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HBO GO AND HBO NOW Acclaimed HBO original programming, including Game of Thrones and a variety of other TV series and movies, is available online through the company’s HBO Go online service. Initially, it was available only to those who already subscribed to the premium channel through their cable company, but in 2015, HBO introduced the stand-alone subscription service HBO Now, which offers HBO content through non-cable providers like Apple. © HBO/Photofest
The Internet and Convergence Change the Game For much of their history, media companies have been part of usually discrete or separate industries—that is, the newspaper business stood apart from book publishing, which was different from radio, which was different from the film industry. But the Internet and convergence have changed that—not only by offering a portal to view or read older media forms but also by requiring virtually all older media companies to establish an online presence. Today, newspapers, magazines, book publishers, music companies, radio and TV stations, and film studios all have Web sites that offer online versions of their product or Web services that enhance their original media form.
The Rise of the New Digital Media Conglomerates The digital turn marks a shift in the media environment, from the legacy media powerhouses like Time Warner and Disney to the new digital media
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conglomerates. Five companies—Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook—reign in digital media, and Netflix is poised to join them, as detailed in Figure 13.5 on page 433.
Even though these digital corporations have proven to be technologically adept, they still need to provide compelling narratives to attract people (to repeat a point from the beginning of the chapter). The five largest companies are weak in this regard, as they rely on other companies’ media narratives (e.g., the sounds, images, words, and pictures) or the stories that their own users provide (as in Facebook posts or YouTube videos). Netflix, the smallest of the companies, is the leader in content development, although Amazon now has its own publishing divisions (to compete with publishing companies) and its own original television series and online channels, like Twitch (to compete with Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube). It’s likely that the other digital companies will eventually do the same. The history of mass communication suggests that it is the content—the narratives—that endures, while the devices and distribution systems do not.
CASE STUDY
Blacks Own Just Ten U.S. Television Stations. Here’s Why. BY KRISTAL BRENT ZOOK
his month, a federal district court judge in California threw out media entrepreneur Byron Allen’s $20 billion lawsuit against
Comcast and Time Warner Cable. The suit accused the cable giants of discriminating against black-owned media companies by creating and reserving just “a few spaces” for their channels at “the back of the bus.” A judge disagreed, dismissing the seventy-one-page lawsuit in a snappy three-page decision.
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But just because this particular case fell flat doesn’t mean minority exclusion from broadcast and cable ownership isn’t a problem. It is—a big one.
Minority owners are burdened by the legacy of racism. When the U.S. government first started giving away our airwaves in the 1930s, they were distributed exclusively to white male owners. It mostly stayed this way until the 1970s, when the FCC tried to remedy the problem by implementing a Minority Ownership Policy. The measure offered tax incentives to people seeking to sell stations to minority owners.
The policy worked. Within two years of its passage, the country went from one black-owned television station to ten. Over its total seventeen- year existence, minority ownership increased fivefold. However, it was struck down by the newly elected Republican Congress in 1995, and since then, its success has been mostly undone. In 2013, minorities owned just 6 percent of commercial television stations in the country, 6 percent of FM stations, and 11 percent of AM stations.
With a few notable exceptions (cable network Black Entertainment Television launched in 1980, and TV One followed in 1995), African American ownership remains particularly low, hovering at less than 1 percent of all television properties, and less than 2 percent of radio. Last year in fact, just two television stations were owned by black owners. (That number is up to about ten today.)
Media consolidation is at the heart of the problem. Clear Channel, for example, famously wiped out small and minority radio station owners with its buying spree, which allowed the company to snatch up as many as seven stations in a single market. According to Lauren M. Wilson— policy counsel at Free Press, a media watchdog organization—minority ownership decreases as markets become more concentrated. The proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable earlier this year was struck down by the FCC for just that reason.
But consolidation isn’t the only evil at work here: Lack of diversity is compounded by historic discrimination. “The FCC has been licensing broadcasting stations for 80 years,” says James Winston, president of the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters. “During most of that time, the only people in a position to obtain them were white males.” Winston explained that as technology developed from radio to television and then cable, the same white-owned companies continued to lead the pack because they could adapt to the new technology the fastest.
“African Americans and other minorities have come to the business
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world late, and without family-inherited wealth,” he says. “We find ourselves with every disadvantage in terms of becoming successful entrepreneurs in broadcasting and in new technologies.”
The FCC has done little recently to right these wrongs. After Congress tossed its Minority Ownership Policy, the FCC did not put a new strategy in place. David Honig—cofounder and president emeritus of the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council in Washington, D.C.—has represented more than seventy minority, civil rights, and religious organizations in proceedings before the FCC over the past three decades. He says that these groups come to his organization with “big business plans” for minority-focused channels but are unable to “crack the code to get in the door.” Cable distributors that control whether or not these start-ups live or die are largely white controlled. It’s up to them to determine whether they want to carry, for example, the BlackEveryWoman channel.
Honig served as subcommittee chair on the FCC’s Diversity Committee, which hasn’t met in nearly two years; it’s the only advisory committee of the agency that hasn’t met for that long. The commission is expected (or, depending on who you ask, legally required by Congress) to issue reports on diversity and minority ownership every two or three years. These reports are generally late, incomplete, and unreliable.
“There are dozens of diversity proposals before the FCC gathering dust,” says Honig, including new tax incentive legislation. “The FCC is doing very, very little relative to the need.”
Source: Adapted from Kristal Brent Zook, “Blacks Own Just Ten U.S. Television Stations. Here’s Why,”Washington Post, August 17, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/17/blacks-own- just-10-u-s-television-stations-heres-why/.
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MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Cultural Imperialism and Movies
In the 1920s, the U.S. film industry became the leader in the worldwide film business. The images and stories of American films are well known in nearly every corner of the world. But with major film production centers in places like India, China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia, and Nigeria, to what extent do U.S. films dominate international markets today? Conversely, how often do international films get much attention in the United States?
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Using international box-office revenue listings (www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/ is a good place to start), compare the recent weekly box-office rankings of the United States to those of five other countries. (Your sample could extend across several continents or focus on a specific region, like Southeast Asia.) Limit yourself to the top ten or fifteen films in box-office rank. Note where each film is produced (some films are joint productions of studios from two or more countries), and put your results in a table for comparison.
2 ANALYSIS What patterns emerged in each country’s box-office rankings? What percentage of films came from the United States? What percentage of films were domestic productions in each country? What percentage of films came from countries other than the United States? In the United States, what percentage of films originated with studios from other countries?
3 INTERPRETATION So what do your discoveries mean? Can you make an argument for or against the existence of cultural imperialism by the United States? Are there film industries in other countries that dominate movie theaters in their region of the world? How would you critique the reverse of cultural imperialism, wherein films from other countries rarely break into the Top 10 box-office list? Does this happen in any countries you sampled?
4 EVALUATION Given your interpretation, is cultural dominance by one country a good thing or a bad thing? Consider the potential advantages of creating a global village of shared popular culture versus the potential disadvantages of cultural imperialism. Also, is there any potential harm in a country’s Top 10 box- office list being filled with domestic productions and rarely featuring international films?
5 ENGAGEMENT Contact managers of your local movie theater (or executives at the
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headquarters of the chain that owns it). Ask them how they decide which films to screen. If they don’t show many international films, ask them why not. Be ready to provide a list of three to five international films released in the United States (see the full list of current U.S. releases at www.boxofficemojo.com) that haven’t yet been screened in the theater.
The Digital Age Favors Small, Flexible Start-Up Companies All the leading digital companies of today were once small start-ups that emerged at important junctures of the digital age. The earliest, Microsoft and Apple, were established in the mid-1970s with the rise of the personal computer. Amazon began in 1995 with the popularization of the Web and the beginnings of e-commerce. Google was established in 1998, as search engines became the best way of navigating the Web. Facebook, beginning in 2004, proved to be the best social media site to emerge in the 2000s, and Netflix began as just another way to deliver DVDs. For each success story, though, hundreds of other firms failed or flamed out quickly (e.g., Myspace).
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FIGURE 13.5 RISE OF THE NEW DIGITAL MEDIA CONGLOMERATES
Microsoft, one of the wealthiest digital companies in the world, is making the
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transition from being the top software company (a business that is slowly in decline) to competing in the digital media world with its Bing search engine and devices like its successful Xbox game console, Surface tablet, and Windows phone. Microsoft holds a small ownership share in Facebook and purchased the social media business LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016.
Apple’s strength has been creating the technology and the infrastructure to bring any media content to users’ fingertips. When many traditional media companies didn’t have the means to distribute online content easily, Apple developed the shiny devices (the iPod, iPhone, and iPad) and easy-to-use systems (the iTunes store) to do it, immediately transforming the media. Today, Apple has a hand in every media industry.
Amazon’s entrée is that it has grown into the largest e-commerce site in the world. In recent years, Amazon has begun shifting from delivering physical products (e.g., bound books) to distributing digital products (e-books and downloadable music, movies, television shows, and more) on its digital devices (Kindle, Fire TV, and Fire Phone).
Google’s search advertising business is worth more than $74.9 billion a year. Google moved into the same digital media distribution business that Apple and Amazon offer via its Android phone operating system, Nexus 7 tablet, Chromebook, and Chromecast. The company used YouTube to be part of the streaming video revolution, and is using YouTube Red as a platform for music videos and original shows.
Facebook’s number of users surpassed one billion worldwide in 2012, and the company has begun to leverage those users (and the massive amounts of data they share about themselves) into advertising sales. Like the four larger digital companies, Facebook now has a hardware device to access the Internet and digital media following its purchase of the Oculus Rift virtual reality gaming headset for $2 billion in 2014. Facebook introduced live streaming on its site in 2016, which challenged Twitter’s Periscope feature as well as YouTube.
Netflix started out as a DVD-by-mail service in 1997 and began streaming in 2007. With over 75 million streaming members in over 190 countries, Netflix is the leading Internet television channel. Netflix does not market any hardware devices, but that may be an advantage in the fast changing media business, where devices can quickly become obsolete. Netflix’s popular original programming also gives it insurance against the high costs of buying programming from other media corporations.
Today, the juncture in the digital era is the growing importance of social media and mobile devices. Like in the earlier periods, the strategy for start-up companies is to find a niche market, connect with consumers, and get big fast, swallowing up or overwhelming competitors. Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Zynga are recent
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examples of this. The successful start-ups then take one of two paths—either be acquired by a larger company (e.g., Google buying YouTube, Facebook buying Instagram) or go it alone and try to get even bigger (e.g., Twitter). Either way, success might not last long, especially in an age when people’s interests can change very quickly. Witness Zynga, which had the top social media game when FarmVille debuted in 2009 but began to fizzle out a few years later without another hit game.
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SOCIAL ISSUES IN MEDIA ECONOMICS
As the Disney-ABC merger demonstrates, recent years have brought a surplus of billion-dollar takeovers and mergers, including those between Time Inc. and Warner Communications, Time Warner and Turner, AOL and Time Warner, UPN and WB, Comcast and NBC Universal, Sirius and XM, Universal Music Group and EMI, Yahoo! and Tumblr, and AT&T and DirecTV (see Figure 13.6). This mergermania has accompanied stripped-down regulation, which has virtually suspended most ownership limits on media industries. As a result, a number of consumer advocates and citizen groups have raised questions about deregulation and ownership consolidation. Still, the 2008 financial crisis saw many of these megamedia firms overleveraged—that is, not making enough from stock investments to offset the debt they took on to add more companies to their empires. So in recent years we have seen Time Warner send AOL adrift, the New York Times Company sell the Boston Globe, the Washington Post Company sell Newsweek, Disney unload Miramax, News Corp. spin off its newspaper and publishing divisions, and the Tribune Company and Gannett split off their newspaper divisions.
One longtime critic of media mergers, Ben Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly, has argued that although there are abundant products in the market— thousands of daily and weekly newspapers, radio and television stations, magazines, and book publishers—only a limited number of companies are in charge of those products.27 Bagdikian and others fear that this represents a dangerous antidemocratic tendency, in which a handful of media moguls wield a disproportionate amount of economic control (see “Case Study: From Fifty to a Few: The Most Dominant Media Corporations” on page 437). The News Corp. phone hacking scandal that came to light in 2011 in the United Kingdom illustrates media power gone awry, with corruption involving top company executives, police, and government officials.28
The Limits of Antitrust Laws Although meant to ensure multiple voices and owners, American antitrust laws have been easily subverted since the 1980s, as companies expanded by diversifying holdings and merging product lines with other big media firms. Large media firms have also become among the most active and powerful lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and other political capitals. The resulting consolidation of media owners has limited the number of independent voices in the market and reduced the number of owners who might be able to innovate and challenge established economic powers, leading to renewed interest in enforcing antitrust laws.
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FIGURE 13.6 MAJOR MEDIA MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS
Diversification Most media companies diversify among media products (such as television stations and film studios), never fully dominating a particular media industry. Time Warner, for example, spreads its holdings among its television programming, film, publishing, cable, and Internet divisions. However, the media giant actually competes with only a few other big companies, like Disney, Viacom, and 21st Century Fox (the cable, broadcast, and satellite company created in the 2013 split of News Corp.).
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CASE STUDY 872
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From Fifty to a Few: The Most Dominant Media Corporations
n this graphic that lists the Top 10 media companies for 1980, 1997, and 2014, what patterns do you notice? How do these
patterns reflect larger trends in the media? For example, seven of the major companies in 1980 were mostly print businesses, but what about in 2014? Should we trust how NBC News covers Comcast or how ABC News covers Disney? Should we be wary if Time magazine hypes a Warner Brothers film? More important, what actions can we take to ensure that the mass media not only function as successful businesses for stockholders but also serve as a necessary part of our democracy? Most of the large media companies have been profiled here and in Chapters 2 through 10 (illustrating their principal holdings). Although the subsidiaries of these companies often change, the graphic demonstrates the wide reach of today’s large conglomerations.
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Data from: Ad Age’s 100 Leading Media Companies, December 7, 1981; “100 Companies by Media Revenue,” Advertising Age, August 18, 1997; various annual reports, 2014. * The revenue in $billions is based on total net U.S. media revenue and does not include nonmedia and international revenue.
Such diversification promotes oligopolies in which a few behemoth companies control most media production and distribution. This kind of economic arrangement makes it difficult for products offered outside an oligopoly to compete in the marketplace. For instance, in broadcast TV, the few networks that control prime time—all of them now owned by or in league with film studios—offer programs that are selected from known production companies that the networks either contract with regularly or own outright. Thus, even with a very good program or series idea, an independent production company—especially one that operates outside Los Angeles or New York—has a very difficult time entering the
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national TV market. The film giants even prefer buying from each other before dealing with independents. For example, in 2009, CBS sold syndication rights for its popular crime show The Mentalist to the TNT cable channel for over $2 million per episode. And for years, CBS’s Without a Trace and NBC’s Law & Order were both running in syndication on cable’s TNT channel, owned by Time Warner, which also co-owns the CW network with CBS.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
The Impact of Media Ownership
Media critics and professionals debate the pros and cons of media conglomerates.
Discussion: This video argues that it is the drive for bottom-line profits that leads to conglomerates. What solution(s) might you suggest to make the media system work better?
Applying Antitrust Laws Today Occasionally, independent voices raise issues that aid the Justice Department and the FTC in their antitrust cases. For example, when EchoStar (now the Dish Network) proposed to purchase DirecTV in 2001, a number of rural, consumer, and Latino organizations spoke out against the merger for several reasons. Latino organizations opposed the merger because in many U.S. markets, direct broadcast satellite (DBS) service offers the only available Spanish-language television programming. The merger would have left the United States with just one major DBS company and created a virtual monopoly for EchoStar, which had fewer Spanish-language offerings than DirecTV. In 2002, the FCC declined to approve the merger, saying it would not serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity.
In 2011, AT&T moved to acquire T-Mobile, another wireless telecom giant, for $39 billion. The Justice Department opposed the merger on antitrust grounds (media watchdog groups said it would have left the country with just three major mobile phone companies, giving consumers far fewer options), leading AT&T to eventually scrap the deal. AT&T, still looking to grow, bought DirecTV in 2014 for $48.5 billion. This bigger merger was approved because the two companies are
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generally involved in different businesses, although the government regulators required that the new company wouldn’t discriminate against carrying other content providers.
But U.S. antitrust laws have no teeth globally. Although international copyright laws offer some protection to musicians and writers, no international antitrust rules exist to prohibit transnational companies from buying up as many media companies as they can afford. Still, as legal scholar Harry First points out, antitrust concerns are “alive and well and living in Europe.”29 For example, when Sony and Bertelsmann’s BMG unit merged their music businesses, only the European Union (EU) raised questions about the merger on behalf of independent labels and musicians worried about the oligopoly structure of the music business. The EU repeatedly reviewed the merger, beginning in 2004, but decided in late 2008 to withdraw its opposition.
The Fallout from a Free Market Since the wave of media mergers began with gusto in the 1980s, a number of consumer critics have pointed to the lack of public debate surrounding the tightening oligopoly structure of international media. Economists and media critics have traced the causes and history of this void to two major issues: a reluctance to criticize capitalism, and the debate over how much control consumers have in the marketplace.
Equating Free Markets with Democracy In the 1920s and 1930s, commercial radio executives, many of whom had befriended FCC members, succeeded in portraying themselves as operating in the public interest while labeling their noncommercial radio counterparts in education, labor, or religion as mere voices of propaganda. In these early debates, corporate interests succeeded in misleadingly aligning the political ideas of democracy with the economic structures of capitalism.
Throughout the Cold War period in the 1950s and 1960s, it became increasingly difficult to criticize capitalism, which had become a synonym for democracy in many circles. In this context, any criticism of capitalism became an attack on the free marketplace. This, in turn, appeared to be a criticism of free speech because the business community often sees its right to operate in a free marketplace as an extension of its right to buy commercial speech in the form of advertising. As longtime CBS chief William Paley told a group of educators in 1937, “He who attacks the fundamentals of the American system” of commercial broadcasting “attacks democracy itself.”30
Broadcast historian Robert McChesney, discussing the rise of commercial radio during the 1930s, has noted that leaders like Paley “equated capitalism with the free and equal marketplace, the free and equal marketplace with democracy, and democracy with ‘Americanism.’” 31 The collapse of the former Soviet Union’s communist economy in the 1990s is often portrayed as a triumph for democracy.
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As we now realize, however, it was primarily a victory for capitalism and free- market economies.
Consumer Choice versus Consumer Control As many economists point out, capitalism is not structured democratically but arranged vertically, with powerful corporate leaders at the top and hourly wage workers at the bottom. But democracy, in principle, is built on a more horizontal model, in which each individual has an equal opportunity to have his or her voice heard and vote counted. In discussing free markets, economists distinguish between similar types of consumer power: consumer control over marketplace goods and freedom of consumer choice.32 Most Americans and the citizens of other economically developed nations clearly have consumer choice: options among a range of media products. Yet consumers and even media employees have limited consumer control: power in deciding what kinds of media get created and circulated.
One recurring place for democratic production is the work of independent and alternative producers, artists, writers, and publishers. Despite the movement toward economic consolidation, the fringes of media industries still offer a diversity of opinions, ideas, and alternative products. In fact, when independent companies become even marginally popular, they are often pursued by large companies that seek to make them subsidiaries. For example, alternative music often taps into social concerns that are not normally discussed in the recording industry’s corporate boardrooms. Moreover, business leaders “at the top” depend on independent ideas “from below” to generate new product lines. A number of transnational corporations encourage the development of local artists—talented individuals who might have the capacity to transcend the regional or national level and become the next global phenomenon.
Cultural Imperialism The influence of American popular culture has created considerable debate in international circles. On the one hand, the notion of freedom that is associated with innovation and rebellion in American culture has been embraced internationally. The global spread of media and increased access to media have made it harder for political leaders to secretly repress dissident groups, as police and state activity (such as the torture of illegally detained citizens) can now be documented digitally and easily dispatched by satellite, the Internet, and cell phones around the world.
On the other hand, American media are shaping the cultures and identities of other nations. American styles in fashion and food, as well as media fare, dominate the global market—a process known as cultural imperialism. Today, many international observers contend that the idea of consumer control or input is even more remote in countries inundated by American movies, music, television, and images of beauty. For example, consumer product giant Unilever sells Dove soap with its “Campaign for Real Beauty” in the United States but markets Fair &
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Lovely products—a skin-lightening line—to poor women in India.
cultural imperialism the phenomenon of American media, fashion, and food dominating the global market and shaping the cultures and identities of other nations.
CULTURAL IMPERIALISM Ever since Hollywood gained an edge in film production and distribution during World War I, U.S. movies have dominated the box office in Europe, in some years accounting for more than 80 percent of the revenues taken in by European theaters. Hollywood’s reach has since extended throughout the world, including previously difficult markets such as China.
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© Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Lucasfilm Ltd./Everett Collection
Although many indigenous forms of media culture—such as Brazil’s telenovela, Jamaica’s reggae, and Japan’s anime—are extremely popular, U.S. dominance in producing and distributing mass media puts a severe burden on countries attempting to produce their own cultural products. For example, American TV producers have generally recouped their production costs by the time their TV shows are exported. This enables American distributors to offer these programs to other countries at bargain rates, undercutting local production companies that are trying to create original programs.
Defenders of American popular culture argue that because some aspects of our culture challenge authority, national boundaries, and outmoded traditions, they create an arena in which citizens can raise questions. Supporters also argue that a universal popular culture creates a global village and fosters communication across national boundaries.
Critics, however, such as the authors of the book Global Dreams, believe that although American popular culture often contains protests against social wrongs, such protests “can be turned into consumer products and lose their bite. Protest itself becomes something to sell.”33 The harshest critics have also argued that American cultural imperialism both hampers the development of native cultures and negatively influences teenagers, who abandon their own rituals to adopt American tastes. The exportation of U.S. entertainment media is sometimes viewed as “cultural dumping,” because it discourages the development of original local products and value systems.
Perhaps the greatest concern regarding a global village is the cultural disconnection for people whose standards of living are not routinely portrayed in contemporary media. About two-thirds of the world’s population cannot afford most of the products advertised on American, Japanese, and European television. Yet more and more of the world’s populations are able to glimpse consumer abundance and middle-class values through television, magazines, and the Internet.
As early as the 1950s, media managers feared political fallout—a backlash of rising expectations—in that ads and products would raise the hopes of poor people but not keep pace with their actual living conditions.34 Furthermore, the conspicuousness of consumer culture makes it difficult for many of us to imagine ways of living that are not heavily dependent on the mass media and brand-name products.
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THE MEDIA MARKETPLACE AND DEMOCRACY
In the midst of today’s major global transformations of economies, cultures, and societies, the best way to monitor the impact of transnational economies is through vigorous news attention and lively public discussion. Clearly, however, this process is being hampered. Beginning in the 1990s, for example, news organizations, concerned about the bottom line, severely cut back the number of reporters assigned to cover international developments. This occurred—especially after 9/11—just as global news became more critical than ever to an informed citizenry.
THE PRESIDENT AND COFOUNDER of Free Press, a national nonpartisan organization dedicated to media reform, Robert McChesney is one of the foremost scholars of media economics in the United States. For ten years he hosted Media Matters, a radio call-in show in Central Illinois that discussed the relationship between politics and media. McChesney (left) most recently published Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America (2013) with journalist and Free Press cofounder John Nichols (right). AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
We live in a society in which often-superficial consumer concerns, stock market quotes, and profit aspirations—rather than broader social issues— increasingly dominate the media agenda. In response, critics have posed some key questions: As consumers, do we care who owns the media as long as most of us have a broad selection of products? Do we care who owns the media as long as
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multiple voices seem to exist in the market?
The Effects of Media Consolidation on Democracy Merged and multinational media corporations will continue to control more aspects of production and distribution. Of pressing concern is the impact of mergers on news operations, particularly the influence of large corporations on their news subsidiaries. These companies have the capacity to use major news resources to promote their products and determine national coverage.
Because of the growing consolidation of mass media, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain a public debate on economic issues. From a democratic perspective, the relationship of our mass media system to politics has been highly dysfunctional. Politicians in Washington, D.C., have regularly accepted millions of dollars in contributions from large media conglomerates and their lobbying groups to finance their campaigns. This changed in 2008 when the Obama campaign raised much of its financing from small donors. Still, corporations got a big boost from the Supreme Court in early 2010 in the Citizens United case. In a five-to-four vote, the court “ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections,” the New York Times reported.35 Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, said, “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” The ruling overturned two decades of precedents that had limited direct corporate spending on campaigns, including the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (often called the McCain-Feingold Act, after the senators who sponsored the bill), which placed restrictions on buying TV and radio campaign ads.
As unfettered corporate political contributions count as “political speech,” some corporations are experiencing backlash (or praise) once their customers discover their political positions. For example, in 2012, fast-food outlet Chick-fil- A’s charitable foundation “was revealed to be funneling millions to groups that oppose gay marriage and, until recently, promoted gay ‘cure’ therapies,” resulting in a firestorm of criticism but also a wave of support from others, the Daily Beast reported. In the same year, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife donated $2.5 million of their own money to support a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington State, gaining praise and criticism from some Amazon customers.36
Politicians have often turned to local television stations, spending record amounts during each election period to get their political ads on the air. In 2004, spending on the federal elections in the United States totaled $4.14 billion, with a large portion of that going to local broadcasters for commercials for congressional candidates and—in swing states like Ohio, Iowa, and Florida—for presidential candidates. In 2008, spending on federal elections topped $5.28 billion, and in 2012, it surpassed $6.28 billion.37 But although local television stations have been
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happy to get part of the ever-increasing bounty of political ad money, the actual content of their news broadcasts has become less and less substantial, particularly when it comes to covering politics.
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reported that from 2005 to 2013, the amount of airtime given to weather, traffic, and sports on local news broadcasts expanded from 32 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, over that same period, the amount of time spent on politics and government stories slipped from 7 percent to 3 percent. The study’s authors noted, “For some time, television consultants have been advising local television stations that viewers aren’t interested in politics and government, and it appears that advice is being taken.”38
Although television consultants might have concluded that local viewers aren’t interested in politics and government, political consultants are only increasing the onslaught of political television ads every campaign season. Thus there is little news content to provide a counterpoint to all the allegations that might be hurled in the barrage of political ads.
The Media Reform Movement Robert McChesney and John Nichols described the state of concern about the gathering consolidation of mainstream media power: “‘Media Reform’ has become a catch-all phrase to describe the broad goals of a movement that says consolidated ownership of broadcast and cable media, chain ownership of newspapers, and telephone and cable-company colonization of the Internet pose a threat not just to the culture of the Republic but to democracy itself.”39 While our current era has spawned numerous grassroots organizations that challenge media to do a better job for the sake of democracy, there has not been a large outcry from the general public for the kinds of concerns described by McChesney and Nichols. There is a reason for that. One key paradox of the Information Age is that for such economic discussions to be meaningful and democratic, they must be carried out in the popular media as well as in educational settings. Yet public debates and disclosures about the structure and ownership of the media are often not in the best economic interests of media owners.
Still, in some places, local groups and consumer movements are trying to address media issues that affect individual and community life. Such movements— like the National Conference for Media Reform—are usually united by geographic ties, common political backgrounds, or shared concerns about the state of the media. The Internet has also made it possible for media reform groups to form globally, uniting around such issues as contesting censorship or monitoring the activities of multinational corporations. The movement was also largely responsible for the success of preserving “net neutrality,” which prevents Internet service providers from censoring or penalizing particular Web sites and online services (see Chapter 2).
With this reform victory and the lingering effects of the 2008–09 economic
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crisis, perhaps we are more ready than ever to question some of the hierarchical and undemocratic arrangements of what McChesney, Nichols, and other reform critics call “Big Media.” Even in the face of so many media mergers, the general public today seems open to such examinations, which might improve the global economy, improve worker conditions, and serve the public good. By better understanding media economics, we can play a more knowledgable role in critiquing media organizations and evaluating their impact on democracy.
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13 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the commercial nature of mass media. In thinking about media ownership regulations, it is important to consider how the media wield their influence.
During the 2000 presidential election, two marginal candidates—Pat Buchanan on the Right and Ralph Nader on the Left—shared a common view that both major- party candidates largely ignored. Buchanan and Nader warned of the increasing power of corporations to influence the economy and our democracy. In fact, between 2000 and 2012, total spending on lobbying in the nation’s capital grew from $1.57 billion to more than $3 billion.40 (See Chapter 12 for more on lobbyists.)
These warnings have generally gone unnoticed and unreported by mainstream media, whose reporters, editors, and pundits often work for the giant media corporations that not only are well represented by Washington lobbyists but also contribute generously to the campaigns of the major parties to influence legislation that governs media ownership and commercial speech.
Fast-forward to 2012. While politicians spoke of transparency and truth-telling, their campaign-funding process had few of those characteristics. In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United (2010) decision, new Super PACs (political action committees) formed that can channel unlimited funds into political races as long as the Super PACs don’t officially “coordinate” with the political campaigns. With his own Super PAC (named Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow), comedian Stephen Colbert satirized the lax standards of Super PAC rules that enable hundreds of millions of dollars to be channeled into politics while obscuring disclosure of the contributors’ identities. By December 2012, Super PACs had spent more than $644 million on the 2012 election cycle (mostly in negative attack ads), with the majority of contributions coming from a few dozen elite ultrawealthy donors. For example, Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife donated in excess of $54 million to candidates and Super PACs in the 2012 election cycle.41 In the 2014 midterm elections, billionaire Tom Steyer surpassed the Adelsons by donating at least $58 million, mostly through the NextGen Climate Action Super PAC. NPR noted that liberal climate activist Steyer was the “election’s biggest donor—that we know of,” a testament to the fact that most big donors, like conservative billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch,
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opt not to disclose most of their campaign expenditures because they aren’t required to do so.42 The huge influx of money was a boon for media advertising profits.
What both Buchanan and Nader argued in 2000 was that corporate influence is a bipartisan concern that we have in common, and that all of us in a democracy need to be vigilant about how powerful and influential corporations become. This is especially true for the media companies that report the news and distribute many of our cultural stories. As media-literate consumers, we need to demand that the media serve as watchdogs over the economy and our democratic values. And when they fall down on the job, we need to demand accountability (through alternative media channels or the Internet), especially from those mainstream media—radio, television, and cable—that are licensed to operate in the public interest.
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
monopoly, 416 oligopoly, 416 limited competition, 416 hegemony, 423 synergy, 425 cultural imperialism, 439
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
Analyzing the Media Economy 1. How are the three basic structures of mass media organizations
—monopoly, oligopoly, and limited competition—different from one another?
2. What are the differences between direct and indirect payments
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for media products? The Transition to an Information Economy
3. Why has the federal government emphasized deregulation at a time when so many media companies are growing so large?
4. How have media mergers changed the economics of mass media?
Specialization, Global Markets, and Convergence 5. How do global and specialized markets factor into the new
media economy? How are regular workers affected? 6. Using Disney as an example, what is the role of synergy in the
current climate of media mergers? 7. Why have Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and
Netflix emerged as the leading corporations of the digital era? Social Issues in Media Economics
8. What are the differences between consumer choice and consumer control?
9. What is cultural imperialism, and what does it have to do with the United States?
The Media Marketplace and Democracy 10. What do critics and activists fear most about the concentration of
media ownership? How do media managers and executives respond to these fears?
11. What are some promising signs regarding the relationship between media economics and democracy?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. Why are consumers more likely to pay to download some digital content, like music and books, and less likely to pay for other content, like sports and news?
2. Why are narratives—media content—crucial to the success of a media corporation?
3. How does the concentration of media ownership limit the number of voices in the marketplace? Do we need rules limiting media ownership?
4. Is there such a thing as a global village? What does this concept mean
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to you?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter. VIDEO: THE MONEY BEHIND THE MEDIA Producers, advertisers, and advocates discuss how ownership systems and profits shape media production.
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PART 5 Democratic Expression and the Mass Media
The freedom and openness of the Internet is a double-edged sword. In a digital world overloaded with data and news, it has become much easier to obtain information. With so many people paying attention to the details of everyday life, it is also easier to uncover wrongdoing and hold institutions to higher levels of transparency. The news media are helping to do this, but the digital turn and online outlets—particularly Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—have provided new methods that allow ordinary citizens and nonprofit groups to do some of the work once performed by investigative journalists.
Although in some cases, like the Arab Spring uprisings and the Occupy Wall Street movement, use of digital technologies has provided a path for effecting change, this ease of getting information has led to more situations involving ethically gray practices, including those of the “hacktivists” WikiLeaks and Anonymous. The fragmented and accessible nature of the Internet has led to concerns about how to best police the online world and control its overwhelming array of voices and traffic. We may be seeing similar conflicts, changes, and compromises in the years ahead, as we continue to explore how powerful mass media fit into a democracy.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture to explore an interactive timeline of the history of mass communication, practice your media literacy skills, test your knowledge of the concepts in the textbook with LearningCurve, explore and discuss current trends in mass communication with Video Activities and Video Tools, and more.
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14 The Culture of Journalism Values, Ethics, and Democracy
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DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA
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IN 1887, a young reporter left her job at the Pittsburgh Dispatch to seek her fortune in New York City. Only twenty-three years old, Elizabeth “Pink” Cochrane had grown tired of writing for the society pages and answering letters to the editor. She wanted to be on the front page. But at that time, it was considered “unladylike” for women journalists to use their real names, so the Dispatch editors, borrowing from a Stephen Foster song, had dubbed her “Nellie Bly.” After four months of persistent job-hunting and freelance writing, Nellie Bly earned a tryout at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, the nation’s biggest paper. Her assignment: to investigate the deplorable conditions at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. Her method: to get herself declared mad and committed to the asylum.
MODERN JOURNALISM IN THE INFORMATION AGE ETHICS AND THE NEWS MEDIA REPORTING RITUALS AND THE LEGACY OF PRINT JOURNALISM JOURNALISM IN THE AGE OF TV AND THE INTERNET ALTERNATIVE MODELS: PUBLIC JOURNALISM AND “FAKE” NEWS DEMOCRACY AND REIMAGINING JOURNALISM’S ROLE
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◄ Journalist Nellie Bly dedicated her life to helping women and the poor as she laid the groundwork for what we know today as investigative journalism. Her undercover work, including time spent posing as a mental patient at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum, as an unwed mother looking to rid herself of an unwanted child, and as a sinner at a home for unfortunate women, exposed a need for reform in the care of the mentally ill and underprivileged members of society.
After practicing the look of a disheveled lunatic in front of mirrors, wandering city streets unwashed and seemingly dazed, and terrifying her fellow boarders in a New York rooming house by acting crazy, she succeeded in convincing doctors and officials to commit her. Other New York newspapers reported her incarceration, speculating on the identity of this “mysterious waif,” this “pretty crazy girl” with the “wild, hunted look in her eyes.”1
Her two-part story appeared in October 1887 and caused a sensation. She was the first reporter to pull off such a stunt. In the days before so-called objective journalism, Nellie Bly’s dramatic first-person accounts documented harsh cold baths (“three buckets of water over my head—ice cold water—into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth”); attendants who abused and taunted patients; and newly arrived immigrant women, completely sane, who were committed to this “rat trap” simply because no one could understand them. After the exposé, Bly was famous. Pulitzer gave her a permanent job, and New York City committed $1 million toward improving its asylums.
Within a year, Nellie Bly had exposed a variety of shady scam artists, corrupt politicians and lobbyists, and unscrupulous business practices. Posing as an “unwed mother” with an unwanted child, she uncovered an outfit trafficking in newborn babies. And disguised as a sinner in need of reform, she revealed the appalling conditions at a home for “unfortunate women.” A lifetime champion of women and the poor, Nellie Bly pioneered what was then called detective or stunt journalism. Her work inspired the twentieth-century practice of investigative journalism—from Ida Tarbell’s exposés of oil corporations in 1902–1904 to the Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting, awarded in 2016 to Leonora LaPeter Anton and Anthony Cormier of the Tampa Bay Times and Michael Braga of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune “for a stellar example of collaborative reporting by two news organizations that revealed escalating violence and neglect in Florida mental hospitals and laid the blame at the door of state officials.”2
One problem facing journalism today is that in the last few years, traditional print and broadcast newsrooms have dramatically cut back on news investigations,
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which are expensive and time-consuming, even though readers and viewers want more of them, not fewer. Mary Walton, writing about the state of investigative reporting for American Journalism Review, made this point in 2010: “Kicked out, bought out or barely hanging on, investigative reporters are a vanishing species in the forests of dead tree media and missing in action on Action News. I-Teams are shrinking or, more often, disappearing altogether. Assigned to cover multiple beats, multitasking backpacking reporters no longer have time to sniff out hidden stories, much less write them.” She reported that Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) membership “fell more than 30 percent, from 5,391 in 2003, to a 10-year low of 3,695 in 2009.”3 But encouragingly, the slack has been picked up, at least partially, by nontraditional and online media. In 2013, Jason Stverak, writing for Watchdog.org, noted, “Today, nonprofit news groups across the country are providing the ‘unsexy and repetitive’ coverage that the old-guard press began abandoning at the turn of the century…. Nonprofit news groups will lead the way in conducting investigative reports and keeping elected officials open and honest.”4 And in 2016, IRE reported that its membership had climbed again to about 5,500.
JOURNALISM IS THE ONLY MEDIA ENTERPRISE that democracy absolutely requires—and it is the only media practice and business that is specifically mentioned and protected by the U.S. Constitution. However, with the major decline in investigative reporting and traditional news audiences, the collapse of many newspapers, and the rise of twenty-four-hour cable news channels and Internet news blogs, mainstream journalism is searching for new business models and better ways to connect with the public.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
In this chapter, we examine the changing news landscape and definitions of journalism. We will:
Explore the values underlying news and ethical problems confronting journalists Investigate the shift from more neutral news models to partisan cable and online news Study the legacy of print-news conventions and rituals Investigate the impact of television and the Internet on news
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Consider contemporary controversial developments in journalism and democracy—specifically, the public journalism movement and satirical forms of news
As you read this chapter, think about how often you look at the news in a typical day. What are some of the recent events or issues you remember reading about in the news? Where is the first place you go to find information about a news event or issue? If you start with a search engine, what newspapers or news organizations do you usually end up looking at? Do you prefer opinion blogs over news organizations for your information? Why or why not? Do you pay for news —either by buying a newspaper or newsmagazine or by going online? For more questions to help you understand the role of journalism in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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MODERN JOURNALISM IN THE INFORMATION AGE
In modern America, serious journalism has sought to provide information that enables citizens to make intelligent decisions. Today, this guiding principle faces serious threats. Why? First, we may just be producing too much information. According to social critic Neil Postman, as a result of developments in media technology, society has developed an “information glut” that transforms news and information into “a form of garbage.”5 Postman believed that scientists, technicians, managers, and journalists merely pile up mountains of new data, which add to the problems and anxieties of everyday life. As a result, too much unchecked data—especially on the Internet—and too little thoughtful discussion emanate from too many channels of communication.
A second, related problem suggests that all the data (and distractions) the media now provide have questionable impact on improving public and political life. Many people feel cut off from our major institutions, including journalism. As a result, some citizens are looking to take part in public conversations and civic debates—to renew a democracy in which many voices participate. For example, one benefit of the controversial Bush v. Gore 2000 post–presidential election story was the way its legal and political complications engaged the citizenry at a much deeper level than the predictable, staged campaigns did.
What Is News? In a 1963 staff memo, NBC news president Reuven Frank outlined the narrative strategies integral to all news: “Every news story should … display the attributes of fiction, of drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising and falling action, a beginning, a middle, and an end.”6 Despite Frank’s candid insights, many journalists today are uncomfortable thinking of themselves as storytellers. Instead, they tend to describe themselves mainly as information- gatherers.
News is defined here as the process of gathering information and making narrative reports—edited by individuals for news organizations—that offer selected frames of reference; within those frames, news helps the public make sense of important events, political issues, cultural trends, prominent people, and unusual happenings in everyday life.
news the process of gathering information and making narrative reports—edited by individuals in a news organization—that
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create selected frames of reference and help the public make sense of prominent people, important events, and unusual happenings in everyday life.
“DEEP THROAT” The major symbol of twentieth-century investigative journalism, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s (above right) coverage of the Watergate scandal for the Washington Post helped topple the Nixon White House. In All the President’s Men, the newsmen’s book about their investigation, a major character is Deep Throat, the key unidentified source for much of Woodward’s reporting. Deep Throat’s identity was protected by the two reporters for more than thirty years. Then, in summer 2005, he revealed himself as Mark Felt (above), the former No. 2 official in the FBI during the Nixon administration. (Felt died in 2008.) AP Photo/Ben Margot
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“DEEP THROAT” The major symbol of twentieth-century investigative journalism, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s (above right) coverage of the Watergate scandal for the Washington Post helped topple the Nixon White House. In All the President’s Men, the newsmen’s book about their investigation, a major character is Deep Throat, the key unidentified source for much of Woodward’s reporting. Deep Throat’s identity was protected by the two reporters for more than thirty years. Then, in summer 2005, he revealed himself as Mark Felt (above), the former No. 2 official in the FBI during the Nixon administration. (Felt died in 2008.) AP Images
Characteristics of News Over time, a set of conventional criteria for determining newsworthiness — information most worthy of transformation into news stories—has evolved. Journalists are taught to select and develop news stories relying on one or more of these criteria: timeliness, proximity, conflict, prominence, human interest, consequence, usefulness, novelty, and deviance.
newsworthiness the often unstated criteria that journalists use to determine which events and issues should become news reports, including timeliness, proximity, conflict, prominence, human interest, consequence, usefulness, novelty, and deviance.
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Most issues and events that journalists select as news are timely, or new. Reporters, for example, cover speeches, meetings, crimes, and court cases that have just happened. In addition, most of these events have to occur close by, or in proximity to, readers and viewers. Although local TV news and papers offer some national and international news, readers and viewers expect to find the bulk of news devoted to their own towns and communities.
Most news stories are narratives and thus contain a healthy dose of conflict—a key ingredient in narrative writing. In developing news narratives, reporters are encouraged to seek contentious quotes from those with opposing views. For example, stories on presidential elections almost always feature the most dramatic opposing Republican and Democratic positions. And many stories in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, pitted the values of other cultures against those of Western culture—for example, Islam versus Christianity or premodern traditional values versus contemporary consumerism.
Reader and viewer surveys indicate that most people identify more closely with an individual than with an abstract issue. Therefore, the news media tend to report stories that feature prominent, powerful, or influential people. Because these individuals often play a role in shaping the rules and values of a community, journalists have traditionally been responsible for keeping a watchful eye on them and relying on them for quotes.
But reporters also look for human-interest stories: extraordinary incidents that happen to “ordinary” people. In fact, reporters often relate a story about a complicated issue (such as unemployment, war, tax rates, health care, or homelessness) by illustrating its impact on one “average” person, family, or town.
Two other criteria for newsworthiness are consequence and usefulness. Stories about isolated or bizarre crimes, even though they might be new, near, or notorious, often have little impact on our daily lives. To balance these kinds of stories, many editors and reporters believe that some news must also be of consequence to a majority of readers or viewers. For example, stories about issues or events that affect a family’s income or change a community’s laws have consequence. Likewise, many people look for stories with a practical use: hints on buying a used car or choosing a college, strategies for training a pet or removing a stain.
Finally, news is often about the novel and the deviant. When events happen that are outside the routine of daily life, such as a seven-year-old girl trying to pilot a plane across the country or an ex-celebrity involved in a drug deal, the news media are there. Reporters also cover events that appear to deviate from social norms, including murders, rapes, fatal car crashes, fires, political scandals, and gang activities. For example, as the war in Iraq escalated, any suicide bombing in the Middle East represented the kind of novel and deviant behavior that qualified as major news.
Values in American Journalism
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Although newsworthiness criteria are a useful way to define news, they do not reveal much about the cultural aspects of news. News is both a product and a process. It is both the morning paper or evening newscast and a set of subtle values and shifting rituals that have been adapted to historical and social circumstances, such as the partisan press values of the eighteenth century or the informational standards of the twentieth century.
For example, in 1841, Horace Greeley described the newly founded New York Tribune as “a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other.”7 Greeley feared that too much neutrality would make reporters into wimps who stood for nothing. Yet the neutrality Greeley warned against is today a major value of conventional journalism, with mainstream reporters assuming they are acting as detached and all-seeing observers of social experience.
Neutrality Boosts Credibility—and Sales As former journalism professor and reporter David Eason notes, “Reporters … have no special method for determining the truth of a situation nor a special language for reporting their findings. They make sense of events by telling stories about them.”8
Even though journalists transform events into stories, they generally believe that they are—or should be—neutral observers who present facts without passing judgment on them. Conventions such as the inverted-pyramid news lead, the careful attribution of sources, the minimal use of adverbs and adjectives, and a detached third-person point of view all help reporters perform their work in an apparently neutral way.
Like lawyers, therapists, and other professionals, many modern journalists believe that their credibility derives from personal detachment. Yet the roots of this view reside in less noble territory. Jon Katz, media critic and former CBS News producer, discusses the history of the neutral pose:
The idea of respectable detachment wasn’t conceived as a moral principle so much as a marketing device. Once newspapers began to mass market themselves in the mid-1880s, … publishers ceased being working, opinionated journalists. They mutated instead into businessmen eager to reach the broadest number of readers and antagonize the fewest…. Objectivity works well for publishers, protecting the status quo and keeping journalism’s voice militantly moderate. 9
To reach as many people as possible across a wide spectrum, publishers and editors realized as early as the 1840s that softening their partisanship might boost sales.
Partisanship Trumps Neutrality, Especially Online and on Cable Since the rise of cable and the Internet, today’s media marketplace has offered a
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fragmented world where appealing to the widest audience no longer makes the best economic sense. More options than ever exist, with newspaper readers and TV viewers embracing cable news, social networks, blogs, and Twitter. The old “mass” audience has morphed into smaller niche audiences that embrace particular hobbies, story genres, politics, and social networks. News media outlets that hope to survive appeal no longer to mass audiences but to interest groups—be they sports fans or history buffs, conservatives or liberals. So, mimicking the news business of the eighteenth century, partisanship has become good business. For the news media today, muting political leanings to reach a mass audience makes no sense because such an audience no longer exists in the way it once did—especially in the days when only three major TV networks offered evening news for a half hour, once a day. Instead, news media now make money by targeting and catering to niche groups on a 24/7 news cycle.
In such a marketplace, we see the decline of a more neutral journalistic model that promoted fact-gathering, documents, and expertise and held up “objectivity” as the ideal for news practice. Rising in its place is a new era of partisan news— what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel call a “journalism of assertion”—marked partly by a return to journalism’s colonial roots and partly by the downsizing of the “journalism of verification” that kept watch over our central institutions.10 This transition is symbolized by the rise of the cable news pundit on Fox News or MSNBC as a kind of “expert,” with more standing than verified facts, authentic documents, and actual experts. Today, the new partisan fervor found in news, both online and on cable, has been a major catalyst for the nation’s intense political and ideological divide.
Other Cultural Values in Journalism Even the neutral journalism model, which most reporters and editors still aspire to, remains a selective and uneven process. Reporters and editors turn some events into reports and discard many others. This process is governed by a deeper set of subjective beliefs that are not neutral. Sociologist Herbert Gans, who studied the newsroom cultures of CBS, NBC, Newsweek, and Time in the 1970s, generalized that several basic “enduring values” have been shared by most American reporters and editors. The most prominent of these values, which persist to this day, are ethnocentrism, responsible capitalism, small-town pastoralism, and individualism.11
By ethnocentrism, Gans meant that in most news reporting, especially foreign coverage, reporters judge other countries and cultures on the basis of how “they live up to or imitate American practices and values.” In identifying responsible capitalism as an underlying value, Gans contended that journalists sometimes naïvely assume that businesspeople compete with one another not primarily to maximize profits but “to create increased prosperity for all.” Gans pointed out that although most reporters and editors condemn monopolies, “there is little implicit or explicit criticism of the oligopolistic nature of much of today’s economy.”12
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ethnocentrism an underlying value held by many U.S. journalists and citizens, it involves judging other countries and cultures according to how they live up to or imitate American practices and ideals.
responsible capitalism an underlying value held by many U.S. journalists and citizens, it assumes that businesspeople should compete with one another not primarily to maximize profits but to increase prosperity for all.
OCCUPY WALL STREET On September 17, 2011, a group of protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district and officially launched the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. Their slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” addressed the growing income disparity in the United States, furthering the idea that the nation’s wealth is unfairly concentrated among the top-earning 1 percent. Although forced out of Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011, the movement resonated with people across the country and around the world. By the end of 2011, Occupy protests had spread to over 951 cities in eighty-two countries. Matthew McDermott/Newscom/Polaris Images/New York/New York/USA
Another value that Gans found was the romanticization of small-town
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pastoralism: favoring the small over the large and the rural over the urban. Many journalists equate small-town life with innocence and harbor suspicions of cities, their governments, and urban experiences. Consequently, stories about rustic communities with crime or drug problems have often been framed as if the purity of country life had been contaminated by “mean” big-city values.
small-town pastoralism an underlying value held by many U.S. journalists and citizens, it favors the small over the large and the rural over the urban.
Finally, individualism, according to Gans, remains the most prominent value underpinning daily journalism. Many idealistic reporters are attracted to this profession because it rewards the rugged tenacity needed to confront and expose corruption. Beyond this, individuals who overcome personal adversity are the subjects of many enterprising news stories.
individualism an underlying value held by most U.S. journalists and citizens, it favors individual rights and responsibilities above group needs or institutional mandates.
CASE STUDY
Bias in the News
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P oliticians seeking to divert attention away from their flaws often try to score points with voters by “blaming” the media for something— usually for bias. Candidates understand that journalists are
generally unpopular and make easy targets—partly because they seldom defend themselves against political attacks. During the 2016 presidential election, GOP nominee Donald Trump took this tactic to new heights, at one time or another banning the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed News, Mother Jones, Gawker, Univision, the Des Moines Register, Politico, the Washington Post, and even the conservative National Review from direct access to him or his staff. A 2010 study in the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics reported that both Democratic and Republican leaders are able “to influence perceptions of bias” by attacking the news media.1
Let’s acknowledge up front that all news is biased to some degree. News, after all, is primarily selective reporting and storytelling, not objective science. Editors choose certain events to cover and ignore others; reporters choose particular words or images to use and reject others. In the area of politics, however, research has shown that political bias in traditional news has not been significant in favoring one candidate over another.2 In fact, bias charges usually emanate from politicians who dislike negative (but generally true) stories about them. However, more significant biases in the news media do exist: journalists favor storytelling with plenty of drama and conflict, telling only “two sides of a story,” powerful and well-connected sources, and practices that serve their space and time limits.
In terms of political bias, a 2012 Pew Research Center study reported that 37 percent of Americans see “a great deal of political bias” in the news—up from 31 percent in 2000 and 25 percent back in 1989. In terms of political party affiliation, 49 percent of Republicans in this survey reported “a great deal” of bias, while only 32 percent of Democrats and 35 percent of Independents reported high levels of political bias. Since the late 1960s, the public perception has been that mainstream news media operate mostly with a liberal bias. This would seem to be supported by a Pew survey that found that 34 percent of national journalists self-identify as liberal, 7 percent as conservative, and 54 percent as moderate.3
Given primary dictionary definitions of liberal (adj., “favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs”) and conservative (adj., “disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change”), it is not surprising that a high percentage of liberals and moderates gravitate to mainstream journalism.4 A profession that documents change, checks power, and
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reports wrongdoing would seem to attract fewer conservatives, who are predisposed to traditional values and limiting change. Still, as sociologist Herbert Gans demonstrated in Deciding What’s News, most reporters, no matter their politics, are socialized into a set of work rituals—especially getting the story first and telling it from “both sides” to achieve a kind of balance.5 In fact, this commitment to “balance” mandates that journalists covering politics stake out a middle (or moderate) position. So if they interview someone on the Left, they must also interview someone on the Right.
Significantly, most research shows that people support news media outlets that seem to affirm their existing values and political leanings (see “Distrust of News Sources” chart below). For example, in a 2014 Pew study, 37 percent of those interviewed reported distrusting Fox News; however, that figure rose to 81 percent among respondents who self-identified as “consistently liberal” but was only 7 percent among respondents who identified as “consistently conservative.”
However, since journalists are primarily storytellers and not objective scientists, searching for liberal or conservative bias should not be the main focus of our media criticism. Under time and space constraints, most reporters follow the routine practices of their profession, which call on them to moderate their own political agendas. Still, news reports will always contain elements of bias, given the human imperfection in storytelling and in communicating through the lenses of language, images, and institutional values. Fully critiquing news stories must depend, then, on whether they are fair, represent an issue’s complexity, provide verification and documentation, represent multiple views, and serve the open marketplace of ideas promoted by democracy.
Data from: Pew Research Center Survey, March 19—April 2, 2014
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Often, however, journalism that focuses on personal triumphs neglects to explain how large organizations and institutions work or fail. Many conventional reporters and editors are unwilling or unsure of how to tackle the problems raised by institutional decay. In addition, because they value their own individualism and are accustomed to working alone, many journalists dislike cooperating on team projects or participating in forums in which community members discuss their own interests and alternative definitions of news.13
Facts, Values, and Bias Traditionally, reporters have aligned facts with an objective position and values with subjective feelings.14 Within this context, news reports offer readers and viewers details, data, and description. It then becomes the citizen’s responsibility to judge and take a stand about the social problems represented by the news. Given these assumptions, reporters are responsible only for adhering to the tradition of the trade—“getting the facts.” As a result, many reporters view themselves as neutral “channels” of information rather than selective storytellers or citizens actively involved in public life.
Still, most public surveys have shown that while journalists may work hard to stay neutral, the addition of partisan cable channels such as Fox News and MSNBC has undermined reporters who try to report fairly. So while conservatives tend to see the media as liberally biased, liberals tend to see the media as favoring conservative positions (see “Case Study: Bias in the News” on page 455). But political bias is complicated. During the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, many pundits on the political Right argued that Obama got much more favorable media coverage than did former president George W. Bush. But left- wing politicians and critics maintained that the right-wing media—especially news analysts associated with conservative talk radio and Fox’s cable channel—rarely reported evenhandedly on Obama, painting him as a “socialist” or as “anti- American.”
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ETHICS AND THE NEWS MEDIA
National journalists occasionally face a profound ethical dilemma, especially in the aftermath of 9/11: When is it right to protect government secrets, and when should those secrets be revealed to the public? How must editors weigh such decisions when national security bumps up against citizens’ need for information?
In 2006, Dean Baquet, then editor of the Los Angeles Times (in 2014, he became the executive editor of the New York Times), and Bill Keller, then executive editor of the New York Times, wrestled with these questions in a coauthored editorial: Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula…. We make our best judgment.
When we come down on the side of publishing, of course, everyone hears about it. Few people are aware when we decide to hold an article. But each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinces us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits….
We understand that honorable people may disagree … to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is a responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government.15 What makes the predicament of these national editors so tricky is that in the war against terrorism, some politicians maintain that one value terrorists truly hate is “our freedom.” At the same time, some of these same politicians criticized the Times for carefully editing and then publishing the WikiLeaks documents. There is irony here: What is more integral to liberty than the freedom of an independent press—so independent that for more than two hundred years U.S. courts have protected the news media’s right to criticize our political leaders and, within boundaries, reveal government secrets?
Ethical Predicaments What is the moral and social responsibility of journalists, not only for the stories they report but also for the actual events or issues they are shaping for millions of people? Wrestling with such media ethics involves determining the moral response to a situation through critical reasoning. Although national security issues raise problems for a few of our largest news organizations, the most frequent ethical dilemmas encountered in most newsrooms across the United States involve intentional deception, privacy invasions, and conflicts of interest.
Deploying Deception Ever since Nellie Bly faked insanity to get inside an asylum in the 1880s,
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investigative journalists have used deception to get stories. Today, journalists continue to use disguises and assume false identities to gather information on social transgressions. Beyond legal considerations, though, a key ethical question comes into play: Does the end justify the means? For example, can a newspaper or TV newsmagazine use deceptive ploys to go undercover and expose a suspected fraudulent clinic that promises miracle cures at a high cost? Are news professionals justified in posing as clients desperate for a cure?
In terms of ethics, there are at least two major positions and multiple variations. At one end of the spectrum, absolutist ethics suggests that a moral society has laws and codes, including honesty, that everyone must live by. This means citizens, including members of the news media, should tell the truth at all times and in all cases. In other words, the ends (exposing a phony clinic) never justify the means (using deception to get the story). An editor who is an absolutist would cover this story by asking a reporter to find victims who have been ripped off by the clinic and then telling the story through their eyes. At the other end of the spectrum is situational ethics, which promotes ethical decisions on a case-by-case basis. If a greater public good could be served by using deceit, journalists and editors who believe in situational ethics would sanction deception as a practice.
Should a journalist withhold information about his or her professional identity to get a quote or a story from an interview subject? Many sources and witnesses are reluctant to talk with journalists, especially about a sensitive subject that might jeopardize a job or hurt another person’s reputation. Journalists know they can sometimes obtain information by posing as someone other than a journalist, such as a curious student or a concerned citizen.
Most newsrooms frown on such deception. In particular situations, though, such a practice might be condoned if reporters and their editors believed that the public needed the information. The ethics code adopted by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) is mostly silent on issues of deception. The code does say that “journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information,” and it also calls on journalists to “seek truth and report it” (see Figure 14.1 on page 458). So is it being “honest” for reporters to use deceptive tactics in the pursuit of truth?
Invading Privacy To achieve “the truth” or to “get the facts,” journalists routinely straddle a line between “the public’s right to know” and a person’s right to privacy. One infamous example is the phone hacking scandal involving News Corp.’s now-shuttered U.K. newspaper, News of the World. In 2011, the Guardian reported that News of the World reporters had hired a private investigator to hack into the voice mail of thirteen-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler and had deleted some messages. Although there had been past allegations that reporters from News of the World had hacked into the private voice mails of the British royal family, government officials, and celebrities, this revelation on the extent of News of the World’s phone hacking activities caused a huge scandal and led to the arrests and resignations of
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several senior executives. Today, in the digital age, when reporters can gain access to private e-mail messages, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages, as well as voice mail, such practices raise serious questions about how far a reporter should go to get information.
FIGURE 14.1 SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS’ CODE OF ETHICS Data from: Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).
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In the case of privacy issues, media companies and journalists should always ask these ethical questions: What public good is being served here? What significant public knowledge will be gained through the exploitation of a tragic private moment? Although journalism’s code of ethics says, “The news media must guard against invading a person’s right to privacy,” this clashes with another part of the code: “The public’s right to know of events of public importance and interest is the overriding mission of the mass media.”16 When these two ethical standards collide, should journalists err on the side of the public’s right to know?
Conflict of Interest Journalism’s code of ethics also warns reporters and editors not to place themselves in positions that produce a conflict of interest—that is, any situation in which journalists may stand to benefit personally from stories they produce. “Gifts, favors, free travel, special treatment or privileges,” the code states, “can compromise the integrity of journalists and their employers. Nothing of value should be accepted.”17 Although small newspapers with limited resources and poorly paid reporters might accept such “freebies” as game tickets for their sportswriters and free meals for their restaurant critics, this practice does increase the likelihood of a conflict of interest that produces favorable or uncritical coverage.
conflict of interest considered unethical, a compromising situation in which a journalist stands to benefit personally from the news report he or she produces.
On a broader level, ethical guidelines at many news outlets attempt to protect journalists from compromising positions. For instance, in most cities, U.S. journalists do not actively participate in politics or support social causes. Some journalists will not reveal their political affiliations, and some even decline to vote.
For these journalists, the rationale behind their decision is straightforward: Journalists should not place themselves in a situation in which they might have to report on the misdeeds of an organization or a political party to which they belong. If a journalist has a tie to any group, and that group is later suspected of involvement in shady or criminal activity, the reporter’s ability to report on that group would be compromised—along with the credibility of the news outlet for which he or she works. Conversely, other journalists believe that not actively participating in politics or social causes means abandoning their civic obligations. They believe that fairness in their reporting, not total detachment from civic life, is their primary obligation.
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MICHAEL FINKEL was let go from the New York Times in 2001, after it was revealed that he created composite characters for a story. His subsequent experiences with an accused murderer who had used Finkel’s name while on the lam were documented in his memoir True Story, which was made into a 2015 movie (below) starring Jonah Hill as Finkel alongside James Franco as Christian Longo, eventually convicted of murder. Barry Wetcher/TM and © copyright Fox Searchlight Pictures. All rights reserved/Everett Collection
Resolving Ethical Problems When a journalist is criticized for ethical lapses or questionable reporting tactics, a typical response might be “I’m just doing my job” or “I was just getting the facts.” Such explanations are troubling, though, because in responding this way, reporters are transferring personal responsibility for the story to a set of institutional rituals.
There are, of course, ethical alternatives to self-justifications such as “I’m just doing my job” that force journalists to think through complex issues. With the crush of deadlines and daily duties, most media professionals deal with ethical situations only on a case-by-case basis as issues arise. However, examining major ethical models and theories is a common strategy for addressing ethics on a general rather than a situational basis. The most well-known ethical standard, the Judeo- Christian command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” provides one foundation for constructing ethical guidelines. Although we cannot address all major moral codes here, a few key precepts can guide us.
Aristotle, Kant, and Bentham and Mill
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The Greek philosopher Aristotle offered an early ethical concept, the “golden mean”—a guideline for seeking balance between competing positions. For Aristotle, this was a desirable middle ground between extreme positions, usually with one regarded as deficient and the other as excessive. For example, Aristotle saw ambition as the balance between sloth and greed.
Another ethical principle entails the “categorical imperative” developed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). This idea maintains that a society must adhere to moral codes that are universal and unconditional, applicable in all situations at all times. For example, the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) is articulated in one form or another in most of the world’s major religious and philosophical traditions and operates as an absolute moral principle. The First Amendment, which prevents Congress from abridging free speech and other rights, could be considered an example of an unconditional national law.
British philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) promoted an ethical principle derived from “the greatest good for the greatest number,” directing us “to distribute a good consequence to more people rather than to fewer, whenever we have a choice.”18
Developing Ethical Policy Arriving at ethical decisions involves several steps. These include laying out the case; pinpointing the key issues; identifying involved parties, their intents, and their competing values; studying ethical models; presenting strategies and options; and formulating a decision.
One area that requires ethics is covering the private lives of people who have unintentionally become prominent in the news. Consider Richard Jewell, the Atlanta security guard who, for eighty-eight days, was the FBI’s prime suspect in the city park bombing at the 1996 Olympics. During this time, at least two key ethical questions emerged: (1) Should the news media have named Jewell as a suspect even though he was never charged with a crime? (2) Should the media have camped out daily in front of his mother’s house in an attempt to interview him and his mother? The Jewell case pitted the media’s right to tell stories and earn profits against a person’s right to be left alone.
Working through the various ethical stages, journalists formulate policies grounded in overarching moral principles.19 Should reporters, for instance, follow the Golden Rule and be willing to treat themselves, their families, or their friends the way they treated the Jewells? Or should they invoke Aristotle’s “golden mean” and seek moral virtue between extreme positions? In Richard Jewell’s situation, how might journalists have developed guidelines to balance Jewell’s interests and those of the news media?
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REPORTING RITUALS AND THE LEGACY OF PRINT JOURNALISM
Unfamiliar with being questioned themselves, many reporters are uncomfortable discussing their personal values or their strategies for getting stories. Nevertheless, a stock of rituals, derived from basic American values, underlie the practice of reporting. These include focusing on the present, relying on experts, balancing story conflict, and acting as adversaries toward leaders and institutions.
Focusing on the Present In the 1840s, when the telegraph first enabled news to crisscross America instantly, modern journalism was born. To complement the new technical advances, editors called for a focus on the immediacy of the present. Modern front-page print journalism began to de-emphasize political analysis and historical context, accenting instead the new and the now.
As a result, the profession began drawing criticism for failing to offer historical, political, and social analyses. Modern journalism tends to reject “old news” for whatever new event or idea disrupts today’s routines. During the 1996 elections, when statistics revealed that drug use among middle-class high school students was rising, reporters latched on to new versions of the drug narrative, which had surfaced about crack cocaine during the 1986 and 1988 national elections.20 But these 1990s reports made only limited references to the 1980s. And although drug problems and addiction rates did not diminish in subsequent years, these topics were virtually ignored by journalists during national elections from 2000 to 2016. Indeed, given the space and time constraints of current news practices, reporters seldom link stories to the past or to the ebb and flow of history. (To analyze current news stories, see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Telling Stories and Covering Disaster” on page 462.)
Getting a Good Story Early in the 1980s, the Janet Cooke hoax demonstrated the difference between the mere telling of a good story and the social responsibility to tell the truth.21 Cooke, a former Washington Post reporter, was fired for fabricating an investigative report for which she initially won a Pulitzer Prize. (It was later revoked.) She had created a cast of characters, featuring a mother who contributed to the heroin addiction of her eight-year-old son.
At the time the hoax was exposed, Chicago columnist Mike Royko criticized conventional journalism for allowing narrative conventions—getting a good story —to trump journalism’s responsibility to the daily lives it documents: “There’s something more important than a story here. This eight-year-old kid is being
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murdered. The editors should have said forget the story, find the kid…. People in any other profession would have gone right to the police.”22 Had editors at the Post done so, Cooke’s hoax would not have gone as far as it did.
According to Don Hewitt, the creator and longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes, “There’s a very simple formula if you’re in Hollywood, Broadway, opera, publishing, broadcasting, newspapering. It’s four very simple words—tell me a story.”23 For most journalists, the bottom line is “Get the story”—an edict that overrides most other concerns. It is the standard against which many reporters measure themselves and their profession.
Getting a Story First In a discussion on public television about the press coverage of a fatal airline crash in Milwaukee in the 1980s, a news photographer was asked to talk about his role in covering the tragedy. Rather than discussing the poignant, heartbreaking aspects of witnessing the aftermath of such an event, the excited photographer launched into a dramatic recounting of how he had slipped behind police barricades to snap the first grim photos, which later appeared in the Milwaukee Journal. As part of their socialization into the profession, reporters often learn not only to emotionally detach from a tragic event but also to evade authority figures in order to secure a story ahead of the competition.
The photographer’s recollection points to the important role journalism plays in calling public attention to serious events and issues. Yet he also talked about the news-gathering process as a game that journalists play. It’s now routine for local television stations, 24/7 cable news, and newspapers to run self-promotions about how they beat competitors to a story. In addition, during political elections, local television stations and networks project winners in particular races and often hype their projections when they are able to forecast results before the competition does.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Telling Stories and Covering Disaster
Covering difficult stories—such as natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy in 2012—may present challenges to journalists about how to frame their coverage. The opening sections, or leads, of news stories can vary depending on the source—whether it is print, broadcast, or online news—or even the editorial style
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of the news organization (e.g., some story leads are straightforward; some are very dramatic). And, although modern journalists claim objectivity as a goal, it is unlikely that a professional in the storytelling business can approximate any sort of scientific objectivity. The best journalists can do is be fair, reporting and telling stories to their communities and nation by explaining the complicated and tragic experiences in words or pictures. To explore this type of coverage, try this exercise with examples from recent disaster coverage of a regional or national event.
1 DESCRIPTION Find print and broadcast news versions of the same disaster story (use LexisNexis if available). Make copies of each story, and note the pictures chosen to tell the story.
2 ANALYSIS Find patterns in the coverage. How are the stories treated differently in print and on television? Are there similarities in the words chosen or images used? What kinds of experiences are depicted? Who are the sources the reporters use to verify their information?
3 INTERPRETATION What do these patterns suggest? Can you make any interpretations or arguments based on the kinds of disasters covered, sources used, areas covered, or words/images chosen? How are the stories told in relation to their importance to the entire community or nation? How complex are the stories?
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4 EVALUATION Which stories are the strongest? Why? Which are the weakest? Why? Make a judgment on how well these disaster stories serve your interests as a citizen and the interests of the larger community or nation.
5 ENGAGEMENT In an e-mail or letter to the editor, share your findings with relevant editors and TV news directors. Make suggestions for improved coverage, and cite strong stories that you admired. Share with the class how the editors and news directors responded.
Journalistic scoops and exclusive stories attempt to portray reporters in a heroic light: They have won a race for facts, which they have gathered and presented ahead of their rivals. It is not always clear, though, how the public is better served by a journalist’s claim to have gotten a story first. In some ways, the 24/7 cable news, the Internet, and bloggers have intensified the race for getting a story first. With a fragmented audience and more media competing for news, the mainstream news often feels more pressure to lure an audience with exclusive, and sometimes sensational, stories. Although readers and viewers might value the aggressiveness of reporters, the earliest reports are not necessarily better, more accurate, or as complete as stories written later, with more context and perspective.
This kind of scoop behavior, which has become rampant in the digital age, demonstrates pack or herd journalism, which occurs when reporters stake out a house; chase celebrities in packs; or follow a story in such herds that the entire profession comes under attack for invading people’s privacy, exploiting their personal problems, or just plain getting the story wrong.
herd journalism a situation in which reporters stake out a house or follow a story in such large groups that the entire profession comes under attack for invading people’s privacy or exploiting their personal tragedies.
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Relying on Experts Another ritual of modern print journalism—relying on outside sources—has made reporters heavily dependent on experts. Reporters, though often experts themselves in certain areas by virtue of having covered them over time, are not typically allowed to display their expertise overtly. Instead, they must seek outside authorities to give credibility to seemingly neutral reports. What daily reporters know is generally subordinate to whom—they know.
During the early twentieth century, progressive politicians and leaders of opinion such as President Woodrow Wilson and columnist Walter Lippmann believed in the cultivation of strong ties among national reporters, government officials, scientists, business managers, and researchers. They wanted journalists supplied with expertise across a variety of areas. Today, the widening gap between those with expertise and those without it has created a need for public mediators. Reporters have assumed this role as surrogates who represent both leaders’ and readers’ interests. With their access to experts, reporters transform specialized and insider knowledge into the everyday commonsense language of news stories.
Reporters also frequently use experts to create narrative conflict by pitting a series of quotes against one another or, on occasion, use experts to support a particular position. In addition, the use of experts enables journalists to distance themselves from daily experience; they are able to attribute the responsibility for the events or issues reported in a story to those who are quoted.
To use experts, journalists must make direct contact with a source—by phone or e-mail or in person. Journalists do not, however, heavily cite the work of other writers; that would violate reporters’ desire not only to get a story first but to get it on their own. Telephone calls and face-to-face interviews, rather than extensively researched interpretations, are the stuff of daily journalism.
In addition, expert sources have historically been predominantly white and male. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) conducted a major study of the 14,632 sources used during 2001 on evening news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC. FAIR found that only 15 percent of sources were women—and 52 percent of these women represented “average citizens” or “non-experts.” By contrast, of the male sources, 86 percent were cast in “authoritative” or “expert” roles. Among U.S. sources for whom race could be determined, the study found that white sources “made up 92 percent of the total, blacks 7 percent, Latinos and Arab Americans 0.6 percent each, and Asian Americans 0.2 percent.”24 (At that time, the 2000 census reported that the U.S. population stood at 69 percent white, 13 percent Hispanic, 12 percent black, and 4 percent Asian.) So as mainstream journalists increased their reliance on a small pool of experts, they probably alienated many viewers, who may have felt excluded even from vicarious participation in day-to- day social and political life.
By 2012, the evidence suggested little improvement. In fact, a study from the 4th Estate showed that over a six-month period during the 2012 election, men were “much more likely to be quoted on their subjective insight in newspapers and on television.” This held true even on stories specifically dealing with women’s
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issues. The 4th Estate study showed that “in front page articles about the 2012 election that mention[ed] abortion or birth control, men [were] 4 to 7 times more likely to be cited than women.” The study concluded by noting that such a “gender gap undermines the media’s credibility.”25
These gender and source representation numbers have not changed much, even recently. Adrienne LaFrance, a staff writer for the Atlantic, found similar numbers borne out in her own work in both 2013 and 2015: “Male dominance in global media is well documented, and has been for many decades. Both in newsrooms and in news articles, men are leaders—they make more money, get more bylines, spend more time on-camera, and are quoted far more often than women—by a ratio of about 3:1.” LaFrance cites an American Sociological Review study summarizing these data over the last forty years: “ ‘The findings of these studies are consistent: They all report substantial underrepresentation of female names, and they typically find that female names constitute approximately one fourth of all mentions.’ ” 26
By the late 1990s, many journalists were criticized for blurring the line between remaining neutral and being an expert. The boom in twenty-four-hour cable news programs at this time led to a news vacuum that was eventually filled with talk shows and interviews with journalists willing to give their views. During events with intense media coverage, such as the 2000 through 2016 presidential elections, 9/11, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, many print journalists appeared several times a day on cable programs acting as experts on the story, often providing factual information but sometimes offering only opinion and speculation.
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WALTER LIPPMANN, often hailed as the father of modern journalism, believed that journalists should act as mediators between the general public and the political elite. In addition to treating journalism as a research-based science, Lippmann believed that the role of a journalist was essential to democracy, as citizens were otherwise uninformed about sociopolitical issues. Carl Mydans/Getty Images
Some editors even encourage their reporters to go on these shows for marketing reasons. Today, many big-city newspapers have office space set aside for reporters to use for cable, TV, and Internet interviews. Critics contend that these practices erode the credibility of the profession by blending journalism with celebrity culture and commercialism. Daniel Schorr, who worked as a journalist for seven decades (he died in 2010), resigned from CNN when the cable network asked him to be a commentator during the 1984 Republican National Convention along with former Texas governor John Connally. Schorr believed that it was improper to blend a journalist and a politician in this way, but the idea seems innocent by today’s blurry standards. As the late media writer David Carr pointed out in the New York Times in 2010, “Where there was once a pretty bright line between journalist and political operative, there is now a kind of continuum, with politicians becoming media providers in their own right, and pundits, entertainers and journalists often driving political discussions.”27
Balancing Story Conflict For most journalists, balance means presenting all sides of an issue without appearing to favor any one position. The quest for balance presents problems for journalists. On the one hand, time and space constraints do not always permit the presentation of all sides; in practice, this value has often been reduced to “telling both sides of a story.” In recounting news stories as two-sided dramas, reporters often misrepresent the complexity of social issues. The abortion controversy, for example, is often treated as a story that pits two extreme positions (staunchly pro- life versus resolutely pro-choice) against each other. Yet people whose views fall somewhere between these positions are seldom represented (studies show that this group actually represents the majority of Americans). In this manner, “balance” becomes a narrative device to generate story conflict.
On the other hand, although many journalists claim to be detached, they often stake out a moderate or middle-of-the-road position between the two sides represented in a story. In claiming neutrality and inviting readers to share their “detached” point of view, journalists offer a distant, third-person, all-knowing point of view (a narrative device that many novelists use as well), enhancing the impression of neutrality by making the reporter appear value-free (or valueless).
The claim for balanced stories, like the claim for neutrality, disguises
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journalism’s narrative functions. After all, when reporters choose quotes for a story, these are usually the most dramatic or conflict-oriented words that emerge from an interview, press conference, or public meeting. Choosing quotes sometimes has more to do with enhancing drama than with being fair, documenting an event, or establishing neutrality.
Until the recent shift to appealing to smaller niche audiences in the Internet age, the balance claim long served the financial interests of twentieth-century news organizations that staked out the middle ground. William Greider, a former Washington Post editor, saw the tie between good business and balanced news: “If you [were] going to be a mass circulation journal, that mean[t] you [were] going to be talking simultaneously to lots of groups that [had] opposing views. So you [had] to modulate your voice and pretend to be talking to all of them.”28
Acting as Adversaries The value that many journalists take the most pride in is their adversarial relationship with the prominent leaders and major institutions they cover. The prime narrative frame for portraying this relationship is sometimes called a gotcha story, which refers to the moment when, through questioning, the reporter nabs “the bad guy,” or wrongdoer.
This narrative strategy—part of the tough questioning style of some reporters— is frequently used in political reporting. Many journalists assume that leaders are hiding something and that the reporter’s main job is to ferret out the truth through tenacious fact-gathering and gotcha questions. An extension of the search for balance, this stance locates the reporter in the middle, between “them” and “us,” between political leaders and the people they represent.
Critics of the tough questioning style of reporting argue that while it can reveal significant information, when overused it fosters a cynicism among journalists that actually harms the democratic process. Although journalists need to guard against becoming too cozy with their political sources, they sometimes go to the other extreme. By constantly searching for what politicians may be hiding, some reporters may miss other issues or other key stories.
When journalists employ the gotcha model to cover news, being tough often becomes an end in itself. Thus reporters believe they have done their job just by roughing up an interview subject or by answering the limited “What is going on here?” question. Yet the Pulitzer Prize, the highest award honoring journalism, often goes to the reporter who asks ethically charged and open-ended questions, such as “Why is this going on?” and “What ought to be done about it?”
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JOURNALISM IN THE AGE OF TV AND THE INTERNET
The rules and rituals governing American journalism began shifting in the 1950s. At the time, former radio reporter John Daly hosted the CBS network game show What’s My Line? When he began moonlighting as the evening TV news anchor on ABC, the network blurred the entertainment and information border, foreshadowing what was to come.
In the early days, the most influential and respected television news program was CBS’s See It Now. Coproduced by Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow, See It Now practiced a kind of TV journalism lodged somewhere between the neutral and narrative traditions. Generally regarded as “the first and definitive” news documentary on American television, See It Now sought “to report in depth—to tell and show the American audience what was happening in the world using film as a narrative tool,” according to A. William Bluem, author of Documentary in American Television.29 Murrow worked as both the program’s anchor and its main reporter, introducing the investigative model of journalism to television—a model that programs like 60 Minutes and Dateline would imitate. Later, of course, Internet news-gathering and reporting would further alter journalism.
Differences between Print, TV, and Internet News Although TV news reporters share many values, beliefs, and conventions with their print counterparts, television transformed journalism in a number of ways.
First, while print editors traditionally cut stories to fit the physical space around ads, TV news directors had to time stories to fit between commercials. Despite the fact that a much higher percentage of space is devoted to print ads (about 60 percent at most dailies), TV ads (which take up less than 25 percent of a typical thirty-minute news program) generally seem more intrusive to viewers, perhaps because TV ads take up time rather than space. The Internet has “solved” these old space and time problems by freeing stories from those constraints online.
Second, while modern print journalists are expected to be detached, TV news derives its credibility from live, on-the-spot reporting; believable imagery; and viewers’ trust in the reporters and anchors. In fact, from the early 1970s through the early 2000s, most annual polls indicated that the majority of viewers found TV news a more credible resource than print news. Viewers have tended to feel a personal regard for the local and national anchors who appear each evening on TV sets in their living rooms. Today, however, this credibility gap has disappeared, partly because of the growing distrust people have of all news media and partly because of print reporters’ growing star status as guests on (or even hosts of) local
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or cable TV news programs.
MORNING NEWS SHOWS are closely tended patches of the network news landscape. Competition between shows like Today and Good Morning America remains intense, and network executives sometimes intervene to make “fixes,” like the controversial 2012 reassignment of former Today anchor Ann Curry. © NBC Universal/Photofest
By the mid-1970s, the public’s fascination with the Watergate scandal, combined with the improved quality of TV journalism, helped local news departments realize profits. In an effort to retain high ratings, stations began hiring consultants, who advised news directors to invest in national prepackaged formats, such as Action News or Eyewitness News, which employ the same theme music and opening graphic visuals from market to market. Consultants also suggested that stations lead their newscasts with crime blocks: a group of TV stories that recount the worst local criminal transgressions of the day. A cynical slogan soon developed in the industry: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Depending on the local station, multiple studies continue to show that crime stories still dominate as the lead story on any typical evening newscast—far more than any other category of news.
Pretty-Face and Happy-Talk Culture In the early 1970s at a Milwaukee TV station, consultants advised the station’s news director that the evening anchor looked too old. The anchor, who showed a bit of gray, was replaced and went on to serve as the station’s editorial director. He was thirty-two years old at the time. In the late 1970s, a reporter at the same station was fired because of a “weight problem,” although that was not given as the official reason. Earlier that year, she had given birth to her first child. In 1983, Christine Craft, a former Kansas City television news anchor, was awarded
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$500,000 in damages in a sex discrimination suit against station KMBC (she eventually lost the monetary award when the station appealed). She had been fired because consultants believed she was too old, too unattractive, and not deferential enough to men.
Such stories are rampant in the annals of TV news. They have helped create a stereotype of the half-witted but physically attractive news anchor, reinforced by popular culture images (from Ted Baxter on TV’s Mary Tyler Moore Show to Ron Burgundy in the Anchorman films). Although the situation has improved slightly, national news consultants set the agenda for what local reporters should cover (lots of crime) as well as how they should look and sound (young, attractive, pleasant, and with no regional accent). Essentially, news consultants—also known as news doctors—have advised stations to replicate the predominant male and female advertising images of the 1960s and 1970s in modern local TV news.
Another strategy favored by news consultants is happy talk: the ad-libbed or scripted banter that goes on among local news anchors, reporters, meteorologists, and sports reporters before and after news reports. During the 1970s, consultants often recommended such chatter to create a more relaxed feeling on the news set and to foster the illusion of conversational intimacy with viewers. Some also believed that happy talk would counter much of that era’s “bad news,” which included coverage of urban riots and the Vietnam War. A strategy still used today, happy talk often appears forced and may create awkward transitions, especially when anchors transition to reports on events that are sad or tragic.
Sound Bitten Beginning in the 1980s, the term sound bite became part of the public lexicon. The TV equivalent of a quote in print news, a sound bite is the part of a broadcast news report in which an expert, a celebrity, a victim, or a person-in-the-street responds to some aspect of an event or issue. With increasing demands for more commercial time, there is less time for interview subjects to explain their views. As a result, sound bites have become the focus of intense criticism. With shorter comments from interview subjects, TV news sometimes seems like dueling sound bites, with reporters creating dramatic tension by editing competing viewpoints together, as if interviewees had actually been in the same location speaking to one another. Of course, print news also pits one quote against another in a story, even though the actual interview subjects may never have met. Once again, these reporting techniques, also at work in online journalism, are evidence of the profession’s reliance on storytelling devices to replicate or create conflict.
sound bite in TV journalism, the equivalent of a quote in print; the part of a news report in which an expert, a celebrity, a victim, or a person on the street is interviewed about some aspect of an
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event or issue.
ANDERSON COOPER has been the primary anchor of Anderson Cooper 360 ° since 2003. Although the program is mainly taped and broadcast from its New York City studio, and typically features reports of the day’s main news stories, with added analyses from experts, Cooper is one of the few “talking heads” who reports live fairly often from the field for major news stories. Notably, he has done extensive coverage of the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; the February 2011 uprisings in Egypt; and the 2016 massacre at Pulse—a gay nightclub in Orlando—which claimed forty- nine lives, making it the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. Ted Soqui/Getty Images
Pundits, “Talking Heads,” and Politics The transformation of TV news by cable—with the arrival of CNN in 1980—led to dramatic changes in TV news delivery at the national level. Prior to cable news (and the Internet), most people tuned to their local and national news late in the afternoon or evening on a typical weekday, with each program lasting just thirty minutes. But today, the 24/7 news cycle means that we can get TV news anytime, day or night, and constant new content has led to major changes in what is considered news. Because it is expensive to dispatch reporters to document stories or maintain foreign news bureaus to cover international issues, the much less expensive “talking head” pundit has become a standard for cable news channels. Such a programming strategy requires few resources beyond the studio and a few guests.
Today’s main cable channels have built their evening programs along partisan
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lines and follow the model of journalism as opinion and assertion: Fox News goes right with pundit stars like Bill O’Reilly (the ratings king of cable news) and Sean Hannity; MSNBC leans left with Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and Lawrence O’Donnell; and CNN stakes out the middle with hosts who try to strike a more neutral pose, like Anderson Cooper.
Today’s cable and Internet audiences seem to prefer partisan talking heads over traditional reporting. This suggests that in today’s fragmented media marketplace, going after niche audiences along political lines is smart business—although not necessarily good journalism. What should concern us today is the jettisoning of good journalism—anchored in reporting and verification—that uses reporters to document stories and interview key sources. In its place, on cable and online, are highly partisan pundits who may have strong opinions and charisma but who probably do no reporting themselves and therefore may not have all their facts straight.
Convergence Enhances and Changes Journalism For mainstream print and TV reporters and editors, online news has added new dimensions to journalism. Both print and TV news can continually update breaking stories online, and many reporters now post their online stories first and then work on traditional versions. This means that readers and viewers no longer have to wait until the next day for the morning paper or for the local evening newscast for important stories. To enhance the online reports, which do not have the time or space constraints of television or print, newspaper reporters are increasingly required to provide video or audio for their stories. This might allow readers and viewers to see full interviews rather than just selected print quotes in the paper or short sound bites on the TV report.
However, online news comes with a special set of problems. Print reporters, for example, can conduct e-mail interviews rather than leave the office to question a subject in person. Many editors discourage this practice because they think relying on e-mail gives interviewees the chance to control and shape their answers. While some might argue that this provides more thoughtful answers, journalists say it takes the elements of surprise and spontaneity out of the traditional news interview, during which a subject might accidentally reveal information—something less likely to occur in an online setting.
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The Contemporary Journalist: Pundit or Reporter? Journalists discuss whether the 24/7 news cycle encourages reporters to offer opinions more than facts.
Discussion: What might be the reasons why reporters should give opinions, and what might be the reasons why they shouldn’t?
Another problem for journalists, ironically, is the wide-ranging resources of the Internet. This includes access to versions of stories from other papers or broadcast stations. The mountain of information available on the Internet has made it all too easy for journalists to—unwittingly or intentionally—copy other journalists’ work. In addition, access to databases and other informational sites can keep reporters at their computers rather than out cultivating sources, tracking down new kinds of information, and staying in touch with their communities.
Most notable, however, for journalists in the digital age are the demands that convergence has made on their reporting and writing. Print journalists at newspapers (and magazines) are expected to carry digital cameras so they can post video along with the print versions of their stories. TV reporters are expected to write print-style news reports for their station’s Web site to supplement the streaming video of their original TV stories. And both print and TV reporters are often expected to post the Internet versions of their stories first, before the versions they do for the morning paper or the six o’clock news. Increasingly, journalists today are also expected to tweet and blog.
The Power of Visual Language The shift from a print-dominated culture to an electronic-digital culture requires that we look carefully at differences among various approaches to journalism. For example, the visual language of TV news and the Internet often captures events more powerfully than do words. Over the past fifty years, television news has dramatized America’s key events. Civil Rights activists, for instance, acknowledge that the movement benefited enormously from televised news that documented the plight of southern blacks in the 1960s. The news footage of southern police officers turning powerful water hoses on peaceful Civil Rights demonstrators, and the news images of “white only” and “colored only” signs in hotels and restaurants, created a context for understanding the disparity between black and white in the 1950s and 1960s.
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NEWS IN THE DIGITAL AGE Today, more and more journalists use Twitter in addition to performing their regular reporting duties. Muck Rack collects journalists’ tweets in one place, making it easier than ever to access breaking news and real-time, one-line reporting. Courtesy of muckrack.com
Other enduring TV images are also embedded in the collective memory of many Americans: the Kennedy and King assassinations in the 1960s; the turmoil of Watergate in the 1970s; the first space shuttle disaster and the Chinese student uprisings in the 1980s; the Oklahoma City federal building bombing in the 1990s; the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center in 2001; Hurricane Katrina in 2005; the historic election of President Obama in 2008; the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011; the brutal murders of twenty schoolchildren and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012; the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; and the 2016 mass shooting of forty-nine people in an Orlando nightclub. During these critical events, TV news has been a cultural reference point, marking the strengths and weaknesses of our world.
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Fake News/Real News: A Fine Line The editor of the Onion describes how the
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publication critiques “real” news media. Discussion: How many of your news sources might be considered “fake” news as opposed to traditional news, and how do you decide which sources to consult?
Today, the Internet, for good or bad, functions as a repository for news images and video, alerting us to stories that the mainstream media missed or to videos captured by amateurs. Everyone remembers the video leaked to Mother Jones magazine in which candidate Mitt Romney proclaimed at a 2012 campaign fund- raiser: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what … who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims.” That footage, played over and over on YouTube and cable news, hurt Romney’s campaign. Then, in summer 2013, CIA employee Edward Snowden chose a civil liberties advocate and columnist for the London-based Guardian to receive leaked material on systematic surveillance of ordinary Americans by the National Security Agency. The video interview with the Guardian scored 1.5 million YouTube hits shortly after its release. As New York Times columnist David Carr noted at the time, “News no longer needs the permission of traditional gatekeepers to break through. Scoops can now come from all corners of the media map and find an audience just by virtue of what they reveal.”30
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ALTERNATIVE MODELS: PUBLIC JOURNALISM AND “FAKE” NEWS
In 1990, Poland was experiencing growing pains as it shifted from a state- controlled economic system to a more open market economy. The country’s leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, the first noncommunist newspaper to appear in Eastern Europe since the 1940s, was also undergoing challenges. Based in Warsaw with a circulation of about 350,000 at the time, Gazeta Wyborcza had to report on and explain the new economy and the new crime wave that accompanied it. Especially troubling to the news staff and Polish citizens were gangs that robbed American and Western European tourists at railway stations, sometimes assaulting them in the process. The stolen goods would then pass to an outer circle, whose members transferred the goods to still another exterior ring of thieves. Even if the police caught the inner circle members, the loot usually disappeared.
These developments triggered heated discussions in the newsroom. A small group of young reporters, some of whom had recently worked in the United States, argued that the best way to cover the story was to describe the new crime wave and relay the facts to readers in a neutral manner. Another group, many of whom were older and more experienced, felt that the paper should take an advocacy stance and condemn the criminals through interpretive columns on the front page. The older guard won this particular debate, and more interpretive pieces appeared.31
This story illustrates the two competing models that have influenced American and European journalism since the early twentieth century. The first—the informational or modern model—emphasizes describing events and issues from a seemingly neutral point of view. The second—a more partisan or European model —stresses analyzing occurrences and advocating remedies from an acknowledged point of view. For a fictionalized representation of these differences, contrast the depiction of journalists on HBO’s U.S. program The Newsroom (2012–2014) with that on the Danish TV series Borgen (2010–2013). In The Newsroom, discussions of remedies and viewpoints take place off camera; in Borgen, journalists talk about these issues on and off camera.
In most American newspapers today, the informational model dominates the front page, while the partisan model remains confined to the editorial pages and an occasional front-page piece. However, alternative models of news—from the serious to the satirical—have emerged to challenge modern journalistic ideals.
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CASE STUDY
A Lost Generation of Journalists?
he economic crisis in 2008–09 added to the pile of problems facing traditional U.S. journalism, joining such obstacles as
Internet competition and loss of classified ad revenue. In 2014, a Pew Research Center study analyzing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics specified one possible result of the economic downturn: “After years of grim news for the news industry marked by seemingly endless rounds of staff cutbacks, it’s not unusual for those thinking about a career in journalism or veterans trying to find a new job to look at options in related fields. One field outpacing journalism both in sheer numbers and in salary growth is public relations.”1
Back in the 1970s, the number of PR employees in the United States was roughly equal to the number of reporters working in print and broadcasting. That ratio shifted to 2 to 1 by 2000, became 3.2 to 1 by 2004, and was nearing 5 to 1 by 2013. Between 2004 and 2015, the number of reporters fell from well over 50,000 to 32,900 (according to ANSE data), while the number of PR specialists “grew by 22 percent, from 166,210 to 202,530.”2
The pay differences were also striking, according to the 2014 Pew study. Over the past decade, the salary gap between PR and news workers had, by 2013, grown to almost $20,000 per year; PR specialists earned an average of $54,940 annually, while reporters averaged $35,600. Nine years earlier, the disparity was not quite as large: $43,830 for PR and $31,320 for reporters.3
The decline in reporters and the rise of PR and political spin doctors raise significant concerns. During and following the digital turn,
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journalists have increasingly relied on press releases both for story ideas and for news copy. However, according to Robert McChesney and John Nichols in The Death and Life of American Journalism, “as editorial staffs shrink, there is less ability for news media to interrogate and counter the claims in press releases.”4 As an example, a 2012 Pew study reported that during the national election that year, journalists “often functioned as megaphones for political partisans, relaying assertions rather than contextualizing them.”5
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With the decrease in reporters and the increase in PR practitioners, far fewer journalists are available to vet information and fact-check the press releases that PR specialists pitch daily to multiple news organizations. For example, on the subject of health news, Pew researchers in 2014 reported on a JAMA Internal Medicine finding “that half of the stories examined relied on a single source or failed to disclose conflicts of interest from sources.”6
Finally, the biggest concern may be the lost generation of journalists. More students coming from journalism schools are taking jobs as business writers and PR workers. The journalism profession, then, needs to not only figure out a new business model for the twenty-first century but also figure out how to recruit the best and brightest journalism students. Back in 1791, our founders offered special protection to journalists under the First Amendment—not to public relations specialists. Good journalism, after all, helps democracy work: It makes sense of key issues, documents events, keeps watch over our central institutions, and tells a community’s significant stories. In the partisan era we now live in, overloaded with decontextualized information and undocumented punditry, these skills are more important than ever. Good journalism and compelling stories will eventually save and sustain the profession, no matter how the
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marketplace continues to fracture.
The Public Journalism Movement From the late 1980s through the 1990s, a number of papers experimented with ways to involve readers more actively in the news process. These experiments surfaced primarily at midsize daily papers, including the Charlotte Observer, the Wichita Eagle, the Virginian-Pilot, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Davis “Buzz” Merritt, editor of the Wichita Eagle at the time, defined key aspects of public journalism, including moving “beyond the limited mission of ‘telling the news’ to a broader mission of helping public life go well,” and moving “from seeing people as consumers—as readers or nonreaders, as bystanders to be informed—to seeing them as a public, as potential actors in arriving at democratic solutions to public problems.”32
public journalism a type of journalism, driven by citizen forums, that goes beyond telling the news to embrace a broader mission of improving the quality of public life; also called civic journalism.
Citizen Journalism One way technology has allowed citizens to become involved in the reporting of news is through cell phone photos and videos uploaded online. Witnesses can now
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pass on what they have captured to major mainstream news sources, like CNN’s iReports, or post to their own blogs and Web sites. Victoria Sinistra/AFP/Getty Images
Public journalism is best imagined as a conversational model for news practice. Modern journalism had drawn a distinct line between reporter detachment and community involvement; public journalism—driven by citizen forums, community conversations, and even talk shows—has obscured this line.
In the 1990s—before people felt the full impact of the Internet—public journalism served as a response to the many citizens who felt alienated from participating in public life. This alienation arose, in part, from viewers who watched passively as the political process seemed to play out in the news and on TV between party operatives and media pundits. Public journalism seemed to involve both the public and journalists more centrally in civic and political life. Editors and reporters interested in addressing citizen alienation—and reporter cynicism—began devising ways to engage people as conversational partners in determining the news. In an effort to draw the public into discussions about community priorities, these journalists began sponsoring citizen forums, where readers would have a voice in shaping aspects of the news that directly affected them.
Criticizing Public Journalism By 2000, more than a hundred newspapers, many teamed with local television and public radio stations, had practiced some form of public journalism. Yet many critics remained skeptical of the experiment, raising a number of concerns, including the weakening of four journalistic hallmarks: editorial control, credibility, balance, and diverse views.33
First, some editors and reporters argued that public journalism had been co- opted by the marketing department and that those who practiced it were merely pandering to what readers wanted and taking editorial control away from newsrooms. They believed that focus group samples and consumer research—tools of marketing, not journalism—blurred the boundary between the editorial and the business functions of a paper. Some journalists also feared that by becoming more active in the community, they might be perceived as community boosters rather than as community watchdogs.
Second, critics worried that public journalism compromised the profession’s credibility, which many believe derives from detachment. They argued that public journalism turned reporters into participants rather than observers. However, as former Wichita Eagle editor Davis Merritt pointed out, professionals who have credibility “share some basic values about life, some common ground about common good.” Yet many journalists have insisted they “don’t share values with anyone; that [they] are value-neutral.”34 Merritt argued that as a result, modern journalism actually has little credibility with the public, which the Pew Research
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Center’s annual credibility surveys bear out. Third, critics contended that public journalism undermined balance and the
both-sides-of-a-story convention by constantly seeking common ground and community consensus; therefore, it ran the risk of dulling the rough edges of democratic speech. Public journalists countered that they were trying to set aside more room for centrist positions. Such positions were often representative of many in the community but were missing in the mainstream news, which has always been more interested in the extremist views that make for a more dramatic story.
Fourth, many traditional reporters asserted that public journalism, which they considered merely a marketing tool, had not addressed the changing economic structure of the news business—especially the decline of reporting jobs and the boom in public relations work (see “Case Study: A Lost Generation of Journalists?” on page 470). With more news outlets in the hands of fewer owners, both public journalists and traditional reporters needed to raise tough questions about the disappearance of competing daily papers and newsroom staff cutbacks at local monopoly newspapers. Facing little competition, in 2010 and 2011 newspapers continued to cut reporting staffs and expensive investigative projects, reduced the space for news, or converted to online-only operations. While such trends temporarily helped profits and satisfied stockholders, they limited the range of stories told and views represented in a community. In addition, the rise of PR made it much easier for companies to get stories about executive managers and corporate images into various news media, which needed new sources for story ideas with so many journalists out of work or switching careers.
“Fake” News and Satiric Journalism For many young people, it is especially frustrating that two wealthy, established political parties—beholden to special interests and their lobbyists—control the nation’s government. In part, this frustration explained the popularity of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential campaign season, as they were considered outside the political establishment. After all, 98 percent of congressional incumbents get reelected each year—not always because they’ve done a good job but often because they’ve made promises and done favors for the lobbyists and interests that helped get them elected in the first place.
Why shouldn’t people, then, be cynical about politics? It is this cynicism that has drawn increasingly larger audiences to “fake” news shows like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore; TBS’s Full Frontal with Samantha Bee; and HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Following in the tradition of Saturday Night Live (SNL), which began in 1975, news satires tell their audiences something that seems truthful about politicians and how they try to manipulate media and public opinion. But most important, these shows use humor and detailed research to critique the news media and our political system. SNL’s sketches on GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2008 drew large audiences and shaped the way younger viewers thought
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about the election. By the 2016 campaign, all the current news satires were aiming their sharp acerbic lenses at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as at CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
The Colbert Report (2005–2014) satirized cable news hosts, particularly Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, and the bombastic opinion-assertion culture promoted by their programs. In critiquing the limits of news stories and politics, The Daily Show has historically parodied the narrative conventions of evening and cable news programs: the clipped eight-second sound bite that limits meaning; the formulaic shot of the TV news “stand up,” depicting reporters “on location” to establish credibility by revealing that they were really there; and the talking heads and opinionated pundits of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. In a now famous 2004 exchange with actor-comedian Rob Corddry, former host Jon Stewart asked his “political correspondent” for his opinion about presidential campaign tactics. “My opinion? I don’t have opinions,” Corddry answered. “I’m a reporter, Jon. My job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. Little thing called objectivity; might want to look it up.”
During his reign as news court jester, Stewart, who stepped down from The Daily Show in 2015, exposed the melodrama of TV news that nightly depicts the world in various stages of disorder while offering the stalwart, comforting presence of celebrity-anchors overseeing it all from their high-tech command centers. Even before CBS’s usually neutral and aloof Walter Cronkite signed off the evening news with “And that’s the way it is,” network news anchors tried to offer a sense of order through the reassurance of their individual personalities.
NEWS AS SATIRE Satirical news has become something of a cottage industry in recent years, stemming from SNL’s “Weekend Update” segment and dominated by The Daily Show. Several Daily Show correspondents have gone on to their own news-related shows and have interviewed a variety of political leaders and prominent figures in the process. For example, John Oliver (left) of Last Week Tonight scored a major interview with Edward Snowden in 2015. Along with the Daily Show’s hiring of South African comedian Trevor Noah (right) as Jon Stewart’s replacement, Larry
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Wilmore’s Nightly Show and Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal have brought much more diversity to the fake news business. Eric Liebowitz/© HBO/Everett Collection
NEWS AS SATIRE Satirical news has become something of a cottage industry in recent years, stemming from SNL’s “Weekend Update” segment and dominated by The Daily Show. Several Daily Show correspondents have gone on to their own news-related shows and have interviewed a variety of political leaders and prominent figures in the process. For example, John Oliver (left) of Last Week Tonight scored a major interview with Edward Snowden in 2015. Along with the Daily Show’s hiring of South African comedian Trevor Noah (right) as Jon Stewart’s replacement, Larry Wilmore’s Nightly Show and Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal have brought much more diversity to the fake news business. Richard Shotwell/AP Images
Yet even as fake anchors, satirists like Stewart and Oliver display a much greater range of emotion—a range that may match our own—than we get from our detached “hard news” anchors: more amazement, irony, outrage, laughter, and skepticism. For example, during Stewart’s coverage of the 2012 presidential election, he often showed genuine irritation or even outrage—coupled with irony and humor—whenever a politician or political ad presented information that was untrue or misleading.
While fake news programs often mock the formulas that real TV news programs have long used, they also present an informative and insightful look at current events and the way “traditional” media cover them. For example, they expose hypocrisy by juxtaposing what a politician said recently in the news with the opposite position articulated by the same politician months or years earlier. Indeed, many Americans have admitted that they watch news satires not only to be entertained but also to stay current with what’s going on in the world. In fact, a prominent Pew Research Center study back in 2007 found that people who
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watched these satiric shows were more often “better informed” than most other news consumers, usually because these viewers tended to get their news from multiple sources and a cross section of news media.35
Although the world has changed, local TV news story formulas (except for splashy opening graphics and Doppler weather radar) have gone virtually unaltered since the 1970s, when SNL first started making fun of TV news. Local newscasts still limit most reporters’ stories to two minutes or less and promote stylish anchors, a “sports guy,” and a certified meteorologist as familiar personalities whom we invite into our homes each evening. Now that a generation of viewers has been raised on the TV satire and political cynicism of “Weekend Update,” David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, the slick, formulaic packaging of political ads and the canned, cautious sound bites offered in news packages are simply not as persuasive as they once were.
Journalism should break free from tired formulas—especially in TV news— and reimagine better ways to tell stories. In fictional television, storytelling has evolved over time, becoming increasingly complex. Although the Internet and 24/7 cable news have introduced new models of journalism and commentary, why has TV news remained virtually unchanged over the past fifty years? Other than the creativity of fake news programs, are there no new ways to report the news? Maybe audiences would value news more if it matched the complicated storytelling that surrounds them in everything from TV dramas to interactive video games to their own conversations. We should demand news narrative forms that better represent the complexity of our world.
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DEMOCRACY AND REIMAGINING JOURNALISM’S ROLE
Journalism is central to democracy: Both citizens and the media must have access to the information that we need to make important decisions. As this chapter illustrates, however, this is a complicated idea. For example, in the aftermath of 9/11, some government officials claimed that reporters or columnists who raised questions about fighting terrorism, invading Iraq, or developing secret government programs were being unpatriotic. Yet the basic principles of democracy require citizens and the media to question our leaders and government. Isn’t this, after all, what the American Revolution was all about? (See “Examining Ethics: WikiLeaks, Secret Documents, and Good Journalism” on page 476.)
Conventional journalists will fight ferociously for the principles that underpin journalism’s basic tenets—freedom of the press, the obligation to question government, the public’s right to know, and the belief that there are two sides to every story. These are mostly worthy ideals, but they do have limitations. These tenets, for example, generally do not acknowledge any moral or ethical duty for journalists to improve the quality of daily life. Rather, conventional journalism values its news-gathering capabilities and the well-constructed news narrative, leaving the improvement of civic life to political groups, nonprofit organizations, business philanthropists, individual citizens, and practitioners of Internet activism.
Social Responsibility Although reporters have traditionally thought of themselves first and foremost as observers and recorders, some journalists have acknowledged a social responsibility. Among them was James Agee in the 1930s. In his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was accompanied by the Depression-era photography of Walker Evans, Agee said that he regarded conventional journalism as dishonest, partly because the act of observing intruded on people and turned them into story characters that newspapers and magazines then exploited for profit.
Agee also worried that readers would retreat into the comfort of his writing— his narrative—instead of confronting what for many families was the horror of the Great Depression. For Agee, the question of responsibility extended not only to journalism and to himself but to the readers of his stories as well: “The reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell.”36 Agee’s self- conscious analysis provides insights into journalism’s hidden agendas and the responsibility of all citizens to make public life better.
Deliberative Democracy
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According to advocates of public journalism, when reporters are chiefly concerned with maintaining their antagonistic relationship to politics and are less willing to improve political discourse, news and democracy suffer. The late Washington Post columnist David Broder thought that national journalists like him—through rising salaries, prestige, and formal education—have distanced themselves “from the people that [they] are writing for and have become much, much closer to people [they] are writing about.”37 Broder believed that journalists need to become activists, not for a particular party but for the political process and in the interest of reenergizing public life. For those who advocate for public journalism, this might also involve mainstream media spearheading voter registration drives or setting up pressrooms or news bureaus in public libraries or shopping malls, where people converge in large numbers.
Public journalism offers people models for how to deliberate in forums, and then it covers those deliberations. This kind of community journalism aims to reinvigorate a deliberative democracy in which citizen groups, local government, and the news media work together more actively to shape social, economic, and political agendas. In a more deliberative democracy, a large segment of the community discusses public life and social policy before advising or electing officials who represent the community’s interests.
EXAMINING ETHICS
WikiLeaks, Secret Documents, and Good Journalism
ince its inception in 2006, the controversial Web site WikiLeaks has released millions of documents—from revelations of toxic
dumps in Africa to the 2013 release of 1.5 million U.S. diplomatic records, many involving President Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. In 2016, WikiLeaks offered reports on the NSA’s “bugging”
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operation of multiple foreign leaders and a searchable database of thirty thousand of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. WikiLeaks’ controversial spokesperson and self-identified “editor in chief,” Julian Assange—an Australian online activist—has been called everything from a staunch free-speech advocate to a “hi-tech terrorist” (by U.S. vice president Joe Biden). Certainly, government leaders around the world have faced embarrassment from the site’s many document dumps and secrecy breaches.
Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images
In its most controversial move, in 2010 WikiLeaks offered 500,000-plus documents, called the “War Logs,” to three mainstream print outlets— the Guardian in the United Kingdom, the German magazine Der Spiegel, and the New York Times. These documents were mainly U.S. military and state department dispatches and internal memos related to the Afghan and Iraq wars—what Bill Keller, then executive editor of the New York Times, called a “huge breach of secrecy” for those running the wars. Keller described working with WikiLeaks as an adventure that “combined the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of handling a vast secret archive with the more mundane feat of sorting, searching and understanding a mountain of data.”1 Indeed, one of the first major stories the Times wrote, based on the “War Logs” project, reported on “Pakistan’s ambiguous role as an American ally.”2 Then, just a few months later, Osama bin Laden was found hiding in the middle of a Pakistani suburb.
WikiLeaks presents a number of ethical dilemmas and concerns for both journalists and citizens. News critic and journalism professor Jay Rosen has called WikiLeaks “the world’s first stateless news organization.”3 But is WikiLeaks actually engaging in journalism—and therefore entitled to First Amendment protections? Or is it merely an important
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“news source, news provider, content host, [or] whistle-blower,” exposing things that governments would rather keep secret, as one critic from the Nieman Journalism Lab suggests?4 And should any document or material obtained by WikiLeaks be released for public scrutiny, or should some kinds of documents and materials be withheld?
Examining Ethics Activity
As a class or in smaller groups, consider the ethical concerns laid out above. Following the ethical template outlined on page 17 in Chapter 1, begin by researching the topic, finding as much information and analysis as possible. Read Bill Keller’s New York Times Magazine piece “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” (January 30, 2011) or his longer 2011 Times report “Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy” (www.nytimesbb.com/opensecrets). See also Nikki Usher’s work for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab and Jay Rosen’s blog, PressThink. Consider also journalism criticism and news study sites, such as the Columbia Journalism Review, the Pew Research Center, and the First Amendment Center. Watch Julian Assange’s interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes from January 2011. Next, based on your research and informed analysis, decide whether WikiLeaks is a legitimate form of journalism and whether there should be newsroom policies that restrict the release of some kinds of documents when in partnership with a resource like WikiLeaks (such as the “War Logs” project described here). Create an outline for such policies.
In 1989, historian Christopher Lasch argued that “the job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.”38 Although he overstated his case—journalism does both and more—Lasch made a cogent point about how conventional journalism had lost its bearings. In the so-called objective era of modern journalism, mainstream news media had lost touch with its partisan roots. The early mission of journalism—to advocate opinions and encourage public debate—had been relegated to alternative magazines, the editorial pages, news blogs, and cable news channels starring allegedly elite reporters. Tellingly, Lasch connected the gradual decline in voter participation, which began in the 1920s, to more professionalized conduct on the part of journalists. With a modern “objective” press, he contended, the public increasingly began to defer to the “more professional” news media to watch over civic life on its behalf.
As the advocates of public journalism acknowledged, people had grown used to letting their representatives think and act for them. Today, more community-
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oriented journalism and other civic projects offer citizens an opportunity to deliberate and to influence their leaders. This may include broadening the story models and frames they use to recount experiences, paying more attention to the historical and economic contexts of these stories, doing more investigative reports that analyze both news conventions and social issues, taking more responsibility for their news narratives, participating more fully in the public life of their communities, admitting to their cultural biases and occasional mistakes, and ensuring that the verification model of reporting is not overwhelmed by the new journalism of assertion.
Arguing that for too long journalism has defined its role only in negative terms, news scholar Jay Rosen notes: “To be adversarial, critical, to ask tough questions, to expose scandal and wrongdoing … these are necessary tasks, even noble tasks, but they are negative tasks.” In addition, he suggests that journalism should assert itself as a positive force, not merely as a watchdog or as a neutral information conduit to readers but as “a support system for public life.”39
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14 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the role that media play in a democracy. Today, one of the major concerns is the proliferation of news sources. How well is our society being served by this trend—especially on cable and the Internet—compared with the time when just a few major news media sources dominated journalism?
Historians, media critics, citizens, and even many politicians argue that a strong democracy is only possible with a strong, healthy, skeptical press. In the old days, a few legacy or traditional media—key national newspapers, three major networks, and three newsmagazines—provided most of the journalistic common ground for discussing major issues confronting U.S. society.
In today’s online and 24/7 cable world, though, the legacy media have ceded some of their power and many of their fact-checking duties to new media forms, especially in the blogosphere. As discussed in this chapter and in Chapter 8, this power shortage is partly because substantial losses in advertising (which has gone to the Internet) have led to severe cutbacks in newsroom staffs, and partly because bloggers, 24/7 cable news media, and news satire shows like The Daily Show, Full Frontal, and Last Week Tonight are fact-checking the media as well as reporting stories that used to be the domain of professional news organizations.
The case before us, then, goes something like this: In the old days, the major news media provided us with reports and narratives to share, discuss, and argue about. But in today’s explosion of news and information, that common ground has eroded or is shifting. Instead, today we often rely only on those media sources that match our comfort level, cultural values, or political affiliations; increasingly these are blog sites, radio talk shows, or cable channels. Sometimes these opinion sites and channels are not supported with the careful fact-gathering and verification that has long been a pillar of the best kinds of journalism.
So in today’s media environment, how severely have technological and cultural transformations undermined the common-ground function of mainstream media? And are these changes ultimately good or bad for democracy?
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KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
news, 451 newsworthiness, 452 ethnocentrism, 454 responsible capitalism, 454 small-town pastoralism, 454 individualism, 454 conflict of interest, 459 herd journalism, 462 sound bite, 466 public journalism, 472
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
Modern Journalism in the Information Age 1. What are the criteria used for determining newsworthiness? 2. Explain the values shift in journalism today from a more
detached or neutral model to a more partisan or assertion model. Ethics and the News Media
3. How do issues such as deception and privacy present ethical problems for journalists?
4. What are the connections between so-called neutral journalism and economics?
Reporting Rituals and the Legacy of Print Journalism 5. Why is getting a story first important to reporters?
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6. Why have reporters become so dependent on experts? Journalism in the Age of TV and the Internet
7. How is credibility established in TV news as compared with print journalism?
8. In what ways has the Internet influenced traditional forms of journalism?
Alternative Models: Public Journalism and “Fake” News 9. What is public journalism? In what ways is it believed to make
journalism better? 10. What role do satirical news programs like SNL’s “Weekend
Update,” The Daily Show, and Last Week Tonight play in the world of journalism?
Democracy and Reimagining Journalism’s Role 11. What is deliberative democracy, and what does it have to do
with journalism?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. What are your main criticisms of the state of news today? In your opinion, what are the news media doing well?
2. Is the trend toward opinion-based partisan news programs on cable and the Internet a good thing or a bad thing for democracy?
3. Is there political bias in front-page news stories? If so, cite some current examples.
4. How would you go about formulating an ethical policy with regard to using deceptive means to get a story?
5. For a reporter, what are the dangers of both detachment from and involvement in public life?
6. Do satirical news programs make us more cynical about politics and less inclined to vote? Why or why not?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE
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LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter. VIDEO: THE OBJECTIVITY MYTH Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Clarence Page and Onion editor Joe Randazzo explore how objectivity began in journalism and how reporter biases may nonetheless influence news stories.
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15 Media Effects and Cultural Approaches to Research
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Greg Gayne/TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved, Everett Collection
DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA
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EVERY DAY THE MEDIA HELP us make sense of our world, and they both shape and are shaped by our history, politics, and economics. Often it’s easier to see the interaction of media and culture from a historical distance, rather than when we are right in the midst of it. For example, consider the immediate post–World War II era, when the horror of new atomic weapons had become an omnipresent threat after two had been dropped on Japan and the superpower nations persisted in testing even more devastating nuclear bombs. Popular science-fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s revealed those fears. For example, Godzilla (1954) gave us a horrible dinosaur-like creature awakened by nuclear radiation that wreaked havoc on Japanese cities, while in the United States, Them (1954) featured giant ant-like creatures unleashed on New Mexico after underground nuclear tests.
EARLY MEDIA RESEARCH METHODS RESEARCH ON MEDIA EFFECTS CULTURAL APPROACHES TO MEDIA RESEARCH MEDIA RESEARCH AND DEMOCRACY
◄ On the hit TV series 24, Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is a Counter Terrorist Unit agent who must make life and death decisions about using torture as a device to obtain
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information from terrorists. What effects have the actions of this fictional agent had on such moral and ethical decisions in the real world?
Nuclear tests created the conditions for Mothra (1961), a giant mothlike monster that again wreaked havoc on Japan. Even the flesh-eating zombies in Night of the Living Dead (1968) were made “undead” by mutating radiation from a NASA space probe that exploded in the atmosphere.1
In recent years, particularly since 9/11, terrorism has been added to our list of significant fears. One of the most significant media programs to feature terrorism was the fictional action drama 24. The show had a successful eight-season run on Fox, from 2001 to 2010, and returned with a twelve-episode series in 2014 called 24: Live Another Day, and a spinoff series in 2017 called 24: Legacy.
The series is notable for two reasons. First is the unique concept that each season of 24 covered a story lasting 24 hours in real time, with each of the season’s 24 episodes documenting one hour, often with an on-screen clock marking the passage of time as Counter Terrorist Unit agent Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) raced to stop various terrorist actions.
Second, 24 is notable for being right in the thick of the U.S. political debate on whether torture is an appropriate tactic to thwart terrorism. (Interestingly, 24 was in production before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.) One of the most significant legal and political debates in the early twenty-first century is whether or not terrorism suspects should be tortured. Those in favor of torture argue it might yield information about other terrorists or terrorist plots. Those opposed argue that it is unethical, yields unreliable information (those being tortured may make up stories to make it stop), and puts our own citizens at risk of the same treatment by enemy states. The debate was heightened even more in light of the human rights violations taking place in Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, when it was revealed that U.S. military personnel were torturing Iraqi prisoners in exceedingly cruel ways, as well as the Bush administration’s justifications for using torture on war detainees.
By season 4 of the program in 2005, many television critics argued that 24 “normalized” torture, with its frequent portrayals of “chemical injection, electric shock and old-fashioned bone-breaking.”2 The New York Times asked, “Has ‘24’ descended down a slippery slope in portraying acts of torture as normal and therefore justifiable? Is its audience, and the public more generally, also reworking the rules of war to the point where the most expedient response to terrorism is to resort to terror?”3
Legal writer Dahlia Lithwick suggested that “the most influential legal thinker in
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the development of modern American interrogation policy is … none other than the star of Fox television’s ‘24,’ Jack Bauer.”4 Lithwick cited a number of government officials who referred to Jack Bauer’s character as inspiration for a pro-torture policy. No less than an authority on law than the late U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia used Jack Bauer as a reason to permit torture as an interrogation tactic: “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles…. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives…. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? … I don’t think so.”5
Most Americans, it seems, would agree. Support for using torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as it is sometimes euphemistically called) rose from 45 percent of Americans in 2005 to 58 percent in 2016. Nevertheless, the report on the survey data says that most support torture only in “exceptional circumstances, such as the ‘ticking time-bomb’ scenario.” And how often does that happen? Although it comes up quite often in a single day of 24, in real life, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in its extensive 712-page 2014 study of the CIA’s interrogation program, “never found an example of this hypothetical ticking bomb scenario.”6
AS THE PRECEDING ILLUSTRATES, many believe that media have a powerful effect on individuals and society. This belief has led media researchers to focus most of their efforts on two types of research: media effects research and cultural studies research.
Media effects research attempts to understand, explain, and predict the effects of mass media on individuals and society. The main goal of this type of research is to uncover whether there is a connection between aggressive behavior and violence in the media, particularly in children and teens. In the late 1960s, government leaders—reacting to the social upheavals of that decade—set aside $1 million to examine this potential connection. Since that time, thousands of studies have told us what most teachers and parents believe instinctively: Violent scenes on television and in movies stimulate aggressive behavior in children and teens— especially young boys.
media effects research the mainstream tradition in mass communication research, it attempts to understand, explain, and predict the impact—or effects—of the mass media on individuals and society.
The other major area of mass media research is cultural studies. This research approach focuses on how people make meaning, apprehend reality, articulate values, and order experience through their use of cultural symbols. Cultural studies scholars also examine the way status quo groups in society, particularly corporate and political elites, use media to circulate their messages and sustain their interests. This research has attempted to make daily cultural experience the focus of media
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studies, centering on the subtle intersections among mass communication, history, politics, and economics.
cultural studies in media research, the approaches that try to understand how the media and culture are tied to the actual patterns of communication used in daily life; these studies focus on how people make meanings, apprehend reality, and order experience through the use of stories and symbols.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
In this chapter, we will:
Examine the evolution of media research over time Focus on the two major strains of media research, investigating the strengths and limitations of each Conclude with a discussion of how media research interacts with democratic ideals
As you get a sense of media effects and cultural studies research, think of some research questions of your own. Consider your own Internet habits. How do the number of hours you spend online every day, the types of online content you view, and your motivations for where you spend your time online shape your everyday behavior? Also, think about the ways your gender, race, sexuality, or class play into other media you consume—like the movies and television you watch and the music you like. For more questions to help you understand the effects of media in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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EARLY MEDIA RESEARCH METHODS
In the early days of the United States, philosophical and historical writings tried to explain the nature of news and print media. For instance, the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, noted differences between French and American newspapers in the early 1830s:
In France the space allotted to commercial advertisements is very limited, and … the essential part of the journal is the discussion of the politics of the day. In America three quarters of the enormous sheet are filled with advertisements and the remainder is frequently occupied by political intelligence or trivial anecdotes; it is only from time to time that one finds a corner devoted to the passionate discussions like those which the journalists of France every day give to their readers.7
During most of the nineteenth century, media analysis was based on moral and political arguments, as demonstrated by the de Tocqueville quote.8
More scientific approaches to mass media research did not begin to develop until the late 1920s and 1930s. In 1920, Walter Lippmann’s Liberty and the News called on journalists to operate more like scientific researchers in gathering and analyzing factual material. Lippmann’s next book, Public Opinion (1922), was the first to apply the principles of psychology to journalism. Described by media historian James Carey as “the founding book in American media studies,”9 it led to an expanded understanding of the effects of the media, emphasizing data collection and numerical measurement. According to media historian Daniel Czitrom, by the 1930s “an aggressively empirical spirit, stressing new and increasingly sophisticated research techniques, characterized the study of modern communication in America.”10 Czitrom traces four trends between 1930 and 1960 that contributed to the rise of modern media research: propaganda analysis, public opinion research, social psychology studies, and marketing research.
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PUBLIC OPINION RESEARCH Public opinion polls suggest that the American public’s attitude toward same-sex marriage has evolved. Just weeks before the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage legal nationwide, a 2015 Pew Research poll reported that 57 percent of Americans were in favor of it—the same percentage of people who opposed it in a poll back in 2001. Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Propaganda Analysis After World War I, some media researchers began studying how governments used propaganda to advance the war effort. They found that during the war, governments routinely relied on propaganda divisions to spread “information” to the public. According to Czitrom, though propaganda was considered a positive force for mobilizing public opinion during the war, researchers after the war labeled propaganda negatively, calling it “partisan appeal based on half-truths and devious manipulation of communication channels.”11 Harold Lasswell’s important 1927 study Propaganda Technique in the World War focused on propaganda in the media, defining it as “the control of opinion by significant symbols, … by stories, rumors, reports, pictures and other forms of social communication.”12 Propaganda analysis thus became a major early focus of mass media research.
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propaganda analysis the study of propaganda’s effectiveness in influencing and mobilizing public opinion.
Public Opinion Research Researchers soon went beyond the study of war propaganda and began to focus on more general concerns about how the mass media filtered information and shaped public attitudes. In the face of growing media influence, Walter Lippmann distrusted the public’s ability to function as knowledgeable citizens as well as journalism’s ability to help the public separate truth from lies. In promoting the place of the expert in modern life, Lippmann celebrated the social scientist as part of a new expert class that could best make “unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make decisions.”13
Today, social scientists conduct public opinion research, or citizen surveys; these have become especially influential during political elections. On the upside, public opinion research on diverse populations has provided insights into citizen behavior and social differences, especially during election periods or following major national events. For example, a 2015 Pew Research poll confirmed what many other polls reported: a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, made legal in June 2015 by the Supreme Court. Since the late 1980s, when the majority of Americans opposed same-sex marriage, the balance has been shifting toward support—gradually at first and more rapidly since 2009.14
On the downside, journalism has become increasingly dependent on polls, particularly for political insight. Some critics argue that this heavy reliance on measured public opinion has begun to adversely affect the active political involvement of American citizens. Many people do not vote because they have seen or read poll projections and have decided that their votes will not make a difference. Furthermore, some critics of incessant polling argue that the public is just passively responding to surveys that mainly measure opinions on topics of interest to business, government, academics, and the mainstream news media. A final problem is the pervasive use of unreliable pseudo-polls, typically call-in, online, or person-in-the-street polls that the news media use to address a “question of the day.” The National Council of Public Opinion Polls notes that “unscientific pseudo-polls are widespread and sometimes entertaining, but they never provide the kind of information that belongs in a serious report,” and discourages news media from conducting them.15
pseudo-polls
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typically call-in, online, or person-in-the-street nonscientific polls that the news media use to address a “question of the day.”
Social Psychology Studies While opinion polls measure public attitudes, social psychology studies measure the behavior and cognition of individuals. The most influential early social psychology study, the Payne Fund Studies, encompassed a series of thirteen research projects conducted by social psychologists between 1929 and 1932. Named after the private philanthropic organization that funded the research, the Payne Fund Studies were a response to a growing national concern about the effects of motion pictures, which had become a popular pastime for young people in the 1920s. These studies, which were later used by some politicians to attack the movie industry, linked frequent movie attendance to juvenile delinquency, promiscuity, and other antisocial behaviors, arguing that movies took “emotional possession” of young filmgoers.16
SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF MEDIA Concerns about film violence are not new. The 1930 movie Little Caesar follows the career of gangster Rico Bandello (played by Edward G. Robinson, shown), who kills his way to the top of the crime establishment and gets the girl as well.
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The Motion Picture Production Code, which was established a few years after this movie’s release, reined in sexual themes and profane language, set restrictions on film violence, and attempted to prevent audiences from sympathizing with bad guys like Rico. Photofest
In one of the Payne studies, for example, children and teenagers were wired with electrodes and galvanometers, mechanisms that detected any heightened response via the subject’s skin. The researchers interpreted changes in the skin as evidence of emotional arousal. In retrospect, the findings hardly seem surprising: The youngest subjects in the group had the strongest reaction to violent or tragic movie scenes, whereas the teenage subjects reacted most strongly to scenes with romantic and sexual content. The researchers concluded that films could be dangerous for young children and might foster sexual promiscuity among teenagers. The conclusions of this and other Payne Fund Studies contributed to the establishment of the Motion Picture Production Code, which tamed movie content from the 1930s through the 1950s (see Chapter 16). As forerunners of today’s TV violence and aggression research, the Payne Fund Studies became the model for media research. (See Figure 15.1 for one example of a contemporary policy that has developed from media research. See also “Case Study: The Effects of TV in a Post-TV World” on 487.)
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FIGURE 15.1 TV PARENTAL GUIDELINES The TV industry continues to study its self-imposed rating categories, promising to fine-tune them to ensure that the government keeps its distance. These standards are one example of a policy that was shaped in part by media research. Since the 1960s, research has attempted to demonstrate links between violent TV images and increased levels of aggression among children and adolescents. Data from: TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board, accessed November 24, 2014, www.tvguidelines.org.
Marketing Research A fourth influential area of early media research, marketing research, developed when advertisers and product companies began conducting surveys on consumer buying habits in the 1920s. The emergence of commercial radio led to the first ratings systems, which measured how many people were listening on a given night. By the 1930s, radio networks, advertisers, large stations, and advertising agencies all subscribed to ratings services. However, compared with print media, whose circulation departments kept careful track of customers’ names and addresses, radio listeners were more difficult to trace. This problem precipitated the development of increasingly sophisticated marketing research methods to
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determine consumer preferences and media use, such as direct-mail diaries, television meters, phone surveys, telemarketing, and Internet tracking. In many instances, product companies paid consumers nominal amounts of money to take part in these studies.
CASE STUDY
The Effects of TV in a Post-TV World
ince TV’s emergence as a mass medium, there has been persistent concern about the effects of violence, sex, and indecent
language seen in television programs. The U.S. Congress had its first hearings on the matter of television content in 1952 and has held hearings in every subsequent decade.
In its coverage of congressional hearings on TV violence in 1983, the New York Times accurately captured the nature of these recurring public hearings: “Over the years, the principals change but the roles remain the same: social scientists ready to prove that television does indeed improperly influence its viewers, and network representatives, some of them also social scientists, who insist that there is absolutely nothing to worry about.”1
One of the central focuses of the TV debate has been television’s effect on children. In 1975, the major broadcast networks (then ABC, CBS, and NBC) bowed to congressional and FCC pressure and agreed to a “family hour” of programming in the first hour of prime-time television
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(8–9 p.m. eastern or 7–8 p.m. central). Shows such as Happy Days, the Cosby Show, and Little House on the Prairie flourished in that time slot. By 1989, Fox had arrived as a fourth major network and successfully counterprogrammed in the family hour with shows about dysfunctional families, such as Married … with Children.
MTV’S VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS, an annual televised music special that sometimes includes sexually tinged or irreverent performances, often catches the ire of the PTC. Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic/Getty Images
The most prominent watchdog monitoring prime-time network television’s violence, sex, and indecent language has been the Parents Television Council (PTC), formed in 1995. The lobbying group’s primary mission is to “promote and restore responsibility and decency to the entertainment industry in answer to America’s demand for positive, family-oriented television programming. The PTC does this by fostering changes in TV programming to make the early hours of prime time family-friendly and suitable for viewers of all ages.”2 The PTC (through its Web campaign) played a leading role in inundating the FCC with complaints and getting it to approve a steep increase in its fines for broadcast indecency.
Yet to address the ongoing concerns of parent groups and Congress, it’s worth asking: What are the effects of TV in what researchers now call a “post-TV” world? In just the past few years, digital video recorders have become common, and services like Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, iTunes, and on-demand cable viewing mean that viewers can access TV programming of all types at any time of the day. Although Americans are watching more television than ever before, it’s increasingly time- shifted programming. How should we consider the possible harmful effects of prime-time network television given that most American
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families are no longer watching during the appointed broadcast network prime-time hours? Does the American public care about such media effects in this post-TV world?
These days, the Parents Television Council still releases its weekly “Family Guide to Prime Time Television” on its Web site. A sample of its guide from summer 2015, for example, listed only one show as “family-friendly” (Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?), while shows as diverse as The Big Bang Theory, 2 Broke Girls, America’s Got Talent, and Arrow received a red-light designation for sexual content, language, and violence.
Of course, as television viewers move away from broadcast networks and increasingly watch programming from multiple sources on a range of devices, the PTC’s traditional concern about prime-time network viewing can seem outdated. In recent years, the PTC announced it was giving its seal of approval to the Inspiration Network cable channel “for programming that embraces time-honored values.”3 The channel’s lineup features shows like The Waltons; Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; Little House on the Prairie; and The Big Valley—all shows from an era decades before our post-TV world.
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RESEARCH ON MEDIA EFFECTS
As concern about public opinion, propaganda, and the impact of the media merged with the growth of journalism and mass communication departments in colleges and universities, media researchers looked more and more to behavioral science as the basis of their research. Between 1930 and 1970, as media historian Daniel Czitrom has noted, “Who says what to whom with what effect?” became the key question “defining the scope and problems of American communications research.”17 In addressing this question specifically, media effects researchers asked follow-up questions such as this: If children watch a lot of TV cartoons (stimulus or cause), will this repeated act influence their behavior toward their peers (response or effect)? For most of the twentieth century, media researchers and news reporters used different methods to answer similar sets of questions— who, what, when, and where—about our daily experiences (see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Wedding Media and the Meaning of the Perfect Wedding Day” on page 492).
Early Theories of Media Effects A major goal of scientific research is to develop theories or laws that can consistently explain or predict human behavior. The varied impacts of the mass media and the diverse ways in which people create popular culture, however, tend to defy predictable rules. Historical, economic, and political factors influence media industries, making it difficult to develop systematic theories that explain communication. Researchers developed a number of small theories, or models, that help explain individual behavior rather than the impact of the media on large populations. But before these small theories began to emerge in the 1970s, mass media research followed several other models. Developing between the 1930s and the 1970s, these major approaches included the hypodermic-needle model, the minimal-effects model, and the uses and gratifications model.
The Hypodermic-Needle Model One of the earliest media theories attributed powerful effects to the mass media. A number of intellectuals and academics were fearful of the influence and popularity of film and radio in the 1920s and 1930s. Some social psychologists and sociologists who arrived in the United States after fleeing Germany and Nazism in the 1930s had watched Hitler use radio, film, and print media as propaganda tools. They worried that the popular media in America also had a strong hold over vulnerable audiences. The concept that powerful media affect weak audiences has been labeled the hypodermic-needle model, sometimes also called the magic bullet theory or the direct-effects model. It suggests that the media shoot their
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potent effects directly into unsuspecting victims.
hypodermic-needle model an early model in mass communication research that attempted to explain media effects by arguing that the media figuratively shoot their powerful effects into unsuspecting or weak audiences; sometimes called the bullet theory or direct effects model.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Media Effects Research Experts discuss how media effects research informs media development.
Discussion: Why do you think the question of media’s effects on children has continued to be such a big concern among researchers?
One of the earliest challenges to this theory involved a study of Orson Welles’s legendary October 30, 1938, radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, which presented H. G. Wells’s Martian invasion novel in the form of a news report and frightened millions of listeners who didn’t realize it was fictional (see Chapter 5). In a 1940 book-length study of the broadcast, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, radio researcher Hadley Cantril argued that contrary to expectations based on the hypodermic-needle model, not all listeners thought the radio program was a real news report. Instead, Cantril—after conducting personal interviews and a nationwide survey of listeners, and analyzing newspaper reports and listener mail to CBS Radio and the FCC—noted that although some did believe it to be real (mostly those who missed the disclaimer at the beginning of the broadcast), the majority reacted out of collective panic, not out of a gullible belief in anything transmitted through the media. Although the hypodermic-needle model has been disproved over the years by social scientists, many people still attribute direct effects to the mass media, particularly in the case of children.
The Minimal-Effects Model
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Cantril’s research helped lay the groundwork for the minimal-effects model, or limited model. With the rise of empirical research techniques, social scientists began discovering and demonstrating that media alone cannot cause people to change their attitudes and behaviors. Based on tightly controlled experiments and surveys, researchers argued that people generally engage in selective exposure and selective retention with regard to the media. That is, people expose themselves to the media messages that are most familiar to them, and they retain the messages that confirm the values and attitudes they already hold. Minimal-effects researchers have argued that in most cases, mass media reinforce existing behaviors and attitudes rather than change them. The findings from the first comprehensive study of children and television—by Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin Parker in the late 1950s—best capture the minimal-effects theory:
minimal-effects model a mass communication research model based on tightly controlled experiments and survey findings; it argues that the mass media have limited effects on audiences, reinforcing existing behaviors and attitudes rather than changing them.
selective exposure the phenomenon whereby audiences seek messages and meanings that correspond to their preexisting beliefs and values.
selective retention the phenomenon whereby audiences remember or retain messages and meanings that correspond to their preexisting beliefs and values.
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MEDIA EFFECTS? In The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, Hadley Cantril (1906–1969) argued against the hypodermic-needle model as an explanation for the panic that broke out after the War of the Worlds radio broadcast (see photo in Chapter 5, page 153). A lifelong social researcher, Cantril also did a lot of work in public opinion research, even working with the government during World War II. Transaction Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
For some children, under some conditions, some television is harmful. For other children under the same conditions, or for the same children under other conditions, it may be beneficial. For most children, under most conditions, most television is probably neither particularly harmful nor particularly beneficial.18
In addition, Joseph Klapper’s important 1960 research study, The Effects of Mass Communication, found that the mass media only influenced individuals who did not already hold strong views on an issue and that the media had a greater impact on poor and uneducated audiences. Solidifying the minimal-effects argument, Klapper concluded that strong media effects occur largely at an individual level
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and do not appear to have large-scale, measurable, and direct effects on society as a whole.19
The Uses and Gratifications Model A response to the minimal-effects theory, the uses and gratifications model was proposed to contest the notion of a passive media audience. Under this model, researchers—usually using in-depth interviews to supplement survey questionnaires—studied the ways in which people used the media to satisfy various emotional or intellectual needs. Instead of asking, “What effects do the media have on us?” researchers asked, “Why do we use the media?” Asking the why question enabled media researchers to develop inventories cataloguing how people employed the media to fulfill their needs. For example, researchers noted that some individuals used the media to see authority figures elevated or toppled, to seek a sense of community and connectedness, to fulfill a need for drama and stories, and to confirm moral or spiritual values.20
uses and gratifications model a mass communication research model, usually employing in-depth interviews and survey questionnaires, that argues that people use the media to satisfy various emotional desires or intellectual needs.
Although the uses and gratifications model addressed the functions of the mass media for individuals, it did not address important questions related to the impact of the media on society. Once researchers had accumulated substantial inventories of the uses and functions of media, they often did not move in new directions. Consequently, uses and gratifications never became a dominant or an enduring theory in media research.
Conducting Media Effects Research Media research generally comes from the private or public sector, and each type has distinguishing features. Private research, sometimes called proprietary research, is generally conducted for a business, a corporation, or even a political campaign. It is usually applied research in the sense that the information it uncovers typically addresses some real-life problem or need. Public research, in contrast, usually takes place in academic and government settings. It involves information that is often more theoretical than applied; it tries to clarify, explain, or predict the effects of mass media rather than to address a consumer problem.
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USES AND GRATIFICATIONS In 1952, audience members at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood donned 3-D glasses for the opening-night screening of Bwana Devil, the first full-length color 3-D film. The uses and gratifications model of research investigates the appeal of mass media, such as going out to the movies. J. R. Eyerman/Getty Images
Most media research today focuses on the effects of the media in such areas as learning, attitudes, aggression, and voting habits. This research employs the scientific method, a blueprint long used by scientists and scholars to study phenomena in systematic stages. The steps in the scientific method include the following:
scientific method a widely used research method that studies phenomena in systematic stages; it includes identifying a research problem, reviewing existing research, developing working hypotheses, determining appropriate research design, collecting information, analyzing results to see if the hypotheses have been verified, and interpreting the implications of the study.
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1. Identifying the research problem 2. Reviewing existing research and theories related to the problem 3. Developing working hypotheses or predictions about what the study
might find 4. Determining an appropriate method or research design 5. Collecting information or relevant data 6. Analyzing results to see if the hypotheses have been verified 7. Interpreting the implications of the study to determine whether they
explain or predict the problem
The scientific method relies on objectivity (eliminating bias and judgments on the part of researchers); reliability (getting the same answers or outcomes from a study or measure during repeated testing); and validity (demonstrating that a study actually measures what it claims to measure).
In scientific studies, researchers pose one or more hypotheses: tentative general statements that predict the influence of an independent variable on a dependent variable. For example, a researcher might hypothesize that frequent TV viewing among adolescents (independent variable) causes poor academic performance (dependent variable). Or another researcher might hypothesize that playing first-person shooter video games (independent variable) is associated with aggression in children (dependent variable).
hypotheses in social science research, tentative general statements that predict a relationship between a dependent variable and an independent variable.
Broadly speaking, the methods for studying media effects on audiences have taken two forms—experiments and survey research. To supplement these approaches, researchers also use content analysis to count and document specific messages that circulate in mass media.
Experiments Like all studies that use the scientific method, experiments in media research isolate some aspect of content; suggest a hypothesis; and manipulate variables to discover a particular medium’s effect on attitude, emotion, or behavior. To test whether a hypothesis is true, researchers expose an experimental group—the group under study—to a selected media program or text. To ensure valid results,
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researchers also use a control group, which serves as a basis for comparison; this group is not exposed to the selected media content. Subjects are picked for each group through random assignment, which simply means that each subject has an equal chance of being placed in either group. Random assignment ensures that the independent variables researchers want to control are distributed to both groups in the same way.
experiments in regard to the mass media, research that isolates some aspect of content; suggests a hypothesis; and manipulates variables to discover a particular medium’s impact on attitudes, emotions, or behavior.
random assignment a social science research method for assigning research subjects; it ensures that every subject has an equal chance of being placed in either the experimental group or the control group.
For instance, to test the effects of violent films on preadolescent boys, a research study might take a group of ten-year-olds and randomly assign them to two groups. Researchers expose the experimental group to a violent action movie that the control group does not see. Later, both groups are exposed to a staged fight between two other boys so that the researchers can observe how each group responds to an actual physical confrontation. Researchers then determine whether or not there is a statistically measurable difference between the two groups’ responses to the fight. For example, perhaps the control subjects try to break up the fight but the experimental subjects do not. Because the groups were randomly selected and the only measurable difference between them was the viewing of the movie, researchers may conclude that under these conditions, the violent film caused a different behavior (see the “Bobo doll” experiment photos on page 493).
When experiments carefully account for independent variables through random assignment, they generally work well to substantiate direct cause-effect hypotheses. Such research takes place both in laboratory settings and in field settings, where people can be observed using the media in their everyday environments. In field experiments, however, it is more difficult for researchers to control variables. In lab settings, researchers have more control, but other problems may occur. For example, when subjects are removed from the environments in which they regularly use the media, they may act differently—often with fewer inhibitions—than they would in their everyday surroundings.
Experiments have other limitations as well. First, they are not generalizable to
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a larger population; they cannot tell us whether cause-effect results can be duplicated outside the laboratory. Second, most academic experiments today are performed on college students, who are convenient subjects for research but are not representative of the general public. Third, while most experiments are fairly good at predicting short-term media effects under controlled conditions, they do not predict how subjects will behave months or years later in the real world.
Survey Research In the simplest terms, survey research is the collecting and measuring of data taken from a group of respondents. Using random sampling techniques that give each potential subject an equal chance to be included in the survey, this research method draws on much larger populations than those used in experimental studies. Surveys may be conducted through direct mail, personal interviews, telephone calls, e-mail, and Web sites, enabling survey researchers to accumulate large amounts of information by surveying diverse cross sections of people. These data help researchers examine demographic factors such as educational background, income level, race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and political affiliation, along with questions directly related to the survey topic.
survey research in social science research, a method of collecting and measuring data taken from a group of respondents.
Two other benefits of surveys are that they are usually generalizable to the larger society and that they enable researchers to investigate populations in long- term studies. For example, survey research can measure subjects when they are ten, twenty, and thirty years old to track changes in how frequently they watch television and what kinds of programs they prefer at different ages. In addition, large government and academic survey databases are now widely available and contribute to the development of more long-range or longitudinal studies, which make it possible for social scientists to compare new studies with those conducted years earlier.
longitudinal studies a term used for research studies that are conducted over long periods of time and often rely on large government and academic survey databases.
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Like experiments, surveys have several drawbacks. First, survey investigators cannot account for all the variables that might affect media use; therefore, they cannot show cause-effect relationships. Survey research can, however, reveal correlations—or associations—between two variables. Second, the validity of survey questions is a chronic problem for survey practitioners. Surveys are only as good as the wording of their questions and the answer choices they present.
correlations observedassociations between two variables.
Content Analysis Over the years, researchers recognized that experiments and surveys focused on general topics (violence) while ignoring the effects of specific media messages (gun violence, fistfights). As a corrective, researchers developed a method known as content analysis to study these messages. Such analysis is a systematic method of coding and measuring media content.
content analysis in social science research, a method for studying and coding media texts and programs.
Although content analysis was first used during World War II for radio, more recent studies have focused on television, film, and the Internet. Probably the most influential content analysis studies were conducted by George Gerbner and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. Beginning in the late 1960s, they coded and counted acts of violence on network television. Combined with surveys, their annual “violence profiles” showed that heavy watchers of television, ranging from children to retired Americans, tend to overestimate the amount of violence that exists in the actual world.21
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Wedding Media and the Meaning of the Perfect Wedding Day
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According to media researcher Erika Engstrom, the bridal industry in the United States generates $50 to $70 billion annually, with more than two million marriages a year.1 Supporting that massive industry are books, magazines, Web sites, reality TV shows, and digital games (in addition to fictional accounts in movies and music) that promote the idea of what a “perfect” wedding should be. What values are wrapped up in these wedding narratives?
1 DESCRIPTION Select three or four bridal media and compare them. Possible choices include magazines such as Brides, Bridal Guide, and Martha Stewart Weddings; reality TV shows like David Tutera’s Celebrations, Say Yes to the Dress, My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, and Four Weddings; Web sites like the Knot, Southern Bride, and Project Wedding; and games like My Fantasy Wedding, Wedding Dash, and Imagine Wedding Designer.
2 ANALYSIS What patterns do you find in the wedding media? (Consider what isn’t depicted as well.) Are there limited ways in which femininity is defined? Do men have an equal role in the planning of wedding events? Are weddings depicted as something just for heterosexuals? Do the wedding media presume that weddings are first-time experiences for the couple getting married? What seem to be the standards in terms of consumption—the expense, size, and number of things to buy and rent to make a “perfect” day?
3 INTERPRETATION What do the wedding media seem to say about what it is to be a woman or a man on her or his wedding day? What do these gender roles for the wedding suggest about the appropriate gender roles for married life after the wedding? What do the wedding media infer about the appropriate level of consumption? In other words, consider the role of wedding media in
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constructing hegemony: In their depiction of what makes a perfect wedding, do the media stories attempt to get us to accept the dominant cultural values relating to things like gender relations and consumerism?
4 EVALUATION Come to a judgment about the wedding media analyzed. Are they good or bad regarding certain elements? Do they promote gender equality? Do they promote marriage equality (that is, gay marriage)? Do they offer alternatives to having a “perfect” day without buying all the trappings of so many weddings?
5 ENGAGEMENT Talk to friends about what weddings are supposed to celebrate, and whether an alternative conception of a wedding would be a better way of celebrating a union of two people. (In real life, if there is discomfort in talking about alternative ways to celebrate a wedding, that’s probably the pressure of hegemony. Why is that pressure so strong?) Share your criticisms and ideas on wedding Web sites as well.
The limits of content analysis, however, have been well documented. First, this technique does not measure the effects of the messages on audiences, nor does it explain how those messages are presented. For example, a content analysis sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation that examined more than eleven hundred television shows found that 70 percent featured sexual content.22 But the study didn’t explain how viewers interpreted the content or the context of the messages.
Second, problems of definition occur in content analysis. For instance, in the case of coding and counting acts of violence, how do researchers distinguish slapstick cartoon aggression from the violent murders or rapes in an evening police drama? Critics point out that such varied depictions may have diverse and subtle effects on viewers that are not differentiated by content analysis. Third, critics point out that as content analysis grew to be a primary tool in media research, it sometimes pushed to the sidelines other ways of thinking about television and media content. Broad questions concerning the media as a popular art form, as a measure of culture, as a democratic influence, or as a force for social control are difficult to address through strict measurement techniques. Critics of content analysis, in fact, have objected to the kind of social science that reduces culture to acts of counting. Such criticism has addressed the tendency by some researchers to
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favor measurement accuracy over intellectual discipline and inquiry.23
SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY These photos document the “Bobo doll” experiments conducted by Albert Bandura and his colleagues at Stanford University in the early 1960s. Seventy-two children from the Stanford University Nursery School were divided into experimental and control groups. The “aggressive condition” experimental group subjects watched an adult in the room sit on, kick, and hit the Bobo doll with hands and a wooden mallet while saying such things as “Sock him in the nose,” “Throw him in the air,” and “Pow.” (In later versions of the experiment, children watched filmed versions of the adult with the Bobo doll.) Afterward, in a separate room filled with toys, the children in the “aggressive condition” group were more likely than the other children to imitate the adult model’s behavior toward the Bobo doll. Courtesy of Albert Bandura
Contemporary Media Effects Theories By the 1960s, the first departments of mass communication began graduating Ph.D.-level researchers schooled in experiment and survey research techniques, as well as content analysis. These researchers began documenting consistent patterns in mass communication and developing new theories. Five of the most influential contemporary theories that help explain media effects are social learning theory, agenda-setting, the cultivation effect, the spiral of silence, and the third-person effect.
Social Learning Theory Some of the most well-known studies that suggest a link between the mass media
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and behavior are the “Bobo doll” experiments, conducted on children by psychologist Albert Bandura and his colleagues at Stanford University in the 1960s. Bandura concluded that the experiments demonstrated a link between violent media programs, such as those on television, and aggressive behavior. Bandura developed social learning theory as a four-step process: attention (the subject must attend to the media and witness the aggressive behavior), retention (the subject must retain the memory for later retrieval), motor reproduction (the subject must be able to physically imitate the behavior), and motivation (there must be a social reward or reinforcement to encourage modeling of the behavior).
social learning theory a theory within media effects research that suggests a link between the mass media and behavior.
Supporters of social learning theory often cite real-life imitations of media aggression as evidence of social learning theory at work. Yet critics note that many studies conclude just the opposite—that there is no link between media content and aggression. For example, millions of people have watched episodes of How to Get Away with Murder and Breaking Bad without subsequently exhibiting aggressive behavior. As critics point out, social learning theory simply makes television, film, and other media scapegoats for larger social problems relating to violence. Others suggest that experiencing media depictions of aggression can actually help viewers let off steam peacefully through a catharsis effect.
Agenda-Setting A key phenomenon posited by contemporary media effects researchers is agenda- setting: the idea that when the mass media focus their attention on particular events or issues, they determine—that is, set the agenda for—the major topics of discussion for individuals and society. Essentially, agenda-setting researchers have argued that the mass media do not so much tell us what to think as what to think about. Traceable to Walter Lippmann’s notion in the early 1920s that the media “create pictures in our heads,” the first investigations into agenda-setting began in the 1970s.24
agenda-setting a media-research argument that says that when the mass media pay attention to particular events or issues, they determine—that is, set the agenda for—the major topics of
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discussion for individuals and society.
MALI The West African nation of Mali has been in the midst of a political crisis since its northern region was seized by rebel forces in 2012. One of the most devastating outcomes of the country’s political strife is the recruitment of child soldiers, as desperate, poor families often give up their children to rebels in exchange for food and money. Despite the devastation in Mali, many feel the international response to Mali’s crisis has been woefully inadequate and the mass media’s coverage equally insufficient. Baba Ahmed/AP Images
Over the years, agenda-setting research has demonstrated that the more stories the news media do on a particular subject, the more importance audiences attach to that subject. For instance, when the media seriously began to cover ecology issues after the first Earth Day in 1970, a much higher percentage of the population began listing the environment as a primary social concern in surveys. When Jaws became a blockbuster in 1975, the news media started featuring more shark attack stories; even landlocked people in the Midwest began ranking sharks as a major problem, despite the rarity of such incidents worldwide. More recently, extensive news coverage about the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and its companion best- selling book in 2006 sparked the highest-ever public concern about global warming, according to national surveys. But in the following years, the public’s sense of urgency faltered somewhat as stories about the economy and other topics dominated the news agenda.
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The Cultivation Effect Another mass media phenomenon—the cultivation effect—suggests that heavy viewing of television leads individuals to perceive the world in ways that are consistent with television portrayals. This area of media effects research has pushed researchers beyond a focus on how the media affects individual behavior toward a focus on larger ideas about the impact on perception.
cultivation effect in media research, the idea that heavy television viewing leads individuals to perceive reality in ways that are consistent with the portrayals they see on television.
The major research in this area grew from the attempts of George Gerbner and his colleagues to make generalizations about the influence of televised violence. The cultivation effect suggests that the more time individuals spend viewing television and absorbing its viewpoints, the more likely their views of social reality will be “cultivated” by the images and portrayals they have seen.25 For example, Gerbner’s studies concluded that although fewer than 1 percent of Americans are victims of violent crime in any single year, people who watch a lot of television tend to overestimate this percentage. Such exaggerated perceptions, Gerbner and his colleagues argued, are part of a “mean world” syndrome, in which viewers with heavy, long-term exposure to television violence are more likely to believe that the external world is a mean and dangerous place.
According to the cultivation effect, media messages interact in complicated ways with personal, social, political, and cultural factors; they are one of a number of important factors in determining individual behavior and defining social values. Some critics have charged that cultivation research has provided limited evidence to support its findings. In addition, some have argued that the cultivation effects recorded by Gerbner’s studies have been so minimal as to be benign and that when compared side by side, the perceptions of heavy television viewers and nonviewers in terms of the “mean world” syndrome are virtually identical.
The Spiral of Silence Developed by German communication theorist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in the 1970s and 1980s, the spiral of silence theory links the mass media, social psychology, and the formation of public opinion. The theory proposes that those who believe that their views on controversial issues are in the minority will keep their views to themselves—that is, become silent—for fear of social isolation, which diminishes or even silences alternative perspectives. The theory is based on social psychology studies, such as the classic conformity research studies of
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Solomon Asch in 1951. In Asch’s study on the effects of group pressure, he demonstrated that a test subject is more likely to give clearly wrong answers to questions about line lengths if all other people in the room unanimously state the same incorrect answers. Noelle-Neumann argued that mass media, particularly television, can exacerbate this effect by communicating real or presumed majority opinions widely and quickly.
spiral of silence a theory that links the mass media, social psychology, and the formation of public opinion; the theory says that people who hold minority views on controversial issues tend to keep their views silent.
According to the theory, the mass media can help create a false, overrated majority; that is, a true majority of people holding a certain position can grow silent when they sense an opposing majority in the media. One criticism of the theory is that some people may fail to fall into a spiral of silence either because they don’t monitor the media or because they mistakenly perceive that more people hold their position than really do. Noelle-Neumann acknowledges that in many cases, “hard-core” nonconformists exist and remain vocal even in the face of social isolation and can ultimately prevail in changing public opinion.26
The Third-Person Effect Identified in a 1983 study by W. Phillips Davison, the third-person effect theory suggests that people believe others are more affected by media messages than they are themselves.27 In other words, it proposes the idea that “we” can escape the worst effects of media while still worrying about people who are younger, less educated, more impressionable, or otherwise less capable of guarding against media influence.
third-person effect the theory that people believe others are more affected by media messages than they are themselves.
Under this theory, we might fear that other people will, for example, take tabloid newspapers seriously, imitate violent movies, or get addicted to the Internet, while dismissing the idea that any of those things could happen to us. It
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has been argued that the third-person effect is instrumental in censorship, as it would allow censors to assume immunity to the negative effects of any supposedly dangerous media they must examine.
Evaluating Research on Media Effects The mainstream models of media research have made valuable contributions to our understanding of the mass media, submitting content and audiences to rigorous testing. This wealth of research exists partly because funding for studies on the effects of the media on young people remains popular among politicians and has drawn ready government support since the 1960s. Media critic Richard Rhodes argues that media effects research is inconsistent and often flawed but continues to resonate with politicians and parents because it offers an easy-to-blame social cause for real-world violence.28 (For more on real-world gun violence in the United States, see “Examining Ethics: Our Masculinity Problem” on page 498.)
Funding restricts the scope of some media effects and survey research, particularly if government, business, or other administrative agendas do not align with researchers’ interests. Other limits also exist, including the inability to address how media affect communities and social institutions. Because most media research operates best when examining media and individual behavior, fewer research studies explore media’s impact on community and social life. Some research has begun to address these deficits and also to turn more attention to the increasing influence of media technology on international communication.
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CULTURAL APPROACHES TO MEDIA RESEARCH
During the rise of modern media research, approaches with a stronger historical and interpretive edge developed as well, often in direct opposition to the scientific models. In the late 1930s, some social scientists began to warn about the limits of “gathering data” and “charting trends,” particularly when these kinds of research projects served only advertisers and media organizations and tended to be narrowly focused on individual behavior, ignoring questions like “Where are institutions taking us?” and “Where do we want them to take us?”29
In the United States in the 1960s, an important body of research—loosely labeled cultural studies—arose to challenge mainstream media effects theories. Since that time, cultural studies research has focused on how people make meaning, understand reality, and order experience by using cultural symbols that appear in the media. This research has attempted to make everyday culture the centerpiece of media studies, focusing on how subtly mass communication shapes and is shaped by history, politics, and economics. Other cultural studies work examines the relationships between elite individuals and groups in government and politics, and how media play a role in sustaining the authority of elites and— occasionally—in challenging their power.
Early Developments in Cultural Studies Research In Europe, media studies have always favored interpretive rather than scientific approaches; in other words, researchers there have approached the media as if they were literary or cultural critics rather than experimental or survey researchers. These approaches were built on the writings of political philosophers such as Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, who investigated how mass media support existing hierarchies in society. They examined how popular culture and sports distract people from redressing social injustices, and they addressed the subordinate status of particular social groups, something emerging media effects researchers were seldom doing.
In the United States, early criticism of media effects research came from the Frankfurt School, a group of European researchers who emigrated from Germany to America to escape Nazi persecution in the 1930s. Under the leadership of Max Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno, and Leo Lowenthal, this group pointed to at least three inadequacies of traditional scientific approaches to media research, arguing that they (1) reduced large “cultural questions” to measurable and “verifiable categories”; (2) depended on “an atmosphere of rigidly enforced neutrality”; and (3) refused to place “the phenomena of modern life” in a “historical and moral context.”30 The researchers of the Frankfurt School did not completely reject the usefulness of measuring and counting data. They contended, however, that
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historical and cultural approaches were also necessary to focus critical attention on the long-range effects of the mass media on audiences.
Since the time of the Frankfurt School, criticisms of the media effects tradition and its methods have continued, with calls for more interpretive studies of the rituals of mass communication. Academics who have embraced a cultural approach to media research try to understand how media and culture are tied to the actual patterns of communication in daily life.
Conducting Cultural Studies Research Cultural studies research focuses on the investigation of daily experience, especially on issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality, and on the unequal arrangements of power and status in contemporary society. Such research emphasizes how some social and cultural groups have been marginalized and ignored throughout history. Consequently, cultural studies have attempted to recover lost or silenced voices, particularly among African American, Native American, Asian and Asian American, Arab, Latino, Appalachian, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender), immigrant, and women’s cultures. The major analytical approaches in cultural studies research today are textual analysis, audience studies, and political economy studies.
Textual Analysis In cultural studies research, textual analysis highlights the close reading and interpretation of cultural messages, including those found in books, movies, and TV programs. It is the equivalent of measurement methods like experiments, surveys, and content analysis. While media effects research approaches media messages with the tools of modern science—replicability, objectivity, and data— textual analysis looks at rituals, narratives, and meaning. One type of textual analysis is framing research, which looks at recurring media story structures, particularly in news stories. Media sociologist Todd Gitlin defines media frames as “persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual.”31
textual analysis in media research, a method for closely and critically examining and interpreting the meanings of culture, including architecture, fashion, books, movies, and TV programs.
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Although textual analysis has a long and rich history in film and literary studies, it became significant to media in 1974, when Horace Newcomb’s TV: The Most Popular Art became the first serious academic book to analyze television shows. Newcomb studied why certain TV programs and formats became popular, especially comedies, westerns, mysteries, soap operas, news reports, and sports programs. Newcomb took television programs seriously, examining patterns in the most popular programs at the time, such as the Beverly Hillbillies, Bewitched, and Dragnet, which traditional researchers had usually snubbed or ignored. Trained as a literary scholar, Newcomb argued that content analysis and other social science approaches to popular media often ignored artistic traditions and social context. For Newcomb, “the task for the student of the popular arts is to find a technique through which many different qualities of the work—aesthetic, social, psychological—may be explored” and to discover “why certain formulas … are popular in American television.”32
Before Newcomb’s work, textual analysis generally focused only on “important” or highly regarded works of art—debates, films, poems, and books. But by the end of the 1970s, a new generation of media studies scholars, who had grown up on television and rock and roll, began to study less elite forms of culture. They extended the concept of what a “text” is to include architecture, fashion, tabloid magazines, pop icons like Madonna, rock music, hip-hop, soap operas and telenovelas, movies, cockfights, shopping malls, reality TV, Martha Stewart, and professional wrestling—trying to make sense of the most taken-for-granted aspects of everyday media culture. Often the study of these seemingly minor elements of popular culture provides insight into broader meanings within our society. By shifting the focus to daily popular culture artifacts, cultural studies succeeded in focusing scholarly attention not just on significant presidents, important religious leaders, prominent political speeches, or military battles but on the more ordinary ways that “normal” people organize experience and understand their daily lives.
Audience Studies Cultural studies research that focuses on how people use and interpret cultural content is called audience studies, or reader-response research. Audience studies differs from textual analysis because the subject being researched is the audience for the text, not the text itself. For example, in Reading the the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Janice Radway studied a group of midwestern women who were fans of romance novels. Using her training in literary criticism and employing interviews and questionnaires, Radway investigated the meaning of romance novels to the women. She argued that reading romance novels functions as personal time for some women, whose complex family and work lives leave them very little time for themselves. The study also suggested that these particular romance-novel fans identified with the active, independent qualities of the romantic heroines they most admired. As a cultural study, Radway’s work did not claim to be scientific, and her findings are not generalizable to all women. Rather, Radway was interested in investigating and interpreting the relationship between
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T
reading romantic fiction and living a conventional life.33
audience studies cultural studies research that focuses on how people use and interpret cultural content. Also known as reader-response research.
Radway’s influential cultural research used a variety of interpretive methods, including literary analysis, interviews, and questionnaires. Most important, these studies helped define culture in broad terms—as being made up of both the products a society fashions and the processes that forge those products.
EXAMINING ETHICS
Our Masculinity Problem
here have been at least eighty-three mass shootings in the United States since 1982, and more than half of them have happened
since 2006.1 Just some of those that made headlines include the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016 (49 dead, 53 injured); the Washington Navy Yard in 2013 (13 dead, 8 injured); Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 (28 dead, 2 injured); the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012 (12 dead, 58 injured); and Virginia Tech in 2007 (33 dead, 23 injured).
What are the reasons? Our news media respond with a number of usual suspects: the easy availability of guns in the United States; influential movies, television shows, and video games; mental illness; bad
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parenting. But Jackson Katz, educator, author, and filmmaker (of Tough Guise and Tough Guise 2), sees another major factor. The least-talked- about commonality in all the shootings is the one so obvious most of us miss it: Nearly all the mass murderers are male (and usually white).
What would psychologists, pundits, and other talking heads be saying if women were responsible for nearly every mass shooting for more than three decades? “If a woman were the shooter,” Katz says, “you can bet there would be all sorts of commentary about shifting cultural notions of femininity and how they might have contributed to her act, such as discussions in recent years about girl gang violence.”2
But women were involved in only three of the eighty-one mass shootings; all the others had a man (or men) behind the trigger. “Because men represent the dominant gender, their gender is rendered invisible in the discourse about violence,” Katz says.3 In fact, the dominance of masculinity is the norm in our mainstream mass media. Dramatic content is often about the performance of heroic, powerful masculinity (e.g., many action films, digital games, and sports). Similarly, humorous content often derives from calling into question the standards of masculinity (e.g., a man trying to cook, clean, or take care of a child). The same principles apply for the advertising that supports the content. How many automobile, beer, shaving cream, and food commercials peddle products that offer men a chance to maintain or regain their rightful masculinity?
Rachel Kalish and Michael Kimmel, sociologists at SUNY Stonybrook, analyzed the problem of mass shootings that usually end in suicide. They found that males and females have similar rates of suicide attempts. “Feeling aggrieved, wronged by the world—these are typical adolescent feelings, common to many boys and girls,” they report.
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The results of these attempts, though, differ by gender. Female suicide behaviors are more likely to be a cry for help. Male suicide behaviors, informed by social norms of masculinity, often result in a different outcome: “aggrieved entitlement.” Kalish and Kimmel define this as “a gendered emotion, a fusion of that humiliating loss of manhood and the moral obligation and entitlement to get it back. And its gender is masculine.”4 Retaliation, which is considered acceptable in lesser forms (think of all the cultural narratives in which the weak or aggrieved character finally gets his revenge), becomes horrifying when combined with the immediacy and lethal force of assault firearms. “Aggrieved entitlement” exactly fit the profile of Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter with a record of misogyny and homophobia.5
There is some evidence that the gun industry understands the sense of masculine entitlement but uses that knowledge to sell guns, not to consider how they might be misused. A marketing campaign begun in 2010 for the Bushmaster .223-caliber semiautomatic rifle showed an image of the rifle with the large tagline “Consider Your Man Card Reissued.” The Bushmaster was the same civilian assault rifle used by the shooter who massacred twenty-eight people at the Newtown elementary school in 2012.
How do we find a way out of this cultural cycle? “Make gender— specifically the idea that men are gendered beings—a central part of the national conversation about rampage killings,” Katz says. “It means looking carefully at how our culture defines manhood, how boys are socialized, and how pressure to stay in the ‘man box’ not only constrains boys’ and men’s emotional and relational development, but also their range of choices when faced with life crises.”6
Political Economy Studies A focus on the production of popular culture and the forces behind it is the topic of political economy studies, which specifically examine interconnections among economic interests, political power, and how that power is used. Among the major concerns of political economy studies is the increasing conglomeration of media ownership. This growing concentration of ownership means that the production of media content is being controlled by fewer and fewer organizations, investing those companies with more and more power. In addition, the domination of public
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discourse by for-profit corporations may mean that the bottom line for all public communication and popular culture is money, not democratic expression.
political economy studies an area of academic study that specifically examines interconnections among economic interests, political power, and how that power is used.
PUBLIC SPHERE Conversations in eighteenth-century English coffeehouses (like the one shown) inspired Jürgen Habermas’s public-sphere theory. However, Habermas expressed concerns that the mass media could weaken the public sphere by allowing people to become passive consumers of the information distributed by the media instead of entering into debates with one another about what is best for society. What do you think of such concerns? Has the proliferation of political cable shows, Internet bloggers, and other mediated forums decreased serious public debate, or has it just shifted the conversation to places besides coffeehouses? The Granger Collection
Political economy studies work best when combined with textual analysis and audience studies, which provide context for understanding the cultural content of a media product, its production process, and how the audience responds. For example, a major media corporation may, for commercial reasons, create a film and market it through a number of venues (political economy), but the film’s meaning or popularity makes sense only within the historical and narrative contexts of the culture (textual analysis), and it may be interpreted by various
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audiences in ways both anticipated and un- expected (audience studies).
Cultural Studies’ Theoretical Perspectives Developed as an alternative to the predictive theories of social science research (e.g., if X happens, the result will be Y), cultural studies research on media is informed by more general perspectives about how the mass media interact with the world. Two foundational concepts in cultural studies research are (1) the public sphere and (2) the idea of communication as culture.
The Public Sphere The idea of the public sphere, defined as a space for critical public debate, was first advanced by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in 1962.34 Habermas, a professor of philosophy, studied late-seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century England and France, and he found those societies to be increasingly influenced by free trade and the rise of the printing press. At that historical moment, an emerging middle class began to gather to discuss public life in coffeehouses, meeting halls, and pubs, and to debate the ideas of novels and other publications in literary salons and clubs. In doing so, this group (which did not yet include women, peasants, the working classes, and other minority groups) began to build a society beyond the control of aristocrats, royalty, and religious elites. The outcome of such critical public debate led to support for the right to assembly, free speech, and a free press.
public sphere those areas or arenas in social life—like the town square or coffeehouse—where people come together regularly to discuss social and cultural problems and try to influence politics; the public sphere is distinguished from governmental spheres, where elected officials and other representatives conduct affairs of state.
Habermas’s research is useful to cultural studies researchers when they consider how democratic societies and the mass media operate today. For Habermas, a democratic society should always work to create the most favorable communication situation possible—a public sphere. Basically, without an open communication system, there can be no democratically functioning society. This fundamental notion is the basis for some arguments on why an open, accessible mass media system is essential. However, Habermas warned that the mass media could also be an enemy of democracy; he cautioned modern societies to beware of
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“the manipulative deployment of media power to procure mass loyalty, consumer demand, and ‘compliance’ with systematic imperatives” of those in power.35
Communication as Culture As Habermas considered the relationship between communication and democracy, media historian James Carey considered the relationship between communication and culture. Carey rejected the “transmission” view of communication—that is, that a message goes simply from sender to receiver. Carey argued that communication is more of a cultural ritual; he famously defined communication as “a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.”36 Thus communication creates our reality and maintains that reality in the stories we tell ourselves. For example, think about the novels; movies; and other stories, representations, and symbols that explicitly or tacitly supported discrimination against African Americans in the United States prior to the Civil Rights movement. When events occur that question reality (like protests and sit-ins in the 1950s and 1960s), communication may repair the culture with adjusted narratives or symbols, or it may completely transform the culture with new dominant symbols. Indeed, analysis of media culture in the 1960s and afterward (including books, movies, TV, and music) suggests a U.S. culture undergoing repair and transformation.
Carey’s ritual view of communication leads cultural studies researchers to consider communication’s symbolic process as culture itself. Everything that defines our culture—our language, food, clothing, architecture, mass media content, and the like—is a form of symbolic communication that signifies shared (but often still-contested) beliefs about culture at a point in historical time. From this viewpoint, then, cultural studies is tightly linked with communication studies.
Evaluating Cultural Studies Research In opposition to media effects research, cultural studies research involves interpreting written and visual “texts” or artifacts as symbolic representations that contain cultural, historical, and political meaning. For example, the wave of police and crime TV shows that appeared in the mid-1960s can be interpreted as a cultural response to concerns and fears people had about urban unrest and income disparity. Audiences were drawn to the heroes of these dramas, who often exerted control over forces that, among society in general, seemed out of control. As James Carey put it, the cultural approach—unlike media effects research, which is grounded in the social sciences—“does not seek to explain human behavior, but to understand it…. It does not attempt to predict human behavior, but to diagnose human meanings.”37 In other words, a cultural approach does not provide explanations for laws that govern how mass media behave. Rather, it offers interpretations of the stories, messages, and meanings that circulate throughout our culture.
One of the main strengths of cultural studies is the freedom it affords researchers to broadly interpret the impact of the mass media. Because cultural
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work is not bound by the precise control of variables, researchers can more easily examine the ties between media messages and the broader social, economic, and political world. For example, media effects research on politics has generally concentrated on election polls and voting patterns, while cultural research has broadened the discussion to examine class, gender, and cultural differences among voters and the various uses of power by individuals and institutions in authority. Following Horace Newcomb’s work, cultural investigators have expanded the study of media content beyond “serious” works. They have studied many popular forms, including music, movies, and prime-time television.
CULTURAL STUDIES researchers are interested in the production and meaning of a wide range of elements within communication culture, as well as audiences’ responses to these. Some researchers have focused on the meaning of the recent trend of dark subject matter in young-adult novels like the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, and Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson. As such books are made into movies, researchers may also study the cultural fascination with actors who appear in them (like Jennifer Lawrence, the star of the Hunger Games films, shown here). Photofest
Just as media effects research has its limits, so does cultural studies research. Sometimes cultural studies have focused exclusively on the meanings of media programs or texts, ignoring their effect on audiences. Some cultural studies, however, have tried to address this deficiency by incorporating audience studies. Both media effects and cultural studies researchers today have begun to look at the limitations of their work more closely, borrowing ideas from one another to better assess the complexity of the media’s meaning and influence.
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MEDIA RESEARCH AND DEMOCRACY
One charge frequently leveled at academic studies is that they fail to address the everyday problems of life, often seeming to have little practical application. The growth of mass media departments in colleges and universities has led to an increase in specialized jargon, which tends to alienate and exclude nonacademics. Although media research has built a growing knowledge base and dramatically advanced what we know about the effect of mass media on individuals and societies, the academic world has also built a barrier to that knowledge. That is, the larger public has often been excluded from access to the research process even though cultural research tends to identify with marginalized groups. The scholarship is self-defeating if its complexity removes it from the daily experience of the groups it addresses. Researchers themselves have even found it difficult to speak to one another across domains because of discipline-specific language used to analyze and report findings. For example, understanding the elaborate statistical analyses used to document media effects requires special training.
PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS Melissa Harris-Perry is an author, a professor at Wake Forest University, and editor-at-large at ELLE.com. From 2012 to 2016, she hosted an opinion show for MSNBC. Her most recent book is Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times/Redux Pictures
In some cultural research, the language used is often incomprehensible to students and to other audiences who use the mass media. A famous hoax in 1996 pointed out just how inaccessible some academic jargon can be. Alan Sokal, a New
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York University physics professor, submitted an impenetrable article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” to a special issue of the academic journal Social Text devoted to science and postmodernism. As he had expected, the article—a hoax designed to point out how dense academic jargon can sometimes mask sloppy thinking—was published. According to the journal’s editor, about six reviewers had read the article but didn’t suspect that it was phony. A public debate ensued after Sokal revealed his hoax. Sokal said he worries that jargon and intellectual fads cause academics to lose contact with the real world and “undermine the prospect for progressive social critique.”38
In addition, increasing specialization in the 1970s began isolating many researchers from life outside the university. Academics were locked away in their ivory towers, concerned with seemingly obscure matters to which the general public couldn’t relate. Academics across many fields, however, began responding to this isolation and became increasingly active in political and cultural life in the 1980s and 1990s.
In recent years, public intellectuals have encouraged discussion about media production in a digital world. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has been a leading advocate of efforts to rewrite the nation’s copyright laws to enable noncommercial “amateur culture” to flourish on the Internet. (Lessig also ran a long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 to advocate for campaign finance reform.) American University’s Pat Aufderheide, longtime media critic for the alternative magazine In These Times, worked with independent filmmakers to develop the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, which calls for documentary filmmakers to have reasonable access to copyrighted material for their work.
Like public journalists, public intellectuals based on campuses help carry on the conversations of society and culture, actively circulating the most important new ideas of the day and serving as models for how to participate in public life.
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15 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the commercial nature of mass media. In controversies about media content, how much of what society finds troubling in the mass media is due more to the commercial nature of the media than to any intrinsic quality of the media themselves? For some media critics, such as former advertising executive Jerry Mander in his popular book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), the problems of the mass media are inherent in the technology of the medium (e.g., the hypnotic lure of a light-emitting screen) and can’t be fixed or reformed. Other researchers focus primarily on the effects of media on individual behavior.
But how much of what critics dislike about television and other mass media— including violence, indecency, immorality, inadequate journalism, and unfair representations of people and issues—derives from the way in which the mass media are organized in our culture rather than from anything about the technologies themselves or their effects on behavior? In other words, are many of the criticisms of television and other mass media merely masking what should be broader criticisms of capitalism?
One of the keys to accurately analyzing television and the other mass media is to tease apart the effects of a capitalist economy (which organizes media industries and relies on advertising, corporate underwriting, and other forms of sponsorship to profit from them) from the effects of the actual medium (television, movies, the Internet, radio, newspapers, etc.). If our media system wasn’t commercial in nature —if it wasn’t controlled by large corporations—would the same “effects” exist? Would the content change? Would different kinds of movies fill theaters? Would radio play the same music? What would the news be about? Would search engines generate other results?
Basically, would society be learning other things if the mass media were organized in a noncommercial way? Would noncommercial mass media set the same kind of political agenda, or would they cultivate a different kind of reality? What would the spiral of silence theory look like in a noncommercial media system?
Perhaps noncommercial mass media would have their own problems. Indeed, there may be effects that can’t be unhitched from the technology of a mass medium no matter what the economy is. But it’s worth considering whether any effects are
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due to the economic system that brings the content to us. If we determine that the commercial nature of the media is a source of negative effects, then we should also reconsider our policy solutions for trying to deal with those effects.
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
media effects research, 483 cultural studies, 483 propaganda analysis, 484 pseudo-polls, 485 hypodermic-needle model, 488 minimal-effects model, 489 selective exposure, 489 selective retention, 489 uses and gratifications model, 489 scientific method, 490 hypotheses, 490 experiments, 490 random assignment, 490 survey research, 491 longitudinal studies, 491 correlations, 491 content analysis, 491 social learning theory, 493 agenda-setting, 494 cultivation effect, 494 spiral of silence, 495 third-person effect, 495 textual analysis, 497 audience studies, 497 political economy studies, 499
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public sphere, 499
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
Early Media Research Methods 1. What were the earliest types of media studies, and why weren’t
they more scientific? 2. What were the major influences that led to scientific media
research? Research on Media Effects
3. What are the differences between experiments and surveys as media research strategies?
4. What is content analysis, and why is it significant? 5. What are the differences between the hypodermic-needle model
and the minimal-effects model in the history of media research? 6. What are the main ideas behind social learning theory, agenda-
setting, the cultivation effect, the spiral of silence, and the third- person effect?
7. What are some strengths and limitations of modern media research?
Cultural Approaches to Media Research 8. Why did cultural studies develop in opposition to media effects
research? 9. What are the features of cultural studies?
10. How is textual analysis different from content analysis? 11. What are some of the strengths and limitations of cultural
research? Media Research and Democracy 12. What is a major criticism about specialization in academic
research at universities?
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13. How have public intellectuals contributed to society’s debates about the mass media?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. Think about instances in which the mass media have been blamed for a social problem. Could there be another, more accurate cause (an underlying variable) of that problem?
2. One charge leveled against a lot of media research—both the effects and the cultural models—is that it has very little impact on our media institutions. Do you agree or disagree, and why?
3. Do you have a major concern about media in society that hasn’t been, but should be, addressed by research? Explain your answer.
4. Can you think of a media issue on which researchers from different fields at a university could team up to study together? Explain.
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter. VIDEO: VIOLENCE IN MOVIES Watch a clip from a film and analyze how it treats violent subject matter.
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16 Legal Controls and Freedom of Expression
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DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA
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POLITICIANS AND THEIR CONSTITUENTS can talk, but money as speech speaks much louder. Aspects of our present political system amount to a legal pay-to-play system in which the wealthiest can leverage indirect influence over elections (manipulating issues by buying lots of advertising) and more direct influence over legislation (manipulating politicians who desperately want money to pay for campaign advertising).1 There is plenty of evidence that a majority of Americans dislike this system. For example, a national survey in 2016 found that 76 percent of likely U.S. voters “believe the wealthiest individuals and companies have too much influence over elections.”2 Yet at the same time, the oversized influence of wealthy contributors and businesses is protected by the First Amendment as a form of speech:
THE ORIGINS OF FREE EXPRESSION AND A FREE PRESS FILM AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT EXPRESSION IN THE MEDIA: PRINT, BROADCAST, AND ONLINE THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND DEMOCRACY
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
◄ Protesters here are speaking out against the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United v.
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Federal Election Commission case. This ruling protects corporations and labor unions, allowing them to spend unlimited amounts of money on TV and radio advertising during elections.
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
In other words, it says nothing explicitly about money. Yet money now counts as speech, protected by the First Amendment. So how did we end up here?
Ironically, it started with Congress’s intention to control the amount of money in elections. In 1974, emerging from the Watergate scandal (President Nixon’s illegal tactics in the 1972 election), Congress amended federal election law to further limit campaign contributions. Two years later, in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the U.S. Supreme Court suggested for the first time that political contributions count as speech. The court argued that restrictions on campaign money “necessarily reduce[d] the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of the exploration, and the size of the audience reached. This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money.”
Over the ensuing years, Congress has tried to again rein in campaign finance with new laws, but federal courts, beholden to the idea that money equals speech, have always struck them down. This brings us to the current state of our national elections. The two main political parties and their supporters spent an estimated $6 billion on campaign advertising for the 2012 election; early estimates for the 2016 presidential race suggested that total spending could reach $10 billion. The main explanation for why corporations and rich individuals can now spend extraordinary amounts lies in another decision by the Supreme Court, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010). The five-to-four decision said that it was a violation of First Amendment
free-speech rights for the federal government to limit spending for TV and radio advertising, usually done through organized Super PACs (political action committees), which are most often sponsored by corporate interests or super-rich donors.
While the Supreme Court decision ran counter to public opinion, many advocates on the political Right and some on the Left offered that the First Amendment means what it says: “Congress shall make no law.” Traditional First Amendment supporters like Gene Policinski of the First Amendment Center argue that the
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“good intentions” behind the idea of limiting campaign spending “don’t justify ignoring a basic concept that the Supreme Court majority pointed out in its ruling: Nothing in the First Amendment provides for ‘more or less’ free-speech protection depending on who is speaking.”3
An advantage in advertising spending is only one of many variables. Nevertheless, those with limited means are at a clear disadvantage compared to those who have money when it comes to buying expensive commercial speech and shaping the direction of a presidential campaign. Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig argues that money corrupted American politics long before the Citizens United ruling. “Politicians are dependent upon ‘the funders’—spending anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent of their time raising money from these funders,” he wrote. “But ‘the funders’ are not ‘the People’: .26 percent of Americans give more than $200 in a congressional campaign; .05 percent give the max to any congressional candidate; .01 percent—the 1 percent of the 1 percent—give more than $10,000 in an election cycle; and .0000063 percent have given close to 80 percent of the super PAC money spent in this election so far. That’s 196 Americans.”4 Given the Citizens United ruling, what can be done to give all citizens a voice in the campaign finance system and make them “patrons” of the political process?
THE CULTURAL AND POLITICAL STRUGGLES OVER WHAT CONSTITUTES FREE SPEECH or free expression have defined American democracy. In 1989, when Supreme Court justice William Brennan Jr. was asked to comment on his favorite part of the Constitution, he replied, “The First Amendment, I expect. Its enforcement gives us this society. The other provisions of the Constitution really only embellish it.” Of all the issues that involve the mass media and popular culture, none is more central—or explosive—than freedom of expression and the First Amendment. Our nation’s historical development can often be traced to how much or how little we tolerated speech during particular periods.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.
The current era is as volatile a time as ever for free-speech issues. Contemporary free-speech debates include copyright issues, hate-speech codes on college and university campuses, explicit lyrics in music, violent images in film and television, the swapping of media files on the Internet, and the right of the
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press to publish government secrets. In this chapter, we will:
Examine free-expression issues, focusing on the implications of the First Amendment for a variety of mass media Investigate the models of expression, the origins of free expression, and the First Amendment Examine the prohibition of censorship and how the First Amendment has been challenged and limited throughout U.S. history Focus on the impact of gag orders, shield laws, the use of cameras in the courtroom, and some of the clashes between the First Amendment and the Sixth Amendment Review the social and political pressures that gave rise to early censorship boards and the current film ratings system Discuss First Amendment issues in broadcasting, considering why broadcasting has been treated differently from print media Explore the newest frontier in free expression—the Internet
One of the most important laws relating to the media is the First Amendment (see pages 505–506 for its full text). While you’ve surely heard about its protections, do you know how or why it was put in place? Have you ever known someone who had to fight to express an idea—for example, was anyone in your high school ever sent home for wearing a certain T-shirt or hat that school officials deemed “offensive”? Have you ever felt that your access to some media content was restricted or censored? What were the circumstances, and how did you respond? For more questions to help you understand the role of freedom of expression in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.
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THE ORIGINS OF FREE EXPRESSION AND A FREE PRESS
When students from other cultures attend school in the United States, many are astounded by the number of books, news articles, editorials, cartoons, films, TV shows, and Web sites that make fun of U.S. presidents, the military, and the police. Many countries’ governments throughout history have jailed, or even killed, their citizens for such speech “violations.” For instance, between 1992 and July 2016, nearly twelve hundred international journalists were killed in the line of duty, often because someone disagreed with what they wrote or reported.5 In the United States, however, we have generally taken for granted our right to criticize and poke fun at the government and other authority figures. Moreover, many of us are unaware of the ideas that underpin our freedoms and don’t realize the extent to which those freedoms surpass those in most other countries.
In fact, a 2016 survey related that 46 percent of the world’s population live in countries with virtually no freedom of the press, with those governments exercising tight control over the news media and even intimidating, jailing, and executing journalists. Only 13 percent of people on the planet live in a country with a free media system.6
JOURNALISTS IN IRAQ During the Iraq War, journalists were embedded with troops to provide “frontline” coverage. The freedom the U.S. press had to report on the war came at a cost. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 258 journalists and media workers were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2016 as a result of hostile actions.
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AP Photo/John Moore
Models of Expression Since the mid-1950s, four conventional models for speech and journalism have been used to categorize the widely differing ideas underlying free expression.7 These models include the authoritarian, communist, social responsibility, and libertarian concepts. They are distinguished by the levels of freedom permitted and by the attitudes of the ruling and political classes toward the freedoms granted to the average citizen. Today, given the diversity among nations, the experimentation of journalists, and the collapse of many communist press systems, these categories are no longer as relevant. Nevertheless, they offer a good point of departure for discussing the press and democracy.
The authoritarian model developed at about the time the printing press first arrived in sixteenth-century England. Its advocates held that the general public, largely illiterate in those days, needed guidance from an elite, educated ruling class. Censorship was frequent, and the government issued printing licenses primarily to publishers who were sympathetic to government and ruling-class agendas. Today, many authoritarian systems operate in developing countries throughout Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where journalism often joins with government and business to foster economic growth, minimize political dissent, and promote social stability. In these societies, both reporters and citizens may be punished if they question leaders and the status quo too fiercely.
authoritarian model a model for journalism and speech that tolerates little public dissent or criticism of government; it holds that the general public needs guidance from an elite and educated ruling class.
In the authoritarian model, the news is controlled by private enterprise. But under the communist or state model, the press is controlled by the government because state leaders believe the press should serve government goals. Ideas that challenge the basic premises of state authority are not tolerated. There are still a few countries using this model, including Myanmar (Burma), China, Cuba, North Korea, and Turkmenistan.
communist or state model a model for journalism and speech that places control in the
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hands of an enlightened government, which speaks for ordinary citizens and workers in order to serve the common goals of the state.
The social responsibility model characterizes the ideals of mainstream journalism in the United States. A socially responsible press is usually privately owned (although the government technically operates the broadcast media in most European democracies). In this model, the press functions as a Fourth Estate— that is, an unofficial branch of government that monitors the legislative, judicial, and executive branches for abuses of power and provides information necessary for self-governance.
social responsibility model a model for journalism and speech in which the press functions as a Fourth Estate, monitoring the three branches of government for abuses of power, and provides information necessary for self-governance.
Fourth Estate the notion that the press operates as an unofficial branch of government, monitoring the legislative, judicial, and executive branches for abuses of power.
The flip side of the state and authoritarian models and a more radical extension of the social responsibility model, the libertarian model encourages vigorous government criticism and supports the highest degree of individual and press freedoms. Under a libertarian model, no restrictions would be placed on the mass media or on individual speech. Libertarians tolerate the expression of everything, from publishing pornography to advocating anarchy. In North America and Europe, many alternative newspapers and magazines operate on such a model.
libertarian model a model for journalism and speech that encourages vigorous government criticism and supports the highest degree of freedom for individual speech and news operations.
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The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution To understand the development of free expression in the United States, we must first understand how the idea for a free press came about. In various European countries throughout the seventeenth century, in order to monitor—and punish, if necessary—the speech of editors and writers, governments controlled the circulation of ideas through the press by requiring printers to obtain licenses from them. However, in 1644, English poet John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, published his essay Areopagitica, which opposed government licenses for printers and defended a free press. Milton argued that all sorts of ideas, even false ones, should be allowed to circulate freely in a democratic society because eventually the truth would emerge. In 1695, England stopped licensing newspapers, and most of Europe followed. In many democracies today, publishing a newspaper, magazine, or newsletter remains one of the few public or service enterprises that requires no license.
PRESS FREEDOM The international human rights organization Freedom House comparatively assesses political rights and civil liberties in 210 of the world’s countries and territories. Among the nations counted as not free (illustrated in blue) are China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Courtesy of Freedomhouse.org
Less than a hundred years later, the writers of the U.S. Constitution were ambivalent about the freedom of the press. In fact, the Constitution as originally ratified in 1788 didn’t include a guarantee of freedom of the press. Constitutional framer Alexander Hamilton thought it impractical to attempt to define “liberty of the press” and believed that whatever declarations might be added to the Constitution, its security would ultimately depend on public opinion. At that time,
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though, nine of the original thirteen states had charters defending the freedom of the press, and the states pushed to have federal guarantees of free speech and a free press approved at the first session of the new Congress. The Bill of Rights, which contained the first ten amendments to the Constitution, was adopted in 1791.
The commitment to freedom of the press, however, was not resolute. In 1798, the Federalist Party, which controlled the presidency and Congress, passed the Sedition Act to silence opposition to an anticipated war against France. Led by President John Adams, the Federalists believed that defamatory articles by the opposition Democratic-Republican Party might stir up discontent against the government and undermine its authority. Over the next three years, twenty-five individuals were arrested and ten were convicted under the act, which was also used to prosecute anti-Federalist newspapers. After failing to curb opposition, the Sedition Act expired in 1801 during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican who had challenged the act’s constitutionality, pardoned all defendants convicted under it.8 Ironically, the Sedition Act, the first major attempt to constrain the First Amendment, became the defining act in solidifying American support behind the notion of a free press. As journalism historian Michael Schudson explained, “Only in the wake of the Sedition Act did Americans boldly embrace a free press as a necessary bulwark of a liberal civil order.”9
Censorship as Prior Restraint In the United States, the First Amendment has theoretically prohibited censorship. Over time, Supreme Court decisions have defined censorship as prior restraint. This means that courts and governments cannot block any publication or speech before it actually occurs, on the principle that a law has not been broken until an illegal act has been committed. In 1931, for example, the Supreme Court determined in Near v. Minnesota that a Minneapolis newspaper could not be stopped from publishing “scandalous and defamatory” material about police and law officials whom they felt were negligent in arresting and punishing local gangsters.10 However, the Court left open the idea that the news media could be ordered to halt publication in exceptional cases. During a declared war, for instance, if a U.S. court judged that the publication of an article would threaten national security, such expression could be restrained prior to its printing. In fact, during World War I, the U.S. Navy seized all wireless radio transmitters. This was done to ensure control over critical information about weather conditions and troop movements that might inadvertently aid the enemy. In the 1970s, though, the Pentagon Papers decision and the Progressive magazine case tested important concepts underlying prior restraint.
prior restraint the legal definition of censorship in the United States; it
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prohibits courts and governments from blocking any publication or speech before it actually occurs.
PRIOR RESTRAINT In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg surrendered to government prosecutors in Boston. Ellsberg was a former Pentagon researcher who turned against America’s military policy in Vietnam and leaked information to the press. He was charged with unauthorized possession of top-secret federal documents. Later called the Pentagon Papers, the documents contained evidence on the military’s bungled handling of the Vietnam War. In 1973, an exasperated federal judge dismissed the case when illegal government-sponsored wiretaps of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst came to light during the Watergate scandal. Bettmann/Getty Images
The Pentagon Papers Case In 1971, with the Vietnam War still in progress, Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department employee, stole a copy of the forty-seven-volume report History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy. A thorough study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam since World War II, the report was classified by the government as top secret. Ellsberg and a friend leaked the study—nicknamed the Pentagon Papers—to the New York Times and the Washington Post. In June 1971, the Times began publishing articles based on the study. To block any further publications, the Nixon administration applied for and received a federal court injunction against the Times, arguing that the publication of these documents posed “a clear and present danger” to national security.
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A lower U.S. district court supported the newspaper’s right to publish, but the government’s appeal put the case before the Supreme Court less than three weeks after the first article was published. In a six-to-three vote, the Court sided with the newspaper. Justice Hugo Black, in his majority opinion, attacked the government’s attempt to suppress publication: “Both the history and language of the First Amendment support the view that the press must be left free to publish news, whatever the source, without censorship, injunctions, or prior restraints.”11 (See “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Who Knows the First Amendment?” on page 512.)
The Progressive Magazine Case The issue of prior restraint for national security surfaced again in 1979 with an injunction being issued to the editors of the Progressive—a national left-wing magazine—to stop publication of an article titled “The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It, Why We’re Telling It.” The dispute began when the editor of the magazine sent a draft to the Department of Energy to verify technical portions of the article. Believing that the article contained sensitive data that might damage U.S. efforts to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the Energy Department asked the magazine not to publish it. When the magazine said it would proceed anyway, the government sued the Progressive and asked a federal district court to block publication.
Judge Robert Warren sought to balance the Progressive’s First Amendment rights against the government’s claim that the article would spread dangerous information and undermine national security. In an unprecedented action, Warren sided with the government, deciding that “a mistake in ruling against the United States could pave the way for thermonuclear annihilation for us all. In that event, our right to life is extinguished and the right to publish becomes moot.”12 During appeals and further litigation, several other publications, including the Milwaukee Sentinel and Scientific American, published their own articles related to the H- bomb, getting much of their information from publications already in circulation. None of these articles—including the one eventually published in the Progressive after the government dropped the case during an appeal—contained the precise technical details needed to actually design a nuclear weapon, nor did they provide information on where to obtain the sensitive ingredients.
Even though the article was eventually published, Warren’s decision stands as the first time in American history that a prior-restraint order imposed in the name of national security actually stopped the initial publication of a controversial news report.
Unprotected Forms of Expression Despite the First Amendment’s provision that “Congress shall make no law” restricting speech, the federal government has made a number of laws that do just that, especially concerning false or misleading advertising, expressions that
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intentionally threaten public safety, and certain speech that compromises war strategy and other issues of national security.
Beyond the federal government, state laws and local ordinances have on occasion curbed expression, and over the years the court system has determined that some kinds of expression do not merit protection under the Constitution, including seditious expression, copyright infringement, libel, obscenity, the right to privacy, and expression that interferes with the Sixth Amendment.
Seditious Expression For more than a century after the Sedition Act of 1798, Congress passed no laws prohibiting dissenting opinion. But by the twentieth century, the sentiments of the Sedition Act reappeared in times of war. For instance, the Espionage Acts of 1917 and 1918, which were enforced during World Wars I and II, made it a federal crime to disrupt the nation’s war effort, authorizing severe punishment for seditious statements.
In the landmark Schenck v. United States (1919) appeal case during World War I, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Socialist Party leader, Charles T. Schenck, for distributing leaflets urging American men to protest the draft, in violation of the recently passed Espionage Act. In upholding the conviction, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote two of the more famous interpretations and phrases in the First Amendment’s legal history:
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS
Who Knows the First Amendment?
Enacted in 1791, the First Amendment supports not just press and speech freedoms but also religious freedom and the right of people to protest and to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” It also says that “Congress shall make no law” abridging or prohibiting these five freedoms. To investigate some critics’ charge that many citizens don’t exactly know the protections offered in the First Amendment, conduct your own survey. Discuss with friends, family, or colleagues what they know or think
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about the First Amendment.
1 DESCRIPTION Working alone or in small groups, find eight to ten people you know from two different age groups: (1) from your peers and friends or younger siblings, and (2) from your parents’ or grandparents’ generations. (Do not choose students from your class.) Interview your subjects individually, in person, by phone, or by e-mail, and ask them this question: “Would you approve of the following law if Congress were considering it?” Then offer the First Amendment (see pages 505–506), but don’t tell them what it is. Then ask them to respond to the following series of questions, adding any other questions that you think would be appropriate:
1. Do you agree or disagree with the freedoms? Explain. 2. Which do you support, and which do you think are excessive or
provide too much freedom? 3. Do you recognize the law? (Note how many identify it as the
First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and how many do not. Note the percentage from each age group.)
4. Optional: If you are willing to do so, please share your political leanings—Republican, Democrat, Independent, not sure, disaffected, apathetic, or other.
Record their answers.
2 ANALYSIS What patterns emerge in the answers from the two groups? Are their answers similar or different? How? Note any differences in the answers based on gender, level of education, or occupation.
3 INTERPRETATION What do these patterns mean? Are your interview subjects supportive or unsupportive of the First Amendment? What are their reasons?
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4 EVALUATION How do your interviewees judge the freedoms? In general, what did your interview subjects know about the First Amendment? What impresses you about your subjects’ answers? Do you find anything alarming or troubling in their answers?
5 ENGAGEMENT Research free expression and locate any national studies that are similar to this assignment. Then, check the recent national surveys on attitudes toward the First Amendment at www.newseuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center. Based on your research, educate others. Do a presentation in class or at your college or university about the First Amendment.
But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
In supporting Schenck’s sentence—a ten-year prison term—Holmes noted that the Socialist leaflets were entitled to First Amendment protection, but only during times of peace. In establishing the “clear and present danger” criterion for expression, the Supreme Court demonstrated the limits of the First Amendment.
Copyright Infringement Appropriating a writer’s or an artist’s words or music without consent or payment is also a form of expression that is not protected as speech. A copyright legally protects the rights of authors and producers to their published or unpublished writing, music, lyrics, TV programs, movies, or graphic art designs. When Congress passed the first Copyright Act in 1790, it gave authors the right to control their published works for fourteen years, with the opportunity for a renewal for another fourteen years. After the end of the copyright period, the work enters the public domain, which gives the public free access to the work. The idea was that a period of copyright control would give authors financial incentive to create original works, and that the public domain gives others incentive to create derivative works.
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copyright the legal right of authors and producers to own and control the use of their published or unpublished writing, music, and lyrics; TV programs and movies; or graphic art designs.
public domain the end of the copyright period for a work, at which point the public may begin to access it for free.
THE LIMITS OF COPYRIGHT The iconic album art for the Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut—a banana print designed by artist Andy Warhol—has been a subject of controversy in recent years, as a copyright dispute between the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the rock band has continued to flourish. The most recent disagreement occurred when the Warhol Foundation, which had previously accused the Velvet Underground of violating its claim to the print, announced plans to license the banana design for iPhone cases. Accusing the foundation of copyright violation, the band filed a copyright claim to the design, which a federal judge later dismissed. Camera Press/Richard Stonehouse/Redux Pictures
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Over the years, as artists lived longer and, more important, as corporate copyright owners became more common, copyright periods were extended by Congress. In 1976, Congress extended the copyright period to the life of the author plus fifty years, or seventy-five years for a corporate copyright owner. In 1998 (as copyrights on works such as Disney’s Mickey Mouse were set to expire), Congress again extended the copyright period for twenty additional years—the eleventh time in forty years that the terms for copyright had been extended.13 As Timothy B. Lee of the Washington Post points out, “The big question now is whether incumbent copyright holders will try to get yet another extension of copyright terms before works begin falling into the public domain again on January 1, 2019.”14 (See “Examining Ethics: A Generation of Copyright Criminals?” on page 529.)
Corporate owners have millions of dollars to gain by keeping their properties out of the public domain. Disney, a major lobbyist for the 1998 extension, would have lost its copyright to Mickey Mouse in 2004 but now continues to earn millions on its movies, T-shirts, and Mickey Mouse watches through 2024. Warner/Chappell Music, which made up to $2 million a year in royalties from the popular “Happy Birthday to You” song, lost its copyright in a 2015 lawsuit in which a U.S. District judge ruled that it didn’t have a valid claim to the 120-year- old song.
Today, nearly every innovation in digital culture creates new questions about copyright law. For example, is a video mash-up that samples copyrighted sounds and images a copyright violation or a creative accomplishment protected under the concept of fair use (the same standard that enables students to legally quote attributed text from other works in their research papers)? Is it fair use for a blog to quote an entire newspaper article as long as it has a link and an attribution? Should news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo! News pay something to financially strapped newspapers when they link to their articles? One of the laws that tips the debates toward stricter enforcement of copyright is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which outlaws any action or technology that circumvents copyright protection systems. In other words, it may be illegal to merely create or distribute technology that enables someone to make illegal copies of digital content, such as a music file or a DVD.
Libel The biggest legal worry that haunts editors and publishers is the issue of libel, a form of expression that, unlike political expression, is not protected as free speech under the First Amendment. Libel refers to defamation of character in written or broadcast form; libel is different from slander, which is spoken language that defames a person’s character. Inherited from British common law, libel is generally defined as a false statement that holds a person up to public ridicule, contempt, or hatred or injures a person’s business or occupation. Examples of libelous statements include falsely accusing someone of professional dishonesty or incompetence (such as medical malpractice), falsely accusing a person of a crime (such as drug dealing), falsely stating that someone is mentally ill or engages in
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unacceptable behavior (such as public drunkenness), or falsely accusing a person of associating with a disreputable organization or cause (such as the Mafia or a neo-Nazi military group).
libel in media law, the defamation of character in written expression.
slander in law, spoken language that defames a person’s character.
LIBEL AND THE MEDIA
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A 1960 New York Times advertisement triggered one of the most influential and important libel cases in U.S. history by criticizing law-enforcement tactics used against Martin Luther King (pictured above) and the Civil Rights movement. The behind-the-scenes machinations of King’s later Alabama demonstrations are the subject of the film Selma. The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Since 1964, the New York Times v. Sullivan case has served as the standard for libel law. The case stems from a 1960 full-page advertisement placed in the New York Times by the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South. Without naming names, the ad criticized the law- enforcement tactics used in southern cities—including Montgomery, Alabama—to break up Civil Rights demonstrations. The ad condemned “southern violators of the Constitution” bent on destroying King and the movement. Taking exception, the city commissioner of Montgomery, L. B. Sullivan, sued the Times for libel, claiming the ad defamed him indirectly. Although Alabama civil courts awarded Sullivan $500,000, the newspaper’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court, which unanimously reversed the ruling, holding that Alabama libel law violated the Times’ First Amendment rights.15
As part of the Sullivan decision, the Supreme Court asked future civil courts to distinguish whether plaintiffs in libel cases are public officials or private individuals. Citizens with more “ordinary” jobs, such as city sanitation employees, undercover police informants, nurses, or unknown actors, are normally classified as private individuals. Private individuals have to prove (1) that the public statement about them was false, (2) that damages or actual injury occurred (such as the loss of a job, harm to reputation, public humiliation, or mental anguish), and (3) that the publisher or broadcaster was negligent in failing to determine the truthfulness of the statement.
There are two categories of public figures: (1) public celebrities (movie or sports stars) or people who “occupy positions of such pervasive power and influence that they are deemed public figures for all purposes” (presidents, senators, mayors), and (2) individuals who have thrown themselves—usually voluntarily but sometimes involuntarily—into the middle of “a significant public controversy,” such as a lawyer defending a prominent client, an advocate for an antismoking ordinance, or a labor union activist.
Public officials also have to prove falsehood, damages, negligence, and actual malice on the part of the news medium; actual malice means that the reporter or editor knew the statement was false and printed or broadcast it anyway, or acted with a reckless disregard for the truth. Because actual malice against a public official is hard to prove, it is difficult for public figures to win libel suits. The Sullivan decision allowed news operations to aggressively pursue legitimate news stories without fear of continuous litigation. However, the mere threat of a libel suit still scares off many in the news media. Plaintiffs may also belong to one of many vague classification categories, such as public high school teachers, police
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officers, and court-appointed attorneys. Individuals from these professions end up as public or private citizens depending on a particular court’s ruling.
actual malice in libel law, a reckless disregard for the truth, such as when a reporter or an editor knows that a statement is false and prints or airs it anyway.
ACTRESS KATIE HOLMES brought a $50 million libel lawsuit against the tabloid newspaper Star in 2011. In January of that year, the tabloid ran a front-page photo of Holmes with the blazing headline “Addiction Nightmare: Katie DRUG SHOCKER! The real reason she can’t leave Tom.” The story inside said nothing about drug addiction but mentioned practices in the Church of Scientology, to which her then husband Tom Cruise belonged. Star settled the suit with Holmes before it went to trial by printing an apology (“Star did not intend to suggest that Ms. Holmes was a drug addict or was undergoing treatment for a drug addiction”) and making a “substantial donation” to a charity of Holmes’s choice. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
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Defenses against Libel Charges Since the 1730s, the best defense against libel in American courts has been the truth. In most cases, if libel defendants can demonstrate that they printed or broadcast statements that were essentially true, such evidence usually bars plaintiffs from recovering any damages—even if their reputations were harmed.
In addition, there are other defenses against libel. Prosecutors, for example, who would otherwise be vulnerable to being accused of libel, are granted absolute privilege in a court of law so that they are not prevented from making accusatory statements toward defendants. The reporters who print or broadcast statements made in court are also protected against libel; they are granted conditional or qualified privilege, allowing them to report judicial or legislative proceedings even though the public statements being reported may be libelous.
qualified privilege a legal right allowing journalists to report judicial or legislative proceedings even though the public statements being reported may be libelous.
Another defense against libel is the rule of opinion and fair comment. Generally, libel applies only to intentional misstatements of factual information rather than opinion, and therefore opinions are protected from libel. However, because the line between fact and opinion is often hazy, lawyers advise journalists to first set forth the facts on which a viewpoint is based and then state their opinion based on those facts. In other words, journalists should make it clear that a statement of opinion is a criticism and not an allegation of fact.
opinion and fair comment a defense against libel that states that libel applies only to intentional misstatements of factual information rather than to statements of opinion.
Libel laws also protect satire, comedy, and opinions expressed in reviews of books, plays, movies, and restaurants. Such laws may not, however, protect malicious statements in which plaintiffs can prove that defendants used their free- speech rights to mount a damaging personal attack.
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Obscenity For most of this nation’s history, legislators have argued that obscenity does not constitute a legitimate form of expression protected by the First Amendment. The problem, however, is that little agreement has existed on how to define an obscene work. In the 1860s, a court could judge an entire book obscene if it contained a single passage believed capable of “corrupting” a person. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, certain government authorities outside the courts—especially U.S. post office and customs officials—held the power to censor or destroy material they deemed obscene.
obscenity expression that is not protected as speech if these three legal tests are all met: (1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the material as a whole appeals to prurient interest; (2) the material depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; (3) the material, as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
This began to change in the 1930s, during the trial involving the celebrated novel Ulysses by Irish writer James Joyce. Portions of Ulysses had been serialized in the early 1920s in an American magazine, Little Review, copies of which were later seized and burned by postal officials. The publishers of the magazine were fined $50 and nearly sent to prison. Because of the four-letter words contained in the novel and the book-burning and fining incidents, British and American publishing houses backed away from the book, and in 1928, the U.S. Customs Office officially banned Ulysses as an obscene work. Ultimately, however, Random House agreed to publish the work in the United States if it was declared “legal.” Finally, in 1933, a U.S. judge ruled that an important literary work such as Ulysses was a legitimate, protected form of expression, even if portions of the book were deemed objectionable by segments of the population.
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HULK HOGAN’S successful lawsuit against the entertainment Web site Gawker set an important precedent for celebrities and other public figures, who are normally unprotected against invasions of privacy. Pool/Getty Images
The current legal definition of obscenity derives from the 1973 Miller v. California case, which stated that to qualify as obscenity, the material must meet three criteria: (1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the material as a whole appeals to prurient interest; (2) the material depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and (3) the material, as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The Miller decision contained two important ideas. First, it acknowledged that different communities and regions of the country have different values and standards with which to judge obscenity. Second, it required that a work be judged as a whole, so that publishers could not use the loophole of inserting a political essay or literary poem into pornographic materials to demonstrate in court that their publications contained redeeming features.
Since the Miller decision, courts have granted great latitude to printed and visual obscenity. By the 1990s, major prosecutions had become rare—aimed mostly at child pornography—as the legal system accepted the concept that a free and democratic society must tolerate even repulsive kinds of speech. Most battles over obscenity are now online, where the global reach of the Internet has eclipsed the concept of community standards. A new complication in defining pornography has emerged with cases of “sexting,” in which minors produce and send sexually
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graphic images of themselves via cell phones or the Internet (see “Case Study: Is ‘Sexting’ Pornography?” on page 517).
CASE STUDY
Is “Sexting” Pornography?
ccording to U.S. federal and state laws, when someone produces, transmits, or possesses images with graphic sexual
depictions of minors, it is considered child pornography. Digital media have made the circulation of child pornography even more pervasive, according to a 2006 study on child pornography on the Internet. About one thousand people are arrested each year in the United States for child pornography, and according to a U.S. Department of Justice guide for police, they have few distinguishing characteristics other than being “likely to be white, male, and between the ages of 26 and 40.”1
Now, a social practice has challenged the common wisdom of what is obscenity and who are child pornographers: What happens when the people who produce, transmit, and possess images with graphic sexual depictions of minors are minors themselves?
The practice in question is “sexting,” the sending or receiving of sexual images via mobile phone text messages or via the Internet. Sexting occupies a gray area of obscenity law—yes, these are images of minors; but no, they don’t fit the intent of child pornography laws, which are designed to stop the exploitation of children by adults.
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© Mother Image/ultura/Aurora Photos
While such messages are usually meant to be completely personal, technology makes it otherwise. “All control over the image is lost—it can be forwarded repeatedly all over the school, town, state, country and world,” says Steven M. Dettelbach, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio. 2 And given the endless archives of the Internet, such images never really go away but can be accessed by anyone with enough skills to find them.
Surveys suggest that about one-third of older teenagers have sent or received sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images via text messaging.3 Some cases illustrate how young people engaging in sexting have gotten caught up in a legal system designed to punish pedophiles. In 2008, Florida resident Phillip Alpert, then eighteen, sent nude images of his sixteen-year-old girlfriend to friends after they got in an argument. He was convicted of child pornography and is required to be registered as a sex offender for the next twenty-five years. In 2009, three Pennsylvania girls took seminude pictures of themselves and sent the photos to three boys. All six minors were charged with child pornography. A judge later halted the charges in the interest of freedom of speech and parental rights. In Cañon City, Colorado, a 2015 texting scandal involving middle and high school students exchanging hundreds of nude photos resulted in student suspensions, a canceled high school football game, and a criminal investigation. Ultimately, the state district attorney didn’t bring charges against the students involved, but felony charges were a possibility. Twenty states (Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia) have responded with new sexting laws, so that teens involved in sexting are generally treated with misdemeanor charges
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rather than being subject to the harsher felony laws against child pornography.4 In the states without such laws, the charges are often at the discretion of prosecutors and courts and could be as harsh as a felony crime, with the accompanying fine, jail time, and permanent criminal record. How do you think sexting should be handled by the law?
The Right to Privacy Whereas libel laws safeguard a person’s character and reputation, the right to privacy protects an individual’s peace of mind and personal feelings. In the simplest terms, the right to privacy addresses a person’s right to be left alone, without his or her name, image, or daily activities becoming public property. Invasions of privacy occur in different situations, the most common of which are intrusion into someone’s personal space via unauthorized tape recording, photographing, wiretapping, and the like; making available to the public personal records, such as health and phone records; disclosing personal information, such as religion, sexual activities, or personal activities; and unauthorized appropriation of someone’s image or name for advertising or other commercial purposes. In general, the news media have been granted wide protections under the First Amendment to do their work.
right to privacy addresses a person’s right to be left alone, without his or her name, image, or daily activities becoming public property.
Public figures, however, have received some legal relief, as many local municipalities and states have passed “anti-paparazzi” laws that protect individuals from unwarranted scrutiny and surveillance of personal activities on private property or outside public forums.
In a recent test of the boundaries of privacy for public figures, in 2016 a Florida jury ordered gossip entertainment Web site Gawker to pay more than $140 million to Terry G. Bollea, better known as the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan. In 2012, Gawker posted a brief excerpt of a grainy sex tape that showed Bollea having sex with his best friend’s wife. The court decision led Gawker to declare bankruptcy and put itself up for sale. Gawker argued that its actions were protected by the First Amendment, and that Bollea was a public figure who had often talked about his sex life in media interviews. But the jury determined that Bollea’s privacy had been violated, and it awarded him the huge sum for emotional
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distress, economic distress, and punitive damages. A number of laws also protect the privacy of regular citizens. For example, the
Privacy Act of 1974 protects individuals’ records from public disclosure unless individuals give written consent. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 extended the law to computer-stored data and the Internet, although subsequent court decisions ruled that employees have no privacy rights in electronic communications conducted on their employer’s equipment. The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, however, weakened the earlier laws and gave the federal government more latitude in searching private citizens’ records and intercepting electronic communications without a court order.
In early 2016, there was a brief but significant standoff between the FBI and Apple over the FBI’s getting access to an iPhone. The phone in question was recovered from one of the terrorists in the December 2015 attack in San Bernardino, California. A court ordered Apple to create a software key for the FBI to unlock the iPhone. Apple responded that writing such software would potentially make all iPhones subject to FBI scrutiny and could make them more susceptible to other hackers. A day before a court hearing on the matter, the FBI withdrew its case, saying that it had already cracked the code to access the iPhone itself. Yet the question remains whether technology companies like Apple should provide customers (most of whom have the best intentions) with the most robust privacy possible or assist law-enforcement agencies (which could include those from authoritarian nations) in gaining access to their products.
First Amendment versus Sixth Amendment Over the years, First Amendment protections of speech and the press have often clashed with the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees an accused individual in “all criminal prosecutions … the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.” In 1954, for example, the Sam Sheppard case garnered enormous nationwide publicity and became the inspiration for the TV show and film The Fugitive. Featuring lurid details about the murder of Sheppard’s wife, the press editorialized in favor of Sheppard’s quick arrest; some papers even pronounced him guilty. A prominent and wealthy osteopath, Sheppard was convicted of the murder, but twelve years later Sheppard’s new lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, argued before the Supreme Court that his client had not received a fair trial because of prejudicial publicity in the press. The Court overturned the conviction and freed Sheppard.
Gag Orders and Shield Laws A major criticism of recent criminal cases concerns the ways in which lawyers use the news media to comment publicly on cases that are pending or are in trial. After the Sheppard reversal in the 1960s, the Supreme Court introduced safeguards that judges could employ to ensure fair trials in heavily publicized cases. These included sequestering juries (Sheppard’s jury was not sequestered); moving cases to other jurisdictions; limiting the number of reporters; and placing restrictions, or
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gag orders, on lawyers and witnesses. In some countries, courts have issued gag orders to prohibit the press from releasing information or giving commentary that might prejudice jury selection or cause an unfair trial. In the United States, however, especially since a Supreme Court review in 1976, gag orders have been struck down as a prior-restraint violation of the First Amendment.
gag orders legal restrictions prohibiting the press from releasing preliminary information that might prejudice jury selection.
In opposition to gag orders, shield laws have favored the First Amendment rights of reporters, protecting them from having to reveal their sources for controversial information used in news stories. The news media have argued that protecting the confidentiality of key sources maintains a reporter’s credibility, protects a source from possible retaliation, and serves the public interest by providing information that citizens might not otherwise receive. In the 1960s, when the First Amendment rights of reporters clashed with Sixth Amendment fair-trial concerns, judges usually favored the Sixth Amendment arguments. In 1972, a New Jersey journalist became the first reporter jailed for contempt of court for refusing to identify sources in a probe of the Newark housing authority. Since that case, forty states and the District of Columbia have adopted some type of shield law, and other states (except Wyoming) have established some shield law protection through legal precedent. There is no federal shield law in the United States, leaving journalists exposed to subpoenas from federal prosecutors and courts. Revelations that the U.S. Department of Justice had obtained phone records of the Associated Press renewed calls for a federal shield law in 2013.
shield laws laws protecting the confidentiality of key interview subjects and reporters’ rights not to reveal the sources of controversial information used in news stories.
Cameras in the Courtroom The debates over limiting intrusive electronic broadcast equipment and photographers in the courtroom actually date to the sensationalized coverage of the Bruno Hauptmann trial in the mid-1930s. Hauptmann was convicted and executed for the kidnap-murder of the nineteen-month-old son of Anne and Charles
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Lindbergh (the aviation hero who made the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927). During the trial, Hauptmann and his attorney complained that the circus atmosphere fueled by the presence of radio and flash cameras prejudiced the jury and turned the public against him.
After the trial, the American Bar Association amended its professional ethics code, Canon 35, stating that electronic equipment in the courtroom detracted “from the essential dignity of the proceedings.” Calling for a ban on photographers and radio equipment, the association believed that if such elements were not banned, lawyers would begin playing to audiences and negatively alter the judicial process. For years after the Hauptmann trial, almost every state banned photographic, radio, and TV equipment from courtrooms.
As broadcast equipment became more portable and less obtrusive, however, and as television became the major news source for most Americans, courts gradually reevaluated their bans on broadcast equipment. In fact, in the early 1980s, the Supreme Court ruled that the presence of TV equipment did not make it impossible for a fair trial to occur, leaving it up to each state to implement its own system. The ruling opened the door for the debut of Court TV (now truTV) in 1991 and the televised O.J. Simpson trial of 1994 (the most publicized case in history). All states today allow television coverage of cases, although most states place certain restrictions on coverage of courtrooms, often leaving it up to the discretion of the presiding judge. While U.S. federal courts now allow limited TV coverage of their trials, the Supreme Court continues to ban TV from its proceedings, but in 2000 the Court broke its anti-radio rule by permitting delayed radio broadcasts of the hearings on the Florida vote recount case that determined the winner of the 2000 presidential election.
As libel law and the growing acceptance of courtroom cameras indicate, the legal process has generally, though not always, tried to ensure that print and other news media are able to cover public issues broadly, without fear of reprisals.
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MEDIA IN THE COURTROOM Photographers surround aviator Charles A. Lindbergh (without hat) as he leaves the courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey, during the trial in 1935 of Bruno Hauptmann on charges of kidnapping and murdering Lindbergh’s infant son. AP Images
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FILM AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT
When the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, even the most enlightened leaders of our nation could not have predicted the coming of visual media such as film and television. Consequently, new communication technologies have not always received the same kinds of protection under the First Amendment as those granted to speech or print media, including newspapers, magazines, and books. Movies, in existence since the late 1890s, earned legal speech protection only after a 1952 Supreme Court decision. Prior to that, social and political pressures led to both censorship and self-censorship in the movie industry.
Social and Political Pressures on the Movies During the early part of the twentieth century, movies rose in popularity among European immigrants and others from modest socioeconomic groups. This, in turn, spurred the formation of censorship groups, which believed that the movies would undermine morality. During this time, according to media historian Douglas Gomery, criticism of movies converged on four areas: “the effects on children, the potential health problems, the negative influences on morals and manners, and the lack of a proper role for educational and religious institutions in the development of movies.”16
Public pressure on movies came both from conservatives, who saw them as a potential threat to the authority of traditional institutions, and from progressives, who worried that children and adults were more attracted to movie houses than to social organizations and urban education centers. As a result, civic leaders publicly escalated their pressure, organizing local review boards that screened movies for their communities. In 1907, the Chicago City Council created an ordinance that gave the police authority to issue permits for the exhibition of movies. By 1920, more than ninety cities in the United States had some type of movie censorship board made up of vice squad officers, politicians, and citizens. By 1923, twenty- two states had established such boards.
Meanwhile, social pressure began to translate into law as politicians, wanting to please their constituencies, began to legislate against films. Support mounted for a federal censorship bill. When Jack Johnson won the heavyweight championship in 1908, boxing films became the target of the first federal censorship law aimed at the motion-picture industry. In 1912, the government outlawed the transportation of boxing movies across state lines. The laws against boxing films, however, had more to do with Johnson’s race than with concern over violence in movies. The first black heavyweight champion, he was perceived as a threat to some in the white community.
The first Supreme Court decision regarding film’s protection under the First Amendment was handed down in 1915 and went against the movie industry. In
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Mutual v. Ohio, the Mutual Film Company of Detroit sued the state of Ohio, whose review board had censored a number of the distributor’s films. On appeal, the case arrived at the Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that motion pictures were not a form of speech but “a business pure and simple” and, like a circus, merely a “spectacle” for entertainment with “a special capacity for evil.” This ruling would stand as a precedent for thirty-seven years, although a movement to create a national censorship board failed.
CENSORSHIP A native of Galveston, Texas, Jack Johnson (1878–1946) was the first black heavyweight boxing champion, from 1908 to 1914. His stunning victory over white champion Jim Jeffries (who had earlier refused to fight black boxers) in 1910 resulted in race riots across the country and led to a ban on the interstate transportation of boxing films. A 2005 Ken Burns documentary, Unforgivable Blackness, chronicles Johnson’s life. Bettmann/Getty Images
Self-Regulation in the Movie Industry As the film industry expanded after World War I, the influence of public pressure and review boards began to affect movie studios and executives who wanted to ensure control over their economic well-being. In the early 1920s, a series of scandals rocked Hollywood: actress Mary Pickford’s divorce and quick marriage to actor Douglas Fairbanks; director William Desmond Taylor’s unsolved murder; and actor Wallace Reid’s death from a drug overdose. But the most sensational scandal involved aspiring actress Virginia Rappe, who died a few days after a wild
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party in a San Francisco hotel hosted by popular silent-film comedian Fatty Arbuckle. After Rappe’s death, the comedian was indicted for rape and manslaughter, in a case that was sensationalized in the press. Although two hung juries could not reach a verdict, Arbuckle’s career was ruined. Censorship boards across the country banned his films. And even though Arbuckle was acquitted at his third trial in 1922, the movie industry chose to send a signal about the kinds of values and lifestyles it would tolerate: Arbuckle was banned from acting in Hollywood. He later resurfaced to direct several films under the name Will B. Goode.
In response to the scandals, particularly the first Arbuckle trial, the movie industry formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and hired as its president Will Hays, a former Republican National Committee chair. Also known as the Hays Office, the MPPDA attempted to smooth out problems between the public and the industry. Hays blacklisted promising actors or movie extras with even minor police records. He also developed an MPPDA public relations division, which stopped a national movement for a federal law censoring movies.
The Motion Picture Production Code During the 1930s, the movie business faced a new round of challenges. First, various conservative and religious groups—including the influential Catholic Legion of Decency—increased their scrutiny of the industry. Second, deteriorating economic conditions during the Great Depression forced the industry to tighten self-regulation in order to maintain profits and keep harmful public pressure at bay. In 1927, the Hays Office had developed a list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” to steer producers and directors away from questionable sexual, moral, and social themes. Nevertheless, pressure for a more formal and sweeping code mounted. As a result, in the early 1930s the Hays Office established the Motion Picture Production Code, whose overseers were charged with officially stamping Hollywood films with a moral seal of approval.
The Code laid out its mission in its first general principle: “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin.” The Code dictated how producers and directors should handle “methods of crime,” “repellent subjects,” and “sex hygiene.” A section on profanity outlawed a long list of phrases and topics, including “toilet gags” and “traveling salesmen and farmer’s daughter jokes.” Under “scenes of passion,” the Code dictated that “excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures are not to be shown,” and it required that “passion should be treated in such a manner as not to stimulate the lower and baser emotions.” The section on religion revealed the influences of a Jesuit priest and a Catholic publisher, who helped write the Code: “No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith,” and “ministers of religion … should not be used as comic characters or as villains.”
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Adopted by 95 percent of the industry, the Code influenced nearly every commercial movie made between the mid-1930s and the early 1950s. It also gave the industry a relative degree of freedom, enabling the major studios to remain independent of outside regulation. When television arrived, however, competition from the new family medium forced movie producers to explore more adult subjects.
The Miracle Case In 1952, the Supreme Court heard the Miracle case—officially Burstyn v. Wilson —named after Roberto Rossellini’s film Il Miracolo (The Miracle). The movie’s distributor sued the head of the New York Film Licensing Board for banning the film. A few New York City religious and political leaders considered the 1948 Italian film sacrilegious and pressured the film board for the ban. In the film, an unmarried peasant girl is impregnated by a scheming vagrant who tells her that he is St. Joseph and she has conceived the baby Jesus. The importers of the film argued that censoring it constituted illegal prior restraint under the First Amendment. Because such an action could not be imposed on a print version of the same story, the film’s distributor argued that the same freedom should apply to the film. The Supreme Court agreed, declaring movies “a significant medium for the communication of ideas.” The decision granted films the same constitutional protections as those enjoyed by the print media and other forms of speech. Even more important, the decision rendered most activities of film review boards unconstitutional because these boards had been engaged in prior restraint. Although a few local boards survived into the 1990s to handle complaints about obscenity, most of them had disbanded by the early 1970s.
The MPAA Ratings System The current voluntary movie rating system—the model for the advisory labels for music, television, and video games—developed in the late 1960s after discontent again mounted over movie content, spurred on by such films as 1965’s The Pawnbroker, which contained brief female nudity, and 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which featured a level of profanity and sexual frankness that had not been seen before in a major studio film. In 1966, the movie industry hired Jack Valenti to run the MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America, formerly the MPPDA), and in 1968 he established an industry board to rate movies. Eventually, G, PG, R, and X ratings emerged as guideposts for the suitability of films for various age groups. In 1984, prompted by the releases of Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the MPAA added the PG–13 rating and sandwiched it between PG and R to distinguish slightly higher levels of violence or adult themes in movies that might otherwise qualify as PG-rated films.
The MPAA copyrighted all ratings designations as trademarks except for the X rating, which was gradually appropriated as a promotional tool by the pornographic film industry. In fact, between 1972 and 1989, the MPAA stopped issuing the X
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rating. In 1990, however, based on protests from filmmakers over movies with adult sexual themes that they did not consider pornographic, the industry copyrighted the NC–17 rating—no children age seventeen or under. In 1995, Showgirls became the first movie to intentionally seek an NC–17 to demonstrate that the rating was commercially viable. However, many theater chains refused to carry NC–17 movies, fearing economic sanctions and boycotts by their customers or religious groups. Many newspapers also refused to carry ads for NC–17 films. Panned by the critics, Showgirls flopped at the box office. Since then, the NC–17 rating has not proved commercially viable, and distributors avoid releasing films with the rating, preferring either to label such films “unrated” or to cut the films to earn an R rating, as happened with Clerks (1994), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Brüno (2009), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Today, there is mounting protest against the MPAA, which many argue is essentially a censorship board that limits the First Amendment rights of filmmakers.
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EXPRESSION IN THE MEDIA: PRINT, BROADCAST, AND ONLINE
During the Cold War, a vigorous campaign led by Joseph McCarthy, an ultraconservative senator from Wisconsin, tried to rid both government and the media of so-called communist subversives who were allegedly challenging the American way of life. In 1950, a publication called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television aimed “to show how the Communists have been able to carry out their plan of infiltration of the radio and television industry.” Red Channels, inspired by McCarthy and produced by a group of former FBI agents, named 151 performers, writers, and musicians who were “sympathetic” to communist or left-wing causes. Among those named were Leonard Bernstein, Will Geer, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Lena Horne, Burgess Meredith, Arthur Miller, Dorothy Parker, Pete Seeger, Irwin Shaw, and Orson Welles. For a time, all were banned from working in television and radio even though no one on the list was ever charged with a crime.17
Although the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to hold controversial political views, network executives either sympathized with the anticommunist movement or feared losing ad revenue. At any rate, the networks did not stand up to the communist witch-hunters. In order to work, a blacklisted or “suspected” performer required the support of the program’s sponsor. Though I Love Lucy’s Lucille Ball, who in sympathy with her father once registered to vote as a communist in the 1930s, retained Philip Morris’s sponsorship of her popular program, other performers were not as fortunate. Although no evidence was ever introduced to show how entertainment programs circulated communist propaganda, by the early 1950s the TV networks were asking actors and other workers to sign loyalty oaths denouncing communism—a low point for the First Amendment.
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THE HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE attempted to expose performers, writers, and musicians as “communist subversives,” blacklisting them from working in Hollywood without any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. In 1947, movie stars like Humphrey Bogart, Evelyn Keyes, and Lauren Bacall, pictured here, visited Washington to protest the committee’s methods. Bettmann/Getty Images
The communist witch-hunts demonstrated key differences between print and broadcast protections under the First Amendment. Whereas licenses for printers and publishers had been outlawed since the eighteenth century, commercial broadcasters themselves had asked the federal government to step in and regulate the airwaves in the late 1920s. At that time, the broadcasters had wanted the government to clear up technical problems, channel noise, noncommercial competition, and amateur interference. Ever since, most broadcasters have been trying to free themselves from the government intrusion they once demanded.
The FCC Regulates Broadcasting Drawing on the argument that limited broadcast signals constitute a scarce national resource, the Communications Act of 1934 mandated that radio broadcasters operate in “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Since the 1980s, however, with cable and, later, DBS increasing channel capacity, station managers have lobbied to own their airwave assignments. Although the 1996 Telecommunications Act did not grant such ownership, stations continue to challenge the “public interest” statute. They argue that because the government is
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not allowed to dictate content in newspapers, it should not be allowed to control broadcasting via licenses or mandate any broadcast programming.
Two cases—Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969) and Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo (1974)—demonstrate the historic legal differences between broadcast and print. The Red Lion case began when WGCB, a small-town radio station in Red Lion, Pennsylvania, refused to give airtime to Fred Cook, author of a book that criticized Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 1964. The Reverend Billy James Hargis, a conservative radio preacher and Goldwater fan, verbally attacked Cook on the air. Cook asked for response time from the two hundred stations that carried the Hargis attack. Most stations complied, granting Cook free reply time. But WGCB offered only to sell Cook time. He appealed to the FCC, which ordered the station to give Cook free time. The station refused, claiming that its First Amendment rights granted it control over its program content. On appeal, the Supreme Court sided with the FCC, deciding that whenever a broadcaster’s rights conflict with the public interest, the public interest must prevail. In interpreting broadcasting as different from print, the Supreme Court upheld the 1934 Communications Act by reaffirming that broadcasters’ responsibilities to program in the public interest may outweigh their right to program whatever they want.
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FAMILY GUY has been the target of hundreds of thousands of indecency complaints, a majority of which have been filed by the Parents Television Council. The Federal Communications Commission evaluates shows based on occurrences of explicit language, violent content, or sexually obscene depictions. Family Guy has been at the center of moral controversy and criticism since its debut in 1999. Everett Collection, Inc.
In contrast, five years later, in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, the Supreme Court sided with the newspaper. A political candidate, Pat Tornillo Jr., requested space to reply to an editorial opposing his candidacy. Previously, Florida had a right-to-reply law, which permitted a candidate to respond, in print, to editorial criticisms from newspapers. Counter to the Red Lion decision, the Court in this case struck down the Florida state law as unconstitutional. The Court argued that mandating that a newspaper give a candidate space to reply violated the paper’s First Amendment rights to control what it chose to publish. The two decisions demonstrate that the unlicensed print media receive protections under the First Amendment that have not always been available to licensed broadcast media.
Dirty Words, Indecent Speech, and Hefty Fines In theory, communication law prevents the government from censoring broadcast content. Accordingly, the government may not interfere with programs or engage in prior restraint, although it may punish broadcasters for indecency or profanity after the fact.
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indecency an issue related to appropriate broadcast content; the government may punish broadcasters for indecency or profanity after the fact, and over the years a handful of radio stations have had their licenses suspended or denied over indecent programming.
The current precedent for regulating broadcast indecency stems from a complaint to the FCC in 1973. In the middle of the afternoon, WBAI, a nonprofit Pacifica network station in New York, aired George Carlin’s famous comedy sketch about the seven dirty words that could not be uttered by broadcasters. A father, riding in a car with his fifteen-year-old son, heard the program and complained to the FCC, which sent WBAI a letter of reprimand. Although no fine was issued, the station appealed on principle and won its case in court. The FCC, however, appealed to the Supreme Court. Although no court had legally defined indecency (and still hasn’t), the Supreme Court’s unexpected ruling in the 1978 FCC v. Pacifica Foundation case sided with the FCC and upheld the agency’s authority to require broadcasters to air adult programming at times when children are not likely to be listening. The Court ruled that so-called indecent programming, though not in violation of federal obscenity laws, was a nuisance and could be restricted to late-evening hours. As a result, the FCC banned indecent programs from most stations between 6:00 A.M. and 10:00 P.M. In 1990, the FCC tried to ban such programs entirely. Although a federal court ruled this move unconstitutional, it still upheld the time restrictions intended to protect children.
This ruling provides the rationale for the indecency fines that the FCC has frequently leveled against programs and stations that have carried indecent programming during daytime and evening hours. While Howard Stern and his various bosses held the early record for racking up millions in FCC indecency fines in the 1990s—before Stern moved to unregulated satellite radio—the largest-ever fine was for $3.6 million, leveled in 2006 against 111 TV stations that broadcast a 2004 episode of the popular CBS program Without a Trace that depicted teenage characters taking part in a sexual orgy.
After the FCC later fined broadcasters for several instances of “fleeting expletives” during live TV shows, the four major networks sued the FCC on grounds that their First Amendment rights had been violated. In its fining flurry, the FCC was partly responding to organized campaigns aimed at Howard Stern’s vulgarity and at the Janet Jackson exposed-breast incident during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. In 2006, Congress substantially increased the FCC’s maximum allowable fine to $325,000 per incident of indecency—meaning that one fleeting expletive in a live entertainment, news, or sports program could cost millions of dollars in fines, as it is repeated on affiliate stations across the country. But in 2010, a federal appeals court rejected the FCC’s policy against fleeting expletives, arguing that it was constitutionally vague and had a chilling effect on
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free speech “because broadcasters have no way of knowing what the FCC will find offensive.”18
Political Broadcasts and Equal Opportunity In addition to indecency rules, another law that the print media do not encounter is Section 315 of the 1934 Communications Act, which mandates that during elections, broadcast stations must provide equal opportunities and response time for qualified political candidates. In other words, if broadcasters give or sell time to one candidate, they must give or sell the same opportunity to others. Local broadcasters and networks have fought this law for years, complaining that it has required them to give marginal third-party candidates with little hope for success equal airtime in political discussions. Broadcasters claim that because no similar rule applies to newspapers or magazines, the law violates their First Amendment right to control content. In fact, because of this rule, many stations avoid all political programming, ironically reversing the rule’s original intention. The TV networks managed to get the law amended in 1959 to exempt newscasts, press conferences, and other events—such as political debates—that qualify as news. For instance, if a senator running for office appears in a news story, opposing candidates cannot invoke Section 315 and demand free time. The FCC has subsequently ruled that interview portions of programs like the 700 Club and TMZ also count as news.
Section 315 part of the 1934 Communications Act; it mandates that during elections, broadcast stations must provide equal opportunities and response time for qualified political candidates.
Due to Section 315, many stations from the late 1960s through the 1980s refused to air movies starring Ronald Reagan. Because his film appearances did not count as bona fide news stories, politicians opposing Reagan as a presidential candidate could demand free time in markets that ran old Reagan movies. For the same reason, TV stations in California banned the broadcast of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies in 2003, when he became a candidate for governor. And in November 2015, Donald Trump’s twelve minutes of screen time as the host of SNL opened the door for his competitors to demand equal screen time from NBC.
However, supporters of the equal opportunity law argue that it has provided forums for lesser-known candidates representing views counter to those of the Democratic and Republican parties, further noting that the other main way for alternative candidates to circulate their messages widely is to buy political ads,
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thus limiting serious outside contenders to wealthy candidates, such as Ross Perot, Steve Forbes, or members of the Bush or Clinton families.
The Demise of the Fairness Doctrine Considered an important corollary to Section 315, the Fairness Doctrine was to controversial issues what Section 315 is to political speech. Initiated in 1949, this FCC rule required stations (1) to air and engage in controversial-issue programs that affected their communities and (2) to provide competing points of view when offering such programming. Over the years, broadcasters argued that mandating opposing views every time a program covered a controversial issue was a burden not required of the print media, and that it forced many of them to refrain from airing controversial issues. As a result, the Fairness Doctrine ended with little public debate in 1987 after a federal court ruled that it was merely a regulation rather than an extension of Section 315 law.
Fairness Doctrine repealed in 1987, this FCC rule required broadcast stations to both air and engage in controversial-issue programs that affected their communities and, when offering such programming, to provide competing points of view.
macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
Bloggers and Legal Rights Legal and journalism scholars discuss the legal rights and responsibilities of bloggers.
Discussion: What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of the audience’s turning to blogs—rather than traditional sources—for news?
Since 1987, however, periodic support for reviving the Fairness Doctrine has
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surfaced. Its supporters argue that broadcasting is fundamentally different from— and more pervasive than—print media, requiring greater accountability to the public. Although many broadcasters disagree, supporters of fairness rules insist that as long as broadcasters are licensed as public trustees of the airwaves—unlike newspaper or magazine publishers—legal precedent permits the courts and the FCC to demand responsible content and behavior from radio and TV stations.
Communication Policy and the Internet Many have looked to the Internet as the one true venue for unlimited free speech under the First Amendment because it is not regulated by the government, it is not subject to the Communications Act of 1934, and little has been done in regard to self-regulation. Its current global expansion is comparable to that of the early days of broadcasting, when economic and technological growth outstripped law and regulation. At that time, noncommercial experiments by amateurs and engineering students provided a testing ground that commercial interests later exploited for profit. In much the same way, amateurs, students, and various interest groups have explored and extended the communication possibilities of the Internet. In fact, they have experimented so successfully that commercial vendors have raced to buy up pieces of the Internet since the 1990s.
Public conversations about the Internet have not typically revolved around ownership. Instead, the debates have focused on First Amendment issues, such as civility and pornography. However, as we watch the rapid expansion of the Internet, an important question confronts us: Will the Internet continue to develop as a democratic medium? In late 2010, the FCC created net neutrality rules for wired (cable and DSL) broadband providers, requiring that they provide the same access to all Internet services and content. But the FCC’s net neutrality rules were rejected by federal courts twice. The courts argued that because the FCC had not defined the Internet as a utility, it couldn’t regulate it in this manner. Telecommunication companies were pleased with the decision, as they don’t want any rules governing how they distribute access to the Internet. However, citizens and entrepreneurs opposed an unregulated system that would allow telecommunication companies to create fast lanes (for those who pay more) and slow lanes on the Internet. The debate generated a record number of comments to the FCC, the vast majority in favor of net neutrality.19 In February 2015, the FCC reclassified broadband Internet as a Title II utility and voted to approve net neutrality rules. Although the FCC has said that it does not seek to control broadband prices, Internet service providers are still unhappy with the decision to redefine Internet connections as an essential utility to which everyone has access (like electricity or phone service). The new net neutrality rules were upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2016, enabling the FCC to enforce open Internet standards on wired and mobile networks.
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NET NEUTRALITY HEARINGS The long-debated issue of net neutrality came to the forefront of politics in early 2015, as politicians made their cases for and against the policy. Many argued that net neutrality would preserve a free and open Internet, while others, including large broadband companies, argued that any government restrictions would hurt innovation. Here, Senator Al Franken, Senator (and presidential candidate) Bernie Sanders, and Senator Edward Markey appear at a news conference advocating for the reclassification of broadband Internet as a Title II utility. The FCC made this change in February 2015. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Critics and observers hope that a vigorous debate about ownership will develop —a debate that will go beyond First Amendment issues. The promise of the Internet as a democratic forum encourages the formation of all sorts of regional, national, and global interest groups. In fact, many global movements use the Internet to fight political forms of censorship. Human Rights Watch, for example, encourages free-expression advocates to use blogs “for disseminating information about, and ending, human rights abuses around the world.”20 Where oppressive regimes have tried to monitor and control Internet communication, Human Rights Watch suggests bloggers post anonymously to safeguard their identity. Just as fax machines, satellites, and home videos helped expedite and document the fall of totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, the Internet helps spread the word and activate social change today.
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A
EXAMINING ETHICS
A Generation of Copyright Criminals?
s a student reading this book, you have probably already composed plenty of research papers and quoted, with
attribution, from various printed sources. This is a routine practice, and you are within the legal bounds of fair use of the sources you sampled. The concept of fair use has existed in U.S. case law for more than 150 years.
But what if you are composing a song or creating a video, and you decide to sample bits of music or a clip of film? Under current law, you have little protection and may be subject to a lawsuit from the recording or motion-picture industry alleging copyright infringement.
As inexpensive digital technology became available, artists began sampling sounds and images, much like scholars and writers might sample texts. University of Iowa communication studies professor Kembrew McLeod explains that in the late 1980s, sampling “was a creative window that had been forced open by hip-hop artists,” but “by the early 1990s, the free experimentation was over…. Everyone had to pay for the sounds that they sampled or risk getting sued.”1 The cost for most acts was far too prohibitive. Fees to use snippets of copyrighted sounds in the Beastie Boys’ 1989 sample-rich Paul’s Boutique recording cost $250,000.2 Today, a recording based on creative mash- ups of samples probably couldn’t even be made, as some copyright owners demand up to $50,000 for sampling just a few seconds of a song.
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Nevertheless, some artists are still trying. Pittsburgh-based mash-up deejay Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) has no problem performing his sample- heavy music, in which he remixes a dozen or more samples on his laptop with some of his own beats to create a new song. Copyright royalties are covered for his live public performances, since many venues already have public performance agreements with copyright management agencies BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC. (These are the same agencies that collect fees from restaurants and radio stations for publicly performed music.) But—and this is one of the many inconsistencies in copyright law—if Gillis wanted to make a recording of his music, the cost of the copyright royalty payments (should they even be granted by the copyright holder) would exceed the revenue generated by selling the recording. On the other hand, if he chose not to get copyright permission for the samples used, he would risk hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties.
DJ GIRL TALK mixes his beats with samples from other artists to create new music. Joey Foley/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Despite the threat of lawsuits, Gillis and an independent label— appropriately named Illegal Art—released the acclaimed Night Ripper album in 2006 and Feed the Animals (which uses 322 samples) in 2008.
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His 2010 album All Day was released as a free download with 372 samples. In defending the recording against potential lawsuits, Gillis and his label argue that they are protected from copyright infringement by the fair-use exemption, which allows for transformative use— creating new work from bits of copyrighted work.3
The uneven and unclear rules for the use of sound, images, video, and text have become one of the most contentious issues of today’s digital culture. As digital media make it easier than ever to create and re-create cultural content, copyright law has yet to catch up with these new forms of expression.
“There’s no way to kill this technology. You can only criminalize its use,” Harvard Law professor and Internet activist Lawrence Lessig notes. “If this is a crime, we have a whole generation of criminals.”4
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THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND DEMOCRACY
For most of our nation’s history, citizens have counted on journalism to monitor abuses in government and business. During the muckraking period, writers like Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, and Sinclair Lewis made strong contributions by reporting on corporate expansion and the corruption that accompanied it. Unfortunately, however, news stories about business issues today are usually reduced to consumer affairs reporting. In other words, when covering a labor strike, factory recall, or business shutdown, the reporter mainly tries to answer the question, How do these events affect consumers? Although this is an important news angle, discussions about media ownership or labor management ethics are no longer part of the news that journalists typically report. Similarly, when companies announce mergers, reporters do not routinely question the economic wisdom or social impact of such changes but instead focus on how consumers will be affected.
At one level, journalists have been compromised by the ongoing upheavals of their own media businesses. As newspapers, magazines, and broadcast stations consolidate, downsize, outsource, or close down completely, and digital outlets spring up without a history or mission of news reporting, there are fewer journalists available to adequately cover and lead discussions on issues of politics, the economy, and media ownership. In fact, the very companies they work for are the prime buyers and sellers of major news-media outlets and are often participants in a political system rife with advertising money during campaign season.
NET NEUTRALITY DAY OF ACTION
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On September 10, 2014, several popular Internet sites—including Netflix, Kickstarter, Reddit, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, and Vimeo—held a Day of Action to support net neutrality and oppose the FCC’s proposal to have fast and slow lanes. The companies featured messages on their pages to contact the FCC and Congress along with images of spinning wheels to signify what the slow lane of an Internet without net neutrality might look like. These messages may have been instrumental in the adoption of net neutrality in 2015.
As a result, it is becoming increasingly important that the civic role of watchdog be shared by citizens and journalists. Citizen action groups like Free Press, the Media Access Project, and the Center for Digital Democracy have worked to bring media ownership issues into the mainstream. However, it is important to remember that the First Amendment protects not only the news media’s free-speech rights but also the rights of all of us to speak out. Mounting concerns over who can afford access to the media go to the heart of free expression. As we struggle to determine the future of converging print, electronic, and digital media and to strengthen the democratic spirit underlying media technology, we need to stay engaged in spirited public debates about media ownership and control, and about the differences between commercial speech and free expression. As citizens, we need to pay attention to who is included and excluded from opportunities not only to buy products but also to speak out and shape the cultural landscape. To accomplish this, we need to challenge our journalists and our leaders. More important, we need to challenge ourselves to become watchdogs—critical consumers and engaged citizens—who learn from the past, care about the present, and map mass media’s future.
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16 Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is the role that media play in a democracy. Is a free media system necessary for democracy to exist, or must democracy be established before a media system can operate freely? What do the mass media do to enhance or secure democracy?
In 1787, as the Constitution was being formed, Thomas Jefferson famously said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Jefferson supported the notion of a free press and free speech. He stood against the Sedition Act, which penalized free speech, and did not support its renewal when he became president in 1801.
Nevertheless, as president, Jefferson had to withstand the vitriol and allegations of a partisan press. In 1807, near the end of his second term, Jefferson’s idealism about the press had cooled, as he remarked, “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
Today, we contend with mass media that extend far beyond newspapers—a media system that is among the biggest and most powerful institutions in the country. Unfortunately, it is also a media system that too often envisions us as consumers of capitalism, not citizens of a democracy. Media sociologist Herbert Gans argues that the media alone can’t guarantee a democracy.21 “Despite much disingenuous talk about citizen empowerment by politicians and merchandisers, citizens have never had much clout. Countries as big as America operate largely through organizations,” Gans explains.
But in a country as big as America, the media constitute one of those critical organizations that can help or hurt us in creating a more economically and politically democratic society. At their worst, the media can distract or misinform us with falsehoods and errors. But at their Jeffersonian best, the media can shed light on the issues, tell meaningful stories, and foster the discussions that can help a citizens’ democracy flourish.
KEY TERMS
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The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
authoritarian model, 508 communist or state model, 508 social responsibility model, Fourth Estate, 508 libertarian model, 508 prior restraint, 509 copyright, 513 public domain, 513 libel, 514 slander, 514 actual malice, 514 qualified privilege, 515 opinion and fair comment, 515 obscenity, 515 right to privacy, 518 gag orders, 519 shield laws, 519 indecency, 526 Section 315, 527 Fairness Doctrine, 527
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
The Origins of Free Expression and a Free Press 1. Explain the various models of the news media that exist under
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http://macmillanlearning.com/mediaculture11e
different political systems. 2. What is the basic philosophical concept that underlies America’s
notion of free expression? 3. How has censorship been defined historically? 4. What is the public domain, and why is it an important element in
American culture? 5. Why is the case of New York Times v. Sullivan so significant in
First Amendment history? 6. How has the Internet changed battles over what constitutes
obscenity? 7. What issues are at stake when First Amendment and Sixth
Amendment concerns clash? Film and the First Amendment
8. Why were films not constitutionally protected as a form of speech until 1952?
9. Why did film review boards develop, and why did they eventually disband?
10. How did both the Motion Picture Production Code and the current movie rating system come into being?
Expression in the Media: Print, Broadcast, and Online 11. What’s the difference between obscenity and indecency? 12. What is the significance of Section 315 of the Communications
Act of 1934? 13. Why didn’t broadcasters like the Fairness Doctrine? The First Amendment and Democracy 14. Why is the future of watchdog journalism in jeopardy?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
1. Have you ever had an experience in which you thought personal or public expression went too far and should be curbed? Explain. How might you remedy this situation?
2. If you owned a community newspaper and had to formulate a policy for your editors about which letters from readers could appear in the limited space available on your editorial page, what kinds of letters would you eliminate, and why? Would you be acting as a censor in
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this situation? Why or why not? 3. Should the United States have a federal shield law to protect
reporters? 4. What do you think of the current movie rating system? Should it be
changed? Why or why not? 5. Should corporations, unions, and rich individuals be able to
contribute any amount of money they want to support particular candidates and pay for TV ads? Why or why not?
LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE
Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture at macmillan learning.com/mediaculture11e for additional learning tools:
REVIEW WITH LEARNINGCURVE LearningCurve, available on LaunchPad for Media & Culture, uses gamelike quizzing to help you master the concepts you need to learn from this chapter. VIDEO: THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND STUDENT SPEECH Legal and newspaper professionals explain how student newspapers are protected by the First Amendment.
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Adrian Brown/Sipa USA
Extended Case Study 1053
Analyzing the Coverage of the Volkswagen and Takata Crises
VOLKSWAGEN’S PUBLIC RELATIONS crisis came fast. By midyear 2015, Volkswagen had finally surpassed both General Motors and Toyota to become the world’s largest automaker, with its VW, Audi, and Porsche brands. But a year later, its CEO had been fired, its worldwide sales had plummeted, and its settlement of two lawsuits had already cost the company up to $14.7 billion, a record payout for an automobile company. And that was just the beginning of the crisis.
◄ The Volkswagen company has been in the news quite a bit recently since it came out that their “clean” diesel engines are not so clean and were designed to cheat emissions tests. However, another automobile industry crisis has been far more deadly than the Volkswagen scandal, even though it may not be spending as much time in the news headlines.
WHAT IN THE WORLD DID VOLKSWAGEN DO WRONG?
In a word, Volkswagen lied. And it wasn’t just a little lie, but a lie that was the foundation of the entire premise to market Volkswagen’s diesel cars as environmentally friendly. As Americans were waking up to the reality of global warming, Volkswagen’s TDI models—marketed as “clean diesel”—became very appealing. But the diesel cars weren’t so clean after all. Independent researchers at West Virginia University (WVU) tested emissions from a variety of diesel automobile models and found that all of them achieved their advertised emission levels except for the two Volkswagens, which did not have the low emissions expected of their “clean diesel” engines. The researchers checked and rechecked their results. “We did so much testing that we couldn’t repeatedly be doing the same mistake again and again,” the lead researcher told NPR.1 It turns out that Volkswagen had secretly installed “defeat device” software in 2009–2015 TDI models of VW Jettas, Passats, Golfs, and Beetles, and the Audi A3. The software would detect when the cars were on a test cycle and ramp down the emissions for the test. Once the test cycle was completed, the car would return to its regular emissions levels, spewing up to forty times the amount of nitrogen oxide pollutants. But when WVU researchers took the Volkswagens out for some real- world driving to test emissions, they discovered the auto company’s deceit.
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“Volkswagen turned nearly half a million American drivers into unwitting accomplices in an unprecedented assault on our atmosphere,” said the deputy attorney general of the United States.2
Volkswagen was loath to admit its lie, too. For more than a year, VW executives referred to a “technical problem” and not their intentional deception.3 The company’s own PR was so bad, the New York Times wrote, “Someday, Volkswagen’s emissions cheating scandal will be studied in crisis communications textbooks. And not in a good way.”4
In 2016, to settle lawsuits from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the state of California, Volkswagen pledged to pay up to $14.7 billion, a record settlement for an automobile company. Up to $10 billion was reserved for buying back or modifying vehicles, and $4.7 billion more was dedicated to fund emissions reduction programs and mitigate pollution caused by the vehicles.
Volkswagen’s problems could worsen. Other lawsuits are possible in the United States, and the largest number of diesel vehicles containing the emissions defeat device were sold in Europe (about 12 million polluting vehicles, compared to about 500,000 in the United States), where repeating a settlement similar to the one in the United States could exceed $100 billion.5
Interestingly, the Volkswagen crisis is not the worst automobile industry crisis of recent years. That prize goes to Takata, the manufacturer responsible for exploding automobile air bags, which send shrapnel into vehicle occupants, injuring or killing them. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), this is what happens to the faulty Takata air bags:
A combination of time, environmental moisture and fluctuating high temperatures contributes to the degradation of the ammonium nitrate propellant in the inflators. Such degradation can cause the propellant to burn too quickly, rupturing the inflator module and sending shrapnel through the air bag and into the vehicle occupants.6
By mid-2016, ruptured Takata air bag inflators had been blamed for fourteen deaths (ten of them in the United States) and more than one hundred serious injuries.7 The air bags tend to fail in hot, humid environments, putting drivers in Southern California, Florida, Texas, and the whole Gulf Coast in the most danger. One victim was a seventeen-year-old high school senior in Texas driving a 2002 Honda Civic. She was wearing a seat belt, and her car suffered only moderate damage after she rear-ended a car at an intersection. But the air bag explosion sent shrapnel through the air bag, which cut her neck and carotid artery, killing her.8 Those who have survived exploding air bag incidents have been blinded and scarred. Some of the faulty air bags have exploded spontaneously without ever being involved in a collision.
Although it is shameful that Volkswagen lied about and denied its emissions trickery, Takata’s record is even more dishonorable. Takata and Honda (the automobile company with the most recalled models using Takata air bags) were both aware of the faulty air bag problem as early as 2004 but issued no recalls until
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four years later—and only a limited recall at that time.9 In 2016, the extent of the problem more than doubled based on the U.S. government’s independent tests of the air bags, and the government expanded the defective air bag recall to include up to 69 million cars in the United States.10 At a press conference announcing the expansion of the recall, the administrator of the NHTSA called the Takata case “the largest and most complex recall in U.S. history,” with the recall period lasting through 2019.11 Takata is one of just three major air bag manufacturers in the world, so its air bags have been used in nearly every major automobile brand, including Acura, Audi, BMW, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Daimler Trucks and Vans, Dodge/Ram, Ford, GMS, Honda, Infiniti, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen.
In the Volkswagen emissions case, less than a half million automobile owners in the United States were directly affected, and although excessive pollution emissions are bad for everyone in the long term, there were no immediate injuries or deaths from the company’s intentional deception. In the Takata case, up to 69 million cars were affected, causing fourteen worldwide deaths and more than one hundred injuries, with the potential for more.
The question is, Why is one of these crises receiving so much coverage in the news media, while the other—more expansive in scope, more dangerous in effect —is not? What conditions in each of the stories has helped increase or deter publicity? For this extended case study, we will look at news stories of the Volkswagen and Takata crises, and comparatively analyze the coverage of each of these events.
As developed in Chapter 1, a media-literate perspective involves mastering five overlapping critical stages that build on one another: (1) description: paying close attention, taking notes, and researching the subject under study; (2) analysis: discovering and focusing on significant patterns that emerge from the description stage; (3) interpretation: asking and answering the “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about your findings; (4) evaluation: arriving at a judgment about whether something is good, bad, poor, or mediocre, which involves subordinating one’s personal views to the critical assessment resulting from the first three stages; and (5) engagement: taking some action that connects our critical interpretations and evaluations with our responsibility as citizens.
STEP 1: DESCRIPTION
Given our research question, in the description phase you will need to research news media coverage of the Volkswagen and Takata stories.
One way to consider the news coverage comparatively is by the number of stories written on each case. Of course, these stories didn’t debut at the same time. Honda issued the first Takata air bag recall in 2008, but the first U.S. news reports about the Takata air bag problem didn’t come until 2010, when Honda expanded its recall to cover more than 800,000 vehicles. The Volkswagen story didn’t break
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until a September 18, 2015, news release by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), so it covers a much shorter period. We might expect the Volkswagen crisis to have fewer news stories, given that the period of analysis is less than a year, compared to more than six years for the Takata crisis.
Another way to critically analyze the two crisis narratives is to consider how each compares in terms of newsworthiness. As we note in Chapter 14 under “Characteristics of News” (page 452), journalists select and develop stories based on one or more criteria, including timeliness, proximity, conflict, prominence, human interest, consequence, usefulness, novelty, and deviance.
NEWS COVERAGE of the Takata airbag and Volkswagen clean diesel scandals has been widespread. When and where did you first hear about these crises?
STEP 2: ANALYSIS
In the second stage of the critical process, you will isolate emerging patterns that call for closer attention. For example, which crisis has more news coverage? Our brief inquiry, using the LexisNexis database to search for stories, led to some interesting results:
Takata (2010 to mid-July 2016)
Volkswagen (September 18, 2015, to mid- July 2016)
New York 219 303
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Times
Washington Post
191 263
USA Today 63 72
Thus in all three news sources, the Volkswagen story received much more coverage, even with its much shorter time frame.
In analyzing newsworthiness, both automotive crises seem to meet all the criteria noted in Step 1. However, there might be some important differences in timeliness (the Takata story has developed over several years), proximity (Volkswagen cars and dealerships are visible across America, whereas few people would know which company makes the air bag hidden in their steering wheel), and prominence (Volkswagen is a well-known global brand, whereas Takata is global but invisible to most consumers). Nevertheless, the Takata narrative is clearly the one of greater consequence: The faulty device can be deadly, and the recall directly affects nearly 70 million people in the United States, compared to less than a half million for the Volkswagen emissions problem.
STEP 3: INTERPRETATION
In the interpretation stage, you will determine the larger meanings of the patterns you have analyzed. The most difficult stage in criticism, interpretation demands an answer to the questions “So what?” and “What does all this mean?”
Our initial interpretation is that in many ways, the Volkswagen crisis is the easier story to cover. Instead of gradually building over several years (the news doesn’t do well with long-term stories, as noted in Chapter 14), the Volkswagen story broke in September 2015 with a big announcement by the EPA, charging that the company had cheated and violated the Clean Air Act.
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THE TDI CLEAN DIESEL seemed to offer the best of both worlds for drivers interested in protecting the environment without sacrificing quality of the driving experience. Ramin Talaie/Getty Images
Volkswagen is also a well-known name brand, placing at No. 18 in the world’s most valuable brands in 2015 (but falling sharply to No. 57 in 2016).12 Takata has never been on the Global 500 brand list. Largely because of Volkswagen’s visibility as a consumer icon, the polling company Gallup found that by October 2015 (less than a month after the story broke), 75 percent of U.S. consumers were familiar with the VW scandal.13 Conversely, automotive information resource Kelley Blue Book conducted a survey regarding Takata and found that “even though more vehicles are impacted by this recall than the five largest previous [recall] campaigns combined, only 52 percent of the survey participants were aware of the issue.”14 As Chapter 14 notes, the media tends to report stories that feature prominent people, and the same goes for prominent companies and brands.
We should add one other point that helps interpret the disparity in coverage. Because the Takata story is longer and more complex, and the company is based in Japan, it’s the kind of story that requires a great deal of time and energy from investigative reporters. Few news organizations are able to devote resources to such a story, although the work of reporter Hiroko Tabuchi and her colleagues at the New York Times is a notable exception. Tabuchi is based in Tokyo and covers Japanese business and economics for the Times; in 2013, she was part of a Pulitzer Prize–winning team that investigated the global business practices of Apple and other technology companies.15 The blog on the Takata air bag recall for Car and Driver magazine by Clifford Atiyeh and Rusty Blackwell continually updates the story, and is another excellent resource that defies journalism’s chronic problem of not following a story over the long haul.16
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STEP 4: EVALUATION
The evaluation stage of the critical process is about making informed judgments. Building on description, analysis, and interpretation, you can better evaluate the news media’s performance.
Based on your critical research, what do the Takata and Volkswagen stories say about the news media’s watchdog function? Are the U.S. news media covering each of these stories as well as they should for citizens?
Also, what do the stories say about the auto industry and who holds it accountable? Who is responsible for spreading the word about recalls of faulty or dangerous cars—automotive manufacturers and suppliers, government safety agencies, the news media, or all of them to the same degree?
STEP 5: ENGAGEMENT
The fifth stage of the critical process—engagement—encourages you to take action, adding your own voice to the process of shaping our culture and environment.
Are your local news media (newspapers, television stations, radio stations, and Web sites) covering these stories adequately? Had you heard about the Volkswagen and Takata stories and recalls before reading this? If not, let the news media know that you and others need to hear more about these recalls.
There is a related question: If you buy a used car that may have had multiple owners and there is a recall, will you find out about it? (In the case of the Texas high school student who died from a Takata air bag, the car manufacturer, Honda, claimed it sent several recall notices, but the family said they never received anything.)
There is one answer, but you need to be proactive: The NHTSA operates a Web site, safercar.gov. The site carries news about automobile recalls, including the Volkswagen and Takata cases. You can look up your car, and those of family members and friends, on one page of the site: https://vinrcl.safercar.gov/vin/.
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https://vinrcl.safercar.gov/vin/
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES Diana DeGette, Jan Schakowsky, and Frank Pallone stand with Angelina Sujata as she speaks about her experience of being injured by a Takata airbag back in 2012. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Finally, the latest in the Takata story, and it’s still not good: There are millions of cars with Takata air bags in the United States, and it will take at least until 2019 for all of them to be recalled. Because there are so many air bags yet to be replaced, the industry can’t keep up with the necessary production. Not only is there a considerable number of used cars being resold with the Takata air bags, but there are still new cars being sold that contain the air bags. This is shocking but legal, as the NHTSA believes the air bags won’t become faulty for several years, by which time the air bags will be recalled and replaced. But what if the drivers don’t find out about the recalls? As the Car and Driver blog notes, “It’s very confusing that automakers would be allowed to install parts that are known to be defective, except NHTSA thinks they won’t become defective until years later, at which time proper replacement parts will be available.”17 There are four car companies still putting Takata air bags in their new cars: Fiat Chrysler, Mitsubishi, Toyota, and, yes, Volkswagen. See safercar.gov for full details.
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Notes
1 Mass Communication: A Critical Approach
1. For demographic information on voting, see http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/11/1596789/-Estimates-put-youth- vote-turnout-at-50-percent-heavily-for-Clinton-except-among-whites/. See also Thom File, “Young-Adult Voting: An Analysis of Presidential Elections,” 1964–2012, U.S. Department of Commerce and U.S. Census Bureau. Report issued April 2014.
2. For all references and quotes in this paragraph, see Jim Rutenberg, “Media’s Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News,” New York Times, November 7, 2016, B1, B4.
3. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 19.
4. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 203.
5. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 65. See also Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
6. James Fallows, “How to Save the News,” Atlantic, June 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/how-to-save-the- news/8095/.
7. “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” A Kaiser Family Foundation Study, p. 2, accessed May 24, 2010, http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf.
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/11/1596789/-Estimates-put-youth-vote-turnout-at-50-percent-heavily-for-Clinton-except-among-whites/
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/how-to-save-the-news/8095/
http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf
8. Jerome Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), 8.
9. Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Pocket Books, 1979), 14.
10. See Plato, The Republic, Book II, 377B.
11. For a historical discussion of culture, see Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
12. For an example of this critical position, see Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
13. For overviews of this position, see Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death; and Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
14. See James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
15. For more on this idea, see Cecelia Tichi, Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 187–188.
16. See Jon Katz, “Rock, Rap and Movies Bring You the News,” Rolling Stone, March 5, 1992, p. 33.
EXAMINING ETHICS Covering War, p. 16
1. Bill Carter, “Some Stations to Block ‘Nightline’ War Tribute,” New York Times, April 30, 2004, p. A13.
2. For reference and guidance on media ethics, see Clifford Christians, Mark Fackler, and Kim Rotzoll, Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning, 4th ed. (White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 1995); and Thomas H. Bivins, “A Worksheet for Ethics Instruction and Exercises in Reason,” Journalism Educator (Summer 1993): 4–16.
CASE STUDY Is Anchorman a Comedy or a Documentary? p. 20
1063
1. John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 39.
2. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What People Should Know and the Public Should Expect (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), 187.
3. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 115.
4. Steven Johnson, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” New York Times Magazine, April 24, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/magazine/24TV.html.
PART 1: DIGITAL MEDIA AND CONVERGENCE
Infographic sources: http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-2013-mobile-growth- statistics/comment-page-3/ http://www.cnet.com/news/vine-grows-to-40-million-users-despite-instagram- challenge/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/22/consumers-spend-85-of-time-on-smartphones- in-apps-but-only-5-apps-see-heavy-use/#.wzzhvrr:5bJy http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2015/the-comparable-metrics- report-q2-2015.html
2 The Internet, Digital Media, and Media Convergence
1. Lev Grossman and Matt Vella, “iNeed?” Time, September 22, 2014, p. 44.
2. “Fear of Missing Out,” J. Walter Thompson Intelligence, May 2011, http://www.jwtintelligence.com/production/FOMO_JWT_TrendReport_May2011.pdf
3. Andrew K. Przybylski et al., “Motivational, Emotional, and Behavioral Correlates of Fear of Missing Out,” Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013): 1841–1848.
4. Ethan Kross et al., “Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well- Being in Young Adults,” PLOS ONE 8, no. 8 (2013),
1064
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/magazine/24TV.html
http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-2013-mobile-growth-statistics/comment-page-3/
http://www.cnet.com/news/vine-grows-to-40-million-users-despite-instagram-challenge/
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/22/consumers-spend-85-of-time-on-smartphones-in-apps-but-only-5-apps-see-heavy-use/#.wzzhvrr:5bJy
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2015/the-comparable-metrics-report-q2-2015.html
http://www.jwtintelligence.com/production/FOMO_JWT_TrendReport_May2011.pdf
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069841.
5. Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 51.
6. Susannah Fox and Lee Rainie, “The Web at 25 in the U.S.,” Pew Research Internet Project, February 27, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/the-web-at-25-in-the-u-s/; “Coverage Error in Internet Surveys,” Pew Research Center, September 22, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/2015/09/22/coverage-error-in- internet-surveys/.
7. “Broadband vs. Dial-Up Adoption over Time,” Pew Research Internet Project, September 2013, http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/internet- use/connection-type/.
8. “Desktop Search Engine Market Share,” NetMarketShare, March 2014, http://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx? qprid=4&qpcustomd=0&qptimeframe=M.
9. Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media,” Business Horizons 53, no. 1 (2010): 59–68.
10. Twitter Usage/Company Facts,” Twitter, accessed February 9, 2016, https://about.twitter.com/company.
11. Renee Guarriello Heath, Courtney Vail Fletcher, and Ricardo Munoz, eds., Understanding Occupy from Wall Street to Portland: Applied Studies in Communication Theory (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2013).
12. Elana Beiser, “China, Egypt Imprison Record Numbers of Journalists,” Committee to Protect Journalists, December 15, 2015, https://cpj.org/reports/2015/12/china-egypt-imprison-record-numbers-of- journalists-jail.php; and Freedom House, “China,” Freedom on the Net 2015, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2015/china.
13. “ComScore Reports December 2015 U.S. Smartphone Subscriber Market Share,” ComScore, February 4, 2016, https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Reports- December-2015-US-Smartphone-Subscriber-Market-Share.
1065
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/the-web-at-25-in-the-u-s/
http://www.pewresearch.org/2015/09/22/coverage-error-in-internet-surveys/
http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/internet-use/connection-type/
http://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qprid=4&qpcustomd=0&qptimeframe=M
https://about.twitter.com/company
https://cpj.org/reports/2015/12/china-egypt-imprison-record-numbers-of-journalists-jail.php
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2015/china
https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Reports-December-2015-US-Smartphone-Subscriber-Market-Share
14. Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet,” Wired, August 17, 2010, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip. See also Charles Arthur, “Walled Gardens Look Rosy for Facebook, Apple—and Would-Be Censors,” Guardian, April 17, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/17/walled-gardens- facebook-apple-censors.
15. Arthur, “Walled Gardens.”
16. Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila, “The Semantic Web,” Scientific American, May 17, 2001.
17. Alex Colon, “Samsung’s Family Hub Fridge Could Be the First Truly Smart Appliance,” PC Magazine, January 7, 2016, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2497578,00.asp.
18. Farhad Manjoo, “The Great Tech War of 2012: Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon Battle for the Future of the Innovation Economy,” Fast Company, October 19, 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/160/tech-wars-2012-amazon- apple-google-facebook.
19. Seth Fiegerman, “Google Tops Exxon Mobil to Become World’s 2nd Most Valuable Company,” Mashable, February 7, 2014, http://mashable.com/2014/02/07/google-second-most-valuable-company/.
20. Vindu Goel, “Facebook Profit Tripled in First Quarter,” New York Times, April 23, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/technology/facebook-profit-tripled- in-first-quarter.html.
21. Internet Advertising Bureau, “2013 Internet Ad Revenues Soar to $42.8 Billion,” April 10, 2014, http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab/recent_press_releases/press_release_archive/press_release/pr- 041014.
22. Mark Zuckerberg, “Our Commitment to the Facebook Community,” The Facebook Blog, November 29, 2011, http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150378701937131.
23. “Cookies: Leaving a Trail on the Web,” Federal Trade Commission,
1066
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/17/walled-gardens-facebook-apple-censors
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2497578,00.asp
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/160/tech-wars-2012-amazon-apple-google-facebook
http://mashable.com/2014/02/07/google-second-most-valuable-company/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/technology/facebook-profit-tripled-in-first-quarter.html
http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab/recent_press_releases/press_release_archive/press_release/pr-041014
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150378701937131
November 2011, http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0042-cookies- leaving-trail-web.
24. See Federal Trade Commission, Privacy Online: Fair Information Practices in the Electronic Marketplace, May 2000, http://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/privacy-online- fair-information-practices-electronic-marketplace-federal-trade- commission-report/privacy2000.pdf.
25. Erika Harrell, “Victims of Identity Theft, 2014,” U.S. Department of Justice, September 2015, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vit14.pdf.
26. American Library Association, “CIPA Questions and Answers,” July 16, 2003, http://www.ala.org/advocacy/sites/ala.org.advocacy/files/content/advleg/federallegislation/cipa/cipaqa- 1.pdf.
27. Federal Communications Commission, “2016 Broadband Progress Report,” January 29, 2016, http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2016/db0129/FCC- 16-6A1.pdf.
28. GSMA, “The Mobile Economy North America 2015,” February 16, 2016, http://gsmamobileeconomy.com/northamerica/.
29. Internet World Stats, “Internet Usage Statistics for Africa,” November 30, 2015, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm#africa. See also Pew Research Center, “Internet Seen as Positive Influence on Education but Negative on Morality in Emerging and Developing Nations,” March 19, 2015, http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2015/03/Pew-Research-Center- Technology-Report-FINAL-March-19-20151.pdf.
30. Rebecca R. Ruiz, “F.C.C. Sets Net Neutrality Rules,” March 12, 2015, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/technology/fcc- releases-net-neutrality-rules.html.
31. Free Press, “Net Neutrality: What You Need to Know Now,” 2015, http://www.savetheinternet.com/net-neutrality-what-you-need-know-now.
32. David Bollier, “Saving the Information Commons,” Remarks to American Library Association Convention, Atlanta, June 15, 2002, http://www.ala.org/acrl/aboutacrl/directoryofleadership/committees/copyright/piratesbollier
1067
http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0042-cookies-leaving-trail-web
http://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/privacy-online-fair-information-practices-electronic-marketplace-federal-trade-commission-report/privacy2000.pdf
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vit14.pdf
http://www.ala.org/advocacy/sites/ala.org.advocacy/files/content/advleg/federallegislation/cipa/cipaqa-1.pdf
http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2016/db0129/FCC-16-6A1.pdf
http://gsmamobileeconomy.com/northamerica/
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm#africa
http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2015/03/Pew-Research-Center-Technology-Report-FINAL-March-19-20151.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/technology/fcc-releases-net-neutrality-rules.html
http://www.savetheinternet.com/net-neutrality-what-you-need-know-now
http://www.ala.org/acrl/aboutacrl/directoryofleadership/committees/copyright/piratesbollier
EXAMINING ETHICS “Anonymous” Hacks Global Terrorism, p. 46
1. Anonymous Official, “Anonymous—Operation ISIS Continues #OpISIS,” YouTube, February 11, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=inGzTacNld0.
2. Emerson Brooking, “The U.S. Government Should Pay Anonymous in Bitcoin to Fight ISIS. Seriously.” Foreign Policy, March 3, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/03/the-u-s-government-should-pay- anonymous-in-bitcoin-to-fight-isis/.
3. Anthony Cuthbertson, “Anonymous Exposes US and UK Companies Hosting Pro-Isis Websites,” International Business Times, April 8, 2015, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-exposes-us-uk-companies-hosting- pro-isis-websites-1495426.
4. Chancellor Agard, “Why USA Network’s ‘Mr. Robot’ Is the Most Realistic Depiction of Hacking on Television,” International Business Times, July 22, 2015, http://www.ibtimes.com/why-usa-networks-mr- robot-most-realistic-depiction-hacking-television-2020213.
5. Somini Sengupta, “Arrests Sow Mistrust inside a Clan of Hackers,” New York Times, March 6, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/technology/lulzsec-hacking-suspects- are-arrested.html.
GLOBAL VILLAGE Designed in California, Assembled in China, p. 56
1. Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” New York Times, January 21, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a- squeezed-middle-class.html.
2. Ibid. See also Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, “In China, Human Costs Are Built into an iPad,” New York Times, January 25, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and- the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html.
3. Bill Weir, “A Trip to the iFactory: ‘Nightline’ Gets an Unprecedented Glimpse inside Apple’s Chinese Core,” ABC News, February 20, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/International/trip-ifactory-nightline-unprecedented- glimpse-inside-apples-chinese/story?id=15748745#.T9AQTu2PfpA.
1068
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inGzTacNld0
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/03/the-u-s-government-should-pay-anonymous-in-bitcoin-to-fight-isis/
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-exposes-us-uk-companies-hosting-pro-isis-websites-1495426
http://www.ibtimes.com/why-usa-networks-mr-robot-most-realistic-depiction-hacking-television-2020213
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/technology/lulzsec-hacking-suspects-are-arrested.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html
http://abcnews.go.com/International/trip-ifactory-nightline-unprecedented-glimpse-inside-apples-chinese/story?id=15748745#.T9AQTu2PfpA
4. Barbara Demick and David Sarno, “Firm Shaken by Suicides,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/26/world/la-fg-china-suicides- 20100526.
5. Fair Labor Association, “Fair Labor Association Secures Commitment to Limit Workers’ Hours, Protect Pay at Apple’s Largest Supplier,” March 29, 2012, http://www.fairlabor.org/blog/entry/fair-labor-association- secures-commitment-limit-workers-hours-protect-pay-apples-largest.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Tracking and Recording Your Every Move, p. 59
1. Robert Epstein, “Google’s Gotcha: 15 Ways Google Monitors You,” U.S. News & World Report, May 10, 2013, http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/05/10/15-ways-google- monitors-you.
3 Digital Gaming and the Media Playground
1. Oculus, “Rift—Next Generation Virtual Reality,” accessed September 5, 2015, https://www.oculus.com/en-us/rift/.
2. Lily Prasuethsut, “Hands On: Oculus Rift Review,” TechRadar, June 18, 2015, http://www.techradar.com/us/reviews/gaming/gaming- accessories/oculus-rift-1123963/review.
3. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, March 25, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101319050523971.
4. “The VOID,” accessed September 5, 2015, https://thevoid.com/#home.
5. Google, “Get Your Cardboard,” accessed September 6, 2015, https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/get-cardboard/.
6. Gartner, “Gartner Says Worldwide Video Game Market to Total $93 Billion in 2013,” October 29, 2013, http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2614915.
7. Erkki Huhtamo, “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: An Archaeology of Arcade Gaming,” in Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, eds., Handbook of Computer Game Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2005), 10.
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http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/26/world/la-fg-china-suicides-20100526
http://www.fairlabor.org/blog/entry/fair-labor-association-secures-commitment-limit-workers-hours-protect-pay-apples-largest
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/05/10/15-ways-google-monitors-you
https://www.oculus.com/en-us/rift/
http://www.techradar.com/us/reviews/gaming/gaming-accessories/oculus-rift-1123963/review
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101319050523971
https://thevoid.com/#home
https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/get-cardboard/
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2614915
8. Ibid., 9–10.
9. Seth Porges, “11 Things You Didn’t Know about Pinball History,” Popular Mechanics, accessed August 7, 2014, http://www.popular mechanics.com/technology/gadgets/toys/4328211-new#fbIndex.
10. Matthew Lasar, “Spacewar!, the First 2D Top-Down Shooter Turns 50,” Arstechnica, October 25, 2011, http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/10/spacewar-the-first-2d-top-down- shooter-turns-50/.
11. “Industry Demographics,” Fantasy Sports Trade Association, accessed May 19, 2014, http://www.fsta.org/?page=Demographics.
12. Keith Stuart, “Nintendo Game Boy—25 Facts for Its 25th Anniversary,” Guardian, April 21, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/21/nintendo-game-boy- 25-facts-for-its-25th-anniversary.
13. See Mark Rogowsky, “Without Much Fanfare, Apple Has Sold Its 500 Millionth iPhone,” Forbes, March 25, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2014/03/25/without-much- fanfare-apple-has-sold-its-500-millionth-iphone/. See also Shara Tibken, “Six Takeaways from Apple CEO Cook’s Earnings Call,” CNET, April 24, 2014, http://www.cnet.com/news/six-takeaways-from-apple-ceo- cooks-earnings-call/.
14. Sam Anderson, “Just One More Game … Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games,’” New York Times, April 4, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmville-and- other-hyperaddictive-stupid-games.html.
15. Entertainment Software Association, 2014 Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry, 2014, p. 12, http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ESA_EF_2014.pdf.
16. Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1997), xxviii.
17. Entertainment Software Association, In-Game Advertising, 2012, http://www.theesa.com/games-improving-what-matters/advertising.asp.
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http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/10/spacewar-the-first-2d-top-down-shooter-turns-50/
http://www.fsta.org/?page=Demographics
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/21/nintendo-game-boy-25-facts-for-its-25th-anniversary
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2014/03/25/without-much-fanfare-apple-has-sold-its-500-millionth-iphone/
http://www.cnet.com/news/six-takeaways-from-apple-ceo-cooks-earnings-call/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmville-and-other-hyperaddictive-stupid-games.html
http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ESA_EF_2014.pdf
http://www.theesa.com/games-improving-what-matters/advertising.asp
18. Ibid.
19. D. A. Gentile et al., “Pathological Video Game Use among Youths: A Two-Year Longitudinal Study,” Pediatrics 127, no. 2 (2011), doi:10.1542/peds.2010-1353.
20. Florian Rehbein and Dirk Baier, “Family-, Media-, and School-Related Factors of Video Game Addiction: A 5-Year Longitudinal Study,” Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Application 25, no. 3 (2013): 118–128.
21. Andrew Salmon, “Couple: Internet Gaming Addiction Led to Baby’s Death,” CNN, April 1, 2010, http://articles.cnn.com/2010-04- 01/world/korea.parents.starved.baby_1_gaming-addiction-internet- gaming-gaming-industry?_s=PM:WORLD.
22. Jason Epstein, “10 of the Most Delightfully Violent Video Games of All Time,” Guyism, February 13, 2012, http://guyism.com/tech/gadgets/10-of-the-most-violent-video-games-of- all-time.html.
23. Patrick Markey and Charlotte N. Markey, “Vulnerability to Violent Video Games: A Review and Integration of Personality Research,” Review of General Psychology 14, no. 2 (2010): 82–91.
24. National Center for Women & Information Technology, “NCWIT Factsheet,” accessed June 26, 2012, http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/ncwitfactsheet.pdf. See also Claire Cain Miller, “Technology’s Man Problem,” New York Times, April 5, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/technology/technologys-man- problem.html.
25. Daniel Engber, “How Do Video Games Get Rated?” Slate, July 15, 2005, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2005/07/how_do_video_games_get_rated.html
26. Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, “The Future of Gamification,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, May 18, 2012, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Future-of- Gamification/Overview.aspx.
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http://guyism.com/tech/gadgets/10-of-the-most-violent-video-games-of-all-time.html
http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/ncwitfactsheet.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/technology/technologys-man-problem.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2005/07/how_do_video_games_get_rated.html
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Future-of-Gamification/Overview.aspx
27. Entertainment Software Association, 2015 Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry, April 2015, http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ESA-Essential-Facts- 2015.pdf.
28. John Markoff, “Company News; Sony Starts a Division to Sell Game Machines,” New York Times, May 19, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/19/business/company-news-sony-starts- a-division-to-sell-game-machines.html.
29. Business Wire, “Nintendo 64 Sold Out; Company Pushes for More Product; Frenzied Consumers Demand to Buy Before Product Officially Launches,” October 2, 1996, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Nintendo+64+Sold+Out%3B+Company+Pushes+for+More+Product%3B+Frenzied...- a018745127.
30. “Tired of Waiting for Prices to Fall, Consumers Are Returning to Video Games,” New York Times, January 26, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/26/business/tired-of-waiting-for-prices- to-fall-consumers-are-returning-to-video-games.html.
31. Craig Glenday, ed., “Hardware History II,” in Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition 2008 (London: Guinness World Records, 2008), 27.
32. Alex Pham, “Star Wars: The Old Republic—the Costliest Game of All Time?” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2012, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2012/01/star-wars- old-republic-cost.html.
33. Matt Brian, “Rovio’s Angry Birds Titles Hit 1 Billion Cumulative Downloads,” TNW Blog, May 9, 2012, http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/05/09/rovios-angry-birds-titles-hit-1- billion-cumulative-downloads/.
34. Rob Waugh, “Star Wars Epic Uses the Force—and $100M—to Take on World of Warcraft,” Mail Online, December 20, 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2076105/Star-Wars-epic- takes-4-billion-titan-online-gaming-World-Warcraft.html.
35. “John Madden Net Worth,” Celebrity Networth, accessed July 5, 2012, http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-athletes/nfl/john-madden-net- worth/.
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http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/19/business/company-news-sony-starts-a-division-to-sell-game-machines.html
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Nintendo+64+Sold+Out%3B+Company+Pushes+for+More+Product%3B+Frenzied...-a018745127
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/26/business/tired-of-waiting-for-prices-to-fall-consumers-are-returning-to-video-games.html
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2012/01/star-wars-old-republic-cost.html
http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/05/09/rovios-angry-birds-titles-hit-1-billion-cumulative-downloads/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2076105/Star-Wars-epic-takes-4-billion-titan-online-gaming-World-Warcraft.html
http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-athletes/nfl/john-madden-net-worth/
36. Joshua Brustein, “Grand Theft Auto V Is the Most Expensive Game Ever—and It’s Almost Obsolete,” Bloomberg Businessweek, September 18, 2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-18/grand-theft- auto-v-is-the-most-expensive-game-ever-and-it-s-almost-obsolete. See also Superannuation, “How Much Does It Cost to Make a Big Video Game?” Kotaku, January 15, 2014, http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it- cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649.
37. Erik Kain, “‘Grand Theft Auto V’ Crosses $1B in Sales, Biggest Entertainment Launch in History,” Forbes, September 20, 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/09/20/grand-theft-auto-v-crosses-1b- in-sales-biggest-entertainment-launch-in-history/.
38. Ian Hamilton, “Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Revenue Down,” Orange County Register, November 8, 2010, http://ocunwired.ocregister.com/2010/11/08/blizzards-world-of-warcraft- revenue-down/.
39. GameStop Corp., 10K Annual Report, April 2, 2014, http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326380/000119312512134615/d283661d10k.htm
40. “Steam: Valve’s Ingenious Digital Store,” Daily Infographic, February 24, 2012, http://dailyinfographic.com/steam-valves-ingenious-digital- store-infographic.
41. Jeff Beer, “Rise of Mobile Gaming Surprises Big Video-Game Developers,” Canadian Business, April 2, 2012, p. 30.
42. Evan Narcisse, “Supreme Court: ‘Video Games Qualify for First Amendment Protection,’” Time, June 27, 2011, http://techland.time.com/2011/06/27/supreme-court-video-games-qualify- for-first-amendment-protection/.
43. Entertainment Software Association, 2015 Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry, April 2015, http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ESA-Essential-Facts- 2015.pdf.
44. Charlie Jane Anders, “Prometheus Writer Jon Spaihts on How to Create a Great Space Movie,” io9, May 10, 2012, http://io9.com/5909279/prometheus-writer-jon-spaihts-on-how-to-create- a-great-space-movie.
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http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-18/grand-theft-auto-v-is-the-most-expensive-game-ever-and-it-s-almost-obsolete
http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/09/20/grand-theft-auto-v-crosses-1b-in-sales-biggest-entertainment-launch-in-history/
http://ocunwired.ocregister.com/2010/11/08/blizzards-world-of-warcraft-revenue-down/
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326380/000119312512134615/d283661d10k.htm
http://dailyinfographic.com/steam-valves-ingenious-digital-store-infographic
http://techland.time.com/2011/06/27/supreme-court-video-games-qualify-for-first-amendment-protection/
http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ESA-Essential-Facts-2015.pdf
http://io9.com/5909279/prometheus-writer-jon-spaihts-on-how-to-create-a-great-space-movie
45. Ray Muzyka, “To Mass Effect 3 Players, from Dr. Ray Muzyka, Co- founder of BioWare,” BioWare, March 21, 2012, http://blog.bioware.com/2012/03/21/4108/.
CASE STUDY Finding Positive Effects in Digital Games, p. 80
1. American Psychological Association, “APA Review Confirms Link between Playing Violent Video Games and Aggression,” August 13, 2015, http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/08/violent-video- games.aspx.
2. American Psychological Association Task Force on Violent Media, “Technical Report on the Review of the Violent Video Game Literature,” August 13, 2015, https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/08/technical-violent- games.pdf.
3. Zoe Kleinman, “Do Video Games Make People Violent?” BBC News, August 17, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33960075.
4. Isabela Granic, Adam Lobel, and Rutger C. M. E. Engels, “The Benefits of Playing Video Games,” American Psychologist, 69, no. 1 (2014): 67.
5. Ibid., 66–78.
6. Ibid., 74.
GLOBAL VILLAGE Global Controversy: The Gender Problem in Digital Games, p. 88
1. Anita Sarkeesian, “It’s Game Over for ‘Gamers’,” New York Times, October 28, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/opinion/anita- sarkeesian-on-video-games-great-future.html.
2. Zachary Jason, “Game of Fear,” Boston Magazine, June 2015, http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2015/04/28/gamergate/.
3. KotakuInAction, “The Global Reach of Gamer-Gate?” May 12, 2015, http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/35ptw7/the_global_reach_of_gamergate/
4. Cory Marshall, “Dozens of Police, SWAT Respond to ‘Swatting’ Hoax in Southwest Portland,” Katu.com, January 4, 2015, http://www.katu.com/news/local/Dozens-of-police-SWAT-respond-to-
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http://blog.bioware.com/2012/03/21/4108/
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/08/violent-video-games.aspx
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/08/technical-violent-games.pdf
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33960075
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/opinion/anita-sarkeesian-on-video-games-great-future.html
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2015/04/28/gamergate/
http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/35ptw7/the_global_reach_of_gamergate/
http://www.katu.com/news/local/Dozens-of-police-SWAT-respond-to-Swatting-hoax-in-Southwest-Portland--287467591.html
Swatting-hoax-in-Southwest-Portland--287467591.html.
5. Ross Miller, “Anita Sarkeesian to Create New Series Looking at Masculinity in Video Games,” The Verge, January 26, 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/26/7915385/new-feminist-frequency- series-on-masculinity-in-video-games. See also https://twitter.com/femfreq and https://www.youtube.com/user/feministfrequency.
6. Brianna Wu, “Can I Play, Too? Gender Equity in the Age of #Gamergate,” University of Northern Iowa, March 31, 2015, 7, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-6fHFM_DdM.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS First-Person Shooter Games: Misogyny as Entertainment? p. 91
1. Seth Schiesel, “Way Down Deep in the Wild, Wild West,” New York Times, May 16, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/arts/television/17dead.html.
2. Ibid.
3. The Red Dragon, “Red Dead Redemption Coolest Achievement Ever— Dastardly Tutorial,” YouTube video, posted May 19, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmtdvpp9dMc&feature=related.
4. Tracy Clark-Flory, “Grand Theft Misogyny,” Salon, May 3, 2008, http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/2008/05/03/gta.
5. Matt Cabral, “A History of GTA and How It Helped Shape Red Dead Redemption,” PCWorld Australia, July 13, 2010, http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/352981/history_gta_how_it_helped_shape_red_dead_redemption/
PART 2: SOUNDS AND IMAGES
Infographic sources: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/30/business/media/music-streaming- guide.html http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/NFLX/1692330868x0x870685/C6213FF9- 5498-4084-A0FF-74363CEE35A1/Q4_15_Letter_to_Shareholders_- _COMBINED.pdf http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/comcast-shrugs-off-years-of-cord-cutting- losses-adds-89k-tv-customers/
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http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/26/7915385/new-feminist-frequency-series-on-masculinity-in-video-games
https://twitter.com/femfreq
https://www.youtube.com/user/feministfrequency
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-6fHFM_DdM
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/arts/television/17dead.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmtdvpp9dMc&feature=related
http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/2008/05/03/gta
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/352981/history_gta_how_it_helped_shape_red_dead_redemption/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/30/business/media/music-streaming-guide.html
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/NFLX/1692330868x0x870685/C6213FF9-5498-4084-A0FF-74363CEE35A1/Q4_15_Letter_to_Shareholders_-_COMBINED.pdf
http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/comcast-shrugs-off-years-of-cord-cutting-losses-adds-89k-tv-customers/
http://ir.timewarner.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=70972&p=quarterlyearnings https://www.sandvine.com/downloads/general/global-internet- phenomena/2015/global-internet-phenomena-africa-middle-east-and-north- america.pdf
4 Sound Recording and Popular Music
1. Adele, “Hello …” Facebook, October 21, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/adele/photos/a.275854269278.145027.9770929278/10153471860189279/? type=3&theater.
2. “Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s Phonautograms,” First Sounds, accessed August 21, 2014, http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php.
3. Thomas Edison, quoted in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 276.
4. Mark Coleman, Playback: From the Victrola to MP3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003).
5. Shawn Fanning, quoted in Steven Levy, “The Noisy War over Napster,” Newsweek, June 5, 2000, p. 46.
6. Ethan Smith, “LimeWire Found to Infringe Copyrights,” Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704247904575240572654422514.html
7. Ben Sisario, “Spotify Hits 10 Million Subscribers, a Milestone,” New York Times, May 21, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/business/media/spotify-hits- milestone-with-10-million-paid-subscribers.html.
8. IFPI, “IFPI Digital Music Report 2014,” 2014, http://www.ifpi.org/downloads/Digital-Music-Report-2014.pdf.
9. See Bruce Tucker, “‘Tell Tchaikovsky the News’: Postmodernism, Popular Culture and the Emergence of Rock ’n’ Roll,” Black Music Research Journal 9, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 280.
10. Robert Palmer, Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta (New York: Penguin, 1982), 15.
11. LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York: Morrow Quill, 1963), 168.
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http://ir.timewarner.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=70972&p=quarterlyearnings
https://www.sandvine.com/downloads/general/global-internet-phenomena/2015/global-internet-phenomena-africa-middle-east-and-north-america.pdf
https://www.facebook.com/adele/photos/a.275854269278.145027.9770929278/10153471860189279/?type=3&theater
http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704247904575240572654422514.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/business/media/spotify-hits-milestone-with-10-million-paid-subscribers.html
http://www.ifpi.org/downloads/Digital-Music-Report-2014.pdf
12. Mick Jagger, quoted in Jann S. Wenner, “Jagger Remembers,” Rolling Stone, December 14, 1995, p. 66.
13. Little Richard, quoted in Charles White, The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock (New York: Harmony Books, 1984), 65–66.
14. Quoted in Dave Marsh and James Bernard, The New Book of Rock Lists (New York: Fireside, 1994), 15.
15. Tucker, “‘Tell Tchaikovsky the News,’” 287.
16. See Gerri Hershey, Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music (New York: Penguin Books, 1984).
17. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, “Nirvana,” in Michael Erlewine, ed., All Music Guide: The Best CDs, Albums, & Tapes, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1994), 233.
18. Joshua P. Friedlander, “News and Notes on 2015 Mid-Year RIAA Shipment and Revenue Statistics,” RIAA, https://www.riaa.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/09/2015_RIAAMidYear_ShipmentData.pdf.
19. Stuart Dredge, “Streaming Music Payments: How Much Do Artists Really Receive?” Guardian, August 19, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/19/zoe-keating-spotify- streaming-royalties.
20. Jeff Leeds, “The Net Is a Boon for Indie Labels,” New York Times, December 27, 2005, p. E1.
21. Nat Hentoff, “Many Dreams Fueled Long Development of U.S. Music,” Milwaukee Journal/United Press International, February 26, 1978, p. 2.
CASE STUDY Psy and the Meaning of “Gangnam Style,” p. 132
1. Jeff Yang, “Gangnam Style’s U.S. Popularity Has Koreans Puzzled, Gratified,” Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/08/28/gangnam-style-viral- popularity-in-u-s-has-koreans-puzzled-gratified/.
5 Popular Radio and the Origins of Broadcasting
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https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2015_RIAAMidYear_ShipmentData.pdf
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/19/zoe-keating-spotify-streaming-royalties
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/08/28/gangnam-style-viral-popularity-in-u-s-has-koreans-puzzled-gratified/
1. Cathy Applefield Olson, “‘You Can’t Stop Technology’: iHeartMedia Chairman and CEO Bob Pittman Talks Radio and Tech at CES,” Billboard, January 6, 2015, http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6429515/bob-pittman- iheartmedia-ces-technology.
2. iHeartCommunications, Inc., Form 10-K, February 19, 2015, http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/739708/000140089115000004/10- K.htm.
3. Olson, “‘You Can’t Stop Technology.’”
4. Captain Linwood S. Howeth, USN (Retired), History of Communications-Electronics in the United States Navy (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1963), http://earlyradiohistory.us/1963hw.htm.
5. Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man out of Time (New York: Touchstone, 2001).
6. William J. Broad, “Tesla, a Bizarre Genius, Regains Aura of Greatness,” New York Times, August 28, 1984, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html? res=9400E4DD1038F93BA1575BC0A962948260&sec=health&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
7. Michael Pupin, “Objections Entered to Court’s Decision,” New York Times, June 10, 1934, p. E5.
8. Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 73.
9. For a full discussion of early broadcast history and the formation of RCA, see Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899– 1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Christopher Sterling and John Kitross, Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1990).
10. See Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New York: New Press, 2001).
11. Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media &
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http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6429515/bob-pittman-iheartmedia-ces-technology
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/739708/000140089115000004/10-K.htm
http://earlyradiohistory.us/1963hw.htm
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9400E4DD1038F93BA1575BC0A962948260&sec=health&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
12. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
13. “Amos ’n’ Andy Show,” Museum of Broadcast Communications, http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/A/htmlA/amosnandy/amosnandy.htm.
14. StreamingRadioGuide, “Radio Stations Streaming on the Internet,” accessed April 3, 2016, http://streamingradioguide.com/.
15. Ed Christman, “RIAA, Pandora, NARAS, NAB Square Off on Capitol Hill,” Billboard.biz, June 7, 2012, http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/legal-and-management/riaa- pandora-naras-nab-square-off-on-capitol-1007257152.story.
16. “Podcast Consumption Surges to One in Five Americans,” Inside Radio, March 7, 2016, http://www.insideradio.com/free/podcast- consumption-surges-to-one-in-five-americans/article_bce00ee0-e4b1- 11e5-9077-9f119ab66694.html.
17. National Association of Broadcasters, “Equipping Mobile Phones with Broadcast Radio Capability for Emergency Preparedness Additional Resources,” accessed June 13, 2014, http://www.nab.org/advocacy/issueResources.asp? id=2354&issueID=1082.
18. Nielsen, “State of the Media: Audio Today 2016, How America Listens,” February 25, 2016, http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports- downloads/2016-reports/state-of-the-media-audio-today-radio-2016.pdf.
19. Radio Advertising Bureau, “RAB Revenue Releases,” 2015, http://www.rab.com/public/pr/rev-pr.cfm?search=2015§ion=press.
20. Federal Communications Commission, “Broadcast Station Totals as of December 31, 2015,” January 8, 2016, https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-337189A1.pdf.
21. Glenn Peoples, “How ‘Playola’ Is Infiltrating Streaming Services: Pay for Play Is ‘Definitely Happening,’” Billboard, August 19, 2015,
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http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/A/htmlA/amosnandy/amosnandy.htm
http://streamingradioguide.com/
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/legal-and-management/riaa-pandora-naras-nab-square-off-on-capitol-1007257152.story
http://www.insideradio.com/free/podcast-consumption-surges-to-one-in-five-americans/article_bce00ee0-e4b1-11e5-9077-9f119ab66694.html
http://www.nab.org/advocacy/issueResources.asp?id=2354&issueID=1082
http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2016-reports/state-of-the-media-audio-today-radio-2016.pdf
http://www.rab.com/public/pr/rev-pr.cfm?search=2015§ion=press
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-337189A1.pdf
http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6670475/playola-promotion- streaming-services; see also Robert Cookson, “Spotify Bans ‘Payola’ on Playlists,” Financial Times, August 20, 2015, https://next.ft.com/content/af1728ca-4740-11e5-af2f-4d6e0e5eda22.
22. Peter DiCola, “False Premises, False Promises: A Quantitative History of Ownership Consolidation in the Radio Industry,” Future of Music Coalition, December 13, 2006, http://futureofmusic.org/article/research/false-premises-false-promises.
GLOBAL VILLAGE Radio Goes Local, Global, and Local Again, p. 163
1. “Small-Town Radio Attracts International Audience,” Feather River Bulletin, February 29, 2012, n.p.
2. Pete Naughton, “The Best Internet Radio Stations,” The Telegraph, December 3, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10409420/The-best- internet-radio-stations.html.
3. Neil Hughes, “Apple Music Radio Debuts in iOS 8.4 & iOS 9 Betas with 28 Stations, Including Beats 1,” AppleInsider, June 18, 2015, http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/06/18/apple-music-radio-debuts-in-ios- 84-ios-9-betas-with-28-stations-including-beats-1.
4. Mark Day, “Apple Takes Offbeat Punt on Global Radio,” The Australian, June 15, 2015, p. 24.
5. Gordon Smith, “Prepared Remarks for NAB President and CEO Gordon Smith at 2014 Radio Show,” September 10, 2014, http://www.radioshowweb.com/2014/newsroom/newsRelease.asp? id=3504.
6 Television and Cable: The Power of Visual Culture
1. Jonah Weiner, “Comedy Central in the Post-TV Era,” New York Times Magazine, June 18, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/magazine/comedy-central-in-the- post-tv-era.html?_r=0.
2. Amanda Kondolojy, “‘ABC World News with Diane Sawyer’ Closes Total Viewing Gap with ‘NBC Nightly News’ by 3%,” TV by the
1080
http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6670475/playola-promotion-streaming-services
https://next.ft.com/content/af1728ca-4740-11e5-af2f-4d6e0e5eda22
http://futureofmusic.org/article/research/false-premises-false-promises
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10409420/The-best-internet-radio-stations.html
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/06/18/apple-music-radio-debuts-in-ios-84-ios-9-betas-with-28-stations-including-beats-1
http://www.radioshowweb.com/2014/newsroom/newsRelease.asp?id=3504
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/magazine/comedy-central-in-the-post-tv-era.html?_r=0
Numbers, June 5, 2012, http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2012/06/05/abc- world-news-with-diane-sawyer-closes-total-viewing-gap-with-nbc-nightly- news-by-3/136864/.
3. See Nielsen, “The Digital Consumer,” February 2014, http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports- downloads/2014%20Reports/the-digital-consumer-report-feb-2014.pdf.
4. See National Cable & Telecommunication Association, “Industry Data,” accessed August 18, 2014, https://www.ncta.com/industry-data.
5. See Edmund Lee, “Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: We Won’t Compete with Cable TV,” Advertising Age, May 4, 2011, http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-compete- cable-tv/227364/.
6. See Nielsen, “The Digital Consumer.”
7. J. Fred MacDonald, One Nation under Television: The Rise and Decline of Network TV (Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1994), 70.
8. See Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1974), 31, 39.
9. Association of Public Television Stations (APTS), “Congress Provides Critical Funding Increases to Public Broadcasting for FY2010,” December 15, 2009, http://archive.today/Ue9iE.
10. Suevon Lee, “Big Bird Debate: How Much Does Federal Funding Matter to Public Broadcasting?” ProPublica, October 11 2012, https://www.propublica.org/article/big-bird-debate-how-much-does- federal-funding-matter-to-public-broadcasting.
11. See Elizabeth Jensen, “PBS Plans Promotional Breaks within Programs,” New York Times, May 31, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/business/media/31adco.html.
12. John Boland, quoted in Katy June-Friesen, “Surge of Channels … Depress PBS Ratings,” Current.org, December 8, 2008, http://www.current.org/2008/12/surge-of-channels-people-meter-chaos- depress-pbs-ratings/.
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http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2012/06/05/abc-world-news-with-diane-sawyer-closes-total-viewing-gap-with-nbc-nightly-news-by-3/136864/
http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2014%20Reports/the-digital-consumer-report-feb-2014.pdf
https://www.ncta.com/industry-data
http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-compete-cable-tv/227364/
http://archive.today/Ue9iE
https://www.propublica.org/article/big-bird-debate-how-much-does-federal-funding-matter-to-public-broadcasting
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/business/media/31adco.html
http://www.current.org/2008/12/surge-of-channels-people-meter-chaos-depress-pbs-ratings/
13. See Dru Sefton, “PBS Mulls Strategy to Boost Kids’ Ratings,” Current.org, March 11, 2014, www.current.org/2014/03/pbs-mulls- strategy-to-boost-kids-ratings.
14. MacDonald, One Nation under Television, 181.
15. United States v. Midwest Video Corp., 440 U.S. 689 (1979).
16. Federal Communications Commission, “Report on Cable Industry Prices,” January 16, 2009, http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-09-53A1.pdf.
17. “Broadband by the Numbers,” NCTA, March 27, 2016, https://www.ncta.com/broadband-by-the-numbers; National Cable & Telecommunication Association, “Operating Metrics,” accessed July 12, 2012, http://www.ncta.com/StatsGroup/OperatingMetric.aspx.
18. See Jack Loechner, “TV Advertising Most Influential,” MediaPost, March 23, 2011, http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/147033.
19. Bill Carter, “Cable TV, the Home of High Drama,” New York Times, April 5, 2010, pp. B1, B3.
20. See Sara Bibel, “Live+7 DVR Ratings: Complete 2013–2014 Season,” TV by the Numbers, June 9, 2014, http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2014/06/09/live7-dvr-ratings-complete- 2013-14-season-the-big-bang-theory-leads-adults-18-49-ratings-increase- raising-hope-earns-biggest-percentage-increase-the-blacklist-tope- viewership-gains/271900/.
21. William J. Ray, “Private Enterprise, Privileged Enterprise, or Free Enterprise,” accessed February 21, 2012, http://www.glasgow- Ky.com/papers/#PrivateEnterprise.
CASE STUDY ESPN: Sports and Stories, p. 182
1. See Linda Haugsted, “ESPN’s First-Place Finish,” Multichannel News, March 3, 2008, p. 21.
TRACKING TECHNOLOGY Binging Gives TV Shows a Second Chance— and Viewers a Second Home, p. 206
1. Grant McCracken, “From Arrested Development to Dr. Who, Binge
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http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-09-53A1.pdf
https://www.ncta.com/broadband-by-the-numbers
http://www.ncta.com/StatsGroup/OperatingMetric.aspx
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/147033
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2014/06/09/live7-dvr-ratings-complete-2013-14-season-the-big-bang-theory-leads-adults-18-49-ratings-increase-raising-hope-earns-biggest-percentage-increase-the-blacklist-tope-viewership-gains/271900/
http://www.glasgow-Ky.com/papers/#PrivateEnterprise
Watching Is Changing Our Culture,” Wired, May 24, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/05/beyond-arrested-development-how-binge- watching-is-changing-our-narrative-culture/.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
7 Movies and the Impact of Images
1. “Star Wars,” Box Office Mojo, accessed June 14, 2015, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=starwars.htm.
2. Walt Disney Company, “Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm Ltd.,” October 30, 2012, http://thewaltdisneycompany.com/disney-news/press- releases/2012/10/disney-acquire-lucasfilm-ltd.
3. Matt Krantz, Mike Snider, Marco Della Cava, and Bryan Alexander, “Disney Buys Lucasfilm for $4 Billion,” USA Today, October 30, 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2012/10/30/disney-star- wars-lucasfilm/1669739/.
4. John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 35.
5. See Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner’s, 1991).
6. Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 18.
7. Douglas Gomery, Movie History: A Survey (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1991), 167.
8. See Barbara Koenig Quart, Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema (New York: Praeger, 1988).
9. Mike McPhate, “Hollywood’s Inclusion Problem Extends beyond the Oscars, Study Says,” New York Times, February 22, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/movies/hollywoods-inclusion- problem-extends-beyond-the-oscars-study-says.html.
1083
http://www.wired.com/2013/05/beyond-arrested-development-how-binge-watching-is-changing-our-narrative-culture/
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=starwars.htm
http://thewaltdisneycompany.com/disney-news/press-releases/2012/10/disney-acquire-lucasfilm-ltd
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2012/10/30/disney-star-wars-lucasfilm/1669739/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/movies/hollywoods-inclusion-problem-extends-beyond-the-oscars-study-says.html
10. See Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 171–180.
11. Ismail Merchant, “Kitschy as Ever, Hollywood Is Branching Out,” New York Times, November 22, 1998, sec. 2, pp. 15, 30.
12. See Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 108–109.
13. See Douglas Gomery, “Who Killed Hollywood?” Wilson Quarterly (Summer 1991): 106–112.
14. Motion Picture Association of America, “Theatrical Market Statistics,” 2013, http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/MPAA- Theatrical-Market-Statistics-2013-032514-v2.pdf.
15. Chris Dodd, “CinemaCon 2014—Remarks as Prepared for Delivery,” March 25, 2014, http://www.mpaa.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/03/MPAA-DODD-CinemaCon-2014-As-Prepared- For-Delivery-MG.pdf.
16. Based on authors’ calculations and Motion Picture Association of America, “Theatrical Market Statistics,” 2011.
17. Tambay A. Obenson, “Is a Theatrical Release Still Essential in 2014, or Will VOD, Digital Distribution Suffice?” Indiewire, January 28, 2014, http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/is-a-theatrical-release-still- essential-in-2014-or-will-vod-digital-distribution-suffice.
18. Andrew Wallenstein and Ramin Setoodeh, “The Movie Deal Netflix Wants to Make—and It’s Not Day-and-Date,” Variety, November 5, 2013, http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/netflix-to-preem-movies-the-same-day- they-bow-in-theaters-1200796130/.
19. Jeff Gammage, “Digital or Die: Theaters Scramble for Pricey New Projectors,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 13, 2013, p. A01.
20. Julianne Pepitone, “Americans Now Watch More Online Movies Than DVDs,” CNN/Money, March 22, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/22/technology/streaming-movie- sales/index.htm.
21. Jake Coyle, “Clicking through the Wild West of Video-on-Demand,”
1084
http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/MPAA-Theatrical-Market-Statistics-2013-032514-v2.pdf
http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/MPAA-DODD-CinemaCon-2014-As-Prepared-For-Delivery-MG.pdf
http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/is-a-theatrical-release-still-essential-in-2014-or-will-vod-digital-distribution-suffice
http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/netflix-to-preem-movies-the-same-day-they-bow-in-theaters-1200796130/
http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/22/technology/streaming-movie-sales/index.htm
Bloomberg Businessweek, March 29, 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-03/D9TQAOI00.htm.
22. Brooks Barnes, “How ‘Hunger Games’ Built Up Must-See Fever,” New York Times, March 18, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/business/media/how-hunger-games- built-up-must-see-fever.html.
23. David S. Cohen, “Academy to Preserve Digital Content,” Variety, August 3, 2007, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117969687.html.
24. David Thorburn, “Television as an Aesthetic Medium,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication (June 1987): 168.
CASE STUDY Breaking through Hollywood’s Race Barrier, p. 228
1. Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 155– 170.
2. “Don Cheadle on Difficulty of Financing Miles Davis Film without White Actor,” BBC, May 4, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03q2p64/.
PART 3: WORDS AND PICTURES
Infographic sources: http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/newspapers-fact-sheet/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-state-of-the-news-media-2015-newspapers- ↑-smartphones-↓/ http://www.biakelsey.com/pdf/newspaper-market-report-info.pdf http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/01/16/a-snapshot-of-reading-in-america-in-2013/ http://www.magazine.org/node/26924
8 Newspapers: The Rise and Decline of Modern Journalism
1. See Richard Campbell and Jimmie L. Reeves, “Covering the Homeless: The Joyce Brown Story,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6, no. 1 (March 1989): 21–42.
2. David Mizner, “Reporting an Explosive Truth: The Boston Globe and Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church,” Knight Case Studies Initiative,
1085
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-03/D9TQAOI00.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/business/media/how-hunger-games-built-up-must-see-fever.html
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117969687.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03q2p64/
http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/newspapers-fact-sheet/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-state-of-the-news-media-2015-newspapers-↑-smartphones-↓/
http://www.biakelsey.com/pdf/newspaper-market-report-info.pdf
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/01/16/a-snapshot-of-reading-in-america-in-2013/
http://www.magazine.org/node/26924
Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, 2009, p. 7.
3. Amy Mitchell, “The Declining Value of U.S. Newspapers,” Pew Research Center, May 22, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact- tank/2015/05/22/the-declining-value-of-u-s-newspapers.
4. Michael Barthel, “State of the News Media 2015: Newspapers: Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Journalism Project, April 29, 2015, www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/newspapers-fact-sheet/.
5. Ibid.
6. See Kay Mills, A Place in the News: From the Women’s Pages to the Front Page (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1988).
7. William Randolph Hearst, quoted in Piers Brendon, The Life and Death of the Press Barons (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 134.
8. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 23.
9. See David T. Z. Mindich, “Edwin M. Stanton, the Inverted Pyramid, and Information Control,” Journalism Monographs 140 (August 1993).
10. Curtis D. MacDougall, The Press and Its Problems (Dubuque: William C. Brown, 1964), 143, 189.
11. Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 92.
12. Tom Wolfe, quoted in Leonard W. Robinson, “The New Journalism: A Panel Discussion,” in Ronald Weber, ed., The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy (New York: Hastings House, 1974), 67. See also Tom Wolfe and E. E. Johnson, eds., The New Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
13. Tom Wicker, On Press (New York: Viking, 1978), 3–5.
14. Jill Abramson, quoted in Nat Ives, “Abramson and Keller, NYT’s Incoming and Outgoing Top Editors, Talk Challenges and Changes,” Advertising Age, June 2, 2011, http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/q-a- york-times-jill-abramson-bill-keller/227928/.
1086
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/22/the-declining-value-of-u-s-newspapers
http://www.journalism.org/2015/04/29/newspapers-fact-sheet/
http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/q-a-york-times-jill-abramson-bill-keller/227928/
15. See Newspaper Association of America, “Trends and Numbers,” accessed July 5, 2013, http://www.naa.org/Trends-and-Numbers.aspx; and National Newspaper Association, “Community Newspaper Facts and Figures,” accessed July 5, 2013, http://nnaweb.org/about-nna? articleCategory=community-facts-figures.
16. See Sreenath Sreenivasan, “As Mainstream Papers Struggle, the Ethnic Press Is Thriving,” New York Times, July 22, 1996, p. C7.
17. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Ethnic: Summary Essay,” State of the News Media 2010, http://stateofthemedia.org/2010/ethnic-summary-essay/.
18. Ibid.
19. See Barbara K. Henritze, Bibliographic Checklist of American Newspapers (Baltimore: Clearfield, 2009).
20. April Turner, “Black Journalists Ranks Cut by Nearly 1,000 in Past Decade,” National Association of Black Journalists newsletter, April 4, 2012, http://www.nabj.org/news/88558.
21. Pamela Newkirk, “The Not-So-Great Migration,” Columbia Journalism Review, May 25, 2011, http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_not-so- great_migration.php.
22. See ASNE, “Table B: Minority Employment by Race and Job Category,” http://asne.org/content.asp?pl=140&sl=416&contentid=416.
23. See ASNE, “Table A: Minority Employment in Daily Newspapers,” http://asne.org/content.asp?contentid=129.
24. Special thanks to Mary Lamonica and her students at New Mexico State University.
25. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, State of the News Media 2010, http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2010/. See also Emily Guskin and Monica Anderson, “Developments in the Hispanic Market,” Pew Research Journalism Project, March 26, 2014, http://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/developments-in-the-hispanic- media-market.
1087
http://www.naa.org/Trends-and-Numbers.aspx
http://nnaweb.org/about-nna?articleCategory=community-facts-figures
http://stateofthemedia.org/2010/ethnic-summary-essay/
http://www.nabj.org/news/88558
http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_not-so-great_migration.php
http://asne.org/content.asp?pl=140&sl=416&contentid=416
http://asne.org/content.asp?contentid=129
http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2010/
http://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/developments-in-the-hispanic-media-market
26. ASNE, “Table A: Minority Employment in Daily Newspapers” and “Table B: Minority Employment by Race and Job Category.”
27. See ASNE, “Table B: Minority employment by race and job category.”
28. See United States Census Bureau, “State & County Quick Facts,” July 8, 2014, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html. See also Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, State of the News Media 2010.
29. Wil Cruz, “The New New Yorker: Ethnic Media Fill the Void,” Newsday, June 26, 2002, p. A25.
30. See Chinese Advertising Agencies, “About Chinese Daily News,” accessed September 3, 2014, http://www.chineseadvertisingagencies.com/mediaguide/Chinese-Daily- News.html.
31. See ASNE, “Table B: Minority Employment by Race and Job Category.”
32. See ASNE, “Table B: Minority Employment by Race and Job Category.”
33. See http://www.villagevoice.com/about.
34. Pew Research Center Publications, “The New Face of Washington’s Press Corps,” February 11, 2009, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1115/washington-press-corps-study; Jodi Enda, Katerina Eva Matsa, and Jan Lauren Boyles, “America’s Shifting Statehouse Press: Can New Players Compensate for Lost Legacy Reporters? July 10, 2014, http://www.journalism.org/2014/07/10/americas-shifting-statehouse.press/.
35. American Society of News Editors, “Decline in Newsroom Jobs Slows,” accessed June 8, 2010, http://asne.org/content.asp? pl=121&sl=150&contentid=150.
36. Rick Edmonds, “ASNE Newsroom Census Total Reflects Decline in Traditional Journalism Jobs,” Poynter, May 6, 2011, http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/business-news/the-biz-blog/130184.
1088
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
http://www.chineseadvertisingagencies.com/mediaguide/Chinese-Daily-News.html
http://www.villagevoice.com/about
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1115/washington-press-corps-study
http://www.journalism.org/2014/07/10/americas-shifting-statehouse.press/
http://asne.org/content.asp?pl=121&sl=150&contentid=150
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/business-news/the-biz-blog/130184
37. See ASNE, “2015 Census,” http://asne.org/content.asp? pl=121&sl=415&contentid=415.
38. See Mac Ryan, “Amid Industry Cuts, Warren Buffett Says He Is Looking to Buy More Newspapers,” Forbes, May 24, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/05/24/warren-buffett-says-he- is-looking-to-buy-more-newspapers/; and Christine Haughney, “Newspaper Work, with Warren Buffett as Boss,” New York Times, June 17, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/business/media/newspaper- work-with-warren-buffett-as-the-boss.html?_r=0.
39. See Philip Meyer, “Learning to Love Lower Profits,” American Journalism Review, December 1995, 40–44.
40. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Newspapers: Summary Essay,” State of the News Media 2010, http://stateofthemedia.org/2010/newspapers-summary-essay/.
41. World Association of Newspapers (WAN), “Newspaper Circulation Grows Despite Economic Downturn,” May 27, 2009, http://www.wan- press.org/article18148.html.
42. Achara Deboonme, “Floppy Discs, Walkmans and Now Newspapers?” Nation (Thailand), June 4, 2013, www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/Floppy-discs-Walkmans-and-now- newspapers-30207480.html.
43. World Association of Newspapers (WAN), “World Press Trends: Newspaper Revenues Shift to New Sources,” June 1, 2015, http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2015/06/01/world-press-trends- newspaper-revenues-shift-to-new-sources.
44. World Association of Newspapers (WAN), “World Press Trends: Print and Digital Together Increasing Newspaper Audiences,” June 9, 2014, http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2014/06/09/world-press-trends- print-and-digital-together-increasing-newspaper-audience.
45. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Newspapers: Summary Essay,” State of the News Media 2010.
46. Ibid.
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http://asne.org/content.asp?pl=121&sl=415&contentid=415
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/05/24/warren-buffett-says-he-is-looking-to-buy-more-newspapers/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/business/media/newspaper-work-with-warren-buffett-as-the-boss.html?_r=0
http://stateofthemedia.org/2010/newspapers-summary-essay/
http://www.wan-press.org/article18148.html
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/Floppy-discs-Walkmans-and-now-newspapers-30207480.html
http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2015/06/01/world-press-trends-newspaper-revenues-shift-to-new-sources
http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2014/06/09/world-press-trends-print-and-digital-together-increasing-newspaper-audience
47. “Anyone with a Modem Can Report on the World,” Liberty Round Table Library Essays, address before the National Press Club, June 2, 1998, http://bhs.cc/journalism/pdf/future/Liberty%20Round%20Table_%20Essays_%20Matt%20Drudge%20Speech.pdf
48. Joshua Micah Marshall, quoted in Noam Cohen, “Blogger, Sans Pajamas, Rakes Muck and a Prize,” New York Times, February 25, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/business/media/25marshall.html? pagewanted=all.
49. See Amy Mitchell, “State of the News Media 2014: Overview,” Pew Research Journalism Project, March 26, 2014, http://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/state-of-the-news-media-2014- overview.
50. John Herrman, “Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic Bring Uncertainty to Online News,” New York Times, April 18, 2016, B1, B6.
51. See “American Newspaper Revenue Is Still Dropping, Just Not Quite as Much as Before,” NiemanLab, April 2, 2014, http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/04/american-newspaper-revenue-is-still- dropping-just-not-quite-as-much-as-before/.
52. Richard Pérez-Peña, “Newspaper Ad Revenue Could Fall as Much as 30%,” New York Times, April 15, 2009, p. B3.
53. See “Gannett Newspapers and Yahoo Create Local Advertising Partnership,” Chicago Press Release Services, July 19, 2010, http://chicagopressrelease.com/technology/gannett-newspapers-and-yahoo; Evan Hessel, “Yahoo!’s Dangerous Newspaper Deal?” Forbes, June 22, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/22/advertising-newspapers-internet- business-media-yahoo.html; and Kate Kaye, “Media General Expands Yahoo Partnership to TV-Only Markets,” Clickz Marketing News, June 11, 2010, http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/1721928/media-general- xpands-yahoo-partnership.
54. Joshua Benton, “American Newspaper Revenue Is Still Dropping, Just Not Quite as Much as Before,” April 21, 2014, http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/04/american-newspaper-revenue-is-still- dropping-just-not-quite-as-much-as-before/.
55. D. M. Levine, “Small Papers Lead the Way on Paywalls,” Adweek,
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http://bhs.cc/journalism/pdf/future/Liberty%20Round%20Table_%20Essays_%20Matt%20Drudge%20Speech.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/business/media/25marshall.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/state-of-the-news-media-2014-overview
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/04/american-newspaper-revenue-is-still-dropping-just-not-quite-as-much-as-before/
http://chicagopressrelease.com/technology/gannett-newspapers-and-yahoo
http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/22/advertising-newspapers-internet-business-media-yahoo.html
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/1721928/media-general-xpands-yahoo-partnership
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/04/american-newspaper-revenue-is-still-dropping-just-not-quite-as-much-as-before/
June 3, 2011, http://www.adweek.com/news/press/small-papers-lead-way- paywalls-132203.
56. See http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/business/the-new-york- times-reaches-a-milestone-thanks-to-our-readers.html?_r=0.
57. Nieman Journalism Lab, “Paywalls Are Not a Cure-All: Evidence from Gannett,” February 4, 2014, http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/02/paywalls- are-not-a-cure-all-evidence-from-gannett.
58. Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Report, October 19, 2009, pp. 77–91. See www.cjr.org for the full report. All quoted material below is from the report. See also Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson, “Finding a New Model for News Reporting,” Washington Post, October 19, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com.
59. Brian Deagon, “You, Reporting Live: Citizen Journalism Relies on Audience; Now, Everyone’s a Stringer …,” Investor’s Business Daily, March 31, 2008, p. A4.
60. Mark Jurkowitz and Paul Hitlin, “Citizen Eyewitnesses Provide Majority of Top Online News Videos,” Pew Research Center, May 20, 2013, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/22/citizen-eyewitnesses- provide-majority-of-top-online-news-videos.
61. Amy Mitchell, Mark Jurkowitz, Jesse Holcomb, Jodi Enda, and Monica Anderson, “Nonprofit Journalism—a Growing but Fragile Part of the U.S. News System,” Pew Research Journalism Project, June 10, 2013, http://www.journalism.org/2013/06/10/nonprofit-journalism/.
62. Jesse Holcomb and Amy Mitchell for Pew Research Journalism Project, “Personal Wealth, Capital Investments, and Philanthropy,” March 26, 2014, http://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/personal-wealth-capital- investments-and-philanthropy/.
63. Committee to Protect Journalists, accessed June 2016, http://www.cpj.org/killed/.
64. Marc Santora and Bill Carter, “War in Iraq Becomes the Deadliest Assignment for Journalists in Modern Times,” New York Times, May 30, 2006, p. A10.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/business/the-new-york-times-reaches-a-milestone-thanks-to-our-readers.html?_r=0
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/02/paywalls-are-not-a-cure-all-evidence-from-gannett
http://www.cjr.org
http://www.washingtonpost.com
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/22/citizen-eyewitnesses-provide-majority-of-top-online-news-videos
http://www.journalism.org/2013/06/10/nonprofit-journalism/
http://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/personal-wealth-capital-investments-and-philanthropy/
http://www.cpj.org/killed/
65. See Matthew Ingram, “Which Will Save AOL: Huffington Post or Patch?” Gigaom, June 9, 2011, http://www.gigaom.com/2011/06/09/which-will-save-aol-huffington-post- or-patch.
66. Jondi Gumz, “Patch.com Shuts News Websites, Lays Off Hundreds,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, January 29, 2014, Business and Financial section.
67. John Carroll, “News War, Part 3,” Frontline, PBS, February 27, 2007, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/etc/script3.html.
CASE STUDY Alternative Journalism: Dorothy Day and I. F. Stone, p. 271
1. I. F. Stone, quoted in Jack Lule, “I. F. Stone: Professional Excellence in Raising Hell,” QS News (Summer 1989): 3.
9 Magazines in the Age of Specialization
1. Jennifer Benjamin, “How Cosmo Changed the World,” accessed August 13, 2012, http://www.cosmopolitan.com/about/a1746/about-us_how- cosmo-changed-the-world/.
2. Sammye Johnson, “Promoting Easy Sex without the Intimacy: Maxim and Cosmopolitan Cover Lines and Cover Images,” in Mary-Lou Galician and Debra L. Merskin, eds., Critical Thinking about Sex, Love, and Romance in the Mass Media (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2007), 55–74.
3. Karen S. H. Roggenkamp, “‘Dignified Sensationalism’: Elizabeth Bisland, Cosmopolitan, and Trips around the World,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 17, no. 1 (2007): 26–40.
4. John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 116.
5. See Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 5.
6. See Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996).
7. See Peterson, Magazines, 5.
1092
http://www.gigaom.com/2011/06/09/which-will-save-aol-huffington-post-or-patch
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/etc/script3.html
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/about/a1746/about-us_how-cosmo-changed-the-world/
8. Rebecca Eisenberg, “Salon Returns to Off-Line Media Roots,” SFGate, October 4, 1998, http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Salon-returns-to- off-line-media-roots-3066497.php.
9. Generoso Pope, quoted in William H. Taft, American Magazines for the 1980s (New York: Hastings House, 1982), 226–227.
10. See S. Elizabeth Bird, For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 24.
11. See Gloria Steinem, “Sex, Lies and Advertising,” Ms., July/August 1990, pp. 18–28.
12. Magazine Media Factbook 2015, Association of Magazine Media, http://www.magazine.org/insights-resources/magazine-media-factbook- 2015.
13. Time Inc., Form 10-K, February 19, 2016, https://invest.timeinc.com/invest/financials/sec-filings/.
CASE STUDY The Evolution of Photojournalism, p. 298
1. Carrie Melago, “Ralph Lauren Model Filippa Hamilton: I Was Fired Because I Was Too Fat!” New York Daily News, October 14, 2009, http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/fashion/2009/10/14/2009-10- 14_model_fired_for_being_too_fat.html#ixzz0riJa9skc.
2. Ken Harris, quoted in Jesse Epstein, “Sex, Lies, and Photoshop,” New York Times, March 8, 2009, http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/03/09/opinion/1194838469575/sex- lies-and-photoshop.html.
TRACKING TECHNOLOGY Paper Still Dominates Magazines in the Digital Age, p. 304
1. See http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20151215/ENTERTAINMENT/151219909/magazine- launches-plunge-in-2015.
2. Samir Husni, “Along with the Showers, April Brought 70 New Titles to the Newsstand … 20 with Promised Frequency …” Mr. Magazine, April 30, 2015, https://launchmonitor.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/along-with-
1093
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Salon-returns-to-off-line-media-roots-3066497.php
http://www.magazine.org/insights-resources/magazine-media-factbook-2015
https://invest.timeinc.com/invest/financials/sec-filings/
http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/fashion/2009/10/14/2009-10-14_model_fired_for_being_too_fat.html#ixzz0riJa9skc
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/03/09/opinion/1194838469575/sex-lies-and-photoshop.html
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20151215/ENTERTAINMENT/151219909/magazine-launches-plunge-in-2015
https://launchmonitor.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/along-with-the-showers-april-brought-70-new-titles-to-the-newsstand-20-with-promised-frequency/
the-showers-april-brought-70-new-titles-to-the-newsstand-20-with- promised-frequency/.
3. Neil Lulofs, “Top 25 U.S. Consumer Magazines for June 2014,” Alliance for Audited Media, August 7, 2014, http://auditedmedia.com/news/blog/2014/august/top-25-us-consumer- magazines-for-june-2014.aspx.
4. MPA: The Association of Magazine Media, Magazine MediaFactbook 2015, http://www.magazine.org/sites/default/files/2015MagazineMediaFactbook.pdf pp. 37, 43.
5. Ibid., p. 37.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Uncovering American Beauty, p. 307
1. Academy for Eating Disorders, “Guidelines for the Fashion Industry,” accessed November 18, 2014, http://www.aedweb.org/web/index.php/23- get-involved/position-statements/95-aed-statement-on-body-shaming-and- weight-prejudice-in-public-endeavors-to-reduce-obesity-9.
2. Academy for Eating Disorders, “Fast Facts on Eating Disorders,” accessed November 18, 2014, http://aedweb.org/web/index.php/education/eating-disorder- information/eating-disorder-information-14#8.
10 Books and the Power of Print
1. Patrick Ryan, “‘Paper Towns’ Buzz Occupies BookCon,” USA Today, May 31, 2015, http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2015/05/31/john-green-paper- towns-bookcon/28232399/; Kelly Lawler, “Screaming Teens Greet Veronica Roth at BookCon,” USA Today, June 2, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2014/05/31/veronica-roth-alex- london-bookcon/9808823/; and Meredith Carey, “Twilight of the Tweens: Prepubescent Readers Invade New York for First Annual BookCon,” Observer, June 2, 2014, http://observer.com/2014/06/twilight-of-the- tweens-prepubescent-readers-invade-new-york-for-first-annual-bookcon/.
2. BookCon, FAQs, accessed May 31, 2015,
1094
http://auditedmedia.com/news/blog/2014/august/top-25-us-consumer-magazines-for-june-2014.aspx
http://www.magazine.org/sites/default/files/2015MagazineMediaFactbook.pdf
http://www.aedweb.org/web/index.php/23-get-involved/position-statements/95-aed-statement-on-body-shaming-and-weight-prejudice-in-public-endeavors-to-reduce-obesity-9
http://aedweb.org/web/index.php/education/eating-disorder-information/eating-disorder-information-14#8
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2015/05/31/john-green-paper-towns-bookcon/28232399/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2014/05/31/veronica-roth-alex-london-bookcon/9808823/
http://observer.com/2014/06/twilight-of-the-tweens-prepubescent-readers-invade-new-york-for-first-annual-bookcon/
http://www.thebookcon.com/about/FAQs/.
3. Seth Fishman, “How to Write YA,” Publishers Weekly, February 27, 2014, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens- authors/article/61185-how-to-write-ya.html.
4. Clare Swanson, “The Bestselling Books of 2014,” Publishers Weekly, January 2, 2015, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry- news/bookselling/article/65171-the-fault-in-our-stars-tops-print-and- digital.html.
5. Claire Kirch, “New Imprint to Reissue Forgotten YA Literature,” Publishers Weekly, April 4, 2013, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens- industry-news/article/56658-new-imprint-to-reissue-forgotten-ya- literature.html.
6. Laura M. Bell, “HelloGiggles Founder and BookCon Panelist Sophia Rossi Talks about the Love Affair between Books and the Internet,” Huffington Post, May 28, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-m- bell/post_9508_b_7449098.html.
7. See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
8. See Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory: From Pulp Row to Quality Street (New York: Street & Smith/Random House, 1955), 72–74.
9. For a comprehensive historical overview of the publishing industry and the rise of publishing houses, see John A. Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972– 1981).
10. National Association of College Stores, “Higher Education Retail Market Facts & Figures, 2016,” http://www.nacs.org/research/industrystatistics/higheredfactsfigures.aspx.
11. See John P. Dessauer, Book Publishing: What It Is, What It Does (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1974), 48.
12. Mid-Continent Public Library, “Based on the Book,” accessed July 23, 2014, http://www.mymcpl.org/books-movies-music/based-book.
1095
http://www.thebookcon.com/about/FAQs/
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/61185-how-to-write-ya.html
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/65171-the-fault-in-our-stars-tops-print-and-digital.html
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/56658-new-imprint-to-reissue-forgotten-ya-literature.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-m-bell/post_9508_b_7449098.html
http://www.nacs.org/research/industrystatistics/higheredfactsfigures.aspx
http://www.mymcpl.org/books-movies-music/based-book
13. See http://www.thebookseller.com/news/e-book-market-share-down- slightly-2015.
14. “Alice in Wonderland iPad App Reinvents Reading (Video),” Huffington Post, April 14, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/14/alice-in-wonderland- ipad_n_537122.html.
15. Jim Milliot, “The Verdict on 2014: Sales Up 4.6%,” Publishers Weekly, June 12, 2015, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by- topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/67131-the-verdict-on-2014- sales-up-4-6.html.
16. Jim Milliot, “Tracking the Transition: Bookstats,” Publishers Weekly, August 12, 2011, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry- news/financial-reporting/article/48348-tracking-the-transition- bookstats.html.
17. Stephanie Clifford and Julie Bosman, “Publishers Look beyond Bookstores,” New York Times, February 27, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/business/media/28bookstores.html.
18. Steve Wasserman, “The Amazon Effect,” Nation, May 29, 2012, http://www.thenation.com/article/168125/amazon-effect#.
19. “October 2015—Apple, B&N, Kobo, and Google: A Look at the Rest of the Ebook Market,” AuthorEarnings, October 2015, http://authorearnings.com/report/october-2015-apple-bn-kobo-and-google- a-look-at-the-rest-of-the-ebook-market/.
20. “February 2016 Author Earnings Report: Amazon’s Ebook, Print, and Audio Sales,” February 2016, http://authorearnings.com/report/february- 2016-author-earnings-report/.
21. Kathryn Zickuhr and Lee Rainie, “A Snapshot of Reading in America in 2013,” Pew Research Center, January 16, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/01/16/a-snapshot-of-reading-in-america- in-2013/.
22. Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
1096
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/e-book-market-share-down-slightly-2015
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/14/alice-in-wonderland-ipad_n_537122.html
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/67131-the-verdict-on-2014-sales-up-4-6.html
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/48348-tracking-the-transition-bookstats.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/business/media/28bookstores.html
http://www.thenation.com/article/168125/amazon-effect
http://authorearnings.com/report/october-2015-apple-bn-kobo-and-google-a-look-at-the-rest-of-the-ebook-market/
http://authorearnings.com/report/february-2016-author-earnings-report/
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/01/16/a-snapshot-of-reading-in-america-in-2013/
23. “How We Will Read: Clay Shirky,” interview by Sonia Saraiya, Findings, April 5, 2012, http://blog.findings.com/post/20527246081/how- we-will-read-clay-shirky.
24. Alan Finder, “The Joys and Hazards of Self-Publishing on the Web,” New York Times, August 15, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/technology/personaltech/ins-and- outs-of-publishing-your-book-via-the-web.html.
GLOBAL VILLAGE Buenos Aires, the World’s Bookstore Capital, p. 334
1. International Publishers Association, “Global Fixed Book Price Report,” May 23, 2014, http://www.internationalpublishers.org/images/reports/2014/fixed-book- price-report-2014.pdf.
2. Deborah Rey, “Bookstore Tourists Should Have One Destination on Their List: Buenos Aires,” Associated Press, May 2, 2015, http://skift.com/2015/05/02/bookstore-tourists-should-have-one- destination-on-their-list-buenos-aires/.
3. Ibid.
4. Catherine Blache, “Why Fixed Book Price Is Essential for Real Competition,” International Publishers Association, March 19, 2015, http://www.internationalpublishers.org/news/blog/entry/why-fixed-book- price-is-essential-for-real-competition.
5. International Publishers Association, “Global Fixed Book Price Report.”
6. Blache, “Why Fixed Book Price Is Essential.”
7. Matt Chesterton, “Top Bookstores in Buenos Aires,” Travel + Leisure, August 2014, http://www.travelandleisure.com/local-experts/buenos- aires/top-bookstores-buenos-aires.
PART 4: THE BUSINESS OF MASS MEDIA
Infographic sources: http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/2015/ranking/#?filter= http://google.client.shareholder.com/investorkit.cfm http://investor.apple.com/sef.cfm#filings
1097
http://blog.findings.com/post/20527246081/how-we-will-read-clay-shirky
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/technology/personaltech/ins-and-outs-of-publishing-your-book-via-the-web.html
http://www.internationalpublishers.org/images/reports/2014/fixed-book-price-report-2014.pdf
http://skift.com/2015/05/02/bookstore-tourists-should-have-one-destination-on-their-list-buenos-aires/
http://www.internationalpublishers.org/news/blog/entry/why-fixed-book-price-is-essential-for-real-competition
http://www.travelandleisure.com/local-experts/buenos-aires/top-bookstores-buenos-aires
http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/2015/ranking/#?filter=
http://google.client.shareholder.com/investorkit.cfm
http://investor.apple.com/sef.cfm#filings
http://investor.fb.com http://www.microsoft.com/investor/SEC/default.aspx http://phx.corporte-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-reportsanual
11 Advertising and Commercial Culture
1. For data on worldwide ad revenue, see Advertising Age, “Marketing Fact Pack, 2016 Edition,” p. 16.
2. See Emily Steel and Sydney Ember, “Networks Fret as Ad Dollars Flow to Digital Media,” New York Times, May 10, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/business/media/networks-fret-as-ad- dollars-flow-to-digital-media.
3. Ad Age, Marketing Fact Pack, “Time Spent Using Media,” p. 21.
4. See Steel and Ember, “Networks Fret,” and Marketing Fact Pack, “Cost for 30-Second Commercial,” p. 18.
5. Teresa F. Lindeman, “Product Placement Nation: Advertisers Pushing the Boundaries to Bring in More Bucks,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 13, 2011, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11133/1146175-28-0.stm; Aimee Picchi, “Cable Networks Are Speeding Up TV Shows to Cram in Ads,” CBS Money Watch, February 19, 2015, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cable-networks-are-speeding-up-tv-shows- to-cram-in-ads/.
6. Caitlin A. Johnson, “Cutting through Advertising Clutter,” CBS Sunday Morning, September 16, 2006, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/17/sunday/main2015684.shtml.
7. For a written and pictorial history of early advertising, see Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple, Advertising in America: The First 200 Years (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 31.
8. Michael Schudson, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 164.
9. Newspaper Association of America, “Business Model Evolving, Circulation Revenue Rising,” April 14, 2014, http://www.naa.org/Trends- and-Numbers/Newspaper-Revenue/Newspaper-Media-Industry-Revenue- Profile-2013.aspx, and Ad Age, “Marketing Fact Pack.”
1098
http://investor.fb.com
http://www.microsoft.com/investor/SEC/default.aspx
http://phx.corporte-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-reportsanual
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/business/media/networks-fret-as-ad-dollars-flow-to-digital-media
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11133/1146175-28-0.stm
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cable-networks-are-speeding-up-tv-shows-to-cram-in-ads/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/17/sunday/main2015684.shtml
http://www.naa.org/Trends-and-Numbers/Newspaper-Revenue/Newspaper-Media-Industry-Revenue-Profile-2013.aspx
10. David Gelles, “At Odds, Omnicom and Publicis End Merger,” New York Times, May 8, 2014, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/ad- agency–giants-said-to-call-off-35-billion-merger/.
11. Natalie Zmuda, “Peterson Milla Hooks Is Ad Age’s Comeback Agency of the Year,” January 28, 2013, Advertising Age, http://adage.com/article/special-report-agency-alist-2013/comeback- agency-year-peterson-milla-hooks/239306/. See also PMH Web site at http://www.pmhadv.com/about/.
12. See TVB, “TV Cost & CPM Trends—Network TV Primetime (M–Su), accessed September 19, 2014, http://www.tvb.org/trends/4718/4709.
13. Bettina Fabos, “The Commercialized Web: Challenges for Libraries and Democracy,” Library Trends 53, no. 4 (Spring 2005): 519–523.
14. Quentin Hardy, “Google Introduces Products That Will Sharpen Its Ad Focus,” New York Times, March 15, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/technology/google-introduces- products-that-will-sharpen-its-ad-focus.html?ref=technology.
15. “Share of Ad Spending by Medium: U.S.,” Advertising Age, December 31, 2012, p. 16.
16. See http://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global- revenue/ and http://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual- revenue-and-net-income/.
17. See Advertising Age, Marketing Fact Pack, 2016 edition, “Net U.S. Mobile Advertising Revenue by Company,” p. 16.
18. Jack Neff, “Unilever to Double Digital Spending This Year,” Advertising Age, June 25, 2010, http://adage.com/cannes2010/article? article_id=144672.
19. See Advertising Age, Marketing Fact Pack, 2016 edition, “Time Spent Using Media,” p. 21.
20. Jon Gibs and Sean Bruich, “Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression,” Nielsen, April 2010, http://www.iab.net/media/file/NielsenFacebookValueofSocialMediaImpressions.pdf
1099
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/ad-agency–giants-said-to-call-off-35-billion-merger/
http://adage.com/article/special-report-agency-alist-2013/comeback-agency-year-peterson-milla-hooks/239306/
http://www.pmhadv.com/about/
http://www.tvb.org/trends/4718/4709
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/technology/google-introduces-products-that-will-sharpen-its-ad-focus.html?ref=technology
http://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/
http://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-revenue-and-net-income/
http://adage.com/cannes2010/article?article_id=144672
http://www.iab.net/media/file/NielsenFacebookValueofSocialMediaImpressions.pdf
21. See Alexandra Ilyashov, “That Dress You Saw All Over Instagram Last Year Might Be a Really Expensive Mistake,” http://www.refinery29.com/2016/03/106064/lord-and-taylor-ootd-ads- campaign-ftc-settlement.
22. See Somini Sengupta, “Like It or Not, His Face Is on Ad,” New York Times, June 1, 2012, p. A1.
23. See “Endorsements Put Stephen Curry on Fast Track to Top of NBA Pile,” https://www.rt.com/sport/337308-stephen-curry-endorsement-deals/.
24. Leslie Savan, “Op Ad: Sneakers and Nothingness,” Village Voice, April 2, 1991, p. 43.
25. See Mary Kuntz and Joseph Weber, “The New Hucksterism,” BusinessWeek, July 1, 1999, 79.
26. Schudson, Advertising, 210.
27. Eric Pfanner, “Your Brand on TV for a Fee, in Britain,” New York Times, March 6, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/business/media/07iht-adco.html.
28. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Basic Books, 1957, 1978), 229.
29. See Eileen Dempsey, “Auld Lang Syne,” Columbus Dispatch, December 28, 2000, p. 1G; John Reinan, “The End of the Good Old Days,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 31, 2004, p. 1D.
30. See Schudson, Advertising, 36–43; Andrew Robertson, The Lessons of Failure (London: MacDonald, 1974).
31. Kim Campbell and Kent Davis-Packard, “How Ads Get Kids to Say, I Want It!” Christian Science Monitor, September 18, 2000, p. 1.
32. See Jay Mathews, “Channel One: Classroom Coup or a ‘Sham’?” Washington Post, December 26, 1994, p. A1ff.
33. See Michael F. Jacobson and Laurie Ann Mazur, Marketing Madness: A Survival Guide for a Consumer Society (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), 29–31.
1100
http://www.refinery29.com/2016/03/106064/lord-and-taylor-ootd-ads-campaign-ftc-settlement
https://www.rt.com/sport/337308-stephen-curry-endorsement-deals/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/business/media/07iht-adco.html
34. “Ads Beat News on School TVs,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 6, 2006, p. A7.
35. Hilary Waldman, “Study Links Advertising, Youth Drinking,” Hartford Courant, January 3, 2006, p. A1.
36. Alix Spigel, “Selling Sickness: How Drug Ads Changed Healthcare,” National Public Radio, October 13, 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=113675737.
37. ProCon.org, “Should Prescription Drugs Be Advertised Directly to Consumers?” updated March 2014, http://prescriptiondrugs.procon.org/view.answers.php? questionID=001603.
38. Jeffrey Godsick, quoted in T. L. Stanley, “Hollywood Continues Its Fast-Food Binge,” Adweek, June 6, 2009, http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/hollywood-continues- its-fast-food-binge-105907.
39. Douglas J. Wood, “Ad Issues to Watch for in ’06,” Advertising Age, December 19, 2005, p. 10.
40. Associated Press, “Two Ephedra Sellers Fined for False Ads,” Washington Post, July 2, 2003, p. A7.
41. Beth Harskovits, “Corporate Profile: Legacy’s Truth Finds Receptive Audience,” PR Week, June 12, 2006, p. 9.
42. See Truth, “Let’s Be the Generation to Finish It,” accessed July 20, 2016, http://www.thetruth.com/about.
43. See Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar, Going Negative: How Attack Ads Shrink and Polarize the Electorate (New York: Free Press, 1996).
44. Center for Responsive Politics, “The Money behind the Elections,” accessed June 14, 2013, http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/.
45. See “Political Advertising Spending in the United States in the 2016 Election Season, by Medium (in Billion U.S. Dollars),” http://www.statista.com/statistics/470711/presidential-election-season-ad-
1101
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=113675737
http://prescriptiondrugs.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=001603
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/hollywood-continues-its-fast-food-binge-105907
http://www.thetruth.com/about
http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/
http://www.statista.com/statistics/470711/presidential-election-season-ad-spend/
spend/.
46. Kantar Media, “KM Reports U.S. Advertising Expenditures Increased 0.9 Percent in 2013, Fueled by Larger Advertisers,” March 25, 2014, http://kantarmedia.us/press/kantar-media-reports-us-advertising- expenditures-increased-09-percent-2013.
EXAMINING ETHICS Do Alcohol Ads Encourage Binge Drinking? p. 371
1. Amanda Stewart, “Alcohol Ads Have Heavy Impact on Underage Binge Drinking,” Design & Trends, January 20, 2015, http://www.designntrend.com/articles/35740/20150120/alcohol-ads-heavy- impact-underage-binge-drinking.htm. See also FoxNews.com, “Children’s Health: TV Alcohol Ad Exposure Linked to Greater Chance of Underage Drinking,” January 20, 2015, http://www.foxnews.com/health/2015/01/20/tv-alcohol-ad-exposure- linked-to-greater-chance-underage-drinking/.
2. Stewart, “Alcohol Ads Have Heavy Impact.”
3. FoxNews.com, “Children’s Health.”
GLOBAL VILLAGE Smoking Up the Global Market, p. 376
1. Peh Shing Huei, “7 Chinese Cities All Fired Up to Curb Smoking,”Straits Times, January 23, 2010, p. 4.
2. Cheng Yingqi, “Women Now Main Target of Tobacco Firms,” China Daily, May 19, 2010, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010- 05/19/content_9865347.htm.
3. See Li Hui and Ben Blanchard, “China Tobacco Monopoly Blocks Full Ban on Tobacco,” Reuters, September 4, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/05/us-china-smoking- idUSKBN0H001N20140905.
4. Cheng Yingqi, “Women Now Main Target of Tobacco Firms,” China Daily, May 19, 2010, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010- 05/19/content_9865347.htm.
5. National Institutes of Health, “Fact Sheet: Global Tobacco Research,” October 2010, http://report.nih.gov/nihfactsheets/Pdfs/GlobalTobacco
1102
http://kantarmedia.us/press/kantar-media-reports-us-advertising-expenditures-increased-09-percent-2013
http://www.designntrend.com/articles/35740/20150120/alcohol-ads-heavy-impact-underage-binge-drinking.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2015/01/20/tv-alcohol-ad-exposure-linked-to-greater-chance-underage-drinking/
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-05/19/content_9865347.htm
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/05/us-china-smoking-idUSKBN0H001N20140905
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-05/19/content_9865347.htm
http://report.nih.gov/nihfactsheets/Pdfs/GlobalTobaccoResearch%28FIC%29.pdf
Research%28FIC%29.pdf.
12 Public Relations and Framing the Message
1. Chris Lee, “Furious 7 and Diversity: Why Hollywood Needs to Catch Up with Reality,” Entertainment Weekly, April 1, 2015, http://www.ew.com/article/2015/04/01/furious-7-and-diversity-why- hollywood-needs-catch-reality.
2. Jeremy Kay, “Fast & Furious 7: ‘Paul Walker’s the Star of Our Film, and He Should Be Celebrated,’” Guardian, April 3, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/apr/03/fast-and-furious-7- paul-walker-universal-marketing-campaign.
3. Box Office Mojo, “The Fast and the Furious,” accessed May 13, 2016, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/? id=fastandthefurious.htm.
4. Matthew J. Culligan and Dolph Greene, Getting Back to the Basics of Public Relations and Publicity (New York: Crown Publishers, 1982), 100.
5. See Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
6. Marvin N. Olasky, “The Development of Corporate Public Relations, 1850–1930,” Journalism Monographs 102 (April 1987): 14.
7. Ivy Lee, quoted in Anthony Fellow, American Media History (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2012), 202.
8. Edward Bernays, “The Theory and Practice of Public Relations: A Résumé,” in E. L. Bernays, ed., The Engineering of Consent (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), 3–25.
9. Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Horace Liveright, 1923), 217.
10. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 136.
11. PRSA, “PR by the Numbers—2012,” http://media.prsa.org/events/PR- by-the-Numbers.htm.
1103
http://www.ew.com/article/2015/04/01/furious-7-and-diversity-why-hollywood-needs-catch-reality
http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/apr/03/fast-and-furious-7-paul-walker-universal-marketing-campaign
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=fastandthefurious.htm
http://media.prsa.org/events/PR-by-the-Numbers.htm
12. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “Fresh Empire,” https://freshempire.betobaccofree.hhs.gov/about-us; Brady Dennis, “The FDA Is Trying to Keep ‘Hip-Hop’ Teens from Smoking: ‘Fresh Empire’ Ads to Air during BET Awards,” Washington Post, October 6, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your- health/wp/2015/10/06/how-the-fda-is-trying-to-keep-hip-hop-teens-from- smoking/; Maanvi Singh, “Notorious FDA? Feds Turn to Hip-Hop to Tamp Down Teen Smoking,” NPR, May 9, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2016/05/09/476900196/notorious-f-d-a-feds-turn-to-hip-hop-to- tamp-down-teen-smoking.
13. Center for Responsive Politics, “Lobbying Database,” accessed August 26, 2012, http://opensecrets.org/lobby.
14. SourceWatch, “Center for Consumer Freedom,” accessed August 20, 2014, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php? title=Center_for_Consumer_Freedom.
15. David Barstow, “Message Machine: Behind TV Analysis, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” New York Times, April 20, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html.
16. Associated Press, “Open Government Study: Secrecy Up,” Politico, March 16, 2014, http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/open- government-study-secrecy-up-104715.html.
17. Stanley Walker, “Playing the Deep Bassoons,” Harper’s, February 1932, p. 365.
18. Ibid., p. 370.
19. Ivy Lee, Publicity (New York: Industries Publishing, 1925), 21.
20. Schudson, Discovering the News, 136.
21. Ivy Lee, quoted in Ray Eldon Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd: The Story of Ivy Lee and the Development of Public Relations (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1966), 114.
22. See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1922, 1949), 221.
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https://freshempire.betobaccofree.hhs.gov/about-us
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/10/06/how-the-fda-is-trying-to-keep-hip-hop-teens-from-smoking/
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/05/09/476900196/notorious-f-d-a-feds-turn-to-hip-hop-to-tamp-down-teen-smoking
http://opensecrets.org/lobby
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_Consumer_Freedom
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/open-government-study-secrecy-up-104715.html
23. Christopher R. Martin, Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).
24. PRWatch, “About Us,” accessed August 26, 2012, http://www.prwatch.org/cmd.
25. John Stauber, “Corporate PR: A Threat to Journalism?” Background Briefing: Radio National, March 30, 1997, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/corporate- pr-a-threat-to-journalism/3563876.
26. See Alicia Mundy, “Is the Press Any Match for Powerhouse PR?” in Ray Eldon Hiebert, ed., Impact of Mass Media (White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 1995), 179–188.
27. Dan Rather, interviewed in “Forty Years after Watergate: Carl Bernstein & Dan Rather with CNN’s Candy Crowley,” State of the Union with Candy Crowley, CNN, August 3, 2014, http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/08/03/forty-years-after- watergate-carl-bernstein-dan-rather-with-cnns-candy-crowley/.
28. The Data Team, “The 2016 Presidential Money Race,” Graphic Detail, Economist, March 7, 2016, http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/03/daily-chart-1.
29. Rosanna Fiske, “PR Pros: Haven’t We Learned Anything about Disclosure?” PRSay, May 11, 2011, http://prsay.prsa.org/index.php/2011/05/11/pr-and-communications-pros- havent-we-learned-anything-about-disclosure/.
30. Elizabeth Blair, “Under the Radar, PR’s Political Savvy,” National Public Radio, May 19, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/05/19/136436263/under-the-radar-pr-s-political- savvy.
31. Fiske, “PR Pros.”
CASE STUDY The NFL’s Concussion Crisis, p. 396
1. Brent Schrotenboer, “NFL Takes Aim at $25 Billion, but at What Price?” USA Today, February 5, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/super/2014/01/30/super-bowl-
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http://www.prwatch.org/cmd
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/corporate-pr-a-threat-to-journalism/3563876
http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/08/03/forty-years-after-watergate-carl-bernstein-dan-rather-with-cnns-candy-crowley/
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/03/daily-chart-1
http://prsay.prsa.org/index.php/2011/05/11/pr-and-communications-pros-havent-we-learned-anything-about-disclosure/
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/19/136436263/under-the-radar-pr-s-political-savvy
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/super/2014/01/30/super-bowl-nfl-revenue-denver-broncos-seattle-seahawks/5061197/
nfl-revenue-denver-broncos-seattle-seahawks/5061197/.
2. Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth (New York: Crown, 2013), 6.
EXAMINING ETHICS Public Relations and Bananas, p. 398
1. Phil Milford, “Dole, Del Monte, Dow Chemical Sued over Banana Pesticide,” BloombergBusiness, June 4, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-04/dole-del-monte- dow-chemical-sued-over-banana-pesticide.
2. Dole Organic Program, “Nazira Farm,” accessed May 11, 2015, http://www.doleorganic.com/index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id=110&Itemid=210&phpMyAdmin=101ec4fece409t73498e50
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS The Invisible Hand of PR, p. 406
1. John Stauber, “Corporate PR: A Threat to Journalism?” Background Briefing: Radio National, March 30, 1997, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/corporate- pr-a-threat-to-journalism/3563876.
13 Media Economics and the Global Marketplace
1. “Netflix’s View: Internet TV Is Replacing Linear TV,” April 18, 2016, https://ir.netflix.com/long-termview.cfm.
2. Netflix Form 10-K (2015 Annual Report), January 26, 2016, https://ir.netflix.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1065280-15-6&CIK=.
3. John Koblin, “Netflix Studied Your Binge Watching Habit. That Didn’t Take Long,” New York Times, June 8, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/09/business/media/netflix-studied-your- binge-watching-habit-it-didnt-take-long.html?_r=1.
4. “Netflix’s View: Internet TV Is Replacing Linear TV.”
5. For this section, the authors are indebted to the ideas and scholarship of Douglas Gomery, a media economist and historian, formerly from the University of Maryland.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-04/dole-del-monte-dow-chemical-sued-over-banana-pesticide
http://www.doleorganic.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=110&Itemid=210&phpMyAdmin=101ec4fece409t73498e50
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/corporate-pr-a-threat-to-journalism/3563876
https://ir.netflix.com/long-termview.cfm
https://ir.netflix.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1065280-15-6&CIK=
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/09/business/media/netflix-studied-your-binge-watching-habit-it-didnt-take-long.html?_r=1
6. Douglas Gomery, “The Centrality of Media Economics,” in Mark R. Levy and Michael Gurevitch, eds., Defining Media Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 202.
7. U.S. Department of Labor, “Minimum Wage Mythbusters,” https://www.dol.gov/featured/minimum-wage/mythbuster.
8. Wesley Morris and James Poniewozik, “Why ‘Diverse TV’ Matters: It’s Better TV. Discuss,” New York Times, February 10, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/arts/television/smaller-screens-truer- colors.html.
9. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
10. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 171.
11. Alex S. Jones, “F.C.C. Raised Limits on Total Stations under One Owner,” New York Times, July 27, 1984, http://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/27/business/fccraiseslimitontotalstationsunderoneowner.html
12. Federal Communications Commission, “Report on Cable Industry Prices,” DA 141829, December 15, 2014, https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatchDA141829A1.pdf.
13. Marcia Breen, “Cable and Satellite TV Costs Will Climb Again in 2016,” NBC News, December 22, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/business/businessnews/cablesatellitetvcostswillclimbagain2016n484531 see also Stacy Jones, “Cost of Cable TV vs. Internet Streaming,” Bankrate, November 24, 2014, http://www.bankrate.com/finance/smartspending/cabletvvsinternetstreamingthecosts1.aspx
14. Tim Arango and Brian Stelter, “Comcast Receives Approval for NBC Universal Merger,” New York Times, January 11, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/business/media/19comcast.html.
15. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 158.
16. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Members Summary,” January 24, 2014, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm.
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https://www.dol.gov/featured/minimum-wage/mythbuster
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/arts/television/smaller-screens-truer-colors.html
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/27/business/fccraiseslimitontotalstationsunderoneowner.html
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatchDA141829A1.pdf
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/businessnews/cablesatellitetvcostswillclimbagain2016n484531
http://www.bankrate.com/finance/smartspending/cabletvvsinternetstreamingthecosts1.aspx
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/business/media/19comcast.html
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
17. Economic Policy Institute, “The State of Working America: The Great Recession,” August 17, 2012, http://stateofworkingamerica.org/great- recession/.
18. Dave Gilson, “Survival of the Richest,” Mother Jones, September/October 2014, pp. 32–35.
19. Lawrence Mishel and Alyssa Davis, “CEO Pay Continues to Rise as Typical Workers Are Paid Less,” Economic Policy Institute, June 12, 2014, http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/.
20. Karl Russell and Josh Williams, “Meet the Highest-Paid C.E.O.s in 2015,” New York Times, May 27, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/29/business/how-much-ceos- made-last-year.html.
21. National Employment Law Project, “Big Business, Corporate Profits, and the Minimum Wage,” July 2012, http://www.nelp.org/page/- /rtmw/NELP-Big-Business-Corporate-Profits-Minimum-Wage.pdf.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 12–13.
25. Robert Sher, “Why Half of All M&A Deals Fail, and What You Can Do about It,” Forbes, March 19, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/03/19/why-half- of-all-ma-deals-fail-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/.
26. Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 131.
27. Ben Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, 6th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 222.
28. Nick Davies, Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch (New York: Faber and Faber, 2014).
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http://stateofworkingamerica.org/great-recession/
http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/29/business/how-much-ceos-made-last-year.html
http://www.nelp.org/page/-/rtmw/NELP-Big-Business-Corporate-Profits-Minimum-Wage.pdf
http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/03/19/why-half-of-all-ma-deals-fail-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/
29. Harry First, “Bring Back Antitrust!” Nation, June 2, 2008, pp. 7–8.
30. William Paley, quoted in Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 251.
31. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy, 264.
32. Edward Herman, “Democratic Media,” Z Papers (January–March 1992): 23.
33. Barnet and Cavanagh, Global Dreams, 38.
34. Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller, Global Reach: The Power of Multinational Corporations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 175.
35. See Adam Liptak, “Justices, 5–4, Reject Corporate Spending Limits,” New York Times, January 22, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html.
36. David Sessions, “Chick-fil-A’s Place in the Church of Fast Food,” Daily Beast, July 29, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/29/chick-fil-a-s-place-in- the-church-of-fast-food.html; Michael D. Shear, “Amazon’s Founder Pledges $2.5 Million in Support of Same-Sex Marriage,” New York Times, July 27, 2012, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/amazons- founder-pledges-2-5-million-in-support-of-same-sex-marriage.
37. Center for Responsive Politics, “The Money behind the Elections,” accessed June 14, 2013, http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/.
38. Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism, State of the News Media 2013, accessed June 14, 2013, http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/special-reports-landing-page/the- changing-tv-news-landscape/.
39. Robert McChesney and John Nichols, “Who’ll Unplug Big Media? Stay Tuned,” Nation, May 29, 2008, http://www.thenation.com/article/wholl-unplug-big-media-stay-tuned.
40. Center for Responsive Politics, “Lobbying Database,” October 15, 2012, http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/index.php.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/29/chick-fil-a-s-place-in-the-church-of-fast-food.html
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/amazons-founder-pledges-2-5-million-in-support-of-same-sex-marriage
http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/
http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/special-reports-landing-page/the-changing-tv-news-landscape/
http://www.thenation.com/article/wholl-unplug-big-media-stay-tuned
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/index.php
41. Center for Responsive Politics, “2012 Top Donors to Outside Spending Groups,” September 1, 2012, http://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php? cycle=2012&disp=D&type=V.
42. Peter Overby, “Democratic Climate Activist Is Election’s Biggest Donor—That We Know Of,” NPR, October 23, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/10/23/358238870/big-spending-democrat-faces- off-with-koch-brothers-in-campaign-ads.
PART 5: DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION AND THE MASS MEDIA
Infographic sources: https://rsf.org/en/ranking http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/15/state-of-the-news-media-2016- key-takeaways/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/21/gun-homicides-steady-after- decline-in-90s-suicide-rate-edges-up/
14 The Culture of Journalism: Values, Ethics, and Democracy
1. See Brooke Kroeger, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1994).
2. The Pulitzer Prizes, “The 2016 Pulitzer Prize Winners: Investigative Reporting,” accessed June 29, 2016, http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/leonora-lapeter-anton-and-anthony- cormier-tampa-bay-times-and-michael-braga-sarasota-herald.
3. Mary Walton, “Investigative Shortfall,” American Journalism Review, September 2010, www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4904.
4. Jason Stverak, “Investigative Journalism Is Alive and Well Outside Mainstream Media,” Watchdog.org, January 18, 2013, www.watchdog.org/66865/investigative-journalism-is-alive-and-well- outside-mainstream-media/.
5. Neil Postman, “Currents,” Utne Reader, July/August 1995, p. 35.
6. Reuven Frank, “Memorandum from a Television Newsman,” reprinted as Appendix 2 in A. William Bluem, Documentary in American Television
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http://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/summ.php?cycle=2012&disp=D&type=V
http://www.npr.org/2014/10/23/358238870/big-spending-democrat-faces-off-with-koch-brothers-in-campaign-ads
https://rsf.org/en/ranking
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/15/state-of-the-news-media-2016-key-takeaways/
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/21/gun-homicides-steady-after-decline-in-90s-suicide-rate-edges-up/
http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/leonora-lapeter-anton-and-anthony-cormier-tampa-bay-times-and-michael-braga-sarasota-herald
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4904
http://www.watchdog.org/66865/investigative-journalism-is-alive-and-well-outside-mainstream-media/
(New York: Hastings House, 1965), 276.
7. Horace Greeley, quoted in Christopher Lasch, “Journalism, Publicity and the Lost Art of Argument,” Gannett Center Journal 4, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 2.
8. David Eason, “Telling Stories and Making Sense,” Journal of Popular Culture 15, no. 2 (Fall 1981): 125.
9. Jon Katz, “AIDS and the Media: Shifting out of Neutral,” Rolling Stone, May 27, 1993, p. 32.
10. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), 78–112.
11. Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News (New York: Pantheon, 1979), 42–48.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 48–51.
14. See Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 3–11.
15. Dean Baquet and Bill Keller, “When Do We Publish a Secret?” New York Times, July 1, 2006, p. A27.
16. Code of Ethics, reprinted in Melvin Mencher, News Reporting and Writing, 3rd ed. (Dubuque, Iowa: William C. Brown, 1984), 443–444.
17. Ibid.
18. For reference and guidance on media ethics, see Clifford Christians, Mark Fackler, and Kim Rotzoll, Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning, 4th ed. (White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 1995); and Thomas H. Bivins, “A Worksheet for Ethics Instruction and Exercises in Reason,” Journalism Educator (Summer 1993): 4–16.
19. Christians, Fackler, and Rotzoll, Media Ethics, 15.
20. See Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy
1111
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).
21. See David Eason, “On Journalistic Authority: The Janet Cooke Scandal,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3, no. 4 (December 1986): 429–447.
22. Mike Royko, quoted in “News Media: A Searching of Conscience,” Newsweek, May 4, 1981, p. 53.
23. Don Hewitt, interview conducted by Richard Campbell on 60 Minutes, CBS News, New York, February 21, 1989.
24. Ina Howard, “Power Sources: On Party, Gender, Race, and Class, TV News Looks to the Most Powerful Groups,” Extra!, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, May 1, 2002, http://www.fair.org/extra- online/articles/power-sources.
25. The 4th Estate, “Silenced: Gender Gap in Election Coverage,” accessed September 3, 2012, http://www.4thestate.net/female-voices-in- media-infographic/.
26. See Adrienne LaFrance, “I Analyzed a Year of My Reporting for Gender Bias (Again),” Atlantic, February 17, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/gender-diversity- journalism/463023/.
27. David Carr, “Journalist, Provocateur, Maybe Both,” New York Times, July 26, 2010, p. B2.
28. William Greider, quoted in Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), 78.
29. Bluem, Documentary in American Television, 94.
30. See David Carr, “Big News Forges Its Own Path,” New York Times, June 16, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/business/media/big- news-forges-its-own-path.html.
31. Based on notes made by the lead author’s wife, Dianna Campbell, after a visit to Warsaw and discussions with a number of journalists working for Gazeta Wyborcza in 1990.
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http://www.fair.org/extra-online/articles/power-sources
http://www.4thestate.net/female-voices-in-media-infographic/
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/gender-diversity-journalism/463023/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/business/media/big-news-forges-its-own-path.html
32. Davis “Buzz” Merritt, Public Journalism and Public Life: Why Telling the News Is Not Enough (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), 113– 114.
33. See Jonathan Cohn, “Should Journalists Do Community Service?” American Prospect (Summer 1995): 15.
34. Davis Merritt and Jay Rosen, “Imagining Public Journalism: An Editor and a Scholar Reflect on the Birth of an Idea,” Roy W. Howard Public Lecture, no. 5 (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1995), 12.
35. Katharine Q. Seelye, “Best-Informed Also View Fake News, Study Finds,” New York Times, April 16, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/business/media/16pew.html.
36. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), xiv.
37. David Broder, quoted in “Squaring with the Reader: A Seminar on Journalism,” Kettering Review (Winter 1992): 48.
38. Lasch, “Journalism, Publicity and the Lost Art of Argument,” 1.
39. Jay Rosen, “Forming and Informing the Public,” Kettering Review, Winter 1992, 69–70.
CASE STUDY Bias in the News, p. 455
1. See Glen R. Smith, “Politicians and the News Media: How Elite Attacks Influence Perceptions of Media Bias,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 15, no. 3 (2010), 319–343.
2. M. D. Watts et al., “Elite Cues and Media Bias in Presidential Campaigns: Explaining Public Perceptions of a Liberal Press,” Communication Research 26 (1999): 144–175.
3. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Bottom-Line Pressures Now Hurting Coverage, Say Journalists,” May 23, 2004, http://www.people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=829.
4. Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.vv. “conservative,” “liberal.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/business/media/16pew.html
http://www.people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=829
5. Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News (New York: Vintage, 1980).
CASE STUDY A Lost Generation of Journalists? p. 470
1. Alex T. Williams, “The Growing Pay Gap between Journalism and PR,” Pew Research Center, August 11, 2014, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact- tank/2014/08/11/the-growing-pay-gap-between-journalism-and-public- relations.
2. See ASNE, “2015 Newsroom Census, Table N: Newsroom Retention,” August 15, 2016, http://asne.org/content.asp?contentid=146.
3. See Williams, “Growing Pay Gap.”
4. See Robert McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism (New York: Nation Books, 2010), 48
5. See Pew Research Center, “The Master Character Narratives in Campaign 2012,” August 23, 2012, http://www.journalism.org/2012/08/23/2012-campaign-character- narratives.
6. See Williams, “Growing Pay Gap.”
EXAMINING ETHICS WikiLeaks, Secret Documents, and Good Journalism, p. 476
1. Bill Keller, “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” New York Times Magazine, January 30, 2011, pp. 33–34.
2. Ibid., p. 37.
3. Jay Rosen, “The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World’s First Stateless News Organization,” PressThink, July 26, 2010, http://www.pressthink.org/2010/07/the-afghanistan-war-logs-released-by- wikileaks-the-worlds-first-stateless-news-organization.
4. Nikki Usher, “Why WikiLeaks’ Latest Document Dump Makes Everyone in Journalism—and the Public—a Winner,” Nieman Journalism Lab, December 3, 2010, http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/12/why- wikileaks-latest-document-dump.
15 Media Effects and Cultural Approaches to Research
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http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/11/the-growing-pay-gap-between-journalism-and-public-relations
http://asne.org/content.asp?contentid=146
http://www.journalism.org/2012/08/23/2012-campaign-character-narratives
http://www.pressthink.org/2010/07/the-afghanistan-war-logs-released-by-wikileaks-the-worlds-first-stateless-news-organization
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/12/why-wikileaks-latest-document-dump
1. Katy Waldman, “The Nuclear Monsters That Terrorized the 1950s,” Slate, January 31, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/nuclear_power/2013/01/nuclear_monster_movies_sci_fi_films_in_the_1950s_were_terrifying_escapism.html See also Neda Ulaby, “Movie Mutants Give a Face to Our Nuclear Fears,” NPR, March 30, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/03/30/134950737/movie- mutants-give-a-face-to-our-nuclear-fears.
2. Adam Green, “Normalizing Torture on ‘24,’” New York Times, May 22, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/arts/television/normalizing- torture-on-24.html.
3. Ibid.
4. Dahlia Lithwick, “Lithwick: How Jack Bauer Shaped U.S. Torture Policy,” Newsweek, July 25, 2008, http://www.newsweek.com/lithwick- how-jack-bauer-shaped-ustorture-policy-93159.
5. “Scalia and Torture,” Atlantic, June 19, 2007, http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/06/scalia-and- torture/227548/.
6. Rupert Stone, “Trump Might Be ‘Fine’ with Torture, but Most Americans Aren’t,” Al Jazeera America, February 22, 2016, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/2/trump-might-be-fine-with- torture-but-most-americans-arent.html.
7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Modern Library, 1835, 1840, 1945, 1981), 96–97.
8. Steve Fore, “Lost in Translation: The Social Uses of Mass Communications Research,” Afterimage, no. 20 (April 1993): 10.
9. James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 75.
10. Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 122– 125.
11. Ibid., 123.
12. Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (New
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http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/nuclear_power/2013/01/nuclear_monster_movies_sci_fi_films_in_the_1950s_were_terrifying_escapism.html
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/30/134950737/movie-mutants-give-a-face-to-our-nuclear-fears
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/arts/television/normalizing-torture-on-24.html
http://www.newsweek.com/lithwick-how-jack-bauer-shaped-ustorture-policy-93159
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/06/scalia-and-torture/227548/
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/2/trump-might-be-fine-with-torture-but-most-americans-arent.html
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 9.
13. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 18.
14. Jon Cohen, “Gay Marriage Support Hits New High in Post–ABC Poll,” Washington Post, March 18, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/03/18/gay- marriage-support-hits-new-high-in-post-abc-poll/.
15. Sheldon R. Gawiser and G. Evans Witt, “20 Questions a Journalist Should Ask about Poll Results,” 2nd ed., http://www.ncpp.org/qajsa.htm.
16. See W. W. Charters, Motion Pictures and Youth: A Summary (New York: Macmillan, 1934); and Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 220–229.
17. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind, 132. See also Harold Lasswell, “The Structure and Function of Communication in Society,” in Lyman Bryson, ed., The Communication of Ideas (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 37–51.
18. Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin Parker, Television in the Lives of Our Children (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), 1.
19. See Joseph Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication (New York: Free Press, 1960).
20. For an early overview of uses and gratifications, see Jay Blumler and Elihu Katz, The Uses of Mass Communication (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1974).
21. See George Gerbner et al., “The Demonstration of Power: Violence Profile No. 10,” Journal of Communication 29, no. 3 (1979): 177–196.
22. Kaiser Family Foundation, Sex on TV 4 (Menlo Park, Calif.: Henry C. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005).
23. Robert P. Snow, Creating Media Culture (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1983), 47.
24. See Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media,” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1972):
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/03/18/gay-marriage-support-hits-new-high-in-post-abc-poll/
http://www.ncpp.org/qajsa.htm
176–187.
25. See Nancy Signorielli and Michael Morgan, Cultivation Analysis: New Directions in Media Effects Research (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990).
26. John Gastil, Political Communication and Deliberation (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 2008), 60.
27. W. Phillips Davison, “The Third-Person Effect in Communication,” Public Opinion Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1983): 1–15, doi:10.1086/268763.
28. Richard Rhodes, The Media Violence Myth, 2000, http://www.abffe.com/myth1.htm.
29. Robert Lynd, Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1939), 120.
30. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind, 143; and Leo Lowenthal, “Historical Perspectives of Popular Culture,” in Bernard Rosenberg and David White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), 52.
31. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 7.
32. Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1974), 19, 23.
33. See Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
34. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962/1994).
35. Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 452.
36. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 23.
37. James Carey, “Mass Communication Research and Cultural Studies: An American View,” in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet
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http://www.abffe.com/myth1.htm
Woollacott, eds., Mass Communication and Society (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 418, 421.
38. Alan Sokal, quoted in Scott Janny, “Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly,” New York Times, May 18, 1996, p. 1. See also The Editors of Lingua Franca, eds., The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy (Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Press, 2000).
CASE STUDY The Effects of TV in a Post-TV World, p. 487
1. Frank J. Prial, “Congressmen Hear Renewal of Debate over TV Violence,” New York Times, April 16, 1983, http://www.nytimes.com/1983/04/16/arts/congressmen-hear-renewal-of- debate-over-tv-violence.html.
2. Parents Television Council, “What Is the PTC’s Mission?” accessed May 15, 2011, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/faqs/main.asp#What%20is%20the%20PTCs%20mission
3. Parents Television Council, “INSP Network Earns PTC Seal of Approval,” May 23, 2012, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/news/release/2012/0523.asp.
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE CRITICAL PROCESS Wedding Media and the Meaning of the Perfect Wedding Day, p. 492
1. Erika Engstrom, The Bride Factory: Mass Media Portrayals of Women and Weddings (New York: Peter Lang, 2012).
EXAMINING ETHICS Our Masculinity Problem, p. 498
1. Mark Follman, Gavin Aronsen, and Deanna Pan, “A Guide to Mass Shootings in America,” Mother Jones, July 18, 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map. See also John Wihbey, “Mass Murder, Shooting Sprees and Rampage Violence: Research Roundup,” Journalist’s Resource, October 1, 2015, http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-justice/mass- murder-shooting-sprees-and-rampage-violence-research-roundup.
2. Jackson Katz, “Memo to Media: Manhood, Not Guns or Mental Illness, Should Be Central in Newtown Shooting,” Huffington Post, updated February 17, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jackson-katz/men- gender-gun-violence_b_2308522.html.
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http://www.nytimes.com/1983/04/16/arts/congressmen-hear-renewal-of-debate-over-tv-violence.html
http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/faqs/main.asp#What%20is%20the%20PTCs%20mission
http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/news/release/2012/0523.asp
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-justice/mass-murder-shooting-sprees-and-rampage-violence-research-roundup
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jackson-katz/men-gender-gun-violence_b_2308522.html
3. Ibid.
4. Rachel Kalish and Michael Kimmel, “Suicide by Mass Murder: Masculinity, Aggrieved Entitlement, and Rampage School Shootings,” Health Sociology Review 19, no. 4 (2010): 451–464.
5. Dan Barry et al., “‘Always Agitated. Always Mad’: Omar Mateen, according to Those Who Knew Him,” New York Times, June 18, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/us/omar-mateen-gunman-orlando- shooting.html.
6. See Ralph Ellis and Sara Sidner, “Deadly California Rampage: Chilling Video, but No Match for Reality,” CNN, May 27, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/24/justice/california-shooting-deaths/.
16 Legal Controls and Freedom of Expression
1. Allan J. Lichtman, “Who Rules America?” The Hill, August 12, 2014, http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/214857-who-rules- america.
2. “Voters Say Money, Media Have Too Much Political Clout,” Rasmussen Reports, February 16, 2016, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/february_2016/voters_say_money_media_have_too_much_political_clout
3. Gene Policinski, “Amendment to Undo Citizens United Won’t Do,” First Amendment Center, September 21, 2011, http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/amendment-to-undo-citizens-united- wont-do.
4. Lawrence Lessig, “An Open Letter to the Citizens against Citizens United,” Atlantic, March 23, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/an-open-letter-to-the- citizens-against-citizens-united/254902/.
5. Committee to Protect Journalists, “1205 Journalists Killed since 1992,” accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.cpj.org/killed/.
6. Freedom House, “Freedom of the Press 2016,” accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/freedom-press-2016.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/us/omar-mateen-gunman-orlando-shooting.html
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/24/justice/california-shooting-deaths/
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/214857-who-rules-america
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/february_2016/voters_say_money_media_have_too_much_political_clout
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/amendment-to-undo-citizens-united-wont-do
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/an-open-letter-to-the-citizens-against-citizens-united/254902/
http://www.cpj.org/killed/
http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/freedom-press-2016
7. Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956).
8. See Douglas M. Fraleigh and Joseph S. Tuman, Freedom of Speech in the Marketplace of Ideas (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 71–73.
9. Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 77.
10. See Fraleigh and Tuman, Freedom of Speech, 125.
11. Hugo Black, quoted in “New York Times Company v. U.S.: 1971,” in Edward W. Knappman, ed., Great American Trials: From Salem Witchcraft to Rodney King (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1994), 609.
12. Robert Warren, quoted in “U.S. v. The Progressive: 1979,” in Knappman, ed., Great American Trials, 684.
13. Lawrence Lessig, “Opening Plenary—Media at a Critical Juncture: Politics, Technology and Culture,” National Conference on Media Reform, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 7, 2008.
14. Timothy B. Lee, “15 Years Ago, Congress Kept Mickey Mouse out of the Public Domain. Will They Do It Again?” Washington Post, October 25, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/10/25/15-years-ago-congress-kept-mickey-mouse-out-of- the-public-domain-will-they-do-it-again.
15. See Knappman, ed., Great American Trials, 517–519.
16. Douglas Gomery, Movie History: A Survey (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1991), 57.
17. See Eric Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 118–130.
18. Fox Television Stations, Inc. v. FCC, No. 06-1760 (2nd Cir. 2010).
19. Brooks Boliek, “Sorry, Ms. Jackson: FCC Hits New Record,” Politico, September 10, 2014, http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/fcc-net- neutrality-record-110818.html.
20. Human Rights Watch, “Become a Blogger for Human Rights,”
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/25/15-years-ago-congress-kept-mickey-mouse-out-of-the-public-domain-will-they-do-it-again
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/fcc-net-neutrality-record-110818.html
http://hrw.org/blogs.htm.
21. Herbert J. Gans, Democracy and the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ix.
CASE STUDY Is “Sexting” Pornography? p. 517
1. Richard Wortley and Stephen Smallbone, “Child Pornography on the Internet,” U.S. Department of Justice, updated May 2012, http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/files/ric/Publications/e04062000.pdf.
2. Steven Dettelbach, quoted in Tracy Russo, “‘Sexting’ Town Hall Meeting Held in Cleveland,” Criminal Justice News, March 19, 2010, http://criminal-justice-online.blogspot.com/2010/03/sexting.html.
3. Amanda Lenhart, “Teens and Sexting,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, December 15, 2009, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1440/teens- sexting-text-messages.
4. Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin, “State Sexting Laws,” Cyberbullying Research Center, July 2015, http://cyberbullying.org/state- sexting-laws.pdf.
EXAMINING ETHICS A Generation of Copyright Criminals? p. 529
1. Kembrew McLeod, Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 67–68.
2. Ibid.
3. Michael D. Ayers, “White Noise: Girl Talk,” Billboard, June 14, 2008.
4. Lawrence Lessig, quoted in Rip: A Remix Manifesto, dir. Brett Gaylor, 2008.
Extended Case Study: Analyzing the Coverage of the Volkswagen and Takata Crises, p. 535
1. Sonari Glinton, “How a Little Lab in West Virginia Caught Volkswagen’s Big Cheat,” NPR, September 24, 2015, http://www.npr.org/2015/09/24/443053672/how-a-little-lab-in-west- virginia-caught-volkswagens-big-cheat.
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http://hrw.org/blogs.htm
http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/files/ric/Publications/e04062000.pdf
http://criminal-justice-online.blogspot.com/2010/03/sexting.html
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1440/teens-sexting-text-messages
http://cyberbullying.org/state-sexting-laws.pdf
http://www.npr.org/2015/09/24/443053672/how-a-little-lab-in-west-virginia-caught-volkswagens-big-cheat
2. Federal Trade Commission, “Volkswagen to Spend up to $14.7 Billion to Settle Allegations of Cheating Emissions Tests and Deceiving Customers on 2.0 Liter Diesel Vehicles,” June 28, 2016, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/06/volkswagen- spend-147-billion-settle-allegations-cheating.
3. Naomi Kresge and Christoph Rauwald, “VW CEO Mueller Blunders by Blaming Emissions Rigging on ‘Technical Problem,’” Automotive News, January 12, 2016, http://www.autonews.com/article/20160112/COPY01/301129940/vw-ceo- mueller-blunders-by-blaming-emissions-rigging-on-technical.
4. Danny Hakim, “VW’s Crisis Strategy: Forward, Reverse, U-Turn,” New York Times, February 26, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/business/international/vws-crisis- strategy-forward-reverse-u-turn.html.
5. Larry E. Hall, “Volkswagen’s Diesel Fix Increases NOx Emissions, Euro Consumer Group Says,” HybridCars.com, July 11, 2016, http://www.hybridcars.com/volkswagens-diesel-fix-increases-nox- emissions-euro-consumer-group-says/.
6. Bryan Thomas, “NHTSA: New Test Data on Particular Subset of Takata Air Bag Inflators Shows Substantially Higher Risk,” NHTSA, June 30, 2016, http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/nhtsa-takata- high-risk-inflators-06302016.
7. Jonathan Soble, “Takata Airbag Linked to Another Death in Malaysia,” New York Times, June 27, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/business/takata-airbag-linked-to- another-death-in-malaysia.html.
8. Associated Press, “Kin of Texas Teen Killed by Takata Air Bag Say They Received No Recall Notice,” New York Daily News, April 7, 2016, http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/kin-teen-killed-takata-air- bags-no-recall-article-1.2592566.
9. Hiroku Tabuchi, “Air Bag Flaw, Long Known to Honda and Takata, Led to Recalls,” New York Times, September 11, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/business/air-bag-flaw-long-known- led-to-recalls.html. See also Hiroko Tabuchi, “Takata Saw and Hid Risk in Airbags in 2004, Former Workers Say,” New York Times, November 6,
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https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/06/volkswagen-spend-147-billion-settle-allegations-cheating
http://www.autonews.com/article/20160112/COPY01/301129940/vw-ceo-mueller-blunders-by-blaming-emissions-rigging-on-technical
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/business/international/vws-crisis-strategy-forward-reverse-u-turn.html
http://www.hybridcars.com/volkswagens-diesel-fix-increases-nox-emissions-euro-consumer-group-says/
http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/nhtsa-takata-high-risk-inflators-06302016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/business/takata-airbag-linked-to-another-death-in-malaysia.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/kin-teen-killed-takata-air-bags-no-recall-article-1.2592566
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/business/air-bag-flaw-long-known-led-to-recalls.html
2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/business/airbag-maker-takata- is-said-to-have-conducted-secret-tests.html.
10. Mark R. Rosekind, “Press Conference to Announce Expansion of Accelerated Takata Air Bag Recalls,” NHTSA, May 4, 2016, http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Speeches,+Press+Events+&+Testimonies/mr- takata-expansion-05042016.
11. Ibid.
12. Brand Finance, “Global 500 2016: The Most Valuable Brands of 2016,” http://brandirectory.com/league_tables/table/global-500-2016.
13. Ed O’Boyle and Amy Adkins, “Can Volkswagen Salvage Its Damaged Brand?” December 3, 2015, Gallup Business Journal, http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/187472/volkswagen-salvage- damaged-brand.aspx.
14. Matt DeLorenzo, “Takata Airbag Recall Low Despite Publicity, KBB Study Finds,” Kelley Blue Book, July 13, 2016, http://www.kbb.com/car- news/all-the-latest/takata-airbag-recall-low-despite-publicity-kbb-study- finds/2100000869/.
15. Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times, http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/hiroko_tabuchi/index.html
16. Clifford Atiyeh and Rusty Blackwell, “Massive Takata Airbag Recall: Everything You Need to Know, Including Full List of Affected Vehicles,” Car and Driver, July 8, 2016, http://blog.caranddriver.com/massive- takata-airbag-recall-everything-you-need-to-know-including-full-list-of- affected-vehicles/.
17. Ibid.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/business/airbag-maker-takata-is-said-to-have-conducted-secret-tests.html
http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Speeches,+Press+Events+&+Testimonies/mr-takata-expansion-05042016
http://brandirectory.com/league_tables/table/global-500-2016
http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/187472/volkswagen-salvage-damaged-brand.aspx
http://www.kbb.com/car-news/all-the-latest/takata-airbag-recall-low-despite-publicity-kbb-study-finds/2100000869/
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/hiroko_tabuchi/index.html
http://blog.caranddriver.com/massive-takata-airbag-recall-everything-you-need-to-know-including-full-list-of-affected-vehicles/
Glossary
A&R (artist & repertoire) agents talent scouts of the music business who discover, develop, and sometimes manage performers.
access channels in cable television, a tier of nonbroadcast channels dedicated to local education, government, and the public.
acquisitions editors in the book industry, editors who seek out and sign authors to contracts.
action games games emphasizing combat-type situations that ask players to test their reflexes and to punch, slash, shoot, or throw as accurately as possible so as to strategically make their way through a series of levels.
actual malice in libel law, a reckless disregard for the truth, such as when a reporter or an editor knows that a statement is false and prints or airs it anyway.
adult contemporary (AC) one of the oldest and most popular radio music formats, typically featuring a mix of news, talk, oldies, and soft rock.
adventure games gamesrequiring players to interact with individual characters and a
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sometimes hostile environment in order to solve puzzles.
advergames video games created for purely promotional purposes.
affiliate station a radio or TV station that, though independently owned, signs a contract to be part of a network and receives money to carry the network’s programs; in exchange, the network reserves time slots, which it sells to national advertisers.
agenda-setting a media-research argument that says that when the mass media pay attention to particular events or issues, they determine—that is, set the agenda for—the major topics of discussion for individuals and society.
album-oriented rock (AOR) the radio music format that features album cuts from mainstream rock bands.
AM (amplitude modulation) a type of radio and sound transmission that stresses the volume or height of radio waves.
analog in television, standard broadcast signals made of radio waves (replaced by digital standards in 2009).
analog recording a recording that is made by capturing the fluctuations of the original sound waves and storing those signals on records or cassettes as a continuous stream of magnetism—analogous to the actual sound.
analysis the second step in the critical process, it involves discovering significant patterns that emerge from the description stage.
anthology dramas a popular form of early TV programming that brought live dramatic
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theater to television; influenced by stage plays, anthologies offered new teleplays, casts, directors, writers, and sets from week to week.
arcade an establishment that gathers together multiple coin-operated games.
ARPAnet the original Internet, designed by the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
association principle in advertising, a persuasive technique that associates a product with some cultural value or image that has a positive connotation but may have little connection to the actual product.
astroturf lobbying phony grassroots public affairs campaigns engineered by public relations firms; coined by Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, it was named after AstroTurf, the artificial-grass athletic field surface.
audience studies cultural studies research that focuses on how people use and interpret cultural content. Also known as reader-response research.
audiotape lightweight magnetized strands of ribbon that make possible sound editing and multiple-track mixing; instrumentals or vocals can be recorded at one location and later mixed onto a master recording in another studio.
authoritarian model a model for journalism and speech that tolerates little public dissent or criticism of government; it holds that the general public needs guidance from an elite and educated ruling class.
avatar a graphic interactive “character” situated within the world of a game, such as World of Warcraft or Second Life.
bandwagon effect
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an advertising strategy that uses exaggerated claims that everyone is using a particular product to encourage consumers to not be left behind.
basic cable in cable programming, a tier of channels composed of local broadcast signals, nonbroadcast access channels (for local government, education, and general public use), a few regional PBS stations, and a variety of cable channels downlinked from communication satellites.
Big Five/Little Three from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, the major movie studios that were vertically integrated and that dominated the industry; the Big Five were Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, and RKO, and the Little Three were those studios that did not own theaters: Columbia, Universal, and United Artists.
Big Six the six major Hollywood studios that currently rule the commercial film business: Warner Brothers, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Columbia Pictures, and Disney.
block booking an early tactic of movie studios to control exhibition, involving pressuring theater operators to accept marginal films with no stars in order to get access to films with the most popular stars.
blockbuster the type of big-budget special effects film that typically has a summer or holiday release date, heavy promotion, and lucrative merchandising tie-ins.
block printing a printing technique developed by early Chinese printers that entails hand-carving characters and illustrations into a block of wood, applying ink to the block, and then printing copies on multiple sheets of paper.
blogs
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sites that contain articles in reverse chronological journal-like form, often with reader comments and links to other articles on the Web (from the term Weblog).
blues originally a kind of black folk music, this emerged as a distinct category of music in the early 1900s; it was influenced by African American spirituals, ballads, and work songs from the rural South, and by urban guitar and vocal solos from the 1930s and 1940s.
book challenge a formal complaint to have a book removed from a public or school library’s collection.
boutique agencies in advertising, small regional ad agencies that offer personalized services.
broadband data transmission over a fiber-optic cable—a signaling method that handles a wide range of frequencies.
broadcasting the transmission of radio waves or TV signals to a broad public audience.
browsers information-search services, such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome, that offer detailed organizational maps to the Internet.
cartridge the early physical form of video games that were played on consoles manufactured by companies like Nintendo, Sega, and Atari.
casual games games that have very simple rules and are usually quick to play, such as Tetris or Angry Birds.
CATV (community antenna television)
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an early cable system that originated where mountains or tall buildings blocked TV signals; because of early technical and regulatory limits, CATV contained only twelve channels.
celluloid a transparent and pliable film that can hold a coating of chemicals sensitive to light.
chapter show in television production, any situation comedy or dramatic program whose narrative structure includes self-contained stories that feature a problem, a series of conflicts, and a resolution from week to week (for contrast, see serial program and episodic series).
cinema verité French term for truth film, a documentary style that records fragments of everyday life unobtrusively; it often features a rough, grainy look and shaky, handheld camera work.
citizen journalism a grassroots movement wherein activist amateurs and concerned citizens, not professional journalists, use the Internet and blogs to disseminate news and information.
codex an early type of book in which paperlike sheets were cut and sewed together along an edge, then bound with thin pieces of wood and covered with leather.
collective intelligence thesharing of knowledge and ideas, particularly in the world of gaming.
commercial speech any print or broadcast expression for which a fee is charged to the organization or individual buying time or space in the mass media.
common carrier a communication or transportation business, such as a phone company or a taxi service, that is required by law to offer service on
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a first-come, first-served basis to whoever can pay the rate; such companies do not get involved in content.
communication the process of creating symbol systems that convey information and meaning (e.g., language, Morse code, film, and computer codes).
Communications Act of 1934 the far-reaching act that established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the federal regulatory structure for U.S. broadcasting.
communist or state model a model for journalism and speech that places control in the hands of an enlightened government, which speaks for ordinary citizens and workers in order to serve the common goals of the state.
compact discs (CDs) playback-only storage discs for music that incorporate pure and very precise digital techniques, thus eliminating noise during recording and editing sessions.
conflict of interest considered unethical, a compromising situation in which a journalist stands to benefit personally from the news report he or she produces.
conflict-oriented journalism found in metropolitan areas, newspapers that define news primarily as events, issues, or experiences that deviate from social norms; journalists see their role as observers who monitor their city’s institutions and problems.
consensus narratives cultural products that become popular and command wide attention, providing shared cultural experiences.
consensus-oriented journalism found in small communities, newspapers that promote social and economic harmony by providing community calendars and meeting notices and carrying articles on local schools, social events, town
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government, property crimes, and zoning issues.
consoles devices people use specifically to play video games.
contemporary hit radio (CHR) originally called Top 40 radio, this radio format encompasses everything from hip-hop to children’s songs; it appeals to many teens and young adults.
content analysis in social science research, a method for studying and coding media texts and programs.
content communities online communities that exist for the sharing of all types of content, from text to photos and videos.
convergence thefirst definition involves the technological merging of media content across various platforms (see also cross platform). The second definition describes a business model that consolidates various media holdings under one corporate umbrella.
cookies information profiles about a user that are usually automatically accepted by a Web browser and stored on the user’s own computer hard drive.
copy editors the people in magazine, newspaper, and book publishing who attend to specific problems in writing, such as style, content, and length.
copyright the legal right of authors and producers to own and control the use of their published or unpublished writing, music, and lyrics; TV programs and movies; or graphic art designs.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) a private, nonprofit corporation created by Congress in 1967 to
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funnel federal funds to nonprofit radio and public television.
correlations observedassociations between two variables.
country claiming the largest number of radio stations in the United States, this radio format includes such subdivisions as old-time, progressive, country-rock, western swing, and country-gospel.
cover music songs recorded or performed by musicians who did not originally write or perform the music; in the 1950s, some white producers and artists capitalized on popular songs by black artists by “covering” them.
critical process the process whereby a media-literate person or student studying mass communication forms and practices employs the techniques of description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement.
cross platform a particular business model that involves a consolidation of various media holdings—such as cable connection, phone service, television transmission, and Internet access—under one corporate umbrella (also known as convergence).
cultivation effect in media research, the idea that heavy television viewing leads individuals to perceive reality in ways that are consistent with the portrayals they see on television.
cultural imperialism the phenomenon of American media, fashion, and food dominating the global market and shaping the cultures and identities of other nations.
cultural studies in media research, the approaches that try to understand how the media and culture are tied to the actual patterns of communication
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used in daily life; these studies focus on how people make meanings, apprehend reality, and order experience through the use of stories and symbols.
culture the symbols of expression that individuals, groups, and societies use to make sense of daily life and to articulate their values; a process that delivers the values of a society through products or other meaning-making forms.
data mining the unethical gathering of data by online purveyors of content and merchandise.
deficit financing in television, the process whereby a TV production company leases its programs to a network for a license fee that is actually less than the cost of production; the company hopes to recoup this loss later in rerun syndication.
demographic editions national magazines whose advertising is tailored to subscribers and readers according to occupation, class, and zip code.
description the first step in the critical process, it involves paying close attention, taking notes, and researching the cultural product to be studied.
design managers publishing industry personnel who work on the look of a book, making decisions about type style, paper, cover design, and layout.
desktop publishing a computer technology that enables an aspiring publisher/editor to inexpensively write, design, lay out, and even print a small newsletter or magazine.
development the process of designing, coding, scoring, and testing a game.
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developmental editor in book publishing, the editor who provides authors with feedback, makes suggestions for improvements, and obtains advice from knowledgeable members of the academic community.
digital in television, the type of signals that are transmitted as binary code.
digital communication images, texts, and sounds that use pulses of electric current or flashes of laser light and are converted (or encoded) into electronic signals represented as varied combinations of binary numbers (ones and zeros); these signals are then reassembled (decoded) as a precise reproduction of a TV picture, a magazine article, or a telephone voice.
digital divide the socioeconomic disparity between those who do and those who do not have access to digital technology and media, such as the Internet.
digital recording music recorded and played back by laser beam rather than by needle or magnetic tape.
digital video the production format that is replacing celluloid film and revolutionizing filmmaking because the cameras are more portable and production costs are much less expensive.
dime novels sometimes identified as pulp fiction, these cheaply produced and low-priced novels were popular in the United States beginning in the 1860s.
direct broadcast satellite (DBS) asatellite-based service that for a monthly fee downlinks hundreds of satellite channels and services; DBS began distributing video programming directly to households in 1994.
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documentary a movie or TV news genre that documents reality by recording actual characters and settings.
domestic comedy a TV hybrid of the sitcom in which characters and settings are usually more important than complicated situations; it generally features a domestic problem or work issue that characters have to solve.
drive time in radio programming, the periods between 6 and 10 A.M. and 4 and 7 P.M., when people are commuting to and from work or school; these periods constitute the largest listening audiences of the day.
e-book a digital book read on a computer or on an electronic reading device.
e-commerce electronic commerce, or commercial activity, on the Web.
electromagnetic waves invisible electronic impulses similar to visible light; electricity, magnetism, light, broadcast signals, and heat are part of such waves, which radiate in space at the speed of light, about 186,000 miles per second.
electronic publishers communication businesses, such as broadcasters or cable TV companies, that are entitled to choose what channels or content to carry.
e-mail electronic mail messages sent over the Internet; developed by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1971.
engagement the fifth step in the critical process, it involves actively working to create a media world that best serves democracy.
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Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) a self-regulating organization that assigns ratings to games based on six categories: EC (Early Childhood), E (Everyone), E 10+, T (Teens), M 17+, and AO (Adults Only 18+).
episodic series a narrative form well suited to television because the main characters appear every week, sets and locales remain the same, and technical crews stay with the program; episodic series feature new adventures each week, but a handful of characters emerge with whom viewers can regularly identify (for contrast, see chapter show).
e-publishing Internet-based publishing houses that design and distribute books for comparatively low prices for authors who want to self-publish a title.
ethnocentrism an underlying value held by many U.S. journalists and citizens, it involves judging other countries and cultures according to how they live up to or imitate American practices and ideals.
evaluation the fourth step in the critical process, it involves arriving at a judgment about whether a cultural product is good, bad, or mediocre; this requires subordinating one’s personal taste to the critical assessment resulting from the first three stages (description, analysis, and interpretation).
evergreens in TV syndication, popular, lucrative, and enduring network reruns, such as the Andy Griffith Show and I Love Lucy.
evergreen subscriptions magazine subscriptions that automatically renew on the subscriber’s credit card.
experiments in regard to the mass media, research that isolates some aspect of
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content; suggests a hypothesis; and manipulates variables to discover a particular medium’s impact on attitudes, emotions, or behavior.
Fairness Doctrine repealed in 1987, this FCC rule required broadcast stations to both air and engage in controversial-issue programs that affected their communities and, when offering such programming, to provide competing points of view.
famous-person testimonial an advertising strategy that associates a product with the endorsement of a well-known person.
feature syndicates commercial outlets or brokers, such as United Features and King Features, that contract with newspapers to provide work from well- known political writers, editorial cartoonists, comic-strip artists, and self-help columnists.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) an independent U.S. government agency charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, cable, and the Internet.
Federal Radio Commission (FRC) abody established in 1927 to oversee radio licenses and negotiate channel problems.
fiber-optic cable thin glass bundles of fiber capable of transmitting along cable wires thousands of messages converted to shooting pulses of light; these bundles of fiber can carry broadcast channels, telephone signals, and a variety of digital codes.
fin-syn (Financial Interest and Syndication Rules) FCC rules that prohibited the major networks from running their own syndication companies or from charging production companies additional fees after shows had completed their prime-time runs; most fin-syn rules were
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rescinded in the mid-1990s.
first-person shooter (FPS) games that allow players to feel as if they are actually holding a weapon and to feel physically immersed in the drama.
first-run syndication in television, the process whereby new programs are specifically produced for sale in syndication markets rather than for network television.
flack a derogatory term that, in journalism, is sometimes applied to a public relations agent.
FM (frequency modulation) a type of radio and sound transmission that offers static-less reception and greater fidelity and clarity than AM radio by accentuating the pitch or distance between radio waves.
folk music music performed by untrained musicians and passed down through oral traditions; it encompasses a wide range of music, from Appalachian fiddle tunes to the accordion-led zydeco of Louisiana.
folk-rock amplified folk music, often featuring politically overt lyrics; influenced by rock and roll.
format radio the concept of radio stations developing and playing specific styles (or formats) geared to listeners’ age, race, or gender; in format radio, management, rather than deejays, controls programming choices.
Fourth Estate the notion that the press operates as an unofficial branch of government, monitoring the legislative, judicial, and executive branches for abuses of power.
fourth screens
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technologies like smartphones, iPods, iPads, and mobile TV devices, which are forcing major changes in consumer viewing habits and media content creation.
fringe time in television, the time slot either immediately before the evening’s prime-time schedule (called early fringe) or immediately following the local evening news or the network’s late-night talk shows (called late fringe).
gag orders legal restrictions prohibiting the press from releasing preliminary information that might prejudice jury selection.
gameplay the way in which a game’s rules, rather than its graphics, sound, or narrative style, structure how players interact with it.
gangster rap a style of rap music that depicts the hardships of urban life and sometimes glorifies the violent style of street gangs.
general-interest magazines types of magazines that address a wide variety of topics and are aimed at a broad national audience.
genre a narrative category in which conventions regarding similar characters, scenes, structures, and themes recur in combination.
grunge rock music that takes the spirit of punk and infuses it with more attention to melody.
guilds or clans in gaming, coordinated, organized teamlike groups that can be either small and easygoing or large and demanding.
HD radio a digital technology that enables AM and FM radio broadcasters to
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multicast two to three additional compressed digital signals within their traditional analog frequency.
hegemony the acceptance of the dominant values in a culture by those who are subordinate to those who hold economic and political power.
herd journalism a situation in which reporters stake out a house or follow a story in such large groups that the entire profession comes under attack for invading people’s privacy or exploiting their personal tragedies.
hidden-fear appeal an advertising strategy that plays on a sense of insecurity, trying to persuade consumers that only a specific product can offer relief.
high culture a symbolic expression that has come to mean “good taste”; often supported by wealthy patrons and corporate donors, it is associated with fine art (such as ballet, the symphony, painting, and classical literature), which is available primarily in theaters or museums.
hip-hop music that combines spoken street dialect with cuts (or samples) from older records and bears the influences of social politics, male boasting, and comic lyrics carried forward from blues, R&B, soul, and rock and roll.
Hollywood Ten the nine screenwriters and one film director subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) who were sent to prison in the late 1940s for refusing to disclose their memberships or to identify communist sympathizers.
HTML (hypertext markup language) the written code that creates Web pages and links; a language all computers can read.
human-interest stories news accounts that focus on the trials and tribulations of the human
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condition, often featuring ordinary individuals facing extraordinary challenges.
hypodermic-needle model an early model in mass communication research that attempted to explain media effects by arguing that the media figuratively shoot their powerful effects into unsuspecting or weak audiences; sometimes called the bullet theory or direct effects model.
hypotheses in social science research, tentative general statements that predict a relationship between a dependent variable and an independent variable.
illuminated manuscripts books from the Middle Ages that featured decorative, colorful designs and illustrations on each page.
indecency an issue related to appropriate broadcast content; the government may punish broadcasters for indecency or profanity after the fact, and over the years a handful of radio stations have had their licenses suspended or denied over indecent programming.
indie rock less commercial rock music, which appeals chiefly to college students and twentysomethings.
indies independent music and film production houses that work outside industry oligopolies; they often produce less mainstream music and film.
individualism an underlying value held by most U.S. journalists and citizens, it favors individual rights and responsibilities above group needs or institutional mandates.
in-game advertisements integrated, often subtle advertisements, such as billboards, logos, or
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storefronts in a game, that can be either static or dynamic.
instant messaging a Web feature that enables users to chat with friends in real time via pop-up windows assigned to each conversation.
intellectual properties in gaming, the stories, characters, personalities, and music that require licensing agreements.
Internet the vast network of telephone and cable lines, wireless connections, and satellite systems designed to link and carry computer information worldwide.
Internet radio online radio stations that either “stream” simulcast versions of on-air radio broadcasts over the Web or are created exclusively for the Internet.
Internet service provider (ISP) a company that provides Internet access to homes and businesses for a fee.
interpretation the third step in the critical process, it asks and answers the “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about one’s findings.
interpretive journalism a type of journalism that involves analyzing and explaining key issues or events and placing them in a broader historical or social context.
interstitials advertisements that pop up in a screen window as a user attempts to access a new Web page.
inverted-pyramid style a style of journalism in which news reports begin with the most dramatic or newsworthy information—answering who, what, where,
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and when (and less frequently why or how) questions at the top of the story—and then trail off with less significant details.
investigative journalism news reports that hunt out and expose corruption, particularly in business and government.
irritation advertising an advertising strategy that tries to create product-name recognition by being annoying or obnoxious.
jazz an improvisational and mostly instrumental musical form that absorbs and integrates a diverse body of musical styles, including African rhythms, blues, big band, and gospel.
joint operating agreement (JOA) in the newspaper industry, an economic arrangement, sanctioned by the government, that permits competing newspapers to operate separate editorial divisions while merging business and production operations.
kinescope before the days of videotape, a 1950s technique for preserving television broadcasts by using a film camera to record a live TV show off a studio monitor.
kinetograph an early movie camera developed by Thomas Edison’s assistant in the 1890s.
kinetoscope an early film projection system that served as a kind of peep show in which viewers looked through a hole and saw images moving on a tiny plate.
leased channels in cable television, channels that allow citizens to buy time for producing programs or presenting their own viewpoints.
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libel in media law, the defamation of character in written expression.
libertarian model a model for journalism and speech that encourages vigorous government criticism and supports the highest degree of freedom for individual speech and news operations.
limited competition in media economics, a market with many producers and sellers but only a few differentiable products within a particular category; sometimes called monopolistic competition.
linotype a technology introduced in the nineteenth century that enabled printers to set type mechanically using a typewriter-style keyboard.
literary journalism news reports that adapt fictional storytelling techniques to nonfictional material; sometimes called new journalism.
Little Three See Big Five/Little Three.
lobbying in governmental public relations, the process of attempting to influence the voting of lawmakers to support a client’s or an organization’s best interests.
longitudinal studies a term used for research studies that are conducted over long periods of time and often rely on large government and academic survey databases.
low culture a symbolic expression supposedly aligned with the questionable tastes of the “masses,” who enjoy the commercial “junk” circulated by the mass media, such as reality television, teen pop music, TV wrestling shows, talk radio, comic books, and monster truck pulls.
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low-power FM (LPFM) a new class of noncommercial radio stations approved by the FCC in 2000 to give voice to local groups lacking access to the public airwaves; the 10-watt and 100-watt stations broadcast to a small, community-based area.
magalog a combination of a glossy magazine and retail catalogue that is often used to market goods or services to customers or employees.
magazine a nondaily periodical that comprises a collection of articles, stories, and ads.
manuscript culture a period during the Middle Ages when priests and monks advanced the art of bookmaking.
market research in advertising and public relations agencies, the department that uses social science techniques to assess the behaviors and attitudes of consumers toward particular products before any ads are created.
mass communication the process of designing and delivering cultural messages and stories to diverse audiences through media channels as old as the book and as new as the Internet.
massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) role-playing games set in virtual fantasy worlds that require users to play through an avatar.
mass media the cultural industries—the channels of communication—that produce and distribute songs, novels, news, movies, online computer services, and other cultural products to a large number of people.
media buyers in advertising, the individuals who choose and purchase the types of media that are best suited to carry a client’s ads and reach the
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targeted audience.
media effects research the mainstream tradition in mass communication research, it attempts to understand, explain, and predict the impact—or effects —of the mass media on individuals and society.
media literacy an understanding of the mass communication process through the development of critical-thinking tools—description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, engagement—that enable a person to become more engaged as a citizen and more discerning as a consumer of mass media products.
mega-agencies in advertising, large firms or holding companies that are formed by merging several individual agencies and that maintain worldwide regional offices; they provide both advertising and public relations services and operate in-house radio and TV production studios.
megaplexes movie theater facilities with fourteen or more screens.
microprocessors miniature circuits that process and store electronic signals, integrating thousands of electronic components into thin strands of silicon, along which binary codes travel.
minimal-effects model a mass communication research model based on tightly controlled experiments and survey findings; it argues that the mass media have limited effects on audiences, reinforcing existing behaviors and attitudes rather than changing them.
modding the most advanced form of collective intelligence; slang for modifying game software or hardware.
modern the term describinga historical era spanning the time from the rise of
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the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the present; its social values include celebrating the individual, believing in rational order, working efficiently, and rejecting tradition.
monopoly in media economics, an organizational structure that occurs when a single firm dominates production and distribution in a particular industry, either nationally or locally.
Morse code a system of sending electrical impulses from a transmitter through a cable to a reception point; developed by the American inventor Samuel Morse.
movie palaces ornate, lavish single-screen movie theaters that emerged in the 1910s in the United States.
MP3 short for MPEG-1 Layer 3, an advanced type of audio compression that reduces file size, enabling audio to be easily distributed over the Internet and to be digitally transmitted in real time.
muckrakers reporters who useda style of early-twentieth-century investigative journalism that emphasized a willingness to crawl around in society’s muck to uncover a story.
multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) the cable industry’s name for its largest revenue generators, including cable companies and DBS providers.
multiple-system operators (MSOs) large corporations that own numerous cable television systems.
multiplexes contemporary movie theaters that exhibit many movies at the same time on multiple screens.
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must-carry rules rules established by the FCC requiring all cable operators to assign channels to and carry all local TV broadcasts on their systems, thereby ensuring that local network affiliates, independent stations (those not carrying network programs), and public television channels would benefit from cable’s clearer reception.
myth analysis a strategy for critiquing advertising that provides insights into how ads work on a cultural level; according to this strategy, ads are narratives with stories to tell and social conflicts to resolve.
narrative the structure underlying most media products, it includes two components: the story (what happens to whom) and the discourse (how the story is told).
narrative films movies that tell a story, with dramatic action and conflict emerging mainly from individual characters.
narrowcasting any specialized electronic programming or media channel aimed at a target audience.
National Public Radio (NPR) noncommercial radio established in 1967 by the U.S. Congress to provide an alternative to commercial radio.
net neutrality the principle that every Web site and every user—whether a multinational corporation or you—has the right to the same Internet network speed and access.
network a broadcast process that links, through special phone lines or satellite transmissions, groups of radio or TV stations that share programming produced at a central location.
network era
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the period in television history, roughly from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, that refers to the dominance of the Big Three networks— ABC, CBS, and NBC—over programming and prime-time viewing habits; the era began eroding with a decline in viewing and with the development of VCRs, cable, and new TV networks.
news the process of gathering information and making narrative reports— edited by individuals in a news organization—that create selected frames of reference and help the public make sense of prominent people, important events, and unusual happenings in everyday life.
newshole the space left over in a newspaper for news content after all the ads are placed.
newspaper chain alarge company that owns several papers throughout the country.
newsreels weekly ten-minute magazine-style compilations of filmed news events from around the world organized in a sequence of short reports; prominent in movie theaters between the 1920s and the 1950s.
news/talk/information the fastest-growing radio format in the 1990s, dominated by news programs and talk shows.
newsworthiness the often unstated criteria that journalists use to determine which events and issues should become news reports, including timeliness, proximity, conflict, prominence, human interest, consequence, usefulness, novelty, and deviance.
nickelodeons the first small makeshift movie theaters, which were often converted cigar stores, pawnshops, or restaurants redecorated to mimic vaudeville theaters.
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ninjas game players who snatch loot out of turn and then leave a pick-up group, or PUG.
noobs game players who are clueless beginners.
O & Os TV stations “owned and operated” by networks.
objective journalism a modern style of journalism that distinguishes factual reports from opinion columns; reporters strive to remain neutral toward the issue or event they cover, searching out competing points of view among the sources for a story.
obscenity expression that is not protected as speech if these three legal tests are all met: (1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the material as a whole appeals to prurient interest; (2) the material depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; (3) the material, as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
off-network syndication in television, the process whereby older programs that no longer run during prime time are made available for reruns to local stations, cable operators, online services, and foreign markets.
offset lithography a technology that enabled books to be printed from photographic plates rather than metal casts, reducing the cost of color and illustrations and eventually permitting computers to perform typesetting.
oligopoly in media economics, an organizational structure in which a few firms control most of an industry’s production and distribution resources.
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online fantasy sports games in which players assemble teams and use actual sports results to determine scores in their online games. These games reach a mass audience, have a major social component, and take a managerial perspective on the game.
online piracy the illegal uploading, downloading, or streaming of copyrighted material, such as music or movies.
open-source software noncommercial software shared freely and developed collectively on the Internet.
opinion and fair comment a defense against libel that states that libel applies only to intentional misstatements of factual information rather than to statements of opinion.
opt-in or opt-out policies controversial Web site policies over personal data gathering: opt-in means Web sites must gain explicit permission from online consumers before the site can collect their personal data; opt-out means that Web sites can automatically collect personal data unless the consumer goes to the trouble of filling out a specific form to restrict the practice.
option time a business tactic, now illegal, whereby a radio network in the 1920s and 1930s paid an affiliate station a set fee per hour for an option to control programming and advertising on that station.
Pacifica Foundation a radio broadcasting foundation established in Berkeley, California, by journalist and World War II pacifist Lewis Hill; in 1949, Hill established KPFA, the first nonprofit community radio station.
paperback books books made with less expensive paper covers, introduced in the United States in the mid-1800s.
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papyrus one of the first substances to hold written language and symbols; produced from plant reeds found along the Nile River.
Paramount decision the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended vertical integration in the film industry by forcing the studios to divest themselves of their theaters.
parchment treated animal skin that replaced papyrus as an early pre-paper substance on which to document written language.
partisan press an early dominant style of American journalism distinguished by opinion newspapers, which generally argued one political point of view or pushed the plan of the particular party that subsidized the paper.
pass-along readership the total number of people who come into contact with a single copy of a magazine.
payola the unethical (but not always illegal) practice of record promoters’ paying deejays or radio programmers to favor particular songs over others.
pay-per-view (PPV) a cable-television service that allows customers to select a particular movie for a fee, or to pay $25 to $40 for a special one-time event.
paywall an online portal that charges consumers a fee for access to news content.
penny arcade the first thoroughly modern indoor playground, filled with coin- operated games.
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penny papers (also penny press) refers to newspapers that, because of technological innovations in printing, were able to drop their price to one cent beginning in the 1830s, thereby making papers affordable to the working and emerging middle classes and enabling newspapers to become a genuine mass medium.
phishing an Internet scam that begins with phony e-mail messages that appear to be from an official site and request that customers send their credit card numbers and other personal information to update their account.
photojournalism the use of photos to document events and people’s lives.
pinball machine the most prominent mechanical game, in which players score points by manipulating the path of a metal ball on a playfield in a glass- covered case.
plain-folks pitch an advertising strategy that associates a product with simplicity and the common person.
podcasting a distribution method (coined from “iPod” and “broadcasting”) that enables listeners to download audio program files from the Internet for playback on computers or digital music players.
political advertising the use of ad techniques to promote a candidate’s image and persuade the public to adopt a particular viewpoint.
political economy studies an area of academic study that specifically examines interconnections among economic interests, political power, and how that power is used.
pop music
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popular music that appeals either to a wide cross section of the public or to sizable subdivisions within the larger public based on age, region, or ethnic background; the word pop has also been used as a label to distinguish popular music from classical music.
portal an entry point to the Internet, such as a search engine.
postmodern the term describinga contemporary historical era spanning the 1960s to the present; its social values include opposing hierarchy, diversifying and recycling culture, questioning scientific reasoning, and embracing paradox.
premium channels in cable programming, a tier of channels that subscribers can order at an additional monthly fee over their basic cable service; these may include movie channels and interactive services.
press agent the earliest type of public relations practitioner, who seeks to advance a client’s image through media exposure.
press releases in public relations, announcements—written in the style of news reports—that give new information about an individual, a company, or an organization, and pitch a story idea to the news media.
prime time in television programming, the hours between 8 and 11 P.M. (or 7 and 10 P.M. in the Midwest), when networks have traditionally drawn their largest audiences and charged their highest advertising rates.
Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR) an FCC regulation that reduced networks’ control of prime-time programming to encourage more local news and public affairs programs, often between 6 and 7 P.M.
printing press
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a fifteenth-century invention whose movable metallic type spawned modern mass communication by creating the first method for mass production; it not only reduced the size and cost of books—making them the first mass medium affordable to less affluent people—but provided the impetus for the Industrial Revolution, assembly-line production, modern capitalism, and the rise of consumer culture.
prior restraint the legal definition of censorship in the United States; it prohibits courts and governments from blocking any publication or speech before it actually occurs.
product placement the advertising practice of strategically placing products in movies, TV shows, comic books, and video games so that the products appear as part of a story’s set environment.
professional books technical books that target various occupational groups and are not intended for the general consumer market.
Progressive Era a period of political and social reform that lasted from the 1890s to the 1920s.
progressive rock an alternative music format that developed as a backlash to the popularity of Top 40.
propaganda in advertising and public relations, a communication strategy that tries to manipulate public opinion to gain support for a special issue, program, or policy, such as a nation’s war effort.
propaganda analysis the study of propaganda’s effectiveness in influencing and mobilizing public opinion.
pseudo-events in public relations, circumstances or events created solely for the
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purpose of obtaining coverage in the media.
pseudo-polls typically call-in, online, or person-in-the-street nonscientific polls that the news media use to address a “question of the day.”
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 the act by the U.S. Congress that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) noncommercial television established in 1967 by the U.S. Congress to provide an alternative to commercial television.
public domain the end of the copyright period for a work, at which point the public may begin to access it for free.
publicity in public relations, the positive and negative messages that spread controlled and uncontrolled information about a person, a corporation, an issue, or a policy in various media.
public journalism a type of journalism, driven by citizen forums, that goes beyond telling the news to embrace a broader mission of improving the quality of public life; also called civic journalism.
public relations the total communication strategy conducted by a person, a government, or an organization attempting to reach and persuade its audiences to adopt a point of view.
public service announcements (PSAs) reports or announcements, carried free by radio and TV stations, that promote government programs, educational projects, voluntary agencies, or social reform.
public sphere
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those areas or arenas in social life—like the town square or coffeehouse—where people come together regularly to discuss social and cultural problems and try to influence politics; the public sphere is distinguished from governmental spheres, where elected officials and other representatives conduct affairs of state.
PUGs in gaming, temporary teams usually assembled by matchmaking programs integrated into a game (short for “pick-up groups”).
pulp fiction a term used to describe many late-nineteenth-century popular paperbacks and dime novels, which were constructed of cheap machine-made pulp material.
punk rock rock music that challenges the orthodoxy and commercialism of the recording business; it is characterized by loud, unpolished qualities, a jackhammer beat, primal vocal screams, crude aggression, and defiant or comic lyrics.
qualified privilege a legal right allowing journalists to report judicial or legislative proceedings even though the public statements being reported may be libelous.
Radio Act of 1912 the first radio legislation passed by Congress, it addressed the problem of amateur radio operators cramming the airwaves.
Radio Act of 1927 the second radio legislation passed by Congress; in an attempt to restore order to the airwaves, the act stated that licensees did not own their channels but could license them if they operated to serve the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.”
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) a company developed during World War I that was designed, with government approval, to pool radio patents; the formation of RCA gave the United States almost total control over the emerging mass
1157
medium of broadcasting.
radio waves a portion of the electromagnetic wave spectrum that was harnessed so that signals could be sent from a transmission point and obtained at a reception point.
random assignment a social science research method for assigning research subjects; it ensures that every subject has an equal chance of being placed in either the experimental group or the control group.
rating in TV audience measurement, a statistical estimate expressed as a percentage of households tuned to a program in the local or national market being sampled.
regional editions national magazines whose content is tailored to the interests of different geographic areas.
responsible capitalism an underlying value held by many U.S. journalists and citizens, it assumes that businesspeople should compete with one another not primarily to maximize profits but to increase prosperity for all.
retransmission fee the fee that cable providers pay to broadcast networks for the right to carry their channels.
rhythm and blues (R&B) music that merges urban blues with big-band sounds.
right to privacy addresses a person’s right to be left alone, without his or her name, image, or daily activities becoming public property.
rockabilly music that mixes bluegrass and country influences with those of black folk music and early amplified blues.
1158
rock and roll music that merges the African American influences of urban blues, gospel, and R&B with the white influences of country, folk, and pop vocals.
role-playing games (RPGs) games that are typically set in a fantasy or sci-fi world in which each player (there can be multiple players in a game) chooses to play as a character that specializes in a particular skill set.
rotation in format radio programming, the practice of playing the most popular or best-selling songs many times throughout the day.
satellite radio pay radio services that deliver various radio formats nationally via satellite.
saturation advertising the strategy of inundating a variety of print and visual media with ads aimed at target audiences.
scientific method a widely used research method that studies phenomena in systematic stages; it includes identifying a research problem, reviewing existing research, developing working hypotheses, determining appropriate research design, collecting information, analyzing results to see if the hypotheses have been verified, and interpreting the implications of the study.
search engines sites or applications that offer a more automated route to finding content by allowing users to enter key words or queries to locate related Web pages.
Section 315 part of the 1934 Communications Act; it mandates that during elections, broadcast stations must provide equal opportunities and response time for qualified political candidates.
1159
selective exposure the phenomenon whereby audiences seek messages and meanings that correspond to their preexisting beliefs and values.
selective retention the phenomenon whereby audiences remember or retain messages and meanings that correspond to their preexisting beliefs and values.
serial program a radio or TV program, such as a soap opera, that features continuing story lines from day to day or week to week (for contrast, see chapter show).
share in TV audience measurement, a statistical estimate of the percentage of homes tuned to a certain program compared with those simply using their sets at the time of a sample.
shield laws laws protecting the confidentiality of key interview subjects and reporters’ rights not to reveal the sources of controversial information used in news stories.
simulation games games that involve managing resources and planning worlds that are typically based in reality.
situation comedy a type of comedy series that features a recurring cast and set as well as several narrative scenes; each episode establishes a situation, complicates it, develops increasing confusion among its characters, and then resolves the complications.
sketch comedy short television comedy skits that are usually segments of TV variety shows; sometimes known as vaudeo, the marriage of vaudeville and video.
slander in law, spoken language that defames a person’s character.
1160
slogan in advertising, a catchy phrase that attempts to promote or sell a product by capturing its essence in words.
small-town pastoralism an underlying value held by many U.S. journalists and citizens, it favors the small over the large and the rural over the urban.
snob-appeal approach an advertising strategy that attempts to convince consumers that using a product will enable them to maintain or elevate their social station.
social learning theory a theory within media effects research that suggests a link between the mass media and behavior.
social media digital applications that allow people worldwide to have conversations, share common interests, and generate their own media content online.
social networking sites sites on which users can create content, share ideas, and interact with friends.
social responsibility model a model for journalism and speech in which the press functions as a Fourth Estate, monitoring the three branches of government for abuses of power, and provides information necessary for self- governance.
soul music that mixes gospel, blues, and urban and southern black styles with slower, more emotional, and melancholic lyrics.
sound bite in TV journalism, the equivalent of a quote in print; the part of a news report in which an expert, a celebrity, a victim, or a person on the street is interviewed about some aspect of an event or issue.
1161
space brokers in the days before modern advertising, individuals who purchased space in newspapers and sold it to various merchants.
spam a computer term referring to unsolicited e-mail.
spiral of silence a theory that links the mass media, social psychology, and the formation of public opinion; the theory says that people who hold minority views on controversial issues tend to keep their views silent.
split-run editions editions of national magazines that tailor ads to different geographic areas.
spyware software with secretive codes that enable commercial firms to “spy” on users and gain access to their computers.
stereo the recording of two separate channels or tracks of sound.
storyboard in advertising, a blueprint or roughly drawn comic-strip version of a proposed advertisement.
strategy games games in which perspective is omniscient and the player must survey the entire “world” or playing field and make strategic decisions.
studio system an early film production system that constituted a sort of assembly- line process for moviemaking; major film studios controlled not only actors but also directors, editors, writers, and other employees, all of whom worked under exclusive contracts.
subliminal advertising
1162
a 1950s term that refers to hidden or disguised print and visual messages that allegedly register on the subconscious, creating false needs and seducing people into buying products.
subsidiary rights in the book industry, selling the rights to a book for use in other media forms, such as a mass market paperback, a CD-ROM, or the basis for a movie screenplay.
supermarket tabloids newspapers that feature bizarre human-interest stories, gruesome murder tales, violent accident accounts, unexplained phenomena stories, and malicious celebrity gossip.
superstations local independent TV stations, such as WTBS in Atlanta or WGN in Chicago, that have uplinked their signals onto a communication satellite to make themselves available nationwide.
survey research in social science research, a method of collecting and measuring data taken from a group of respondents.
syndication leasing TV stations or cable networks the exclusive right to air TV shows.
synergy in media economics, the promotion and sale of a product (and all its versions) throughout the various subsidiaries of a media conglomerate.
talkies movies with sound, beginning in 1927.
Telecommunications Act of 1996 the sweeping update of telecommunications law that led to a wave of media consolidation.
telegraph
1163
invented in the 1840s, it sent electrical impulses through a cable from a transmitter to a reception point, transmitting Morse code.
textbooks books made for the el-hi (elementary and high school) and college markets.
textual analysis in media research, a method for closely and critically examining and interpreting the meanings of culture, including architecture, fashion, books, movies, and TV programs.
third-person effect the theory that people believe others are more affected by media messages than they are themselves.
third screens the computer-type screens on which consumers can view television, movies, music, newspapers, and books.
time shifting the process whereby television viewers record shows and watch them later, when it is convenient for them.
Top 40 format the first radio format, in which stations played the forty most popular hits in a given week, as measured by record sales.
trade books the most visible book industry segment, featuring hardbound and paperback books aimed at general readers and sold at bookstores and other retail outlets.
transistors invented by Bell Laboratories in 1947, these tiny pieces of technology, which receive and amplify radio signals, make portable radios possible.
trolls players who take pleasure in intentionally spoiling a gaming
1164
experience for others.
underground press radical newspapers, run on shoestring budgets, that question mainstream political policies and conventional values; the term usually refers to a journalism movement of the 1960s.
university press the segment of the book industry that publishes scholarly books in specialized areas.
urban contemporary one of radio’s more popular formats, primarily targeting African American listeners in urban areas with dance, R&B, and hip-hop music.
uses and gratifications model a mass communication research model, usually employing in-depth interviews and survey questionnaires, that argues that people use the media to satisfy various emotional desires or intellectual needs.
Values and Lifestyles (VALS) a market-research strategy that divides consumers into types and measures psychological factors, including how consumers think and feel about products and how they achieve (or do not achieve) the lifestyles to which they aspire.
vellum a handmade paper made from treated animal skin, used in the Gutenberg Bibles.
vertical integration in media economics, the phenomenon of controlling a mass media industry at its three essential levels: production, distribution, and exhibition; the term is most frequently used in reference to the film industry.
video news releases (VNRs) in public relations, the visual counterparts to press releases; they pitch story ideas to the TV news media by mimicking the style of a
1165
broadcast news report.
video-on-demand (VOD) cable television technology that enables viewers to instantly order programming, such as movies, to be digitally delivered to their sets.
video subscription services a term referring to cable and video-on-demand providers, introduced to include streaming-only companies like Hulu Plus and Netflix.
viral marketing short videos or other content that marketers hope will quickly gain widespread attention as users share it with friends online or by word of mouth.
vitascope a large-screen movie projection system developed by Thomas Edison.
Webzine a magazine that publishes on the Internet.
wiki Web sites Web sites that are capable of being edited by any user; the most famous is Wikipedia.
wireless telegraphy the forerunner of radio, it is a form of voiceless point-to-point communication; it preceded the voice and sound transmissions of one-to-many mass communication that became known as broadcasting.
wireless telephony early experiments in wireless voice and music transmissions, which later developed into modern radio.
wire services commercial organizations, such as the Associated Press, that share news stories and information by relaying them around the country and the world, originally via telegraph and now via satellite
1166
transmission.
World Wide Web (WWW) a data-linking system for organizing and standardizing information on the Internet; the WWW enables computer-accessed information to associate with—or link to—other information, no matter where it is on the Internet.
yellow journalism a newspaper style or era that peaked in the 1890s, it emphasized high-interest stories, sensational crime news, large headlines, and serious reports that exposed corruption, particularly in business and government.
zines self-published magazines produced on personal computer programs or on the Internet.
1167
Credits
Page 40, Figure 2.1: Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, “Distributed Networks,” from Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Copyright © 1996 by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 80, Case Study: Isabela Granic, Adam Lobel, and Rutger C. M. E. Engels, “The Benefits of Playing Video Games,” American Psychologist, January 2014, 69(1), 66–78. Reprinted with permission. 128, Global Village: John Seabrook, “Blank Space: What Kind of Genius Is Max Martin?,” from the New Yorker, September 30, 2016. John Seabrook/The New Yorker © Conde Nast Publications, Inc. 132, Case Study: Michael K. Park, “Psy-zing Up to Mainstream of ‘Gangnam Style.’” Used by permission of the author. 158, Case Study: David Foster Wallace, excerpt from “Host: The Origin of Talk Show Radio.” Originally published in the Atlantic, April 2005, pp. 66–68. Reprinted by permission of The David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. 298, Case Study: Christopher R. Harris, “The Evolution of Photojournalism,” Courtesy Christopher R. Harris. 328, Case Study: Mark C. Rogers, “Comic Books: Alternative Themes, but Superheroes Prevail.” Used by permission of the author. 368, Case Study: Bradley Johnson, “Super Bowl, Supersized: $4.5 Billion in Ad Spending over 50 Years.” Reprinted with permission from Crain Communications Inc. 376, Global Village: Wang Xiaodong, “Tough New Laws on Tobacco Advertising Lauded by WHO.” Reproduced with permission of China Daily. 404, Table 12.2: Public Relations Society of America, Ethics Code. Used by permission of the Public Relations Society of America. 430, Case Study: Kristal Brent Zook, “Blacks Own Just Ten U.S. Television Stations. Here’s Why.” Courtesy of Kristal Brent Zook. 458, Figure 14.1: Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. Copyright © Society of Professional Journalists. Reprinted with permission.
1168
Index
AAA Living, 303
AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), 303, 306
AARP Bulletin, 300, 303, 306, 313
AARP The Magazine, 300, 303, 305–306, 313, 425
ABC (American Broadcasting Company), 200, 351–352, 437, 487
Disney and, 196, 205, 419, 425, 427, 435
ESPN and, 182–183, 205
news and, 4, 8, 191, 249, 455, 463, 465
radio and, 151, 165
TV and, 12, 173–174, 177, 180, 191–192
“ABC” (Jackson 5), 120
ABC Family (now Freeform), 427
ABC World News Tonight, 191
Abduction, 227
Abdul, Paula, 358
Abercrombie & Fitch, 423
1169
abolition, 267, 291, 308, 313, 342
abortion, 463, 464
Abramoff, Jack, 400
Abramson, Jill, 263
Absolut Vodka, 375
Abu Ghraib prison, 482
Academy Awards, 226–228, 230, 251, 427
access, media, 40, 46–47, 50–52, 61–62, 96–97, 102, 191, 439, 531
Access Hollywood, 256
accountability, 251, 252, 280, 437, 444, 446, 527–528, 540
AC/DC, 156
Acta Diurna, 253
Action for Children’s Television (ACT), 373
Activision, 94
Activision Blizzard, 94–96
activism, 48, 118, 267, 269–270, 475
music and, 120–121, 123, 126, 134, 156
See also social change
Acura, 537
Adams, Eddie, 299
Adams, John, 509
Adams, Ryan, 116
1170
Adbusters, 372, 373
Ad Council, 357
Adele (Adele Laurie Blue Adkins), 105–106, 127
Adelson, Sheldon, 444
Adidas, 393, 397
AdMob, 54
Adorno, T. W., 496
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA; Defense Department), 39–41
Advance Publications, 311, 437
Adventures by Disney, 242
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), 335
advertising, 20–21, 348, 351–383
alcohol, 357, 371, 375, 377
audiences and, 157, 181, 203–204
book, 325, 339, 343
children and, 373–374
classified, 253, 255, 267, 270, 414–415, 470
competition for, 4, 268, 276, 301, 310, 351, 360, 364, 478
consumerism and, 353, 356, 366, 372, 378–380
criticism of, 22, 357, 380
economy and, 353, 356–357, 361, 379
Facebook and, 54–55, 364
1171
gaming and, 85–87, 382
Google and, 4, 11–12, 54, 363–364, 433
government and, 356
green, 369, 378
health and, 374–377
impact of, 371–377
Internet, 4, 42–43, 54–55, 58, 200, 205, 243, 351–352, 356, 363–366, 372, 380, 415, 478
magazine, 200, 291, 294–295, 300, 303, 310, 351, 354, 364
media corporations and, 416–417
mobile devices and, 55, 310, 364–365, 447
music and, 106, 130, 133, 358, 382
newspaper, 200, 253, 255, 267–268, 270, 272, 275, 278, 351, 354, 356, 364, 414
political, 4, 380, 424, 442, 444
vs. PR, 387, 397
product placements and, 239, 353, 370, 374, 378, 382, 417
radio, 147, 152, 157, 165, 353, 358, 364
regulation and, 355, 357, 372–376, 378, 511
targeted, 43, 55, 58, 205, 361, 365, 374–375, 377
tobacco industry, 371, 375, 376, 379, 394–395
TV, 22, 174, 178, 184–185, 189, 200–201, 203–205, 283–284, 351–353, 357–359, 363–364, 371, 373–374, 377, 380
1172
video rentals and, 185
viral marketing and, 361, 366, 382
World War II and, 356–357, 393, 489
Advertising Age, 303, 352
advertising agencies, 358–361, 363, 364
Advertising Agencies, American Association of (AAAA), 357
advertising campaigns
antismoking, 379, 394–395
“got milk?,” 353
#LegalizeCheese, 401
Miller Lite, 361–362
Smokey the Bear, 357
Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion (Schudson), 370
advertorials, 86
advice columns, 257
Advocate, 308
A&E, 174, 205, 210, 427
Aerosmith, 125
affirmative action, 268
Afghanistan, 447
Afghanistan War (2001–present), 13, 16, 464, 476
AFL-CIO, 393
1173
Africa, 45, 48, 244, 275, 476, 508
African Americans, 91, 267, 297, 300, 394, 496
advertising and, 375, 377
magazines and, 307, 308
movies and, 227, 228
music and, 114–120, 124–125
newspapers and, 267–268, 270
radio and, 152, 159
TV and, 153, 202, 425, 430–431
violence against, 271
See also Civil Rights movement
Afro-American (Baltimore), 268
After Earth, 227
Against the Current, 313
Agee, James, 261, 475
Agence France-Presse, 273
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., 204
Age of Conan, 84
Aïda (Verdi), 18
AIDS, 308, 357
“Ain’t That a Shame” (Domino), 118
Air1, 167
1174
Airbnb, 304
Akira, 86
Aladdin, 427
alcoholism, 236
Alexander, Charles, 293
Alfred A. Knopf, 325, 337
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 188, 189
Algeria, 282–283
Alice in Chains, 125
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 332–333
Alice in Wonderland (Disney film), 426
Alice’s Wonderland, 426
Alienated American, 267
Alkaline Trio, 133
“All Along the Watchtower” (Dylan), 117
All Day, 529
Allegiant (Roth), 320, 331
Allen, Byron, 430
Allen, Gracie, 150
Allen, Paul, 52
Allen, Woody, 54, 188
All the President’s Men (film), 251–252
1175
All the President’s Men (Woodward and Bernstein), 452
All Things Considered, 161
Ally McBeal, 189
Alpert, Phillip, 517
Altamont racetrack concert, 121–122
Alternative Newsweeklies, Association of, 270
amateur production, 13, 469, 472, 501
Amazing Spider-Man 2, The, 86
Amazon, 52, 65, 330–334, 341–345, 348, 442
Audible and, 331, 349
book industry and, 327, 333–334, 337, 341–342
brand value of, 349
content creation and, 21, 51, 54, 173–174
convergence and, 11
e-books and, 51, 332, 338, 341–342
e-commerce and, 343, 432–433
Foxconn and, 56, 422
gaming and, 86, 97
jobs at, 345
as leading digital conglomerate, 11, 103, 349, 414–415, 429, 432–433
movies and, 237–238, 241, 242
music and, 130, 134
1176
Netflix and, 54, 413–414
net neutrality and, 62
streaming and, 419
TV and, 12
vertical integration and, 341
Amazon Appstore, 49, 332
Amazon Cloud, 54
Amazon CreateSpace, 342
Amazon Fire Phone, 433
Amazon Fire TV, 49, 433
Amazon Instant Video, 50, 185
Amazon Kindle, 49, 51, 54, 56, 78, 310, 332, 341–342, 349, 433
Amazon Prime, 112, 184, 206, 352, 419
Amazon Publishing, 341
Amazon Video, 103
AMC, 20–21, 23, 174, 184, 187, 239–240
Amélie, 229
American Bandstand, 118
American Cancer Society, 393
American Family Association, 167
American Family Radio, 167
American Farmer, 292
1177
American Graffiti, 226
American Horror Story, 189–190
American Hustle, 231
American Idol, 156, 194, 370
American Journal of Education, 292
American Journal of Science, 292
American Law Journal, 292
American Legacy Foundation, 379
American Legion Magazine, 303
American Library Association (ALA), 60–61, 336
American Magazine, 292
American Medical Association, 393
“American Pie” (McLean), 119
American Psychologist, 80
American Revolution, 254, 263, 292, 475
American Rifleman, 303
Americans, The, 20
American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), 112
American Spectator, 312
American Tobacco Company, 356, 391–392
American Top 40, 156
America’s Got Talent, 487
1178
Amini, Hossein, 245
Amos ’n’ Andy, 151, 152–153
Amsterdam, 334
Amsterdam News (Harlem), 268
Amy, 230
Analytics 360, 363
Anchorman, 20–21, 466
Anderson, Laurie Halse, 500
Anderson, Wes, 20, 231
Anderson Cooper 360 ˚, 467
Andreessen, Marc, 42
Andrews, Julie, 330
Andrews Sisters, 113
Android operating system, 49, 51–52, 54, 77–78, 97, 349, 433
Andrus, Ethel Percy, 306
Andrzejewski, Alexa, 64
Andy Griffith, 23
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 513
Angelou, Maya, 336
Angels (band), 119
Angie’s List, 304
Angie’s List (magazine), 304
1179
Angry Birds, 78, 81–83, 86, 95, 97, 98
Anheuser-Busch, 183
Anik, 180
Animal Farm (Orwell), 336
Animals (band), 119
animation, 215–216, 241, 426–427
anime, 86, 233, 246
Annenberg, Walter, 300
“Annie Had a Baby,” 114
Anonymous, 46–47, 446
Anthropologie, 340
anti-Semitism, 236, 271
antitrust regulation, 257, 296, 418–419, 421, 434, 438
Anton, Leonora LaPeter, 259, 450
AOL (previously America Online), 42–43, 52
Huffington Post and, 283, 421
Time Warner and, 311, 421, 425, 434–435
Verizon and, 283
Appalachia, 121, 496
Apple, 23, 43, 50–54, 65, 186, 370, 540
books and, 332, 341–342
brand value of, 349, 369
1180
convergence and, 11
FBI and, 518
Foxconn and, 56–57, 422
gaming and, 77
as leading digital conglomerate, 349, 414–415, 429, 432–433
mobile devices and, 49, 97, 242
movies and, 242
music and, 54, 103, 111, 414
Apple App Store, 49, 77–78, 97–98
Apple Game Center, 77
Apple iChat, 43
Apple iCloud, 54
Apple iPads, 25, 49, 54, 77, 187, 433
books and, 332–333, 341–342
magazines and, 303, 310
Apple iPhones, 49, 52, 54, 77, 243, 303, 358, 433
books and, 332, 341
Apple iPods, 49, 54, 162, 187, 331–332, 414, 433
Apple iTunes, 50, 54, 62, 348, 414, 433
magazines and, 303
music and, 111, 126, 130–131, 133–134
video and, 103, 185, 237–238, 241–242, 487
1181
Apple Music, 103, 111, 126, 131, 163, 166
Apple TV, 49, 237
Apprentice, The, 3
Apu Trilogy, 229
aQuantive, 364
Arabs, 496
Arab Spring uprisings, 45, 47, 48, 263, 446, 467, 468
Árbenz, Jacobo, 398
Arbuckle, Fatty, 522
Arcade Fire, 123, 133
archiving, digital, 63
Archon, 94
Areopagitica (Milton), 509
Are You Experienced (Hendrix), 136
Are You My Mother? (Bechdel), 326
Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, 487
Argentina, 334, 447
Ariel Publicity, 135
Aristotle, 14, 20, 460
Armies of the Night (Mailer), 261
Armstrong, Edwin, 143, 154–155
Armstrong, Louis, 113, 358
1182
Arnaz, Desi, 188
Arnold Worldwide, 363, 379
Aronofsky, Darren, 231
Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne), 257, 290
ARPAnet, 39–41
Arrested Development, 50, 206
Arrow, 487
Arthritis Foundation, 393
Asch, Solomon, 495
Asia, 176, 376, 428, 508
movies and, 232–233, 240
music and, 125
newspapers and, 275
Asian Americans, 227, 269, 308, 496
Asians, 132, 269, 496
Asian Week, 308
As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 336
Assange, Julian, 476
assassinations, political, 261, 299, 468
Assassin’s Creed, 82, 84, 95
Associated Press (AP), 255, 273, 283, 519
Asteroids, 73
1183
Astro Boy, 86
Atari, 73–74, 93–94, 96
Atiyeh, Clifford, 540
Atkinson, Samuel Coate, 293
Atlantic (record label), 118
Atlantic Monthly (now Atlantic), 306, 463
atomic weapons, 481–482
AT&T, 42, 62, 111, 180, 224, 257, 352, 419
Comcast and, 207, 421
radio and, 145–148
T-Mobile and, 435, 438
TV and, 103, 176, 207, 434, 435
Audi, 535–537
Audible, 331, 349
audiences
advertising, 157, 181, 203–204
digital generation, 8, 21, 174
fragmenting of, 10, 209, 352
global, 243, 358
movie, 215, 226, 232, 241
music, 122, 123
popular culture, 22
1184
PR, 393
radio, 157, 159, 161
ratings and shares and, 203–205
size of, 35, 54, 210
studies of, 497
teen, 113, 215, 226, 241
TV, 181, 188, 193, 195, 204, 352
Audion vacuum tube, 143, 154
Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC; now Alliance for Audited Media), 357
Aufderheide, Pat, 501
augmented reality (AR), 302
Austen, Jane, 331
Australia, 62, 146, 229, 274, 342
Australian, 163
Austria, 334
authoritarianism, 508
Authors Guild, 333
Author Solutions, 342
Autobiography of Malcolm X, The, 335
automobile industry, 535–541
Avalon, Frankie, 119
Avatar, 217, 238
1185
Avatar Kinect, 92
avatars, 45, 73, 82
Avengers movies, 96, 216–217, 238, 241
Avett Brothers, 116
Avicii, 126
Babbage’s, 97
Babylon, 322, 354
“Baby Love” (Supremes), 121
“… Baby One More Time” (Martin), 128–129
Bacall, Lauren, 524
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 19
Bachelor, The, 13, 18
Backstreet Boys, 128
Back to the Future II, 239
Bad Boy Entertainment, 125
Bad Religion, 133
Baer, Ralph, 73
Baez, Joan, 121, 270
Bagdikian, Ben, 434
Baidu, 43
Bailey, F. Lee, 518
Bainbridge Island (Washington), 401
1186
Baker, Belle, 113
Baker, Ray Stannard, 296
Baldwin, Faith, 290
Ball, Lucille, 188, 524
Ballantine Bantam Dell, 337
Bambi, 426
Banana Republicans, 405
banana republics, 398
bananas, 398
Bancroft family, 274
Bandai Namco, 95
Bandura, Albert, 493
Bank of America, 274
Bannon, Steve, 3
Baquet, Dean, 456
Bard’s Tale, The, 94
Barnes & Noble, 327, 332, 339–341
Barnes & Noble Nook, 341–342
Barnet, Richard J., 428, 441
Barney & Friends, 193
Barnum, Phineas Taylor (P. T.), 4, 388, 389, 397
Baron, Martin, 4, 252
1187
Barry, Jack, 179
Bartles & Jaymes, 369
Basie, (William James) “Count,” 113
Batman, 328–329
Batman, 86, 217
Battlefield 1, 395
Baumgartner, Felix, 397, 399
BBDO Worldwide, 358
Beach Boys, 119
Beadle, Erastus, 324
Beadle, Irwin, 324
Beastie Boys, 125, 529
Beatles, 19, 23, 117, 119–121, 129, 136, 205, 373, 382
Beats Electronics, 111, 349
Beat the Clock, 152
Beauty and the Beast, 426–428
Bechdel, Alison, 326, 336
Beck, 106
Beck, Glenn, 157, 159
Bee, Samantha, 473–474
Bee Gees, 124
Beethoven, 18
1188
Bejeweled, 78, 81, 94
Belgium, 50
Bell, Alexander Graham, 108, 306
Bell, Chichester, 108
Bellan-White, Nadja, 381
Belle and Sebastian, 123–124
Bell Laboratories, 153
Beloved (Morrison), 331, 336
Ben Ali, Zine el-Abidine, 47
Ben-Hur, 224
Bennett, James Gordon, 255, 257–258
Benny, Jack, 150
Bentham, Jeremy, 460
Bergman, Ingmar, 229
Berkeley Barb, 270
Berklee College of Music, 135
Berkshire Hathaway, 274
Berle, Milton, 188
Berlin, 334
Berlin, Irving, 113
Berliner, Emile, 107–108
Berman & Co., 400
1189
Bernays, Edward, 150, 389, 391–392, 398, 423
Berners-Lee, Tim, 41, 51
Bernstein, Carl, 452
Bernstein, Leonard, 523
Berry, Chuck, 26, 115, 119
Berry, Stephen J., 282
Bertelsmann, 336–337, 438
Best Buy, 97, 130, 242
Best War Ever, The (Rampton and Stauber), 405
BET, 181, 425
BET Hip-Hop Awards, 395
Better Business Bureau, 357, 377
Better Call Saul, 20, 174
Better Homes and Gardens, 300–301, 305, 312
Beverly Hillbillies, 205, 497
Bewitched, 497
Bewkes, Jeffrey, 422
Beyoncé, 367, 385
Beyond Magenta (Kuklin), 336
Bezos, Jeff, 51, 252, 279, 341, 417, 442
BFG, The (Dahl), 331
BH Media Group, 274
1190
Bianchini, Gina, 64
Bible, 322, 327, 335–336
Biden, Joe, 476
Big Bang, 132
Big Bang Theory, The, 18, 187, 188, 190, 200–201, 204, 487
Big Bopper (Jiles Perry Richardson, Jr.), 119
Big Brother and the Holding Company, 121
Big C, The, 189
Bigelow, Kathryn, 227
Big Hero 6, 425, 427
Big Machine, 106, 127, 164
“Big Mac” theory, 22
Big Sleep, The, 226
Big Valley, The, 487
Billboard, 117, 128, 166
Bill of Rights, 254, 509
Binch, Winson, 381
Bing, 43, 52, 349, 363, 433
bin Laden, Osama, 16, 476
BioWare, 94
Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold Act; 2002), 442
Birth of a Nation, The (1915), 224–225
1191
Birth of a Nation, The (2016), 231
Bisland, Elizabeth, 290
Biswas-Diener, Robert, 38
BitTorrent, 111
Blache, Catherine, 334
Black, Hugo, 510
Black, Rebecca, 372
BlackBerry, 49
Black Entertainment Television, 430
Black Journalists, National Association of (NABJ), 268
Black Keys, 83
Blacklist, The, 187, 200
Black Mirror, 27
Black Owned Broadcasters, National Association of, 430
Black Panther Party, 262
Black Swan, 231
Blackwell, Otis, 116
Blackwell, Rusty, 540
Blastmedia, 409
Blek, 77
Blindspot, 200
Bling Ring, The, 231
1192
Blizzard, 76, 83, 94
Blockbuster, 185, 229, 236–237, 413
Blogger, 44, 54
blogs, 4, 13, 25, 43, 44, 366, 400–401, 527–528, 530
news, 31, 192, 263, 276–277, 462, 472, 478
photojournalism, 299
Blondie, 123
Bloodline, 414
“Blueberry Hill” (Domino), 115
Blue Bloods, 187
BlueFocus Communication Group, 393
Blue Jasmine, 54
Bluem, A. William, 465
Blue Ruin, 45
Blume, Judy, 336
Blumlein, Alan, 109
Blu-ray, 236, 238, 242
blurring of boundaries
art/commerce, 22, 26
cable/network TV, 209
documentary/drama, 227
fact/fiction, 26
1193
high/low culture, 115
journalism/commerce, 472
journalism/politics, 464
masculinity/femininity, 115
media formats and, 39, 50, 153
mobile/screen TV, 209
neutral/expert journalism, 463
news/entertainment, 27, 187, 465
print/electronic/digital, 30
sacred/secular, 116
serious/comic, 117
streaming music/radio, 112
urban/rural, 115
white/black, 117
Bly, Nellie, 257, 290, 449–450, 457
BMG, 126, 438
BMW, 537
Bobo doll experiments, 493
Bob & Tom Show, The, 165
Bogart, Humphrey, 524
“Bohemian Rhapsody,” 26
BoJack Horseman, 414
1194
Bok, Edward, 295
Boland, John, 195
Bollier, David, 63
Bollywood, 229, 232
Bonanza, 173
Bones, 200–202
Bong Joon-ho, 233
Bon Iver, 133
Bonzer, Eric, 64
book clubs, 340
BookCon, 320, 337
BookExpo America (BEA), 320, 337
book industry, 26, 320, 324–334, 336–343, 345–346, 348
adaptability of, 248, 277, 332
advertising and, 325, 339, 343
independent publishers and, 321, 337, 345
ownership and, 336–337
sound recording and, 331
Book Industry Study Group (BISG), 325
Book-of-the-Month Club, 340
books, 249, 319–347
audio, 50, 326, 330–332, 343
1195
banned, 330, 333, 335–336
best-seller, 330, 337–339
challenged, 336
children’s, 332–333
colonial, 324
comic, 86, 326, 328–329
e-books, 51, 54, 249, 326–327, 330, 332–334, 338, 341–342
gaming and, 86
graphic novels, 326, 328–329, 343
history of, 322–324
immigrants and, 325, 342
Internet and, 9, 331, 341–342
magazines and, 325, 340
as mass medium, 7, 11, 54, 248, 277, 320–321, 323–324, 328, 332, 336, 342
movies and, 326, 329, 330–331
preservation of, 330, 333
professional, 325, 326
pulp fiction, 324
radio and, 325
religious, 300, 325–327
romance, 497
textbooks, 325–327
1196
trade, 325–326
TV and, 321, 328–329, 330–331
university press, 325–326, 330
young-adult, 319–320, 326
Bookseller of Kabul, The (Seierstad), 262
Booksellers Association, American (ABA), 325
bookstores, 334, 339–340, 342
Boone, Daniel, 388
Boone, Pat, 117–118
Boorstin, Daniel, 397
Borchetta, Scott, 106
Borden, 356
Borders, 339–340
Borgen, 469
Boston (rock group), 123
Boston Globe, 251–253, 279, 434–435
Boston magazine, 88
Boston Marathon, 397
Boston Marathon bombing, 175, 469
Boston News-Letter, 254, 354
Boston Public Library, 333
Bouazizi, Mohamed, 45, 48
1197
Bourke-White, Margaret, 297, 299
Bowie, David, 115, 123, 136
Bowles, Eammon, 242
Bowling for Columbine, 230
Box Office Mojo, 241, 432
Boy’s Life, 306
Boyz N the Hood, 228
BP (previously British Petroleum) Deepwater Horizon oil spill, 401, 467
Bradford, Andrew, 292
Brady, Mathew, 293–294
Braga, Michael, 259, 450
branding, 349, 355, 361, 372, 540
brand stretching, 376
BrandZ, 369
Brave, 86, 427
Brave New World (Huxley), 25, 336
Bravo, 181, 205
Brazil, 447
Breaking Bad, 190, 201, 204, 414, 493
Breeders, 123
Breitbart News, 3
Brennan, William, Jr., 507
1198
Brewster, Jordana, 386
bridal industry, 492
Brides, 302
Bright House Networks, 435
Brinkley, David, 191
Brita, 367
British American Tobacco (BAT), 376
British Sky Broadcasting, 192
broadband Internet, 42, 48, 52, 62, 128, 528
Broadcasters, National Association of (NAB), 163, 165, 167, 198, 357, 393
broadcasting, 144
deregulation and, 419
digital, 176–177, 184
political, 527
toll, 147
Broadcasting, 159
Broadcasting Corporation of America (BCA), 147
Broad City, 21
Broadway, 329, 428
Broder, David, 475
Brokaw, Tom, 191
Brokeback Mountain, 217
1199
Brooker, Charlie, 27
Brooks, Mel, 19, 188
Brown, Chris, 133
Brown, Dan, 331
Brown, Helen Gurley, 289–290, 305
Brown, James, 120
Brown, Lisa, 99
Brown, Margaret Wise, 23
Brown-Miller Communications, 400
browsers, 41–42, 50, 58, 349
Brüno, 523
Brunswick Group, 393
Brussels, 175
Bubble Island, 95
Bubble Witch Saga, 95
Buchanan, Pat, 444
Buckley, William F., 312
Buckley v. Valeo, 506
Buddhadharma, 313
Bud Light, 366, 371
Budweiser, 375
Buena Vista, 240, 426
1200
Buenos Aires, 334
Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody), 388–389
Buffalo News, 274
Buffett, Warren, 252, 274, 417
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 26, 190
Buick Circus Hour, 178
Bulgaria, 447
Bullock, Sandra, 44
Bully, 230
Burke, James E., 401
Burke, John, 388, 389
Burns, George, 150
Burns, Ken, 521
Burns and Allen Show, The, 150
Burson-Marsteller, 392–393, 401, 405, 410
Burstyn v. Wilson, 522
Bush, George W., 4, 17, 456
Bush administration (George W.), 16, 400, 482
Bush family, 527
Bushido Blade, 78
Bushnell, Nolan, 73
Bush v. Gore, 451, 519
1201
Businessweek, 88, 280
Butler, The, 227
Butterfield 8, 236
Buzzcocks, 123
BuzzFeed, 249, 277, 285, 455
Bwana Devil, 490
Byrds, 121
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The, 229
Cable & Telecommunications Association, National (NCTA), 207
Cablevision, 111, 187, 201–202, 207
Caesar, Julius, 253
Caesar, Sid, 188
Cage the Elephant (musical artist), 160
California, 92, 327, 374, 536
California Center for Public Health Advocacy, 400
California Milk Processor Board, 353
Call of Duty, 82, 87, 91, 94
Cambodia, 269
Camel News Caravan, 178
Camel Newsreel Theater, 191
campaign financing, 442, 501, 505–506
Campbell, Clive (DJ Kool Herc), 124
1202
Campbell, John, 254
Campbell Soup, 355, 378
Campion, Jane, 227
CampusBookRentals, 327
Canada, 89, 126, 176, 180, 229, 230, 337, 342
Canadian Business, 97
Candy Crush Saga, 75, 83, 94–95
Cannes Film Festival, 231, 233
Canon, 393
Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 323
“Can’t Feel My Face” (Martin), 129
Cantor, Eddie, 113
Cantril, Hadley, 488–489
capitalism, 7, 25, 417, 438–439, 454, 502, 532
Capote, Truman, 261–262, 307
Captain America, 328
Captain America, 216, 326
Captain Underpants series (Pilkey), 336
Cara, Alessia, 125
Car and Driver blog, 540–541
Care Bear Family, The, 373
Carey, James, 484, 500
1203
Carlin, George, 526
Carnation, 356
Carnegie, Andrew, 342, 345, 418
Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, 193
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 345
Carolina Hurricanes, 183
Carr, David, 464, 469
car radios, 149, 153, 162, 168
Carrie (1976), 227
Carrie (2013), 227
Carroll, John, 284
Carroll, Lewis, 332–333
Cars 2, 216
Carson, Rachel, 342
Carter, Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. (Lil Wayne), 136
Carter, Jimmy, 418
Cartoon Network, 425
cartoons, 272–273, 426
Casablanca, 225
Cash Money Records, 127
Castle, 200
Castle Wolfenstein, 82
1204
Casual Vacancy, The (Rowling), 339
Catch-22 (Heller), 336
Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger), 336
cathode ray tube (CRT), 72, 176
Catholic Church, sexual abuse scandal and, 251–252
Catholic Legion of Decency, 522
Catholic Worker, 271
Cavanagh, John, 428, 441
Cawelti, John, 20
CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), 85, 337, 351–352, 422–423, 437–438
news and, 4, 8, 50, 165, 191, 249, 454–455, 463
programming and, 6, 187, 192, 200, 205, 487
radio and, 149–153
Super Bowl and, 363, 368
Time Warner and, 174, 208
TV and, 173, 177–178, 180, 193, 196
Viacom and, 205
CBS Evening News (previously The CBS-TV News), 191
CBS Records, 108–109
CD Baby, 133–134
CD-ROMs, 96
celebrities, 3–4, 5, 113, 301–302, 330, 366–367, 377, 385–386, 400,
1205
464, 514–516
Celler-Kefauver Act (1950), 418
cell phones. See mobile phones
censorship, 60, 443, 495, 508–510, 515–516, 526, 528–529
books and, 328, 330, 333, 335–336
movies and, 217, 236, 521–523
music and, 117, 118
war coverage and, 16–17
Centipede, 74, 75
challenging authority, 7, 24, 40, 236, 261, 276, 324, 327, 335, 440, 496
Chan, Jackie, 232
Chance the Rapper, 126
Change.org, 44–45
Channel One, 374
“Chantilly Lace” (The Big Bopper), 119
Chaplin, Charlie, 25, 27, 94, 221–222
Charles, Ray, 115, 118, 358
Charlie Hebdo attack, 46, 283
Charlotte Observer, 472
Charlottesville Tomorrow, 285
Charlotte’s Web (White), 336
Charter Communications, 42, 62, 207, 435
1206
Chase, Melissa, 169
Chattanooga Times, 259
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 323
Chavez, Cesar, 369
Cheadle, Don, 228
Cheers, 12, 205
Cheetos, 86
Chegg, 327
Chelsea Lately, 132
Chen Kaige, 232
Cherokee Phoenix (Georgia), 269
Cherokee Rose Bud (Oklahoma), 269
Chess (music label), 127
Chevrolet, 537
Chic, 124
Chicago, 226
Chicago Defender, 268
Chicago Tribune, 435
Chick-fil-A, 442
Chico’s, 360
children
advertising and, 373–374
1207
gaming and, 76
magazines for, 306
media effects and, 15, 22–24, 483, 485, 487–489
public TV and, 193, 195
Children’s Internet Protection Act (2000), 60–61
Children’s Television Act (1990), 374
Child’s Play, 85
China, 6, 30, 56–57, 87, 402, 422, 447, 468
books and, 322–323, 337
free expression in, 508–509
immigrants from, 48, 269
movies and, 232, 237, 244, 432
tobacco advertising in, 376
China Film Group, 229
China South Publishing and Media Group, 337
Chiquita Brands, 398
Chi-Raq, 227
Choice, The, 331
Chow Yun-Fat, 232
Christie, Chris, 407
chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), 396
Chrysler, 537
1208
Chuck E. Cheese chain, 73
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 398, 482
Cincinnati Enquirer, 273
Cinderella, 220, 426
CinemaNow, 242
Cinemark USA, 239–240
CinemaScope, 236
cinematograph, 219
Cineplex Entertainment, 239–240
Cinerama, 236
Citadel, 167
citizen journalism, 29, 48, 281–282, 446, 472–473, 477
Citizen Kane (film), 18, 23, 258
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 444, 506
City Lights Books, 340
Civilization, 82
Civil Rights movement, 261, 263, 327, 500, 514
movies and, 228
music and, 118, 120, 156
newspapers and, 268
photojournalism and, 299
TV and, 13, 153, 175, 176, 468
1209
Civil War, U.S., 255–256, 259, 291, 293–294
Clapton, Eric, 114
Clara, Lu, and Em, 152
Clarissa (Richardson), 324
Claritin, 377
Clark, Dick, 117–118, 156
Clarke, Arthur C., 180
Clarkson, Kelly, 128
Clash, 123
Clash of Clans, 97
Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), 418
Clean Air Act, 539
Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia), 112, 139–140, 163–164, 166–167, 181, 419–420, 430
Cleaver, Eldridge, 270
Clerks, 523
Cleveland Cavaliers, 182
Click Rain, Inc., 381
Clif Bar, 397
Clinton, Bill, 13, 263, 330, 419
Clinton, Hillary, 4, 330, 473, 476
Clinton family, 527
Clooney, George, 377
1210
Closer, The, 190
cloud services, 52, 332
Club Penguin, 76
CNBC, 192, 205
CNN (Cable News Network), 4, 16, 18, 181, 192, 249, 428, 435, 455, 467, 473
iReports, 281, 472
Schorr and, 464
Coachella music festival, 377
Cobain, Kurt, 123, 125
Coca, Imogene, 188
Coca-Cola, 355, 357, 370, 393
Cochrane, Elizabeth “Pink.” See Bly, Nellie
Cody, William F. (Buffalo Bill), 388, 389
Cohen, Alexandra, 135
Colbert, Stephen, 330, 444
Colbert Report, The, 88, 473–474
Cold War, 234, 523
Cole, Nat King, 178, 202
Coles, Joanna, 307
Colgate Comedy Hour, 178
Colgate-Palmolive, 152, 356
collective intelligence, 84–85
1211
Collier’s, 295, 296, 298, 300
Collins, Suzanne, 331, 500
Colombia, 398
colonial America, 254, 292, 324, 354, 454
Colorado movie theater mass shooting, 498
Color Purple, The (Walker), 336
Columbia Journalism Review, 476
Columbia Journalism School, 252
Columbia Pictures, 224, 240–241
Columbia University, 257, 280
Columbine High School mass shooting, 80, 90
Columbus Dispatch, 262, 265
Combs, Seah “Diddy,” 125
Comcast, 42, 62, 103, 111, 174, 186, 196, 238, 415, 430, 437
AT&T and, 207, 421
Hulu and, 174, 207
NBC Universal and, 205, 207, 242, 419, 434–435
Time Warner Cable and, 207, 435
Xfinity and, 242
Comedy Central, 21, 174, 178, 181, 188
“Come See about Me” (Supremes), 121
comic books, 86, 326, 328–329
1212
Comics Magazine Association of America, 328
Coming Home, 232
Commercial Alert, 370, 372, 377
commercialism, 30, 32, 63, 126, 229
Internet and, 41–43, 65–66
mass media and, 15, 343, 464, 499, 502, 532
commercial speech, 372–373, 379, 408, 439, 531
Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, 514
common sense, 423–424
communication, mass, 6, 8–9
convergence and, 173
global dominance of U.S. in, 146
Communications Act of 1934, 150, 151, 198, 524, 526
Section 315 of, 527
Wagner-Hatfield Amendment to, 160
communism, 327, 439, 508
witch-hunt and, 189, 234, 261, 271, 523–524
communities
cable TV and, 198, 208
gaming and, 71, 84–85
magazines and, 292
newspapers and, 264, 269–270, 274, 276
1213
public journalism and, 472
virtual, 84
compact discs (CDs), 93, 106, 109–110, 127, 130–131, 133, 414
competition, 78, 199, 244, 416, 419
complexity, 21, 24, 30, 73, 81, 174, 455, 464, 474
computers, personal (PCs), 35, 41, 48, 432
Concussion, 396
Condé Nast, 311
Condé Nast Traveler, 306
Congress, U.S.
advertising regulation and, 355, 372–375
antitrust regulation and, 418, 421
newspapers and, 274
radio and, 134, 145, 150, 160, 164, 166
social reform legislation and, 296
TV and, 179, 193–194, 199, 430
Conjuring, The, 226
Connally, John, 464
Conrad, Frank, 146–147
Constitution, U.S., 451, 509
See also First Amendment
consumer choice vs. consumer control, 439
1214
consumer culture, 6–7, 15, 24–25, 30–31, 441
advertising and, 353, 356, 366, 372, 378–380
magazines and, 291, 294, 313
music and, 122
newspapers and, 257–258
PR and, 387
wedding media and, 492
Consumer Freedom, Center for (CCF), 400
consumer groups, 185, 361, 400, 419, 421, 425, 434
Consumer Reports, 303, 310
Consumers League, National, 377
consumption, media, 12, 15, 35, 352
Contact (Fleischman), 392
content, media
advertising and, 313, 382
analysis of, 490–493
control of, 52, 60–61, 175, 177–180, 196, 202, 421
creation of, 12, 21, 51, 54, 348, 414, 417, 429
distribution of, 51, 415, 433
media corporations and, 241, 425
quality of, 4, 12, 421, 442, 471
user-created, 43–44
1215
content communities, 44–45
Contract with God, A (Eisner), 326
convergence, media, 5–6, 8, 10–13, 27, 30, 32, 173, 429
books and, 329, 332–333
gaming and, 76–78
impact of, 48–51
Internet and, 10–11, 34, 48, 185
journalism and, 263, 275, 277, 467–468
magazines and, 302–303
media corporations and, 11
movies and, 242–243
music and, 107
narratives and, 13
new business models and, 49
newspapers and, 263, 275, 277
radio and, 11, 107, 162, 164–165
technology and, 6, 10–11, 102
TV and, 185–187, 210
Cook, Fred, 524
Cook, Morna, 135
Cooke, Janet, 461
cookies, 55, 58, 59, 365
1216
Cook’s Illustrated, 303, 310
Coolidge, Calvin, 147, 391
Cooper, Anderson, 467
Cooper, Gary, 234
Coors, 377
Coppola, Francis Ford, 226
Coppola, Sofia, 227, 231
copyright, 85, 95–96, 110, 112, 501, 507, 513, 529
book digitizing and, 333
streaming and, 164
Copyright Act (1790), 513
Copyright Act, Digital Millennium (1998), 513
Copyright Royalty Board, 164
Corddry, Rob, 473
Cormier, Anthony, 259, 450
Cornell College (Iowa), 282
corporations, advertising, 358–359, 364
corporations, distrust of, 369, 389, 418
corporations, media, 11, 15, 274, 502
accountability of, 437, 444
adaptability of, 102, 430
advertising and, 416–417
1217
book industry and, 321, 325
consolidation and, 65, 140, 199, 207–208, 237, 239–240, 379, 415, 419–421, 430–435, 437, 441–444, 499
diversification and, 435, 438
global, 26–27, 146, 241, 244, 336, 414, 418, 422, 425, 428–429, 438, 443
influence of, 30, 348, 379, 424, 442, 444, 499, 530
lobbying by, 198, 434, 442, 444
media content and, 241, 425
media coverage of, 405–406, 437, 444, 530–531
movie industry and, 241
net neutrality and, 62
PR and, 392–393
public interest and, 168, 443
radio and, 163, 167
social responsibility and, 416–417
traditional vs. digital, 348, 415, 429
TV and, 205, 207–209
Correll, Charles, 152–153
Cosby Show, 487
Cosmopolitan, 258, 289–290, 295, 303, 305, 311–312
cover models and, 307
Cosmopolitan en Español, 308
1218
Costa Rica, 398
Costco, 339–340
Coulson, Mark, 80
counterculture movement, 262, 328
Counter-Strike, 75–76, 85, 97
Couric, Katie, 191
Court TV (now truTV), 519
Cove, The, 230
Cox, James M., 146
Cox Communications, 42, 207, 238
Cox Enterprises, 437
Craft, Christine, 466
Craig, Daniel, 377
craigslist, 253, 414
Crane, Stephen, 261
Crew Cuts, 118
Crimean War, 298
Crisis, 308
Crispin Porter & Bogusky, 379
critical process, 5, 27–30, 32, 537
criticism, media, 5–6, 14–15, 22, 76, 251, 455, 502
satiric journalism and, 473–474
1219
of TV, 5, 180
Crockett, Davy, 388
Cronkite, Walter, 191–192, 474
Croods, The, 378
Cross, Katherine, 88
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 229, 232
crowdfunding, 89
Cruise, Tom, 46, 515
Crumb, R., 328
Crunch Course, 396
Crystallizing Public Opinion (Bernays), 391
CSI, 190, 201
C-SPAN, 181
Cuba, 298, 447, 508–509
Cubans, 268–269
cubreporters.org, 285
“Cued Recall of Alcohol Advertising on Television and Underage Drinking Behavior” (Dartmouth University study), 371
cultivation effect, 494, 502
cultural imperialism, 244, 246, 312, 432, 439–441
culture, 5–6, 481–482
advertising and, 343, 359, 369, 374, 379–380
American, 179, 241, 244, 246, 328–329, 388, 424, 429, 432,
1220
439–441, 454
books and, 321, 323, 342–343
celebrity, 5, 301–302, 464
communication as, 500
electronic, 179
entertainment, 388
global, 62, 429, 439–441
high vs. low, 15, 18–19, 22–23, 26, 115, 179–180
indigenous, 246, 440–441
map model for, 5, 22–24, 31
movies and, 217, 244
music and, 107, 114, 119, 129, 134
newspapers and, 253
popular, 22, 320, 328–329, 429, 439, 440, 497, 500, 507
PR and, 387
radio and, 168
skyscraper model for, 5, 15, 18–19, 22, 30–31
TV and, 175, 179–180, 190, 209, 262–263, 468–469
urban, 115–116, 119, 124, 157, 159, 228, 306
visual, 16, 291, 293–294, 297, 299, 357–358, 468
See also consumer culture
Cumulus Media, 165, 166–167
1221
Curb Your Enthusiasm, 188
Cure, 123
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The (Haddon), 336
Curry, Ann, 466
Curry, Stephen, 182, 367
Curtis, Cyrus, 296
Customs Office, U.S., 515
CW network, 193, 438
Cyber PR, 135
Czitrom, Daniel, 484, 488
Daily Kos, 276
Daily Mail, 249, 260
Daily Show, The, 21, 178, 192, 455, 473–474, 478
Daimler, 537
Dairy Council, National, 374
Dairy Herd Management, 303
Dakota Farmer, 303
Dallas, 12, 21, 205
Dallas Morning News, 279
Dalrymple, Helen, 355
Daly, John, 191, 465
Dance Dance Revolution, 83–84
1222
Dancing with the Stars, 18, 193, 200
Dangerous (M. Jackson), 125
Dangerous Liaisons (2012), 232
Daniels, Lee, 227–228
Dante Alighieri, 98
Daredevil, 174, 206
Dark Horse, 329
Dark Knight, The, 238, 241, 326
Dark Knight Rises, The, 238
Dark Souls, 95
Dartmouth University, 371
Das Kapital (Marx), 335
data mining, 54–55, 58–59, 66, 86, 185, 364–365, 379, 433
Dateline, 201, 465
Daughters of the American Revolution, 14
Dauman, Philippe P., 422
Dave and Buster’s chain, 73
da Vinci, Leonardo, 217
Davis, Miles, 18
Davison, W. Phillips, 495
Day, Benjamin, 255
Day, Dorothy, 271
1223
Daye, Matthew, 324
Daye, Stephen, 324
Days Are Gone (Haim), 124
DC comics, 328–329
DC Universe Online, 97
DDB Worldwide, 358
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), 46
Deadliest Catch, 192, 193
Dead Man, 231
Dead Poets Society, 427
Dead Weather, 160
Dean, James, 235
De Armas Spanish Magazine Network, 308
Death and Life of American Journalism, The (McChesney and Nichols), 470
Death of Literature, The (Kernan), 343
Death Race, 90
De Beers, 357
Deciding What’s News (Gans), 455
Deezer, 111, 126, 166
deficit financing, 201, 203
Def Jam Recordings, 106, 125
Defoe, Daniel, 244, 291–292
1224
De Forest, Lee, 143, 148, 154–155
DeGeneres, Ellen, 132
Degree, 367
Deitz, Corey, 169
Delilah, 167
Dell, 56, 63, 336
Del Monte, 398
Deloitte Digital, 359
de Martinville, Édouard-Léon Scott, 107–108
democracy, 5, 7, 22, 30–32
advertising and, 378
books and, 342–343, 346, 348
capitalism and, 438–439, 532
engagement and, 31, 348
free press and, 417, 421, 532
informed citizenry and, 4, 252, 280, 283–284, 389, 441, 464
Internet and, 9, 63, 65, 528
journalism and, 4, 28–29, 252, 276, 282–284, 286, 451, 455, 464, 471, 475, 477–478
magazines and, 313–314
media consolidation and, 207–208, 379, 434, 437, 441–444, 499
media research and, 501
music and, 134
1225
PR and, 405, 407–408
public debate and, 442–443, 475, 499
radio and, 63, 168
social media and, 45, 48
TV and, 63, 208–210
Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 483
Denial of Service attacks, 46, 89
Denmark, 447, 469
Dentsu Inc., 359
DePalma, Brian, 227
deregulation, 158, 163, 166, 168, 199, 418–420, 422, 434
Der Spiegel, 476
desktop publishing, 309
Des Moines Register, 455
“Desolation Row” (Dylan), 156
Details, 305
Detroit Free Press, 275
Detroit News, 275
Dettelbach, Steven M., 517
Deus Ex, 95
Deutsch LA, 381
Diablo, 75, 94
1226
Dial Global (now Westwood One), 167
Diamond Dash, 95
Diamond Sutra (Wang Chieh), 323
El Diario–La Prensa (New York), 269
Diario Las Americas (Miami), 269
Diary of a Young Girl, The (Frank), 335
DiCaprio, Leonardo, 397
Dickens, Charles, 244
Dickinson, Emily, 18, 23
Dickson, William Kennedy, 219
Dick Van Dyke, 188
Diddley, Bo, 115
Didion, Joan, 13, 100, 261–262
Diener, Ed, 38
Diesel, Vin, 385–386, 387
Diet Coke, 367
Digital Democracy, Center for, 531
digital divide, 61–63, 65
Digital Public Library of America, 333
digital turn, 34, 102
advertising and, 348, 351–352
book industry and, 248, 320, 332–333, 337–338, 341, 343, 346
1227
gaming and, 97
gatekeepers and, 346
magazines and, 248–249, 302–303, 311
media corporations and, 348, 429
movies and, 242–243
music and, 119, 126, 130
narratives and, 429, 432
new business models and, 4, 8, 49, 278–281, 283, 451, 470–471
newspapers and, 248–249, 253, 277
PR and, 348
radio and, 112, 140
DigitasLBi, 359, 364
Digster, 166
dime novels, 324
directories, Web, 43
DirecTV, 103, 184, 238, 437–438
AT&T and, 207, 434–435
disc jockeys, 102, 118, 124, 140, 146, 155–158
disclosure, 366, 395, 400–401, 444
Discover, 306
Discovering the News (Schudson), 403
Discovery Channel, 187, 193
1228
Dish (previously Dish Network), 103, 184, 187, 199, 207, 238, 438
Dish, The, 276
Disney. See Walt Disney Company
Disney, Walt, 234, 426
Disney Channel, 181–182, 427–428
Disney Cruise Line, 242, 425
Disneyland, 426
Disneyland Paris, 427–428
Disney Publishing, 427–428
Disney Stores, 427–428
Distilled Spirits Council, 371
Divergent (film), 320
Divergent trilogy (Roth), 320
diversity, 25–26, 28, 30, 65, 431
African American ownership and, 430
books and, 343
content creation and, 417
gaming and, 91
vs. globalism, 244
journalism and, 474
movies and, 244, 246, 386
TV and, 195
1229
Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 98
Doc Martin, 190
Doctor Strange, 216
Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, 501
Documentary in American Television (Bluem), 465
Dodge/Ram, 537
Dolby Digital sound, 93
Dole Food Company, 398
Dollarocracy (McChesney and Nichols), 441
Dominican Republic, 447
Domino, Fats, 115, 118
Dong, Arthur, 227
Donkey Kong, 73, 82, 93
Donna Reed Show, The, 424
Don’t Look Back, 123
Doom, 75, 78, 82
Doors, 121–122, 156, 262
Dope, 228
Dorsey, Tommy, 113
dot-com bubble, 368
Dotto, 179
DoubleClick, 364
1230
Doubleday, 336, 340
Doubleday Broadway, 337
Doubleday & McClure Company, 325
Douglass, Frederick, 267
Dove soap, 364, 440
Dowd, Maureen, 273
Down and Out in Beverly Hills, 427
Downey, Morton, Jr., 158
“Down Hearted Blues” (Smith), 114
Downie, Leonard, 280–281
downloading, 97, 103, 164
movies and, 237, 239, 242
music and, 106, 109, 127, 130–131
TV and, 210
Downton Abbey, 190
doxing, 89
Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), 361, 363
Dragnet, 188, 497
Drake, 127
Draw Something, 95
Dre, Dr. (Andre Young), 111
DreamWorks, 233
1231
DreamWorks Animation, 378
Dreiser, Theodore, 261, 290
Drell, Lauren, 135
Drew, Robert, 230
Drew Associates, 230
Drive, 245
Drive (YouTube channel), 205
Dr. Phil, 203
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, 487
Drudge, Matt, 263, 276
Drudge Report, 192, 263
drugs, 121, 236, 261, 357, 377
DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), 42–43, 62
Dualtone Records, 127
Du Bois, W. E. B., 308
DuckDuckGo, 59
Duck Dynasty, 210
Duerson, Dave, 396
Duff, Hilary, 307
Dugdale, Scott, 110
Duncan, David, 299
DuVernay, Ava, 227
1232
DVDs, 50, 96, 185–186, 209, 236, 340, 353, 413, 422, 433
movie industry and, 231, 237–238, 240, 242
DVRs (digital video recorders), 12, 185–186, 204, 209, 487
Dylan, Bob, 117, 121, 123, 156, 270
Dynasty, 21, 30
E!, 207
Eagles, 115
Earle, Steve, 116
Eason, David, 453
Eastern Europe, 30, 469, 530
Eastman, George, 218–219, 221, 298
Eastman Kodak, 218, 236, 355–356
Easy Rider, 226
eating disorders, 307, 374
Eating Disorders, Academy for, 307
eBay, 60, 62, 253, 327, 414
Ebony, 308
eCampus.com, 327
EchoStar Communications (later Dish), 207, 438
Eclectic Reader, The (McGuffey), 326
e-commerce, 54–55, 327, 349
Amazon and, 343, 432–433
1233
Economic Club of New York, 406
economic crisis (2008–09), 16, 193–194, 263, 267–268, 279, 356, 358, 422, 434, 470
economics, media, 51, 348, 413–445, 473, 483, 502
advertising and, 353, 379
global, 418, 425
government and, 353
Internet and, 52–58, 415
movies and, 235–242
music and, 114
social issues and, 423, 434–435, 438–441
specialization and, 418, 425
synergy and, 425–428
Ecuador, 398, 447
Edelman, 393, 405, 406
Edison, Thomas, 10, 107–108, 143
motion pictures and, 219, 221–222, 224
eDonkey, 111
Ed Sullivan Show, 14, 120, 151, 205
education, 6–7, 15, 325, 391
movies and, 230
public, 292, 293, 326–327
radio and, 145, 150, 160
1234
TV and, 196, 198
Educational Media Foundation, 167
Edwards, Douglas, 191
Effects of Mass Communication, The (Klapper), 489
EFM Media, 158
Egypt, 322, 354, 447, 467
8 tracks, 164
Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 323
Eisner, Michael, 421, 426
Eisner, Will, 326
El Ateneo Grand Splendid, 334
Elder Scrolls, The, 85
Elder Scolls Online, 45
elections, national, 25, 283, 424, 452, 464
1920, 146
1960, 209, 230
1972, 506
1986, 461
1988, 461
1992, 8
1996, 461
2000, 444, 451, 519
1235
2008, 442, 468, 473
2012, 8, 28, 407, 442, 444, 463, 469, 474, 506
2016, 3–4, 9, 28, 407, 455, 473, 506
electricity, 108, 142
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The (Wolfe), 261
Electronic Arts (EA), 94–95, 395
Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), 85
Elementary, 200
Elements of Journalism, The (Kovach and Rosenstiel), 21
11.22.63 (King), 331
Elizabethan theater, 244
Elle, 311
Ellen DeGeneres Show, The, 132, 203
Ellington, Duke, 113
Ellsberg, Daniel, 510
“El Nuevo Herald,” 269
e-mail, 8, 25, 40–43
Emancipator, 308
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 292
EMI, 126, 434–435
Eminem, 125
Empire, 20, 50, 187, 205, 227, 352
1236
Empires & Allies, 95
Employment Law Project, National, 422
eMule, 111
Encore, 207
“End, The” (Doors), 156
engagement, 5, 12, 17, 29, 31–32, 451, 531
Engels, Rutger C. M. E., 80–81
“Engineering of Consent, The” (Bernays), 423
English language, 128–129
Engstrom, Erika, 492
Entertainment Software Association (ESA), 87, 92
Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), 92
Entertainment Tonight, 195
Entertainment Weekly, 302, 303
environment, 120, 312–313, 342, 387, 397, 401, 405, 407, 494, 536
E. P. Dutton, 325
ephedra, 378
Epitaph, 133
EPPY Awards, 270
Epsilon, 359
e-publishing, 342, 343
Equitable Insurance, 257
1237
e-readers, 54, 249, 332
Eritrea, 62
Espionage Acts (1917; 1918), 511
ESPN (Entertainment Sports Programming Network), 86, 181–183, 193, 211
ABC and, 182–183, 205
Disney and, 183, 427, 435
ESPN Classic, 427
ESPNEWS, 427
ESPN The Magazine, 306, 427
ESPNU, 427
Esquire, 311
Essence, 308
E.T., 217, 239, 370
ethics
advertising and, 371, 382
copyright and, 529
data mining and, 58
journalism and, 16–17, 446, 456–460, 476
PR and, 396, 400–402, 404, 410
torture debate and, 482
WikiLeaks and, 446, 456–457, 476
ethnic profiling, 269
1238
ethnocentrism, 454
Etsy, 530
Euripides, 14
Euronews, 192
Europe, 176, 323
advertising in, 354, 370, 373
antitrust regulation in, 438
design from, 357–358
Eastern, 30, 469, 530
free expression in, 508, 509
immigrants from, 220, 267, 325, 521
journalism in, 469, 483
media research in, 496
movies and, 229, 240, 440
Evans, Chris, 233
Evans, Walker, 475
Eve (cigarettes), 375
Eveready Hour, 151, 152
EverQuest, 92, 97
Everything Bad Is Good for You (Johnson), 21
Exorcist, The, 226, 237
Expendables 3, The, 232
1239
Eyes Wide Shut, 523
Eyre, Chris, 227
Fabian, 119
Facebook, 8, 11–12, 35, 38, 45, 50, 52, 393
advertising and, 4, 54–55, 364
celebrities and, 385–386
commercialism and, 65
data mining and, 54–55, 364–365
gaming and, 70, 95, 98–99
Instagram and, 44, 55
as leading digital conglomerate, 55, 349, 414–415, 429, 433–434
magazines and, 302
movies and, 103, 243
net neutrality and, 62
news and, 4, 31, 263, 446
Oculus and, 70, 98, 433
protest movements and, 48, 263
sponsored stories and, 366–367, 382
TV and, 103, 174
WhatsApp and, 43, 55, 349
Facebook Chat, 43
Fahrenheit 9/11, 217, 230–231
1240
Fainaru, Steve, 396
Fainaru-Wada, Mark, 396
Fairbanks, Douglas, 94, 221–222, 522
Fair Labor Association (FLA), 57
Fair & Lovely products, 440
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), 463
Fairness Doctrine, 145, 158, 527–528
fair trade, 407
fair use, 513, 529
Fallon, Jimmy, 178, 474
Fallout, 79
Fallows, James, 11–12
Family Circle, 300–301, 312
Family Guy, 21, 526
Famous Players Company, 221
Famuyiwa, Rick, 228
Fandango, 207
fan fiction, 45, 342
FanFiction.net, 45
Fanning, Shawn, 110
Fantasia, 426
Fantastic Four, 242
1241
Fantasy Focus, 86
fantasy league sports, 76, 86
Fantasy Sports Trade Association, 76
Farber, Erica, 169
Farewell My Concubine, 232
Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway), 336
Fargo, 18, 20–21, 50, 189
FarmVille, 81, 86, 95, 434
Farnsworth, Philo, 176
Fast and Furious movie franchise, 385–386
Fat Boys, 124
Faulkner, William, 336
Fault in Our Stars, The (film), 331
Fault in Our Stars, The (Green), 320
fax machines, 8, 25
FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 518
FCB, 359
FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 526
Fear Factor, 152
Fearless (Swift), 106
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), 37–38
Federal Communications Act, 118
1242
Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 29, 150–151, 166, 419, 430
advertising and, 370, 375
broadcast networks and, 146, 524, 526–527
disclosure rules and, 395
diversity and, 431
Fairness Doctrine and, 158, 528
Fund for Local News and, 281
media mergers and, 435
net neutrality and, 62, 528
radio and, 153, 155, 160, 168, 438–439
TV and, 176–177, 195–196, 198–199, 202, 487
Federalist Party, 509
Federal Radio Commission (FRC), 150
Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 55, 149, 407, 536
advertising and, 357, 370, 377–378
antitrust regulation and, 418–419, 438
data mining and, 58–59
disclosure rules and, 366, 401
Feed the Animals, 529
Fellini, Federico, 229
Felt, Mark, 452
Feminist Frequency, 88–89
1243
Fenton, Roger, 298
Ferrell, Will, 20, 370
Fessenden, Reginald, 143–144
Fey, Tina, 330
FHM, 302
Fiat Chrysler, 541
Fibber McGee and Molly, 151
fiber-optic cable, 41, 184, 199
Field, Sally, 227
Fifty Shades of Grey (James), 18, 336, 342
Fiji, 367
Filkins, Dexter, 262
Film Board, National (Canada), 230
film festivals, 231, 243
Filo, David, 43
Filtr, 166
Final Fantasy, 78–79, 81, 95
financial crisis. See economic crisis (2008–09)
Finding Dory, 216
Finding Nemo, 427
Finkel, Michael, 459
Finland, 63, 447
1244
Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 18, 23
fin-syn (Financial Interest and Syndication Rules), 196
FIP Radio (Paris), 163
Firefox, 42, 59
First Amendment (U.S. Constitution), 16, 254, 372, 374, 460, 505–507, 509–531
books and, 335
gaming and, 71, 98
Internet and, 528
movies and, 520–521
print vs. broadcast media and, 524, 526–528
vs. Sixth Amendment, 511, 518–519
Supreme Court and, 71, 98, 198, 442, 506, 510–512, 514, 521–526
First Amendment Center, 476, 506
Fisher, Carrie, 216
Fishman, Seth, 320
Fiske, Rosanna, 410
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 325, 336
500 Days of Summer, 231
FKA Twigs, 106
Fleischman, Doris, 391
Fleishman-Hillard, 358, 393, 406
1245
Flickr, 43, 45
Focus, 240
Fog of War, The, 230
Food and Drug Act (1906), 296, 355
Food and Drug Administration, U.S. (FDA), 355, 394
Food Marketing Institute, 353
Foodspotting, 64
Forbes, Steve, 527
Ford, 352, 393, 537
Ford, Harrison, 216
Ford, Henry, 422
Ford, Sarah, 99
Foreign Policy, 46
Forever (Blume), 336
“Forever” (Brown), 133
Forever War, The (Filkins), 262
Forrest Gump, 241
Fortune, 298
Foster, Jodie, 227
4AD (record label), 133
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (Mander), 502
Foursquare, 530
1246
Fourth Estate, 508
fourth screens, 187, 204
Four Tops, 120
Fox, William, 221
Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX), 20, 146, 186–189, 200, 205–206, 351–352, 370, 487
Hulu and, 185, 207
Murdoch and, 300
Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd.), 56–57, 422
Fox Family Network, 427
Fox Film Corporation (later Twentieth Century Fox), 221
Fox Movietone, 191, 225
Fox News, 4, 13, 20–21, 182, 192, 249, 454–456, 467, 473
Fox Searchlight Pictures, 231, 240
Fox Sports, 182, 363
fragmented market, 10, 26, 34, 209, 352, 453–454, 462, 467, 471
See also specialization
France, 46, 126, 128, 163, 283, 427–428, 509
advertising in, 358–359
American culture and, 246
books and, 334, 337
free press in, 447
magazines in, 291
1247
movies and, 219–220, 229, 244, 432
newspapers in, 483
Francis, Connie, 119
Franco, James, 331, 459
Frank, Anne, 335
Frank, Reuven, 451
Franken, Al, 528
Franken Berry (cereal), 19
Frankenstein (Shelley), 18–19
Frankfurt School, 496
Franklin, Aretha, 120
Franklin, Benjamin, 254, 267, 292, 324
Franklin, James, 254
fraud, 47, 58, 60
Freed, Alan, 115, 117–118
Freedom House, 509
Freedom’s Journal, 267
free expression, 61, 506–512, 531
limits of, 511–512
movies and, 523
speech and, 234, 270, 372, 439, 506–507, 512
See also First Amendment
1248
Freeform (previously ABC Family), 331, 427–428
Freegate, 48
free press, 270, 274, 372, 447, 457, 475, 506–509, 512, 518–519
democracy and, 417, 421, 532
national security and, 16, 456, 507, 510–511
Free Press, 62, 430, 441, 531
Free Speech for Me—but Not for Thee (Hentoff), 335
French Publishers Association, 334
Freud, Sigmund, 23, 391
Friedkin, William, 226
Friendly, Fred, 465
Friends, 66, 201, 203, 205
Fringe, 26
Frito-Lay, 370
Frogger, 75
Frozen, 227, 241–242, 245, 425–427
Fruit Ninja, 78
Fugitive, The, 205, 518
Full Frontal, 473–474, 478
Fun Home (Bechdel), 329, 336
funk, 120
Furious 7, 365
1249
Future (hip-hop artist), 126
FX, 20, 174, 189–190
FXX, 86
Gaga, Lady, 115, 135
Gagliano, Gina, 345
gag orders, 519
Galavisión, 167
Galaxy, 78
Gallo, 369
Game Boy, 74, 77, 83
GameCube, 74
Game Informer, 300, 303
Game of Thrones, 18, 20–21, 50, 184, 187, 331, 429
#GamerGate controversy, 88–89
games, video, 25, 69–101
action, 78–79, 80
board, 75
casual, 83, 95, 97
complexity of, 81
conventions of, 82
educational, 72, 87, 195
first-person shooter, 75–76, 78–79, 81–82, 91
1250
free-to-play, 75, 96–97
graphics and, 75
MMORPG, 45, 76, 79, 81, 87, 94–95, 97
MOBA, 79
music, 83
penny arcades and, 71–73, 75
platforms for, 49, 75
puzzle, 73, 75, 79, 81
role-playing, 79, 81
simulation, 83
sports, 76, 81, 83
strategy, 83
subscription, 75
survival horror, 79
wedding, 492
GameSpot, 85
GameStop, 97
GameTrailers, 85
gaming, digital, 15, 69–101
adaptability and, 94
advertising and, 85–87, 382
books and, 86
1251
business of, 92–98
children and, 76
culture of, 88–89, 99
developers and, 94–99
distribution and, 94, 96–97
effects of, 80–81, 87, 90, 91, 498
First Amendment and, 71, 98
gender and, 87–90, 92
history of, 71–76
Internet and, 75–76, 93
as mass medium, 71, 76, 78, 84, 96, 98, 100
modding and, 85
movies and, 86
music and, 83–84
other media and, 78, 85
PR and, 395
publishers and, 93–96
rating system of, 90, 92, 98
regulation of, 85, 90, 92
royalties and, 95
social interaction and, 71, 78, 81, 84, 87, 92
TV and, 72–73
1252
virtual worlds and, 44–45, 76
gaming consoles, 73–75, 92–94, 96, 102, 186, 237
Gandhi, Mohandas, 297
“Gangnam Style,” 45, 132
gangster rap, 125, 226
Gannett, 262, 273, 275, 278–279, 434, 437
Gans, Herbert, 454–455, 532
Ganz, 76
Gap, 360
Garland, Judy, 178
gatekeepers, media, 8–9, 346, 469
Internet and, 9, 50
Gates, Bill, 52, 148
Gatorade, 397
GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; 1947), 425
Gavron, Sarah, 227
Gawker, 44, 46, 455, 516, 518
Gawker Media, 85
Gaye, Marvin, 120, 123
Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), 469
Geer, Will, 523
Gelbart, Larry, 188
1253
gender bias, 463, 492
gender roles, 492, 498
General, The, 223
General Electric (GE), 367, 391, 437
NBC and, 148, 174, 205, 242
radio and, 143, 145–148
RCA-NBC and, 419
Universal and, 242
General Hospital, 190
General Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 292
General Motors, 55, 149, 352, 373, 391, 535
General Motors Family Party, 152
Genesis, 156
Gentleman’s Agreement, 236
Gentleman’s Magazine, 292
George, Boy, 115
George Polk Awards, 276
George Washington Bridge lane closure scandal, 407
Gerbner, George, 491, 494
Geritol, 179
Germany, 6, 87, 447
books and, 323, 334, 336–337
1254
films from, 229, 432
music industry in, 126, 130
Gershwin, George, 113
Getty Oil, 183
Ghostery, 58
GI Bill, 327
Gibson, Charles, 192
Gibson, Don, 118
Gibson, Tyrese, 386
G.I. Joe, 373
Gillette, 370
Gilligan, Vince, 204
Ginsberg, Allen, 270, 340
Girls, 21, 184
Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis), 529
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The, 229
Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, The (Schumer), 339
Gitlin, Tod, 497
Gjoni, Eron, 88
Glamour, 290
Glasgow (Kentucky), 208
Glee, 189
1255
Glenn Beck Program, The, 167, 455
Global Dreams (Barnet and Cavanagh), 428, 441
globalism, 10, 62, 243–244, 358, 429, 439–441
global market
magazines and, 312
media corporations and, 26–27, 146, 241, 244, 336, 414, 418, 422, 425, 428–429, 438, 443
movies and, 222, 227, 229, 237, 239, 241, 243–244, 246, 432, 440
music and, 119, 126, 130
newspapers and, 275
radio and, 163
technology and, 428, 495
TV and, 428
Globe, 309
G.L.O.S.S., 123
Godey’s Lady’s Book, 291, 293–294
Godfather, The, 217, 226, 237
Godsick, Jeffrey, 378
Godzilla, 233, 481
Goffin, Gerry, 113
Go-Go’s, 123
Goldberg, Whoopi, 330
1256
Golden State Warriors, 182
Goldhill, Jonathan, 381
Goldhill Group, The, 381
Golding, William, 336
Goldsmith, Thomas T., 72
Goldwater, Barry, 524
Golf Channel, 207
Golf Digest, 306
Golin and Weber Shandwick, 359
Gomery, Douglas, 220, 521
Gone Girl, 225
Gone with the Wind, 225
Gong Li, 232
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, 353
Good Housekeeping, 258, 300–301, 305, 391
“Good Luck Charm” (Presley), 116
Goodman, Benny, 113
Good Morning, Vietnam, 427
Good Morning America, 192, 427, 466
Goodnight Moon (Brown), 23
Goodreads, 343
Goodrum, Charles, 355
1257
“Good Times” (Chic), 124
Good Wife, The, 21
Goodwin, Hannibal, 218–219
Google
advertising and, 4, 11–12, 54, 363–364, 433
Android and, 49, 54
brand value of, 349, 369
commercialism and, 65
convergence and, 11–12
digital journalism and, 279
Internet and, 50, 54
as leading digital conglomerate, 52, 349, 414–415, 429, 432–434, 437
mobile devices and, 242
Motorola and, 435
movies and, 242
net neutrality and, 62
search engine of, 43, 52, 54
streaming and, 185
YouTube and, 45, 54, 204, 242, 349, 433, 435
Google+, 38, 45, 50, 54, 302
Google AdWords, 365
Google Analytics, 394
1258
Google Apps, 43, 51, 54
Google Books, 333
Google Cardboard, 70
Google Chat, 43
Google Chrome, 42, 54, 59, 349
Google Chromebook, 433
Google Chromecast, 49, 433
Google.cn (China), 48
Google Drive, 44
Google Gmail, 42–43, 54
Google Goggles, 43, 365
Google Maps, 54
Google Nexus, 49, 78, 310, 341, 433
Google Now, 51
Google Play, 49, 50, 54, 77–78, 97, 111, 237–238, 241, 332, 341–342
Google Shopping, 54
Google Voice Search, 43, 365
GoPro Hero 3 camera, 243
Gordy, Berry, 120
Gore, Lesley, 119
Gore, Tipper, 134
Gosden, Freeman, 152–153
1259
Gotham, 200
government
distrust of, 25, 46–47, 424
repressive, 30, 45, 48, 62, 439
surveillance by, 58, 60
Governors Ball music festival, 377
G. P. Putman, 325
GQ, 302, 310, 312
Gracenote, 273
Grahame-Smith, Seth, 25, 331
Graham Holdings Company, 302
Grammy Awards, 106
gramophones, 108
Gramsci, Antonio, 423, 496
Grand Budapest Hotel, The, 231
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, 124
Grand Ole Opry, 159
Grand Theft Auto, 18, 79–80, 84, 90–91, 96
Granic, Isabela, 80–81
Granik, Debra, 227
Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 336
graphophones, 108
1260
Grateful Dead, 63, 121
Gravity, 225
“Great American Fraud, The” (Collier’s), 295
“Great Balls of Fire” (Blackwell), 116
Great Depression, 108, 230, 418, 422, 475
advertising and, 356
book industry and, 321, 325
magazines and, 296, 298, 325
movie industry and, 522
newspapers and, 275
radio and, 152, 160, 236, 325
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 325, 336
Great Train Robbery, The, 220
Greece, 6, 13, 334
Greeley, Horace, 453
Green, David Gordon, 54
Green, John, 320, 336
Green Bay Packers, 401
Green Day, 123
Green Hornet, The, 151
greenwashing, 407
Greider, William, 464
1261
Gremlins, 523
Grey Global, 359
Grey’s Anatomy, 200, 211
Griffith, Bill, 328
Griffith, D. W., 20, 94, 221–222, 224, 225
Groepper, Lindsay, 409
Grokster, 111
grunge, 119, 123, 125
Guardian, 27, 99, 260, 457, 469, 476
Guatemala, 398
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, 228
Guetta, David, 126
Guitar Hero, 81, 83, 94
“Gulf Coast Blues” (Smith), 114
Gunsmoke, 190
Guns N’ Roses, 23
gun violence, 447, 467–468, 498
See also mass shootings
Gutenberg, Johannes, 6, 323
Gutenberg Bible, 323
Guthrie, Arlo, 121
Guthrie, Woody, 121
1262
Guy, Buddy, 114
Habermas, Jürgen, 499, 500
Habibi (Thompson), 336
Habitat for Humanity, 399
Hachette, 337
hackers, 41, 46–47, 60
Hadden, Briton, 297, 298
Haddon, Mark, 336
Haenlein, Michael, 43–44
Haim, 124
Hakuhodo DY Holdings, 359
Hale, Sarah Josepha, 293–294
Hale Global, 283
Haley, Alex, 190
Haley, Bill, 115
Half-Life, 76, 85, 88
Hallmark Channel, 425
Halo, 75, 78–82, 84, 87, 93–94
Hamill, Mark, 216
Hamill, Pete, 342
Hamilton, Alexander, 292, 509
Hamilton, Andrew, 254, 292
1263
Hamilton, Filippa, 299
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 18
Hammett, Dashiell, 523
Hancock, John, 292
Handler, Daniel (Lemony Snicket), 331
Hannity, Sean, 159, 467
Happy Days, 487
Harbrecht, Doug, 276
Hardcore Henry, 243
Hardee’s, 370, 378
Harding, Warren G., 146
Hardwicke, Catherine, 227
Hare, Jimmy, 298
Hargis, Billy James, 524
Harmonix Systems, 83
Harper & Bros., 325
HarperCollins, 325, 337, 345, 378
Harper & Row, 325
Harper’s, 294, 306
Harper’s Bazaar en Español, 308
Harris, Benjamin, 254
Harris, Calvin, 126
1264
Harris, John, 280
Harris, Ken, 299
Harris, Neil Patrick, 188, 331
Harris-Perry, Melissa, 501
Harry, Debbie, 123
Harry Potter (film), 241, 320
Harry Potter franchise, 18, 24
Harry Potter series (Rowling), 326, 331, 336
Hart, Michael, 332
Harvard University, 279, 333
Harvey, David, 421
hate speech, 60–61, 507
Hatfields and McCoys, 190
HathiTrust Digital Library, 333
Hauptmann, Bruno, 519–520
Havas, 359
Hawaii Five-O, 190
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 293
Hayes, Chris, 467
Haynes, Darren, 211
Hays, Will, 522
HBO (Home Box Office), 103, 174, 180–181, 331, 352, 429
1265
programming and, 6, 20–21, 26, 184, 189–190, 195
HBO Go, 429
“H-Bomb Secret, The” (Progressive magazine), 511
HBO Now, 186, 429
Hearst, Albert, 257
Hearst, George, 257
Hearst, William Randolph, 256–259, 290, 309
Hearst Corporation, 183, 311–312, 437
Heart, 83
“Heartbreak Hotel” (Presley), 116
“Heat Wave” (Martha and the Vandellas), 120
Hefner, Hugh, 303
hegemony, 423–424, 492
Hein, Teresa, 211
Heinz, 356
Helix, 45
Heller, Joseph, 336
Hellman, Lillian, 523
Hellmann’s, 364
Hello Kitty, 246
Hell’s Angels (Thompson), 262
Help a Reporter Out (HARO), 409
1266
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, 373
Hemingway, Ernest, 325, 336
He Named Me Malala, 230
Hendrix, Jimi, 117, 121–122, 136
Hennessy, 375, 377
Henry, John, 252
Hentoff, Nat, 134, 335
Her, 51
“Here” (Cara), 125
Here Media, 308
Here TV, 308
Herman’s Hermits, 119
Heroes Reborn, 200
Herrold, Charles “Doc,” 146
Hersey, John, 261, 307
Herthel, Jessica, 336
Hertz, Heinrich, 142
Heth, Joice, 388
Hewitt, Don, 209, 461
Hewlett-Packard, 56, 393
Hicks, Wilson, 297
Hidden Blade, 78
1267
Hidden Fortress, The, 233
Hidden Persuaders, The (Packard), 373
Hide Away, 227
Hiebing, 401
Highlights for Children, 306, 310
Hill, Jonah, 459
Hill, Lewis Kimball, 160
Hillcrest Media, 342
Hill+Knowlton Strategies, 359, 392–393, 405–406
Hill Street Blues, 190
Hine, Lewis, 298
Hiroshima (Hersey), 307
Hispanic Broadcasting, 167
Hispanics, 159, 193, 268–269, 307–308, 375, 377, 394
History (National Geographic), 304
History Channel, 190, 205
“History of the Standard Oil Company, The” (Tarbell), 295
History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy (Pentagon Papers), 510
Hitchcock, Alfred, 226
Hitler, Adolf, 488
Hits Now!, 165
Hogan, Hulk (Terry G. Bollea), 516, 518
1268
Hole, 123
Holly, Buddy, 115–116, 119
Hollywood Ten, 234
Holmes, Katie, 515
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 511–512
Holt, Lester, 191
Holtzbrinck, 337
Home Education Magazine, 313
home entertainment, 69, 77, 180, 234, 236–237
Homeland, 21, 174, 184–185
Homer, 244
homosexuality, 134, 336, 498
Honda, 537
Honduras, 398
Hong Kong, 48, 229, 232, 432
Hong Kong Disneyland Resort, 428
Honig, David, 430–431
Hoover, Herbert, 150
Hopper, Dennis, 226
Horgan, Stephen, 298
Horkheimer, Max, 496
Horne, Lena, 523
1269
HotAir, 44
Hot Country, 165
Hotmail, 42
Houghton Mifflin, 325
“Hound Dog” (Thornton), 115
House, (Eddie James) “Son,” 114
House of Cards, 246, 414
House of Flying Daggers, 232
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 234, 524
Howl (Ginsberg), 340
Howlin’ Wolf, 114
How to Get Away with Murder, 200, 493
How to Train Your Dragon 2, 378
HTC, 49, 70
HTML (hypertext markup language), 42, 64
Hubbard, Gardiner Green, 306
Huffington Post, 44, 192, 249, 276–277, 285, 320, 455
AOL and, 283, 421
Verizon and, 283
Hulk, the, 242
Hulu, 62, 75, 103, 238, 331, 352, 419, 429
advertising and, 365
1270
movie industry and, 237
ownership of, 174, 185, 207, 242
programming and, 186, 198, 487
TV and, 12, 174, 206
Human Rights Watch, 528, 530
Humor Times, 313
Humphrey, Hubert, 230
Hungary, 447
Hunger Games, The (film), 23, 243, 320
Hunger Games trilogy (Collins), 23, 331, 500
Huntley, Chet, 191
Huntley Brinkley Report, 191
Hurricane Katrina, 468
Hurt Locker, The, 227
Hushmail, 48
Hüsker Dü, 123
Husni, Samir, 304
Huxley, Aldous, 25, 336
Hyatt, Ariel, 135
Hyman, Mark, 17
Hynde, Chrissie, 123
Hype Machine, 134
1271
I, Frankenstein, 19
I Am Jazz (Herthel and Jennings), 336
IBM, 56, 63, 369
IBM Interactive Experience, 359
“I Can’t Help Myself” (Four Tops), 120
“I Can’t Stop Loving You” (Gibson), 118
Ice-T, 124
iconoscope, 176
identity theft, 47, 60
IDW, 329
IFC, 204
I. F. Stone’s Weekly, 271
Iger, Robert, 216, 422, 428
IGN, 85
“I Hear a Symphony” (Supremes), 121
“I Heard It through the Grapevine” (Gaye), 120
iHeartMedia, 140, 163–164, 167, 419–420
iHeartRadio, 112, 130, 133, 140, 164–165, 167
IHOP, 370
“I Kissed a Girl” (Martin), 128
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou), 336
Illegal Art, 529
1272
Illinois Central Railroad, 389
Il Miracolo (The Miracle), 522
I Love Lucy, 188, 202, 524
Image, 329
Image, The (Boorstin), 397
IMAX, 243
IMAX 3D Experience, 225, 240
IMDb, 349
immigrants, 4, 14, 295, 450
Asian, 269
books and, 325, 342
Chinese, 48, 269
European, 220, 267, 325, 521
magazines and, 308, 314
media research and, 496
movies and, 220, 229, 521
newspapers and, 257–258, 267, 269
Spanish-speaking, 269, 308
Imus, Don, 158
Ince, Thomas, 222
In Cold Blood (Capote), 261, 307
income disparity, 15, 22, 380, 422–423, 441, 454, 500, 505–506
1273
Inconvenient Truth, An, 230, 494
Incredibles, The, 427
indecency, 487, 526
Independent, 393
Independent Broadcasters, United (UIB), 149
Independent Reflector, 292
India, 47, 246, 376, 391, 440
films from, 229, 232, 432
Indiana Jones, 428
Indian Country Today, 269–270
India-Pakistan partition, 297
Indiegogo, 243
individualism, 6–7, 21, 24–25, 324, 372, 388, 454, 456
Industrial Age, 7, 417–418
Industrial Light & Magic, 245
Industrial Revolution, 6–7, 10, 24–25, 71, 255, 257–258, 325, 356, 387
Inferno (Brown), 331
Infiniti, 537
infomercials, 86
Información, La (Houston), 269
information
as commodity, 8
1274
decontextualized, 471
formats of, 263
narratives and, 13
quality of, 12
sources for, 283–284
volume of, 15, 451
Information Age, 7–8, 417–418, 443
information commons, 63
infrastructure, 62, 128, 199
InnoCentive, 44
innovations, media, 10, 62–63, 134, 154, 217, 225
Inside Amy Schumer, 21, 174, 188
Inside Out, 216
Insomniac Games, 99
Inspiration Network, 487
Instagram, 38, 44, 55, 302, 308, 364–365, 434
instant messaging (IM), 43, 55
Instructions Not Included, 229
InStyle, 311
Insurgent (Roth), 320
intellectual properties, 95
International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), 419
1275
Internet, 5, 14, 35, 37–67, 170, 182, 281
accessibility and, 40, 46–47, 50–52, 61–62
advertising and, 42–43, 54–55, 58, 200, 205, 243, 351–352, 356, 363–366, 372, 380, 415, 478
books and, 9, 331, 341–342
broadband, 42, 48, 52, 62, 128, 528
censorship and, 516, 528–529
closed, 50–51, 54, 65
commercialism and, 41–43, 65–66
convergence and, 10–11, 34, 48, 185
development of, 10, 39–43
economics and, 52–58, 415
gaming and, 75–76, 93
gatekeepers and, 9, 50
magazines and, 302–303, 311
as mass medium, 10, 11, 34, 41, 43, 60, 63, 65–66, 110, 358, 364
mobile devices and, 49–51, 364
movies and, 231, 236–237, 242–243
music and, 6, 9, 107, 110–112, 124, 130–131, 133–134
news and, 453–454, 462, 465, 467–469
newspapers and, 263, 275, 277, 279
PR and, 395, 400–401
1276
privacy/security and, 52, 55, 58–60, 486
radio and, 162–164, 414
regulation of, 60–61, 150, 446, 528
social change and, 46–48, 530
terrorism and, 46–47
TV and, 49, 184, 186, 199, 209, 237, 414, 433
Internet Archive, 63, 333
Internet Explorer, 42
Internet service providers (ISPs), 42, 52, 62, 111, 267
net neutrality and, 528
Interpublic Group, 358–359, 364, 392–393
Interstate Commerce Act (1887), 389
In the Heat of the Night, 228
In These Times, 312, 501
In Touch Weekly, 302
Invasion from Mars, The (Cantril), 488–489
Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), 450
Investigative Reporting, Center for, 283
Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, The, 282
Iran, 509
U.S. nuclear deal with, 264
Iraq, 282–283, 447, 509
1277
Iraq War, 13, 16, 283, 405, 453, 464, 476, 508
Iron Chef, 246
Iron Man, 242, 428
Iron Man 3, 216
ISIS, 16, 46–47, 175
Israel, 447
Italy, 128, 229, 334, 354, 447
It Happened One Night, 225
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, 188
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Public Enemy), 136
iUniverse, 342
Ivory Soap, 355
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” (Beatles), 129
Izanskey, Chris, 44–45
J-14, 425
Jab Tak Hai Jaan, 232
Jack FM, 165
Jackson, Janet, 527
Jackson, Michael, 13, 125, 358
Jackson, Peter, 331
Jackson 5, 120
Jagger, Mick, 113, 115–116, 120
1278
Jamaica, 447
James, E. L., 18, 336, 342
James, LeBron, 182, 367
Jan & Dean, 119
Japan, 62, 86, 176, 246, 299, 447
books and, 328, 334
films from, 229, 233, 432
music and, 126, 130
WWII and, 271, 481
Jarmusch, Jim, 231
Jaws, 226, 237–238, 494
Jay-Z, 106, 111
Jazz Singer, The, 224–225
J. B. Lippincott, 325
JCPenney, 360
Jefferson, Thomas, 509, 532
Jefferson Airplane, 121
Jeffries, Jim, 521
Jennings, Jazz, 336
Jennings, Peter, 191–192
Jet, 308
JetBlue Airways, 397
1279
Jetpack Joyride, 98
Jett, Joan, 123
Jewell, Richard, 460
Jewish Currents, 313
Jimi Hendrix Experience, 121
“JK Wedding Entrance Dance,” 133
jobs
advertising, 381
book industry, 345
Internet, 64
IT, 90
movie industry, 245
music industry, 135
newspaper industry, 285
outsourcing of, 422, 425
PR, 408
radio industry, 169, 285
TV industry, 211, 285
video game industry, 99
See also labor issues
Jobs, Steve, 54, 56, 64
John, Elton, 115, 123, 358
1280
John Hancock Financial, 397
“Johnny B. Goode” (Berry), 115
Johns Hopkins University, 403
Johnson, Bradley, 368
Johnson, Dwayne, 386
Johnson, Jack, 63, 521
Johnson, John H., 308
Johnson, Lyndon, 192–193
Johnson, Robert, 114, 119
Johnson, Samuel, 292
Johnson, Steven, 21
Johnson & Johnson, 393, 401
Johnson Publishing Company, 308
Joker’s Wild, The, 179
Jolson, Al, 113, 224–225
Jones, Grace, 115
Jones, LeRoi, 270
Jones, Mary Harris, 312
Jonze, Spike, 51
Joplin, Janis, 121–122
Joplin, Scott, 113
Jordan, 62
1281
journalism, 20, 24–26, 28–29, 449–480
of assertion, 4, 454, 467, 473
blogs and, 4, 44, 276, 299, 468
citizen, 29, 48, 281–282, 446, 472–473, 477
community and, 456, 468, 472–473, 477
complexity and, 455, 464, 474
conflicts of interest and, 457, 459
convergence and, 263, 275, 277, 467–468
credibility and, 463, 464, 465, 472
embedded, 508
ethics and, 16–17, 446, 456–460, 476
European, 469, 483
expert sources and, 463–464
historical context and, 461, 477
interpretive, 260–261, 271, 297, 461
investigative, 251–253, 256, 259, 271, 282–283, 446, 450, 465, 477, 540
literary, 255, 261–262, 307
magazines and, 291, 295–296, 305–306, 310, 312
marketing tactics and, 464, 472–473
muckrakers and, 25, 290, 295–296, 312, 355, 388–390, 530
multimedia, 10, 92, 162, 263, 277, 285
neutrality and, 453–454, 456, 463–465, 467, 469, 472, 477
1282
new business models for, 278–281, 283, 451, 470–471
objectivity and, 258–260, 264, 267, 461–462
online, 262–263, 270, 278–279, 283, 285, 446, 450, 467–469
opinion and, 4, 464, 467
photo, 296–301, 306
politics and, 254–255, 455, 465
PR and, 402–409, 470–471, 473
press releases and, 395, 470
public, 472–473, 477
reporting rituals of, 460–465
risks involved in, 282–283, 508
social responsibility and, 408, 461, 475
stunt, 290, 450
time and space constraints and, 262, 267, 277, 455, 461, 465, 467
TV and, 465–469
Twitter and, 48, 446, 468
verification and, 4, 451, 455, 467, 471, 477, 478
watchdog role of, 4, 452, 465, 471–472, 475, 508, 530, 540
WikiLeaks and, 476
See also newspapers
Journalists, Committee to Protect (CPJ), 282–283, 508
Journalists, Society of Professional (SPI), 457, 458
1283
Journeys (Smithsonian), 304
Joy, 231
Joyce, James, 18, 23, 335–336, 515–516
Joyner, Tom, 157
JPMorgan Chase, 274, 367
jukeboxes, 71, 109, 112, 117–118, 156
Jules and Jim, 229
Jump Bug, 82
Jungle, The (Sinclair), 296
Ju-on, 233
Jurassic World, 86, 238, 241, 422
Jurkowitz, Mark, 285
Just Dance, 83–84
Justice Department, U.S., 60, 147, 196, 202, 205, 234–235, 418–419, 435, 438, 519
juvenile delinquency, 117–118, 328, 485
J. Walter Thompson, 359
Kafka, Franz, 23
Kaiser Family Foundation, 12, 492
Kaiser Permanente, 367
Kalish, Rachel, 498
Kalman, Maira, 326
Kaltenborn, H. V., 151
1284
Kane, Bob, 328
Kang Sung, 386
Kansas (rock group), 123
Kant, Immanuel, 460
Kaplan, Andreas M., 43–44
Kardashian, Kim, 18
Karloff, Boris, 19
Kasem, Casey, 156
Katz, Jackson, 498
Katz, Jon, 263, 453
Kazaa, 111
Kazan, Elia, 234
KCBS, 146
KCOR, 159
KCOU, 163
KDKA, 146–147
Keating, Zoë, 131
Keaton, Buster, 223
Keillor, Garrison, 307
Keller, Bill, 456, 476
Kellogg, John, 135
Kellogg cereals, 355
1285
Kelly, Megyn, 3
Kennedy, Anthony, 442
Kennedy, John F., 175, 209, 230, 299, 468
Kernan, Alvin, 343
Kerouac, Jack, 270
Kesha, 136
Ketchum, 358, 393
KEXP, 163
Keyes, Evelyn, 524
Keyhole, 394
Key & Peele, 188
Keys, Alicia, 159
KGO, 158
Khalifa, Wiz (Cameron Jibril Thomaz), 159, 386
Khan, Shah Rukh, 232
Kia Motors, 358
Kickstarter, 44–45, 88, 98, 530
Kidman, Nicole, 377
Kid Rock, 125
Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, The, 227
Kim Jee-woon, 233
Kimmel, Michael, 498
1286
kinescope, 188
kinetograph, 219
kinetoscopes, 71, 219
King (gamemaker), 94–95
King, B. B., 114
King, Carole, 113
King, Martin Luther, 175, 468, 514
King, Stephen, 331
King Features Syndicate, 258
Kings of Leon, 116
Kinks, 119
Kipling, Rudyard, 290
Kissinger, Henry, 476
Klapper, Joseph, 489
Klear, 394
Klein, Ezra, 277
Klondike, 378
K-Love, 167
Kmart, 360
Knight-Ridder, 274–275, 437
KNOW, 162
Kobo e-reader, 342
1287
Koch, Charles, 444
Koch, David, 444
Kodak, 298
Kohl’s, 360
Koppel, Ted, 17
Korea, 229, 323
Korean War, 261, 271, 283, 298–299
Kore-eda, Hirokazu, 233
Kotaku, 85, 88
Kovach, Bill, 21, 454
KQNY, 163
Kraft Television Theater, 189
Kuklin, Susan, 336
Kurosawa, Akira, 229, 233
“La Bamba” (Valens), 119
Labor Department, U.S., 417
labor issues, 56–57, 295, 298, 407, 418, 422, 425, 443
PR and, 387–388, 390
Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of, 285
L.A. Confidential, 226
Ladies’ Companion, 324
Ladies’ Home Journal (LHJ), 295–296, 300–301, 305, 313
1288
Ladies’ Magazine, 293–294
La Dolce Vita, 229
Lady and the Tramp, 426
Lady Vengeance, 233
LaFrance, Adrienne, 463
Lagardère, 337
Lam, Ringo, 232
Lamar, Kendrick, 126
Lambert, Adam, 115
L.A. Noire, 91
Laos, 269
Lara Croft, 86
Lasch, Christopher, 477
Lassie, 22
Lasswell, Harold, 484
Last.fm, 164
Last Tango in Paris, 217
Last Week Tonight, 18, 21, 26, 184, 473–474, 478
Latina, 308
Latin America, 176, 398, 508
Latinos, 438, 496
Latvia, 393
1289
Laugh-O-gram Films, 426
Lauren, Ralph, 402
Laverne & Shirley, 188
Law & Order, 202, 438
Lawrence, Jennifer, 500
Layton, Lyndsey, 410
“Leader of the Pack” (Shangri-Las), 119
League, The, 86
League of Denial (Fainaru-Wade and Fainaru), 396
League of Legends, 75
Learning Games Network, 99
Learning Tree, The, 228
Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 335
Lebanon, 334
LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole, 262
Ledbetter, Huddie (Lead Belly), 121
Ledin, Marie, 128
Lee, Ang, 227
Lee, Harper, 335–336
Lee, Ivy Ledbetter, 389–391, 403, 418
Lee, Jennifer, 227, 245
Lee, Spike, 227, 233
1290
Lee, Timothy B., 513
Lee Chang-dong, 233
Legend of Zelda, The, 94
Lego Movie, The, 239
Leiber, Jerry, 113
Leigh, Janet, 226
Lennon, John, 128
Lennox, Annie, 115
Leno, Jay, 330
Lenovo, 435
Lens, 299
Leo Burnett Worldwide, 358–359, 373
Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, 397
Le Prince, Louis Aimé Augustin, 218
Les Misérables, 226
Lessig, Lawrence, 501, 506, 529
Lethal Weapon 4, 232
“Let It Be” (Beatles), 129
“Let’s Spend the Night Together” (Rolling Stones), 120
Letterman, David, 474
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee), 475
Levin, Mark, 159
1291
Levi Strauss, 355
Levithan, David, 336
Lévy, Pierre, 84
Lewinsky, Monica, 13, 263
Lewis, Jerry Lee, 116, 118
Lewis, Sinclair, 290, 530
LG (company), 49
LGBT community, 267, 270, 308, 442, 496
Li, Jet, 232
libel, 511, 513–515
Liberator, 308
Liberia, 447
libertarianism, 508
Liberty and the News (Lippmann), 483
Liberty Media, 207
libraries, 63, 164, 333, 342, 345
Library of Congress, 63, 164
Lieberman, Joe, 92
Liebling, A. J., 307
Life, 178, 230, 297, 298–299, 301
Life in Pieces, 200
Life of an American Fireman, The, 220
1292
Life of Pi, 227
Lifetime, 205, 425
Like Father, Like Son, 233
Lilo & Stitch, 426–427
Limbaugh, Rush, 157–159
LimeWire, 111
Limp Bizkit, 125
Lincoln, Abraham, 259
Lind, Jenny, 388
Lindbergh, Anne, 519
Lindbergh, Charles A., 225, 390, 519, 520
LinkedIn, 38, 45, 433
linotype machines, 324
Linux, 47, 63
Lion King, The, 426–428
Lionsgate, 240, 243, 300
Lipitor, 377
Lippmann, Walter, 260, 392, 404, 463–464, 483–484, 494
Lipton, 364
literacy, 7, 24, 255, 267, 291–293, 325–327, 357, 389
Literary Guild, 340
Lithwick, Dahlia, 482
1293
Little, Brown, 325, 339, 342
Little Caesar, 485
Little House on the Prairie, 487
Little Mermaid, The, 426–427
Little Miss Sunshine, 231
Little Review, 515
Little Richard (Penniman), 115–117, 119
Living Desert, The, 426
Lizzo, 126
LL Cool J, 124
LMFAO, 358
lobbying, 374, 389, 399–400, 405, 410, 473
by media corporations, 198, 434, 442, 444
Lobel, Adam, 80–81
Local Community Radio Act (2011), 168
Lolita (film), 236
Lolita (Nabokov), 335–336
Lone Ranger, The, 151, 175
Longo, Christian, 459
“Long Tall Sally” (Little Richard), 118
Lonny, 303
Look, 297, 301
1294
Looking for Alaska (Green), 320, 336
Lord of the Flies, The (Golding), 336
Lord of the Rings, The (film), 217, 241
Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 331
Los Angeles, 187, 334
Los Angeles Times, 260, 269, 279, 284, 435
Lost, 26, 190
Lost in Translation, 227, 231
Lost Weekend, The, 236
Lowe, Zane, 163
Lowe and Partners, 359
Lowenthal, Leo, 496
LSD, 121
Lucas, George, 215–216, 226–227, 233
Lucasfilm, 216, 242, 427–428
Luce, Henry, 297–298, 305
Lucky, 302
Lucky Strike, 391
Lucky Strike Orchestra, 152
Ludacris, 386
Ludlow strike, 390–391, 401
Lumière, Auguste, 219
1295
Lumière, Louis, 219
Lumineers, 127
Lyle, Jack, 489
MacFarlane, Seth, 132
Mackenzie Blue series, 378
Mackey, John, 400
Macmillan, 325, 337
Macy’s, 423
Mad Catz, 83
Mad Cow USA (Rampton and Stauber), 405
Madden, John, 83, 95
Madden NFL (previously John Madden Football), 76, 83, 94
Maddie & Tae, 106
Maddow, Rachel, 191, 467
Madea Christmas, A, 227
Mad Men, 21, 358, 414
Madonna, 205, 358
Madrid, 334
magalogs, 311–312
magazine industry, 289–317
adaptability of, 248, 277, 290, 303
advertising and, 200, 291, 294–295, 300, 303, 310, 351, 354, 364
1296
circulation and, 293, 296–297, 300–301, 305–307, 313
consumerism and, 291, 294, 313
development of, 291–296, 304
organization of, 309–312
ownership and, 311–312
Progressive magazine case and, 510, 511
readership and, 292, 294, 296, 303, 306–307
specialization and, 291–292, 301, 303–309, 425
3-D digital technology and, 302
Magazine Media, Association of (previously Magazine Publishers of America), 304
magazines, 289–317
African Americans and, 308
alternative, 312–313, 508
books and, 325, 340
bridal, 492
children’s, 306
digital, 304, 311
elite, 306–307
general-interest, 293, 296–297, 300–302
illustrations and, 291, 293–294
immigrants and, 308, 314
international editions of, 312
1297
Internet and, 302–303, 311
journalism and, 291, 295–296, 305–306, 310, 312
literary, 290, 292, 295, 306
as mass medium, 248, 277, 291, 294, 300, 313, 316
men’s, 303, 305
news, 192, 196, 201, 263, 297, 478
vs. newspapers, 295, 302, 309, 314
nineteenth-century, 292–294
political, 291, 312
popularity of, 304
radio and, 296, 297, 301
Spanish-language, 308
teen, 302, 306
TV and, 208, 300, 301, 311, 314
women and, 291, 293–294, 301, 305
Magic Lantern, 217
Magnavox, 73, 93
Magnificent Seven, The, 233
Magnolia Pictures, 242
“Magnum Pleasure Hunt,” 86
Mailer, Norman, 261–262
Maine battleship, sinking of, 298
1298
Mainstream Media Liberal Bias (MMLB), 158
Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (Stephens), 324
Malaysia, 232, 376
Malcolm X, 335
Maldives, 447
Maleficent, 86
Malek, Rami, 47
Mali, 494
Mañana Daily News, El (Chicago), 269
Mander, Jerry, 502
manga, 86
Mann, Estle Ray, 72
Man of Steel, 370, 378
Manson, Charles, 122, 262
Manson, Marilyn, 115
manuscripts, illuminated, 7, 322–323
Man with the Golden Arm, The, 236
“Maple Leaf Rag” (S. Joplin), 113
Marciani, Juan Pablo, 334
Marconi, Guglielmo, 142, 148
Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, 142–143, 145–146, 148
Marcus Theatres, 239–240
1299
marginalized groups, 132, 168, 270, 314, 406, 408, 432, 434, 439, 496, 501, 506, 527, 531
Marie Claire, 290
Mario, 84
Mario Kart, 88
Market, Edward, 528
Mark Levin Show, The, 165
Marlboro, 369, 376
Married … with Children, 487
Mars, Bruno, 116
Marshall, Josh, 276
Marshall, Penny, 227
Martha and the Vandellas, 120
Martin, Max (Karl Martin Sandberg), 128–129
Marvel, 86, 328–329
Disney and, 216, 242, 329, 427–428
Marvel vs. Capcom, 78, 86
Marx, Groucho, 150
Marx, Karl, 335, 496
Mary Tyler Moore Show, 466
M*A*S*H, 188, 205
Mashable, 44, 135, 277
mash-ups, 25, 43
1300
mass production, 71, 417–418
mass shootings, 60, 80, 90, 467–469, 498
Masterful Marketing, 381
Master of None, 414
Masterpiece Classic, 190
Masterpiece Mystery!, 190
Masterpiece Theatre, 190
Masters of Sex, 184
Matador, 133
Mateen, Omar, 498
Mattel, 360
Matthews, Chris, 473
Maus (Spiegelman), 329
Maxim, 302, 305
Maxwell (Gerald Maxwell Rivera), 159
Maxwell, James, 142
“Maybellene” (Berry), 115
Mayfield, Curtis, 123
Mazda, 537
MC5, 123
MCA (now NBC Universal), 185
McCain-Feingold Act (Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act; 2002), 442
1301
McCall’s, 300
McCann Erickson, 359
McCarthy, Joseph, 189, 271, 523
McCartney, Paul, 128
McChesney, Robert, 439, 441, 443, 470
McClatchy Company, 274
McClure’s Magazine, 295–296, 390
McCracken, Grant, 206
McDonald’s, 358, 378, 423
McGraw, Tim, 106
McGraw-Hill, 325, 337
McGuffey, William Holmes, 326
McKay, Adam, 20
McLaughlin, Ed, 158
McLean, Don, 119
McLeod, Kembrew, 529
McQueen, Steve, 227–228
meaning, creating, 6, 9, 13, 22, 24, 27, 30, 206, 483, 496
Meat Inspection Act (1906), 296
meat packing scandal, 295
Media Access Project, 531
Media and Democracy, Center for (CMD), 405–406
1302
Media Kitty, 409
media literacy, 4, 5, 15, 27–31
Media Matters, 441
Media Monopoly, The (Bagdikian), 434
Media Reform, National Conference for, 443
media reform movement, 443
Medical Repository, 292
Meet the Press, 18, 191
Méliès, Georges, 220, 224
Memoirs of a Geisha, 232
Memphis Free Speech, 271
Men’s Health, 305, 312
Mentalist, The, 438
Mercedes-Benz, 537
merchandising, 215–216, 239, 241–243, 374, 422, 425, 427
Mercury label, 117–118
Mercury Theater of the Air, 153
Meredith, Burgess, 523
Meredith Corporation, 304, 312
Merge Records, 130, 133
Merritt, Davis “Buzz,” 472
“Message, The” (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five), 124
1303
Metal Gear, 84
Metroid, 77, 79, 82
Mexicans, 113, 268–269
Mexico, 4, 157, 176, 193, 229, 237, 432, 447
Meyer, Stephenie, 331, 500
MGM, 223–224, 235
M.I.A. (record label), 106
Miami Heat, 182
Miami Herald, 269, 524, 526
Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, 524, 526
Mickey Mouse, 426, 513
microblogging, 44
microprocessors, 40–41
Microsoft, 42–43, 51–52, 62–63, 65, 279, 333, 393
advertising and, 364, 367
brand value of, 349, 369
Foxconn and, 56, 422
gaming and, 73–75, 77–78, 85, 92–95
as leading digital conglomerate, 52, 349, 414–415, 429, 432–433
phones of, 49, 52, 78, 433
Microsoft Surface, 49, 52, 78, 349, 433
Midwest Video case, 198
1304
Mightybell, 64
military, 8, 10, 142, 145, 271
Mill, John Stuart, 460
Miller, Arthur, 523
Miller, Glenn, 113
Miller beer, 377
Miller v. California, 516
Milton, John, 509
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 279
Milwaukee Sentinel, 511
Minaj, Nicki, 127, 136
Mindy Project, The, 186, 206, 350
Minecraft, 77, 79
Minesweeper, 83
minimum wage, 417
Minions, 86
Minneapolis Star Tribune, 274, 472
MinnPost, 283
Minority Ownership Policy, 430
Minority Report, 200
Minow, Newton, 158, 180
Minutemen, 123
1305
Miracle case (Burstyn v. Wilson), 522
Miramax, 231, 427, 434
Misisipi, El (New Orleans), 268
misogyny, 4, 87–91, 134, 498
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Rigg), 331
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, 193
Mitsubishi, 537, 541
Miyamoto, Shigeru, 74
Miyazaki, Hayao, 233
mobile devices, 34, 434
advertising and, 55, 310, 348, 365, 447
e-books and, 54, 249, 332
gaming and, 77–78, 83, 92–93, 95, 97
Internet and, 49–51, 364
magazines and, 302–303, 310, 311
movies and, 237, 242
multitasking and, 187
music and, 111
newspapers and, 260, 263
PR and, 348
radio and, 153, 162, 170
TV and, 182, 185–187, 209
1306
mobile phones, 8, 38, 62, 165, 170, 242
See also smartphones
Modern Family, 18, 188, 370
modern period, 24–25
Modern Times, 25, 27
Mod Squad, The, 190
Moment of Impact, 396
Momentum, 304
Monday Night Football, 182–183
Monk Comes Down the Mountain, 232
Monkey King, The, 232
monopolies, 257, 295, 416, 418, 427
movie industry and, 222
newspaper industry and, 253, 274–275, 277
radio and, 145–147
TV and, 208
See also corporations, media
Monroe, Marilyn, 301, 303
Monsanto, 47
Monster’s, Inc., 427
Monsters University, 216
Moonves, Leslie, 422–423
1307
Moore, Michael, 230
morality, 60, 236, 328, 483, 521–522
Morning Edition, 161
Morpheus, 111
Morrison, Jim, 122
Morrison, Toni, 331, 336
Morse, Samuel, 141
Morse code, 141
Mortal Kombat, 92, 98
Mosaic, 41–42
Mother Jones, 262, 312, 455, 469
Mothra, 482
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA; formerly MPPDA), 236, 522–523
Motion Picture Patents Company (the Trust), 221–222
Motion Picture Production Code, 236, 486, 522
Motorola, 49, 56, 149, 154, 435
Motown, 119, 120–121, 127
Moulin Rouge!, 226
Mountain Goats, 133
Movie Gallery–Hollywood Video chain, 236
movie industry, 102–103, 215–247, 521–524
adaptability of, 234, 236–237, 303
1308
attendance and, 225, 235–236
communist witch-hunt and, 234, 523–524
cultural imperialism and, 432, 440
development of, 217–220
directors and, 226–227, 232–233, 297, 300
distribution and, 222, 231, 235–237, 240–243
diversity and, 244, 246, 386
economics of, 237–242
First Amendment and, 520–521
flexibility and, 422
independent films and, 231, 239–240, 244
music and, 106, 130, 227, 240–241
production and, 221–222, 237
promotion and, 215, 240–241, 243
race barrier and, 228
radio and, 236
ratings system and, 236, 523
regulation and, 234–235, 521–522
sound recording and, 240–241
special effects and, 215, 225, 241, 243
studio system and, 187, 221–228, 234, 240
technology and, 215–219, 224–225, 236, 243
1309
theaters and, 222–224, 227–229, 231, 235–237, 239–240, 353, 364
TV and, 227, 234–237, 239–240
vertical integration and, 221, 224, 234–235, 241
video rentals and, 185–186, 229, 236–240, 242
World War I and, 222, 246, 440, 521
movies, 8, 13, 24, 71, 102–103, 215–247
action, 232, 241, 244
animated, 215–216, 241, 426–427
as art form, 217–219
blockbuster, 96, 215, 217, 224, 232, 238–241, 243, 329
books and, 326, 329, 330–331
documentary, 227, 229–230, 239, 243
effects of, 485, 488, 498, 521
foreign, 222, 227, 229, 232–233, 241, 246
gaming and, 86
immigrants and, 220, 229, 521
independent, 224, 227, 229–231, 239–241, 243
as mass medium, 217, 219–220, 227, 244, 277, 488
on-demand, 231, 237
science-fiction, 481
short, 219–220, 222–224, 229
silent, 14, 220, 223–224, 244
1310
sound and, 224–225, 236
talkies, 224
3-D, 70, 236, 238, 243, 490
violence and, 228, 235–236, 485–486
Movietone (Fox), 191, 225
Mozart in the Jungle, 174
Mozilla Foundation, 59
MPAA ratings system, 523
MP3, 110
Mr. Natural (Crumb), 328
Mr. Robot, 47
“Mr. Tambourine Man” (Dylan), 121
Ms., 303, 305, 310
MSL Group, 359, 393
MSNBC, 191–192, 205, 454–455, 467, 473, 501
MTV, 26, 126, 139, 181, 192, 428
influence of, 358
Video Music awards on, 487
MTV Networks/Viacom, 85
Muddy Waters, 114, 119
Muir, David, 192
Mulan, 426
1311
M.U.L.E., 94
Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council, 430–431
multitasking, media, 12, 50, 187, 352
Mumbai, 334
Munsters, The, 19
Murdoch, Rupert, 146, 274, 300
Murphy, Debra, 381
Murrow, Edward R., 150, 465
music, 105–137
black urban, 115–116, 119
blues, 114, 116, 119–120
British bands and, 119–124
Caribbean, 160
country, 115–116, 118, 157, 159
cover, 113, 117–118, 128
disco, 123–124
folk, 120–121, 123
free expression and, 134
gospel, 113–116, 118, 120
heavy metal, 119, 226
hip-hop, 14, 25–26, 116, 119, 124–126, 246, 377, 394, 529
jazz, 113
1312
Korean pop (K-pop), 132
Latin, 125, 160
pop, 15, 113, 119, 126, 134
postmodern, 26
protest, 270
rap, 134
R&B, 26, 114–116, 119
rock, 26, 107, 112, 113–124, 134, 156, 160, 168, 246
soul, 26, 119, 120, 123–124
soundtrack, 226, 242
videos and, 25, 133–134, 487
music industry, 105–137
access vs. ownership and, 111
adaptability of, 111, 126
advertising and, 106, 130, 133, 358, 382
advisory labels and, 134
business of, 54, 127, 130–131, 133
distribution and, 106, 119, 127, 130–131
female performers and, 114, 119, 123–125, 134
file-sharing and, 51, 110–111, 414
gaming and, 83–84
independent labels and, 105–106, 119–120, 125–127, 131, 133–134
1313
Internet and, 9, 63, 107, 110–112, 124, 130–131, 133–134
as mass medium, 110, 113, 127, 134, 227
movies and, 106, 130, 227, 240–241
music charts and, 114–115, 119, 123
radio and, 112, 126, 140, 151, 153, 155–157, 159–160, 165–166
records and, 102, 106, 108, 110, 130–131, 136, 159
royalties and, 109, 131, 133, 134
songwriting and, 119, 128–129, 131
streaming and, 103, 106, 109, 111–112, 126–127, 130–131, 156, 163, 166, 414
technology and, 110, 136
TV and, 106, 130, 178, 487
See also sound recording
Music Publishers’ Association, National, 133
Mutual v. Ohio, 521
Muybridge, Eadweard, 218
Myanmar (Burma), 62, 508
My Best Girl, 221
“My Boyfriend’s Back” (Angels), 119
Myers, Maddy, 88
My Ford, 311–312
“My Girl” (Temptations), 120
“My Guy” (Wells), 120
1314
My Little Pony and Friends, 373
MyOpusRadio, 163
Myspace, 45, 134, 425
Myst, 75, 79
myths, American, 388
NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 153, 224, 308
Nabokov, Vladimir, 335–336
Nader, Ralph, 377, 444
NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 425
Naishuller, Ilya, 243
Napoleon, 224
Napster, 51, 110–111, 414
narratives, 5–6, 13–15, 30, 32, 217, 320
advertising and, 352, 369–370
American Dream, 424
complexity of, 73, 174
consensus, 244
convergence and, 13
digital turn and, 429, 432
gaming and, 71, 73, 100
hegemony and, 424
journalism and, 20, 258, 261, 263, 267, 286, 461–463, 467, 471,
1315
474, 477
media research and, 497
movies and, 217, 220, 224–225, 241, 244
sports and, 182
TV and, 194, 208–209, 244
narrowcasting, 144, 181, 309
Naruto, 86
Nas (hip-hop star), 377
Nash, Ogden, 307
Nasreen’s Secret School (Winter), 336
Nation, 271, 291, 312
National (band), 133
National Enquirer, 309
National Federation for Decency, 167
National Gallery of Art, 18
National Geographic, 300, 304, 306, 311, 312
National Geographic Traveler, 306
National Guard, 370
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 536, 540–541
national identity, 294, 313
nationalism, 7, 369
National Review, 291, 312, 455
1316
Native American Press Association, 269
Native Americans, 61, 227, 269–270, 308, 388, 496
Native American Times, 269
Navy, U.S., 143, 145
NBA (National Basketball Association), 182
NBC (National Broadcasting Company), 21, 437
ESPN and, 182
GE and, 148, 174, 205, 242
Hulu and, 185
news and, 4, 8, 31, 165, 191, 249, 454–455, 463
radio and, 148–152
TV and, 173–174, 177–178, 180, 187, 191, 193, 200, 205–206, 487
NBC Nightly News, 31, 191
NBCSN, 207
NBC Universal, 240
Comcast and, 205, 207, 242, 419, 434–435
NC-17 rating, 523
NCAA, 183
NCIS, 6, 20, 187, 200, 204
Near v. Minnesota, 510
Negro Digest, 308
Neighborhood, The, 125
1317
Nelson, Ricky, 119
Nest Labs, 349
Nestlé, 393
Net, The, 44
Net-a-porter.com, 304
Netflix, 50, 62, 75, 229
Amazon and, 54, 413–414
content creation and, 20–21, 173–174, 189, 331, 414, 429, 433
as leading digital conglomerate, 103, 414, 429, 433–434
movies and, 231, 237–239, 241–243
net neutrality and, 530
streaming and, 186, 204, 209, 242, 352, 413–414, 419, 429
time shifting and, 185, 487
TV and, 12, 184, 206–207, 413–414, 433
VOD and, 195, 238
Netherlands, the, 334, 337, 447
net neutrality, 62, 443, 528, 530
Netscape, 41–42
networks, computer, 41
Nevermind (Nirvana), 123, 125
Newcomb, Horace, 497
New England Courant, 254
1318
New England Whalers, 183
New Girl, 185, 188, 204
New Horizon Interactive (Club Penguin), 427
Newhouse newspaper chain, 311
New Line, 240
New Media Investment Group, 265
New Orleans Daily Creole, 267
NewPages, 342
Newport Folk Festival, 121
NewsBasis, 409
News Corp., 146, 207, 241, 274, 300, 309, 337, 425, 435, 437
phone hacking scandal at, 434, 457, 459
News Editors, American Society of (ASNE), 261, 268–269
News for Chinese, 269
newsies, 256
news media, 8, 12, 16, 25, 168, 446–447, 450–456, 462–474
advertising and, 470, 478
amateur videos and, 469, 472
apps for, 249
editors and, 272, 456
fake, 4, 21, 26, 184, 192, 469, 473–474, 478
fragmented market and, 453–454, 462
1319
gatekeepers and, 469
Internet and, 453–454, 462, 465, 467–469
local, 540
long-term stories and, 491, 539, 540
newsmagazines, 192, 196, 201, 263, 297, 478
as nonprofits, 280–283
press conferences and, 152, 397
public perception of, 455, 466
radio and, 150, 157, 159, 261, 268, 275
sound bites and, 466–467
staff cutbacks and, 441, 450, 470–471, 473, 478
technology and, 256, 263
television and, 20–21, 187, 191–192, 261, 263, 453–454, 462–463, 467, 474, 478
24/7, 191, 192, 454, 462, 467–468, 474, 478
News of the World, 457
newspaper industry, 248–249, 251–287
adaptability of, 248, 256, 263, 276–277, 281
advertising and, 200, 253, 255, 267–268, 270, 272, 275, 278, 351, 354, 356, 364, 414
circulation and, 253–255, 257–259, 264, 267–268, 270–271, 273, 275, 278–280, 285
consumerism and, 257–258
1320
development of, 253–258
foreign bureaus and, 283
Internet and, 263, 275, 277, 279
new business models for, 4, 278–281, 283
operations of, 270, 272–273
ownership and, 271–274, 283
paywalls and, 278–279
penny press and, 255–258
print vs. digital, 263, 272, 274, 277, 286
radio and, 261, 268, 275
readership and, 4, 253–257, 259–260, 267–270, 271, 275–279, 283
regulation of, 274
reporting on, 265, 283
Spanish-language, 268–269
staff cutbacks and, 263, 265, 268, 272–273, 280–281, 283, 285, 402, 473
syndication and, 258, 272–273
TV and, 262–263, 268, 275
watchdog role of, 256, 258, 264, 279, 283, 286
yellow journalism and, 256–258, 295
See also journalism
Newspaper Preservation Act (1970), 274
1321
Newspaper Publishers Association, American, 406
newspapers, 5, 87, 251–287
alternative, 270–271, 508
colonial, 254
economic coverage by, 265
ethnic, 267–269
Frenchvs. American, 483
immigrants and, 257–258, 267, 269
informed citizenry and, 25
local, 265, 276, 283, 285
vs. magazines, 295, 302, 309, 314
as mass medium, 25, 248, 255–256, 277, 282, 286
opinion pages of, 253–255, 259–261, 469
Newspapers, World Association of (WAN), 275
newsreels, 225, 229
Newsroom, The, 469
Newsweek, 263, 297, 434, 454
newsworthiness, 452, 537–538
New York, 187, 298, 334, 374, 390
New York Daily Compass, 271
New York Daily Graphic, 298
New York Dolls, 123
1322
New Yorker, 60, 95, 307, 310
New York Herald, 267
New York Journal, 257–258
New York Morning Herald, 255
New York Observer, 280
New York Post, 260, 274
New York Public Library, 333
New York Sun, 255
New York Times, 3–4, 10, 13, 17–18, 28–29, 253, 261–264, 273, 400, 540
blogging and, 276, 299
Boston Globe and, 252, 434–435
Finkel and, 459
Foxconn investigation by, 56–57
gaming and, 91, 92
Ochs and, 259
online, 249, 260, 278–279
Pentagon Papers and, 510
Sarkeesian and, 88
war coverage by, 16–17
WikiLeaks and, 476
New York Times v. Sullivan, 514, 515
New York Tribune, 453
1323
New-York Weekly Journal, 254
New York World, 257–258, 290, 449–450
New Zealand, 342, 377
Nexium, 377
NextGen Climate Action Super PAC, 444
NextRadio app, 165
NFL (National Football League), 50, 182–183, 187, 200, 352
concussion crisis and, 396
Madden NFL, 76, 83, 94
NFL Films, 396
NFL Network, 182
NFL’s Hardest Hits, 396
Nicaragua, 447
Nichols, John, 441, 443, 470
Nickelodeon, 181–182, 425
nickelodeons, 220, 236
Nielsen ratings, 184, 186–187, 203–204
Nieman Journalism Lab, 278–279, 456–457, 476
Nigeria, 432, 447
Night (Wiesel), 331
Nightline, 17, 406
Nightly Show, The, 21, 178, 473–474
1324
Night of the Living Dead, 482
Night Ripper, 529
Night Trap, 92
Nike, 25, 382
Nikon, 370
9/11 terrorist attacks, 16, 60–61, 175, 367, 369, 464, 468
aftermath of, 269, 441, 452, 475, 482
Nine Inch Nails, 123, 134
1984 (Orwell), 336
1989 (Swift), 106, 128
Nine West, 360
Nintendo, 73–75, 77, 86, 93–94, 96
Nipkow, Paul, 176
Nirvana, 123, 125
Nissan, 537
Nixon, Richard M., 209, 234, 251, 406–407, 476, 506
Nixon administration, 407, 452, 510
Noah, 231
Noah, Trevor, 473–474
Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth, 495
Noisey, 205
Nokia, 370
1325
Norris, Frank, 296
North American Review, 292
North by Northwest, 226
North Korea, 447, 508–509
North Star, 267
Northup, Solomon, 228
Norway, 334, 447
Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace), 125
NPR (National Public Radio), 18, 147, 160–161, 168, 410
NRA (National Rifle Association), 303
NSA (National Security Agency)
domestic surveillance and, 60, 469
WikiLeaks and, 476
’NSync, 128
nuclear weapons, 271
Nurse Jackie, 184, 414
N. W. Ayer & Son, 354
NYDailynews.com, 260
NYPost.com, 260
NYTimes.com, 260
Oakley, Annie, 388
Obama, Barack, 16, 330, 380, 407, 442, 456, 468
1326
Obama administration, 16–17, 194
obesity, 374–375
O’Brien, Conan, 474
obscenity, 511, 515–516, 523
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, 48, 263, 446, 454
Ochs, Adolph, 259
Ochs, Phil, 121
Oculus, 45, 55, 70, 92, 98, 349, 433
O’Donnell, Lawrence, 467
Odyssey, 72–73, 93
Office, The, 201, 246, 414
offset lithography, 323–324
Ogilvy & Mather, 359, 361, 381
Ogilvy Public Relations, 392–393
Ohio, 374
OK!, 302
OK Computer (Radiohead), 136
Oklahoma City federal building bombing, 468
Okonma, Tyler Gregory (Tyler, the Creator), 159
Oldboy, 233
Oldsmobile, 373
Old Time Spelling Bee, 151
1327
oligopolies, 126–127, 205, 221, 224, 235, 273, 416, 418, 438
See also corporations, media
Oliver, John, 21, 31, 184, 473–474
Olympics, 1996 bombing at, 460
Omaha World-Herald, 274
Omegathon, 85
Omega watches, 377
Omnicom, 358–359, 364, 375, 392–393
On Air with Ryan Seacrest, 156, 167
Once Upon a Time series, 425
O’Neal, Shaquille, 205
OneDrive, 52
100 Balls, 97
Oneida Nation, 269–270
OneRepublic, 136
Onion, 469
online piracy, 107, 130
Only Lovers Left Alive, 231
open-source software, 63
Opinión, La (Los Angeles), 269
#OpISIS campaign (Anonymous), 46–47
Oprah’s Book Club, 331
1328
Oprah Winfrey Show, The, 331, 417
Oracle, 63
oral tradition, 6, 8, 11, 121, 244, 253, 322
Orange Is the New Black, 20, 174, 189, 370, 414
O’Reilly, Bill, 467, 473
O’Reilly Factor, The, 20–21, 184
Organic Life, 304
Origin, 97
Orkut, 45
Orlando night club mass shooting, 467, 469, 498
Orwell, George, 336
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 299
O: The Oprah Magazine, 303, 311
Out, 308
Outcault, Richard (R. F.), 257
Outside, 306
OWN, 417
Oxford University, 333
Oxford University Press, 330
P2 radio, 163
Pacifica Foundation, 160, 526
Packard, Vance, 373
1329
Pac-Man, 73, 75, 79, 82
Page, Clarence, 273
Paine, Thomas, 292
Pakistan, 269, 297, 447, 476
Paley, Sam, 149
Paley, William, 149–151, 178, 439
Palin, Sarah, 473
Palmer, Amanda, 134
Palmer, Volney, 354
Palmolive Hour, 152
Pamela (Richardson), 324
Panavision, 236
Pandora, 103, 112, 130–131, 133, 163–165, 169, 414
Panera, 423
paparazzi, 18, 518
Paper Towns (Green), 320
Paramount decision (1948), 235
Paramount Pictures, 221, 223–224, 235, 240
Paramount Vantage, 231
Parents Latina, 304
Parents Television Council (PTC), 487, 526
Paris (France), 46, 163, 283, 334, 427–428
1330
Park, George, 390
Park, Michael, 132
Park Chan-wook, 233
Parker, Dorothy, 307, 523
Parker, Edwin, 489
Parks, Gordon, 228, 297, 300
Parks, Gordon, Jr., 228
Parks and Recreation, 188, 206
partisanship, 3–4, 26, 254, 260, 453–455, 467, 469
pass-along readership, 297
Passion of the Christ, The, 241
Patch local news experiment, 283
patent medicines, 295, 354–355, 378
PATRIOT Act, USA (2001), 60, 518
Patton, Charley, 114
Paul’s Boutique, 529
Pavement, 133
Pawnbroker, The, 523
Pawn Stars, 13
Paxil, 377
Payne Fund Studies, 485–486
PayPal, 60
1331
PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), 160–161, 180–181, 193–195
PCWorld, 302
Pearl Jam, 123, 125
Pearson PLC, 337
peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, 111
“Peggy Sue” (Holly), 119
Peirce, Kimberly, 227
Pelley, Scott, 191
Penguin Books, 337
Penguin Random House, 337
Penn, William, 355
Penniman, Little Richard, 115–117, 119
Pennsylvania Gazette, 254
Pennsylvania Magazine, 292
Pennsylvania Railroad, 390
Penny Arcade, 85
Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), 85
Penny Dreadful, 20
Pentagon Papers, 510
Pentagon Pundit program, 400
People, 300–302, 309, 311
People en Español, 302, 308
1332
People StyleWatch, 302
Pepsi, 367
Periscope, 433
Perkins, Anthony, 226
Perkins, Carl, 115–116
Perot, Ross, 380, 527
Perry, Katy, 128, 134
Perry, Tyler, 227
Person of Interest, 206
Peru, 398, 447
Peter, Paul, and Mary, 121
Peter Pan, 178, 426
Peters, Mike, 273
Peterson Milla Hooks (PMH), 359–360
petition, right to, 506, 512
Pew Research Center, 285, 409, 476
Project for Excellence in Journalism, 283, 442
State of the News Media, 276–277, 281
Peyton Place, 236
Pfizer, 377
Philadelphia Inquirer, 274
Philadelphia Story, The, 225
1333
Philadelphische Zeitung, 267
Philip Morris, 369, 376, 524
Philippines, 246, 282–283
Philips, 109–110
Phillips, David Graham, 290, 295
Phillips, Sam, 116
phishing, 60
Phoenix Publishing and Media Company, 337
phonographs, 71, 107–108, 112
Photobucket, 45
photography, 291, 293–294, 298–299, 306–307
photojournalism, 296–301, 306
Photoshop, 299
Piano, The, 227
Pickett, Wilson, 120
Pickford, Mary, 94, 221–222, 521–522
Pilkey, Dav, 336
Pillsbury, 356
Pinball Construction Set, 94
Pineapple, 304
Pineapple Express, 54
Pink Floyd, 156
1334
Pinky, 236
Pinocchio, 426
Pinterest, 38, 45, 302
Pirates of the Caribbean, 232, 428
Pittman, Bob, 139–140
Pitts, Leonard, 273
Pittsburgh Courier (later New Pittsburgh Courier), 268
Pittsburgh Dispatch, 449
Pixar, 216, 242, 426–427
Plants vs. Zombies, 88, 94
Plato, 6, 14
Playboy, 300, 303, 305
Player, The, 200
PlayStation, 56, 68–70, 74, 77, 93–94, 97
podcasts, 157, 162, 164–165
Poehler, Amy, 205
Poetics (Aristotle), 20
Poetry, 233
Pokémon, 246
Pokémon (game), 84
Pokémon (TV program), 373
Pokémon Red/Blue, 77
1335
Poland, 30, 447, 469
Polar Music Prize, 128
police brutality, 263
Policinski, Gene, 506
Politico, 192, 276, 279–280, 455
politics
advertising and, 4, 380, 424, 442, 444
books and, 328, 336
broadcasting and, 17, 527
censorship and, 60, 528–529
hegemony and, 424
journalism and, 254–255, 455, 464
magazines and, 291, 312
media corporations and, 442, 444, 499, 530
media research and, 483, 496, 499, 500
music and, 156
PR and, 387, 405–408, 410
Progressive Era and, 25
radio and, 158–159, 168
social media and, 3–4, 27, 400
TV and, 175, 189, 527
wealth and, 505–506
1336
young people and, 473
polls, 4, 484–485
Polo, Marco, 323
Polygram, 126
Pompeii, 354
Pong, 73, 83
Pontiac, 537
Ponyo, 233
Poor Richard’s Almanac, 292
Pop, Iggy (James Newell Osterberg, Jr.), 123
PopCap Games, 94
Pope, Alexander, 292
Pope, Generoso, 309
Popov, Alexander, 143
PopularMechanics.com, 302
Popular Party, 254
Popular Science, 302
populism, 3, 25–26
Populous, 82
pornography, 60–61
child, 46–47, 516–517
Porsche, 535
1337
Porter, 304
Porter, Cole, 113
Porter, Edwin S., 220, 224
Porter Novelli, 358
Portlandia, 204
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), 336
Portugal, 246, 334, 447
Postal Act of 1879, 294
Post cereals, 355
Postman, Neil, 451
postmodern period, 25–27
Poynter Institute, 280
Precious, 228
premodern period, 25
Prentice-Hall, 325
presidential debates, 209
Presley, Elvis, 14, 115–116, 118–119, 134
Press International, United (UPI), 273
PressThink, 456–457, 476
Pretty Little Liars, 331
Pretty Woman, 427
Prevention, 312
1338
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Grahame-Smith), 25, 331
Pride Tree Holdings, 340
Primary, 230
Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR), 195
Prince, 115
Principles of Uncertainty (Kalman), 326
printing press, 25, 253, 323
print media
adaptability of, 175, 248–249
convergence and, 11
prior restraint, 509–511, 522–523
privacy
Internet and, 52, 55, 58–60, 486
right to, 47, 341, 410, 457, 459–460, 511, 516, 518
See also data mining
Privacy Act (1974), 518
Privacy Act, Electronic Communications (1986), 518
PRNewswire, 409
Procter & Gamble, 352, 356, 361, 363, 391, 393
profanity, 336, 522–523, 526–527
Professor Quiz, 151
ProfNet, 409
1339
Pro Football Weekly, 306
Progressive, 291, 312
Progressive Era, 25
Progressive Grocer, 303
Progressive magazine case, 510, 511
Prohibition, 25, 112
Project Gutenberg, 332
Project Loon, 61
Project Runway, 192
Prometheus Radio Project, 168
propaganda, 391, 393–394, 405, 426, 484, 488
Propaganda Technique in the World War (Lasswell), 484
ProPublica, 194, 277, 281, 283
protest, right to, 506, 512
Protestant Reformation, 7
Proximity Worldwide, 364
PRWatch, 404–406
PR Week, 404, 407
pseudo-polls, 485
PS4 game console, 49
Psy (Park Jae-Sang), 45, 132
Psycho, 23, 226
1340
Public Broadcasting, Corporation for (CPB), 160–161, 193, 280
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, 160, 193
public debate, 6, 8, 14, 31, 441–443, 451, 501
democracy and, 442–443, 475, 499
Internet and, 65
journalism and, 472, 477
magazines and, 314
about media ownership, 379, 443, 499, 531
movies and, 244
newspapers and, 253
PR and, 404
about wealth disparity, 423
Public Enemy, 124, 136
Public Integrity, Center for, 283
public intellectuals, 501
public interest
broadcast networks and, 140, 145, 147, 150, 158, 168, 395, 438–439, 444, 524, 526, 528
journalism and, 257, 279, 286, 295, 421, 459
media corporations and, 168, 443
Publicis, 358–359, 364, 392–393
Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, 254
Public Opinion (Lippmann), 392, 483
1341
Public Opinion Polls, National Council of, 485
public relations, 150, 385–412, 418
adaptability of, 400–401
vs. advertising, 387, 397
development of, 387–392
impact of, 387, 405–406, 410
Internet and, 395, 400–401
invisibility of, 405–406, 410
journalism and, 402–409, 470–471, 473
social media and, 348, 385–386, 395, 400, 409
Takata and, 536–541
Volkswagen and, 535–541
Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), 392, 404, 410
Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA), 392
Public Relations Tactics, 404
public service announcements (PSAs), 357, 371, 376, 395
public’s right to know, 456–457, 459–460, 475, 507, 510–511
Publishers, Association of American (AAP), 325, 333
Publishing. See book industry
Publix, 223
Puerto Ricans, 268–269
Pulitzer, Joseph, 256–259, 280, 290, 449–450
1342
Pulitzer Prizes, 251, 257, 259, 283–284, 329, 400, 450, 461, 465, 540
QR codes, 302
Quake, 75, 82
Quaker Oats, 355
Queen, 26, 156
Queen Latifah, 125
Quinn, Zoe, 88–89
Rachel Maddow Show, 191, 192
racial integration, 114–115
racism, 14, 30, 60
books and, 336
movies and, 224–225, 228, 521
music and, 115, 117–118, 134
radio and, 152
See also Civil Rights movement
radio, 11, 35, 48, 87, 102, 138–171, 186, 256, 285, 420
adaptability of, 141, 154, 162, 165, 175, 303
advertising and, 147, 152, 157, 165, 353, 358, 364
alternative, 160
AM, 155, 158
amateur, 145–146
books and, 325
1343
development of, 8, 10, 141–146, 170
FM, 154–155, 158, 160, 167–168
HD, 162
Internet, 162–164, 414
local, 139–140, 148, 157, 163, 165, 168, 170
magazines and, 296, 297, 301
as mass medium, 63, 112, 141–142, 144, 146–148, 153, 162, 165, 168, 170, 277, 488
movies and, 236
networks and, 147–150, 165
newspapers and, 261, 268, 275
ownership and, 145, 166
payola scandals and, 117–118, 134, 166, 382
pirate, 167–168
public, 18, 145, 147, 160–161, 165, 168, 280, 283, 410
public service and, 395, 438–439, 526
regulation of, 145, 150–151, 153, 166
royalties and, 164–165
satellite, 133, 162, 164, 435
sound recording and, 107–108, 112, 123, 140, 149
Spanish-language, 159–160, 167, 269
specialization and, 157–160, 303, 425
sports and, 159
1344
streaming, 112, 130–131, 133, 140, 163–164, 170
transistor, 153
TV and, 112, 151–153, 155, 174–175, 177, 187, 208
wired vs. wireless, 170
radio programming, 147, 150–153, 155–160
drama, 152–153
format, 155–156
music, 112, 126, 140, 151, 153, 155–157, 159–160, 165–166
news and information, 150, 157, 159
quiz show, 151
soap opera, 152–153, 168
talk show, 8, 156–159, 165, 168, 261, 456, 478
variety show, 150–151, 162
Radio Act of 1912, 145, 151
Radio Act of 1927, 150–151
Radio Advertising Bureau, 169
Radiohead, 105–106, 136
Radio Reverb, 163
Radio Zero, 163
Radway, Janice, 497
railroads, 25, 293, 354, 389, 418
Rain, 132
1345
Rainey, Ma, 114
Raising Hell (Run-DMC), 124
Raitt, Bonnie, 114
Ralph Lauren (company), 402
Ralph Radio (Russia), 163
Ramones, 123
Rampton, Sheldon, 405
Ramsey, Dave, 159
Rand McNally, 325
Random Family (LeBlanc), 262
Random House, 325, 337, 515
Ranger Rick, 306
Rappe, Virginia, 522
“Rapper’s Delight” (Sugarhill Gang), 124
Rascal Flatts, 106, 127
Rasmussen, Bill, 183
Rather, Dan, 191, 407
Raw, 329
Ray, Johnnie, 115
Ray, Satyajit, 229
Ray, William, 208
Rayman, 95
1346
Raza, La (Chicago), 269
Razorfish, 364
RCA (Radio Corporation of America), 11, 108–109, 146–149, 151, 154–155, 176–177, 332, 391, 437
RCA-NBC, 149, 178, 205, 419
RCA Victor, 149
Reader’s Digest, 296–297, 300–301, 306, 312, 313
Reading the Romance (Radway), 497
Reagan, Ronald, 158, 234, 418, 527
Reagan era, 158, 312
Real Housewives of New York City, 13, 18
Real World, The, 26, 192
Rear Window, 226
Rebel without a Cause, 235–236
“Reconstruction of American Journalism, The” (Downie and Schudson), 280–281
Red (Swift), 106, 128
Redbox, 186, 237–238
Red Bull, 399
Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, 523
Red Dead Redemption (RDR), 91
Redding, Otis, 117, 120
1347
Reddit, 88, 530
Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 524
Redmayne, Eddie, 377
Redstone, Sumner, 205
Reed, Lou, 123
Reese’s Pieces, 370
Reformer, 308
Regal Entertainment Group, 239–240
Reid, Wallace, 522
Reiner, Carl, 188
Relativity, 240
religion, 26, 92, 400, 430–431, 505, 512
books and, 300, 325–327, 336
magazines and, 292
movies and, 522
RELX Group, 337
R.E.M., 123
Remarx Media, 409
REO Speedwagon, 123
Reporters without Borders, 48
Report from Vietnam by Walter Cronkite, 192
Republic, The (Plato), 14
1348
research, media, 8–9, 394, 481–503
on audience, 497
cultural studies and, 483, 496–500
European, 496
media effects and, 483, 485, 488–495
political/economic/historical context and, 483, 496, 499, 500
on public opinion, 484–485, 489
scientific, 483–484, 490
social psychology and, 485–486, 493, 495
television and, 483, 487, 489, 491–495, 497, 500, 502
Resident Evil, 79, 86
Reuters, 273
Revere, Paul, 292
Review, 291
Review of General Psychology, 90
Revlon, 178, 367
“Revolution,” 382
Reynolds, Frank, 191
R/GA, 364
Rhapsody, 103, 111, 130
Rhimes, Shonda, 211
Rhodes, Richard, 495
1349
Richardson, Samuel, 324
Riggs, Ransom, 331
Right Media, 364
Rihanna, 106
Riis, Jacob, 298
Ring, 308
Ringling Brothers, 388
Ringu, 233
Rio, 95
Rio de Janeiro, 334
Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, The (Bowie), 136
Rivera, Gerald Maxwell, 159
Rizzoli & Isles, 202
R. J. Reynolds, 375
RJR Nabisco, 375
RKO, 223–224, 235
Roanoke Times, 274
Roberts, Jim, 277
Robinson, Edward G., 485
Robinson, Jackie, 268
Robinson, Max, 191
Robinson, Smokey, 120
1350
Robinson Crusoe, 291
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 121
Rock Band, 83–84, 88
Rockefeller, John D., 295, 390, 403, 418
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 390
Rockford Files, The, 190
Rockstar Games, 91, 96
Rockwell, Norman, 296
Rocky, 237
Roc Nation, 106
Rodale, 304, 312
Rodriguez, Michelle, 386
Rodriguez, Robert, 245
Roger and Me, 230
Rogers, Buddy, 221
Rogers, Mark C., 328–329
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, 216, 239
Roku, 49, 186, 237
Rolling Stone, 88, 136, 262–263
Rolling Stones, 18, 114, 117, 119–121
“Roll Over Beethoven” (Berry), 26, 115
Romans, 322
1351
Rome, Jim, 157
Romney, Mitt, 407, 469
Ronaldo, Cristiano, 386
Rooms To Go, 360
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 151–152, 230
Roosevelt, Theodore, 295–296, 397
Roots, 190
Roseanne, 12, 66, 188
Rosen, Jay, 476–477
Rosenstiel, Tom, 21, 454
Rosing, Boris, 176
Ross, Diana, 120–121
Ross, Harold, 307
Ross, Lillian, 307
Rossellini, Roberto, 522
Roth, Veronica, 320, 331
Roundhay Garden Scene, 218
Rovio, 95, 98
Rowling, J. K., 326, 331, 336, 338–339
Royal Headache, 123
royalties and, 338
Royko, Mike, 461
1352
RTVE.es radio, 163
Rudolph, Maya, 188
Run-DMC, 124
Runyon, Damon, 290
Rushdie, Salman, 335
Rush Limbaugh Show, The, 158, 167, 455
Rushmore, 231
Russell, David O., 231
Russia, 143, 163, 176, 447, 509
movies and, 237, 243, 432
See also Soviet Union
Rutenberg, Jim, 4
Saab, 537
Saatchi & Saatchi, 359
safercar.gov, 540–541
Safety Council, National, 90, 357
Salinger, J. D., 336
Salmon, Allison, 99
Salon, 192, 302
Salt-N-Pepa, 125
same-sex marriage, 24, 442, 484, 492
Sam’s Club, 339–340
1353
Samsung, 49, 51, 70, 358, 393
San Andreas, 422
San Bernardino terrorist attack, 518
Sandberg, Karl Martin (Max Martin), 128–129
Sanders, Bernie, 473, 528
San Diego Union-Tribune, 265
Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting, 468, 498
San Francisco, 340
San Francisco Examiner, 257, 302
San Jose Mercury News, 274
Santa Barbara, 30
Santos, Romeo, 386
Sapkowski, Andrzej, 86
Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 259, 450
Sarkeesian, Anita, 88–89
Sarnoff, David
radio and, 148–149, 154–155
TV and, 155, 176, 178
Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 335
satellite technology, 42, 147, 180–181, 428
“Satisfaction” (Rolling Stones), 117
Saturday Evening Post, 293, 296, 301, 313
1354
Saturday Globe, 295
Saturday Night Live (SNL), 21, 31, 132, 188, 473–474, 527
Saturn, 537
Saudi Arabia, 62, 176, 447, 509
Savan, Leslie, 369
Sawyer, Diane, 192
Say Yes to the Dress, 13
Scalia, Antonin, 98, 482
Scandal, 200, 211
Scarface, 217
Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 335
Schall, James, 99
Schenck, Charles T., 511
Schenck v. United States, 511
Schoofs, Mark, 277
“School Day” (Berry), 115
Schorr, Daniel, 464
Schramm, Wilbur, 489
Schudson, Michael, 280–281, 370, 403, 509
Schultz, Connie, 273
Schumer, Amy, 339
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 527
1355
Schweitzer, Albert, 299
Scientific American, 51, 511
scientific method, 490
Scientology, Church of, 46
Scorpion, 187, 200
Scorsese, Martin, 226
Scribner’s, 325
Scripps, Edward Wyllis, 273
Seabrook, John, 128–129
Seacrest, Ryan, 156–157
Seal Island, 426
Sean Hannity Show, 192, 455
search engines, 43, 52, 54, 432, 434
advertising and, 55, 363, 382
Sears, 73, 370
Seattle Seahawks, 401
Seau, Junior, 396
Second Life, 45, 76
security
Internet, 52, 55, 58–60, 486
national, 16, 456, 507, 510–511
Sedition Act (1798), 509, 532
1356
Seeger, Pete, 121, 270, 523
See It Now, 465
“See You Again,” 386
Sega, 73–75, 86, 93, 95, 96
Seierstad, Åsne, 262
Seinfeld, 23, 66, 173, 188, 198, 205
Seinfeld, Jerry, 330
Selecta, 308
selective exposure, 9, 489
self-publishing, 9, 133, 338, 342, 346
Selma, 227, 514
Semantic Web, 51
Senate, U.S., 134, 296, 328
Sendak, Maurice, 23
Senegal, 246
sensationalism, 15, 256, 258
Sephora, 360
Serial, 165
Series of Unfortunate Events, A books (Snicket), 331
service sector, 417–418, 422
Sesame Street, 193, 195
Seven Beauties, 227
1357
Seven Cities of Gold, 94
7-Eleven, 370
700 Club, 527
Seven Samurai, 229, 233
Se7en (film), 226
Se7en (K-pop artist), 132
7-7-7 Rule, 419–420
Seventeen, 302, 306–307
Sex and the City, 189
Sex and the Single Girl (Brown), 290
Sex Pistols, 123
sexting, 516–517
sexual abuse scandal, Catholic priests and, 251–252
sexuality, 60, 113, 115–116, 120, 236, 305, 336
sexual revolution, 290, 327
“Sexy Ways,” 114
SFGate.com, 260
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles), 136
Shadow, The, 151, 153
Shaft, 228
“Shake, Rattle, and Roll” (Turner), 115
Shakespeare, William, 18–19, 23–24
1358
Shakira, 386
Shakur, Tupac, 125
“Shame of the Cities” (Steffens), 295
Shanghai Disney Resort, 428
Shangri-Las, 119
Shaw, Irwin, 523
“Sh-Boom” (Chords), 118
She & Him, 133
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 18–19
Shenzhen (China), 56
Sheppard, Sam, 518
Sherlock, 190
Sherlock Jr., 223
Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), 418
shield laws, 519
Shins, 358
Shirky, Clay, 346
“Shop Around” (Smokey Robinson and the Miracles), 120
Showgirls, 523
Showtime, 20, 174, 184, 189, 208
Shrek 2, 241
Shuster, Joe, 328
1359
Shyamalan, M. Night, 227
Siegel, Jerry, 328
Silence of the Lambs, 226
Silent Spring (Carson), 342
Silly Symphonies series, 426
SimCity, 83, 87
Simon, Neil, 188
Simon & Schuster, 325, 337, 339
Simpson, O.J., 519
Simpsons, The, 19, 21, 23
Sims Social, The, 86
Sinatra, Frank, 113, 150, 178
“Since U Been Gone” (Martin), 128
Sin City, 226, 245
Sinclair, Upton, 296, 530
Sinclair Broadcast Group, 17
S.I. Newhouse & Sons, 437
Singapore, 87, 334
Singing Fool, The, 225
Singleton, John, 227, 228
Siouxsie and the Banshees, 123
Siri, 51
1360
SiriusXM, 162, 164, 434, 435
Sister Citizen (Harris-Perry), 501
Sitting Bull, 388
Sixth Amendment (U.S. Constitution), 511, 518–519
60 Minutes, 20, 90, 192, 194, 209, 252, 461, 465, 476
critical evaluation of, 28–29
$64,000 Challenge, 178
$64,000 Question, 178
Skrillex, 126
Skype, 43, 62
Slacker Radio, 131, 133, 164
slander, 514
Slate, 302
Slater, Christian, 47
Sleep Number, 360
Sleepy Hollow, 200
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Didion), 262
Slovenia, 334
Small Farmer’s Journal, 313
smartphones, 35, 43, 48–49, 61, 70
advertising and, 365
e-books and, 332
1361
gaming and, 77, 92
magazines and, 303
newspapers and, 263
TV and, 186–187, 209
smartwatches, 49
Smashing Pumpkins, 63
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana), 123
Smiley, Tavis, 157
Smith, Bessie, 114
Smith, Gordon, 163
Smith, Howard K., 191
Smith, Patti, 123
Smith, W. Eugene, 299
Smith, Will, 396
Smith Brothers, 355
Smithsonian, 306
Smithsonian Institution, 63, 304
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, 120
Snake Pit, The, 236
Snapchat, 43, 174, 365
Snicket, Lemony, 331
SNK, 93
1362
Snowden, Edward, 60, 469, 474
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, 227
Snowpiercer, 233
Snow White and the Huntsman, 245
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 426
social change, 7, 25, 46–48, 92, 235–236, 271, 295, 323, 356, 446, 530
social classes, 14, 403–404, 500
elite, 6–7, 25, 115, 189, 292, 306–307, 389, 392, 444, 464, 483, 496, 499, 508
middle, 7, 25, 255–256, 258–259, 261, 267, 283, 292, 323, 325, 389, 499
working, 6, 24, 255–258, 261, 283, 294, 389, 499
social issues, 15, 496
journalism and, 262
magazines and, 295
media economics and, 423, 434–435, 438–441
movies and, 236, 244
newspapers and, 270
social media, 37–38, 43–45, 48, 343, 394, 433–434
advertising and, 348, 364–366, 377
gaming and, 71, 75, 78, 81
magazines and, 302
1363
as mass medium, 44
movies and, 243–244
music and, 106
news and information from, 3–4, 21, 44, 283–284
oral tradition and, 8
politics and, 3–4, 27, 400
PR and, 348, 385–386, 395, 400, 409
social networks, online, 22, 24, 44–45, 93, 134, 187, 277, 382
social responsibility, 4, 158, 508, 537
journalism and, 408, 461, 475
media corporations and, 416–417
PR and, 407–408
Social Text, 501
Socrates, 13–14
SOEmote software, 92
Sokal, Alan, 501
Soldevilla, Jeremy, 345
Somalia, 282–283
“Someday We’ll Be Together” (Supremes), 121
Song Machine, The (Seabrook), 128
Song of Solomon (Morrison), 331
Sonic the Hedgehog, 82, 84, 95
1364
Sonic Youth, 123, 133
Sony, 56, 109–110, 332, 422, 425, 438
Columbia Pictures and, 241
gaming and, 68–70, 73–74, 92–95, 97
movies and, 185, 231, 240–241
music and, 126, 133, 166
radio and, 153
TV and, 198, 201
Sophocles, 244
Sopranos, The, 174
Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 336
SoundCloud, 103, 112, 134
Sounder, 228
SoundExchange, 133
Soundgarden, 123, 125
Sound of Music, The, 178
sound recording, 107–112
book industry and, 331
digital, 109–110
as mass medium, 107–108, 134
movie industry and, 240–241
radio and, 107–108, 112, 123, 140, 149
1365
See also music
SourceWatch, 400
Sousa, John Philip, 113
South America, 275
South by Southwest festival, 231
South Carolina Gazette, 254
Southeast Asia, 376
Southern Swallow Productions, 409
South Korea, 62, 87, 132, 233, 334, 432, 447
South Park, 21
Soviet Union, 30, 180, 234, 261, 297, 327
collapse of, 41, 439
films from, 229
So You Think You Can Dance, 13
Space Invaders, 74, 75
space shuttle, 468
Spacewars!, 72
Spain, 163, 298, 334, 447
spam, 363
Spanish-American War, 298
Spanish Civil War, 334
Spanish International Network, 193
1366
Spanish-language media, 159–160, 167, 193, 268–269, 308, 438
Sparks, Nicholas, 331
Speak Now (Swift), 106
Spears, Britney, 128, 132
specialization, 10, 326, 417–418, 422, 454, 501
magazines and, 291–292, 301, 303–309, 425
radio and, 141, 157–160, 303, 425
TV and, 204, 209–210, 425
Spectacular Now, The, 331
Spectator, 292
Spelunky, 75
Spider-Man, 242, 428
Spider-Man, 427–428
Spiegelman, Art, 329
Spielberg, Steven, 20, 225–226, 233
Spike TV, 85
Spinutech, 64
SpinWatch.org, 406
spiral of silence theory, 495, 502
Splash, 427
Splinter Cell, 86
SpongeBob SquarePants, 373
1367
Spore, 84
Sports Illustrated, 305, 310–311
Spotify, 103, 111–112, 126, 130–131, 134–135, 166, 414, 429
Swift and, 106
Spotlight, 18, 251–252
Springsteen, Bruce, 123, 162
Sprint, 165
Spy Kids, 245
spyware, 58
Square Enix, 95
Stack, 83
Stallone, Sylvester, 397
Standard Oil, 257, 390, 418
Stanford Research Institute (SRI; now Strategic Business Insights, SBI), 360
Stanford University, 333
Stanton, Edwin M., 259
Staples, Vince, 125
Star, 302, 309, 515
Starbucks, 393
StarCraft, 81–83, 94
Starflight, 94
Starr, Ringo, 373
1368
Star Trek, 23, 190
Star Wars, 18, 96, 215–217, 227, 233, 237–239, 241
Disney and, 216, 239, 427–428
Star Wars: A New Hope, 216
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, 70, 216, 238–239
Star Wars: The Old Republic, 94, 95, 96
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, 216, 238
Starz, 207
Statham, Jason, 386
Stauber, John, 405–406
Stax, 127
Steam, 70, 95, 97
Steamboat Bill Jr., 223
Steffens, Lincoln, 295–296
Steiger, Paul, 277
Steinbeck, John, 336
Steinem, Gloria, 305
Stephens, Ann, 324
stereoscopes, 69–70
Stern, Howard, 162, 526–527
Stewart, Cara, 409
Stewart, Jon, 473–474
1369
Stewart, Martha, 162
Steyer, Tom, 444
St. Louis Blues, 114
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 257
Stockham, Thomas, 109
Stoller, Mike, 113
Stone, Emma, 367
Stone, I. F., 271
Stone Temple Pilots, 125
Stooges (rock band), 123
“Stop! In the Name of Love” (Supremes), 120–121
Story of “Frozen,” The, 425
storytelling. See narratives
Storz, Todd, 155–156
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 293, 330, 342
streaming services, 180, 185–186, 199, 237–238, 433
movie, 237, 239, 243
music, 103, 106, 109, 111–112, 126–127, 130–131, 156, 163, 166, 414
Netflix, 186, 204, 209, 242, 352, 413–414, 419, 429
radio, 112, 130–131, 133, 140, 163–164, 170
TV, 174, 184, 204, 210, 419
Street Fighter, 78, 81, 86
1370
Streisand, Barbra, 227
Stuart, Keith, 99
StubHub, 51
Stverak, Jason, 450
STX Entertainment, 243
Styx, 123
Subaru, 537
suburbanization, 234–236, 235
Suffragette, 227
Sugarhill Gang, 124
suicide, 396, 498
Sullivan, Ed, 120
Sullivan, L. B., 514
Summer, Donna, 124
Summit Entertainment, 240
Sun (music label), 127
Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway), 325, 336
Sundance Channel, 23
Sundance Film Festival, 231, 241
Sunday Night Football, 187
Sunday Times of London, 298
Sun Records, 116
1371
Sunset Boulevard, 226
Super Bowl, 18, 173, 363, 368
Super Fly, 228
Superman, 328–329, 370
Super Mario Bros. series, 74, 79, 81–82, 93
Super Monkey Ball, 95
Super PACs (political action committees), 444, 506
Super Size Me, 230
Superstorm Sandy, 407, 462
Supreme Court, U.S.
Brown v. Board of Education and, 114
on campaign financing, 442, 444, 506
First Amendment and, 71, 98, 198, 442, 506, 510–512, 514, 521–526
gaming and, 71, 92, 98
journalism and, 271
movie industry and, 235, 521–523
music industry and, 111
radio and, 143, 151, 526
same-sex marriage and, 484
Sixth Amendment and, 518–519
on torture, 482
TV and, 198
1372
Supremes, 120–121
Survivor, 192
Sutherland, Kiefer, 482
Swallow, Erica, 409
swatting, 89
Swayze, John Cameron, 191
Sweden, 62, 89, 128, 163, 229
“Sweet Little Sixteen” (Berry), 115
Swift, Taylor, 18, 105–106, 127–128, 367, 385–386
Swinton, Tilda, 233
Syfy, 174
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 233
synergy, 240–242, 329, 343, 425–428
Syria, 62, 282
tablets
advertising and, 310
e-books and, 249
gaming and, 77
magazines and, 302–303, 310
movies and, 242
newspapers and, 263
TV and, 186
1373
tabloids, 255–256, 308–309
Tabuchi, Hiroko, 540
Tainter, Charles Sumner, 108
Taiwan, 246, 447
Takata air bag crisis, 536–541
Tales from the Crypt, 328
Talking Heads, 123
Talking Points Memo, 276, 280
Talladega Nights, 370
Tampa Bay Times (previously St. Petersburg Times), 259, 280, 450
Tangled, 427
Tarbell, Ida, 295, 390, 450, 530
Target, 97, 130, 339–340, 359, 423
Tatler, 292
Taxi Driver, 226
Taylor, William Desmond, 522
Taylor Swift, 106
TBS, 182, 201
TBWA Worldwide, 358, 375
TechCrunch, 44
technological determinism, 136
technology
1374
adaptability of, 49, 154
addiction to, 27, 87
advertising and, 356, 379
convergence and, 6, 10–11, 102
criticism of, 25, 26
interconnection and, 27, 34
Internet and, 40–41
media effects and, 502
movies and, 215, 217–219, 224–225, 236, 243
music and, 110, 136
news media and, 256, 263
PR and, 409
printing, 292–294, 298, 323–324
radio and, 162, 170
TV and, 175–177, 180, 185–187
TechRadar, 70
teenagers, 236, 441, 500
advertising and, 373–375, 379, 395
magazines for, 302, 306
media effects and, 483, 485
reading and, 319–320, 343
Teen Mom, 18, 26, 192
1375
Teen Vogue, 302
Tekken, 95
Telecommunications Act of 1996, 52, 65, 140, 151, 166, 199, 202, 419–420, 524
Telecommunications Inc., 437
telegraph, 7–8, 10, 25, 141–142, 150, 256
Telegraph (London), 163
Telegraph.co.uk, 260
Telemundo, 181, 193
telephone companies, 42, 150, 184, 199, 267, 419
telephones, 48, 143, 187
television, 8, 35, 48, 87, 102–103, 141, 170, 172–213, 285, 420, 428, 433–435
adaptability of, 185, 206, 209–210, 212
advertising and, 22, 174, 178, 184–185, 189, 200–201, 203–205, 283–284, 351–353, 357–359, 363–364, 371, 373–374, 377, 380
African Americans and, 153, 202, 425, 430–431
audiences of, 181, 188, 193, 195, 204, 352
Big Three networks and, 177, 180–181, 187, 195
binge-watching and, 206, 414, 419
books and, 328, 329, 330
children and, 193, 195, 373–374, 483, 486–489
communist witch-hunt and, 524
1376
content control and, 175, 177–180, 196, 202
criticism of, 5, 180
as cultural reference point, 175, 190, 209, 468–469
DBS, 184, 187, 199, 201–202, 207, 438
development of, 175–180
digital, 184
distribution and, 202
First Amendment and, 524, 526–528
flexibility and, 422
gaming and, 72–73
HDTV, 176–177
impact of, 14, 175, 177, 494–495, 498
independent producers and, 178, 196, 201
Internet and, 49, 184, 186, 199, 209, 237, 414, 433
journalism and, 465–469
local, 20–21, 181, 191, 196, 198–199, 474
magazines and, 208, 300, 301, 311, 314
as mass medium, 63, 173, 175–177, 208, 212, 227, 277, 487, 494–495
movies and, 227, 234–237, 239–240
music and, 106, 130, 178, 487
Netflix and, 12, 184, 206–207, 413–414
network era of, 13, 180, 244
1377
newspapers and, 262–263, 268, 275
on-demand, 12, 487
ownership and, 202, 524
post-TV world and, 487
public, 160–161, 180–181, 190, 193–195, 306
public service and, 395, 526
quiz-show scandals and, 118, 175, 177, 178–180, 382
radio and, 112, 151–153, 155, 174–175, 177, 187, 208
ratings and, 203–205
regulation and, 150, 195–196, 198–199, 202, 373, 486, 487, 526–527
research and, 483, 487, 489, 491–495, 497, 500, 502
streaming and, 174, 184, 204, 210, 419
syndication and, 196, 201–203, 239
technology and, 175–177, 180, 185–187
3-D, 70, 237
time shifting and, 50, 174, 185–186, 487
viewing options and, 185–187, 204, 209
violence and, 486–487
visual design and, 357
television, cable, 8, 42, 62, 173–174, 177, 198–205, 207–209
access channels and, 181, 196, 198–199
advertising and, 351, 353
1378
development of, 180–184
magazine industry and, 311
movies and, 236–237, 239–240
news and, 263, 453–454, 462–463, 467, 478
regulation of, 150, 196, 198–199
Television Program Executives, National Association of (NATPE), 202
television programming, 152, 173, 175, 187–195
British, 190
cancellation of, 204
children’s, 374
complexity of, 21
crime show, 500
drama, 189, 190, 194
educational, 374
entertainment and information, 187
game show, 192
miniseries, 190
news, 20–21, 187, 191–192, 261, 263, 453–454, 462–463, 467, 474, 478
prime time, 178, 196, 200–202, 352, 363, 487
quiz show, 151, 178–180, 195, 203
reality, 3, 13, 15, 25, 187, 192–194, 201, 210, 256, 370, 492
1379
serial, 153, 190
situation comedy, 168, 187–188, 194
soap opera, 187–188, 190, 196, 305
Spanish-language, 167, 193, 269, 438
specialization and, 204, 209–210, 425
sports, 15, 24, 87
talk show, 178, 192, 203, 478
variety show, 178, 187–188, 192
Television Systems Committee, National (NTSC), 176
Telstar, 180
Temple Run, 97–98
Temptations, 120
Ten Commandments, The, 224
Ten Haken, Paul, 381
Tennessean (Nashville), 273
Tesla, Nikola, 143–144
Tetris, 73, 77–78, 83
Texaco Star Theater, 188
Texas, 269, 327, 374
Texas Instruments, 153
texting, 38, 43
Texture app, 310–311
1380
thaumatrope, 217
Them, 481
Them (music group), 119
They Are Us (Hamill), 342
Thicke, Robin, 159
ThinkProgress, 44
third screens, 182, 185–186, 204, 365
30 Rock, 95
This American Life, 50
“This Land Is Your Land” (W. Guthrie), 121
Thomas, Lowell, 151
Thomaz, Cameron Jibril (Wiz Khalifa), 159
Thompson, Craig, 336
Thompson, Hunter S., 261–262
Thomson Reuters, 337
Thoreau, Henry David, 292
Thornton, (Willie Mae) “Big Mama,” 115
“Thou Ancient, Thou Free,” 128
Three Little Pigs, 426
“Thriller” video, 13
Thug Life (Shakur), 125
Thumb, General Tom, 388
1381
Thurber, James, 307
Thursday Night Football, 187, 200, 352
Tidal, 103, 111
Tikkun, 308
Timberlake, Justin, 366
Time, 31, 136, 178, 297–298, 302, 310–312, 391, 437, 454
Time Inc., 230, 434, 437
magazines and, 301, 303, 305, 311–312
Time-Life Books, 340–341
Times Mirror Company, 435, 437
Time Warner, 42, 52, 103, 415, 422, 437–438
AOL and, 311, 421, 425, 434–435
CBS and, 174, 208
DC characters and, 329
movies and, 231, 240
streaming and, 186
Turner Broadcasting and, 419, 435
TV and, 187
Time Warner Cable, 42, 62, 111, 201–202, 238, 311, 430, 437
Charter Cable/Bright House Networks and, 435
Comcast and, 207, 435
Timothy, Elizabeth, 254
1382
Tin Pan Alley, 113, 129
Tiny Wings, 98
Tip Top Weekly, 324
Titanic (film), 217, 238
Titanic disaster, 145, 148, 151
Titus Andronicus, 130
TiVo Premiere, 237
T-Mobile, 435, 438
TMZ, 527
TMZ.com, 18
TNT (Turner Network Television), 174, 182, 190, 202, 438
tobacco industry, 371, 375, 376, 379, 394–395
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 483
Today, 132, 178–179, 466
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), 335–336
Tokyo, 334
Tokyo Disney Resort, 427–428
Tokyo Game Show, 85
Tolkien, J. R. R., 331
Tomb Raider, 82
Tomlinson, Ray, 40
Tonight Show, 178
1383
Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The, 188
Top Chef, 13, 50, 192
Toppers Pizza, 401
Topsify, 166
Toronto International Film Festival, 231
torture debate, 482
Torvalds, Linus, 63
Toshiba, 56
Touchstone, 426–427
Tough Guise, 498
Townsquare Media, 167
Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! (Stauber and Rampton), 405
Toyota, 535, 537, 541
Toy Story, 427
Toy Story 3, 216
TPM Muckraker, 44
Train, 358
Trainwreck, 422
Tramp, The (Riis), 298
transatlantic cable, 8, 141
Transformers, 241
“Transgressing the Boundaries” (Sokal), 501
1384
transistors, 153
Transparent, 18, 54, 174
Transportation Department, U.S., 357
Travel & Leisure, 306, 334
“Treason of the Senate, The” (Phillips), 290, 295
Treasure Island, 426
Trello, 44
Triangle, 222
Triangle Publications, 300
Tribeca Film Festival, 231
Tribune Media Company, 434–435, 437
Tribune Media Services (now Gracenote), 273
Tribune Publishing, 265
Trip to the Moon, A, 220
Troggs, 119
trolls, 84
Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series, 88–89
True Detective, 6, 20, 174, 184, 189, 190
True Story, 459
Truffaut, François, 229
Trump, Donald, 3–4, 9, 455, 473, 527
Trust Us, We’re Experts! (Rampton and Stauber), 405
1385
Truth or Consequences, 151–152
Tucker, Sophie, 113
Tulsa World, 274
Tumblr, 38, 43–44, 48, 243, 263, 434, 530
TuneCore, 134
TuneIn, 164–165
Tunisia, 45, 47, 48
Turkey, 246
Turkmenistan, 508
Turner, Big Joe, 115
Turner, Frank, 133
Turner, Ike, 120
Turner, Nat, 231
Turner, Ted, 181, 192
Turner, Tina, 120
Turner Broadcasting, 419, 434–435
“Tutti Frutti” (Little Richard), 117
TV Everywhere, 186
TV Guide, 179, 300–301, 306, 313
TV One, 430
TV: The Most Popular Art (Newcomb), 497
Twain, Mark, 261, 292, 335
1386
12 Years a Slave, 217, 227–228
Twentieth Century Fox, 95, 201, 223–224, 235, 240–241
21st Century Fox, 196, 201, 240–241, 378, 435, 437
Hulu and, 174, 242
Twenty-One, 179
24, 482
24/7 Media, 364
20/20, 194
Twilight movie series, 227, 320, 331
Twilight series (Meyer), 342, 500
Twilight Zone, 189
Twitch, 86, 429
Twitter, 38, 44, 299, 433–434
data mining and, 364–365
#GamerGate and, 88–89
journalism and, 48, 446, 468
live-tweeting and, 12
magazines and, 302, 308
movies and, 243
news from, 4, 8, 31, 263, 395
Trump and, 3
Twitter Analytics, 394
1387
Two Boys Kissing (Levithan), 336
2 Broke Girls, 487
2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke), 180
Tylenol poisoning crisis, 401
Tyler, the Creator (Tyler Gregory Okonma), 159
Uber, 64, 304
Ubisoft, 95
Ukraine, 447
Ultrasurf, 48
Ulysses (Joyce), 335–336, 515–516
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, 206, 414, 421
Uncharted, 94
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 330, 342
Under Armour, 367
Unforgivable Blackness, 521
Unilever, 364, 393, 440
UniMás, 167
United Arab Emirates, 393
United Artists, 94, 221–222, 224
United Features (now Universal Uclick), 273
United Fruit, 398
United Kingdom, 62, 89, 246, 274, 342
1388
advertising and, 354, 359, 370
books and, 334, 337
free expression in, 447, 509
magazines and, 291–292
movies and, 229, 432
music and, 105–106, 119–124, 126
News Corp. scandal in, 434, 457, 459
PR and, 406
TV and, 190
United Mine Workers, 390
United Negro College Fund, 357
Universal Music Group, 106, 126, 133, 135, 166, 434–435
Universal Studios, 174, 207, 224, 240–242, 386
universities and colleges
beer industry and, 377
binge drinking and, 371
journalism and, 280–281
PR and, 393
radio and, 146, 156
University of Michigan, 333
Univision, 166–167, 193, 455
Up, 216, 427
1389
Updike, John, 307
UPN, 434
Uptown (cigarettes), 375
urbanization, 6–7, 294–295, 325, 379, 387
Urban Outfitters, 340
urban unrest, 190, 466, 500
USA Network, 47, 174, 181–182
USA Today, 25, 50, 249, 260, 262, 264, 273, 279, 309
Usher, Nikki, 456–457, 476
U.S. News & World Report, 297
Us Weekly, 302, 309
Utne Reader, 312
U2, 83, 123
Valens, Ritchie, 119
Valenti, Jack, 523
Vallée, Rudy, 113
VALS (Values and Lifestyle) strategy, 360–362
values, 5–6, 14, 24–27
advertising and, 356–357, 367, 370
“family,” 25, 335
journalism and, 453–454, 456, 460
Valve Corporation, 85, 97
1390
Vampire Weekend, 106, 123, 127
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 418
Van Doren, Charles, 179
Vanidades, 308
Vanishing Lady, The, 220
Vanity Fair, 306, 310, 312, 358
Vann, Robert C., 268
Vargas, Elizabeth, 192
vaudeville, 113, 151, 188
Vaughan, Stevie Ray, 114
VCRs (videocassette recorders), 185, 209, 236
Velvet Underground, 123, 513
Venice Classic Radio, 163
Verdi, Giuseppe, 18
Verizon, 42, 62, 111, 238, 283, 352, 421
Verizon FiOS, 207
Vermeer, Johannes, 69
Verne, Jules, 257, 290
vertical integration
Amazon and, 341
movie industry and, 221, 224, 234–235, 241
Vertigo, 226
1391
Vevo, 112, 130, 133–134
Viacom, 85, 187, 205, 231, 240, 422, 435
Viagra, 377
Victor Talking Machine Company, 11, 108, 149
Victrolas, 108
videocassettes, 185, 236
video news releases (VNRs), 395
video-on-demand (VOD), 12, 184, 195, 237–238, 487
video stores, 102, 185, 236, 413–414
Vienna, 391
Vietnam, 269, 376, 466
Vietnam War, 14, 120, 156, 261, 271, 283, 327
Cronkite and, 191–192
Pentagon Papers and, 510
photojournalism and, 299
View-Master devices, 69, 70
vigilantism, 46–47
Village People, 124
Village Voice, 270
Vimeo, 45, 243, 530
Vine, 35, 38, 44
violence, media
1392
aggressive behavior and, 483, 486, 493
books and, 336
content analysis and, 491–492
free speech and, 507
gaming and, 80–81, 87–90
movies and, 228, 235–236, 485–486
music and, 125, 134
news media and, 447
as scapegoat, 493, 495
TV and, 486–487
Violent Media, American Psychology Association Task Force on, 80
Vioxx, 377
Virginian-Pilot, 472
Virginia Slims, 375
Virginia Tech mass shooting, 498
Virtual Entertainment Centers, 70
virtual reality (VR), 55, 68–70, 92
Visa, 55, 369
VistaVision, 236
vitascope, 219–220
Vivendi, 94, 241
Vogue, 290, 310, 312, 358
1393
Voice, The, 13, 18, 50, 66, 187, 192, 200, 352
Voice of San Diego, 283
VOID, 70
Volkswagen, 363, 367
diesel crisis and, 535–541
Volvo, 378
voter participation, 4, 459, 477, 484–485, 490
Vox Media, 277
Voz, La (Miami), 269
Vudu, 238, 242
Waldenbooks, 339
Wales, Jimmy, 400–401
Walker, Alice, 336
Walker, John Brisben, 290
Walker, Paul, 386
Walker, Stanley, 402
Walking Dead, The, 18, 174, 184–185, 187, 190, 206, 414
“Walk This Way” (Aerosmith), 125
Wallace, Christopher (Notorious B.I.G.; Biggie Smalls), 125
Wallace, David Foster, 158
Wallace, DeWitt, 296
Wallace, Lila Acheson, 296
1394
Wall Street Journal, 4, 31, 264, 274, 279
Walmart, 97, 130, 242, 339–340
Walt Disney Company, 76, 240, 421–422, 434, 437, 513
ABC and, 196, 205, 419, 425, 427, 435
ESPN and, 183, 427, 435
Hulu and, 174, 185, 207, 242
Lucasfilm and, 242
Marvel and, 216, 242, 329, 427–428
merchandising and, 242, 425, 427
Miramax and, 231
Pixar and, 242
Star Wars and, 216, 239, 427–428
synergy and, 425–428
theme parks of, 427–428
TV and, 201, 426
Walt Disney World, 426
Walters, Barbara, 191
Walton, Mary, 450
Waltons, The, 487
Wang, Wayne, 227
Wang Chieh, 323
war, media coverage of, 16–17, 283, 297, 508
1395
War Advertising Council (later Ad Council), 356–357
Warcraft, 86
Warhol, Andy, 26, 513
“War Logs,” 476
Warner, Jack L., 234
Warner Brothers, 224–225, 234–235, 240, 329, 378, 437
Warner/Chappell Music, 513
Warner Communications, 73, 434
Warner Music Group, 126, 166
War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 153, 290, 488–489
Warren, Robert, 511
Washington, D.C., 272–273
Washington, George, 292
Washington Navy Yard mass shooting, 498
Washington Post, 14, 260, 263, 276, 280, 434, 455, 461, 510
Bezos and, 51, 252, 279
Watergate scandal and, 251, 452
Wasteland, 94
watchdogs
of advertising, 359, 370, 372–373, 377–378
journalists as, 4, 452, 465, 471–472, 475, 508, 530, 540
of media, 4, 29, 31, 359, 430, 443, 531
1396
newspapers as, 256, 258, 264, 279, 283, 286
of PR, 404, 405
of TV, 487
Watchmen, 326
Watergate scandal, 406–407, 452, 466, 468, 506
Wayne, Lil (Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr.), 136
WB, 434
WCBS, 208
WDIA, 159
WEAF (now WNBC), 147, 151
wealth disparity, 15, 22, 380, 422–423, 441, 454, 500, 505–506
Weather Channel, 174, 181, 210
Weaver, Sigourney, 178
Weaver, Sylvester “Pat,” 178
Weavers, 121
Webcaster Settlement Act, 164
Webcomics, 85
Weber Shandwick, 393, 406
Webkinz, 76
Webkinz Jr., 76
Webzines, 302–303
wedding media, 492
1397
Weebly, 44
Week, The, 297
Weekly Bangla Patrika, 269
Weekly Standard, 312
Weeknd, 128
Weinstein Company, 229, 239, 240
Welles, Orson, 20, 153, 258, 488, 523
Wells, H. G., 153, 290, 488
Wells, Ida, 271
Wells, Mary, 120
Wertham, Fredric, 328
Wertmüller, Lina, 227
West, Kanye, 18
Westar, 180
Westboro Baptist Church, 47
Westergren, Tim, 164, 169
Western Union, 8, 147
Westinghouse, 146–148, 176
West Wing, The, 414
Westwood One, 165, 167
WFMU, 163
WGN, 152, 181
1398
WGY, 147
Wharton, Edith, 290
WhatsApp, 43, 55, 349
What’s My Line?, 191, 465
Wheel of Fortune, 195, 203
“Where Did Our Love Go” (Supremes), 120–121
Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak), 23
Where to Invade Next, 230
Whiplash, 231
White, E. B., 307, 336
White, Jack, 83
White, Jeff, 245
White Album, The (Beatles), 136
White Album, The (Didion), 100, 261–262
“White Christmas,” 113
Whitman, Walt, 335
Whittle Communications, 374
Who, 119
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, 426–427
Whole Booke of Psalms, The (The Bay Psalm Book), 324
Whole Foods Market, 400
Whole Foods Market Magazine, 311–312
1399
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 523
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, 180
Wichita Eagle, 472
Wicker, Tom, 262
Wiesel, Elie, 331
Wi-Fi, 77, 97, 170
Wii, 49, 74–75, 92, 94, 97
Wii Fit, 74, 87
Wii Sports, 74
WikiLeaks, 44, 446, 456–457, 476
Wikipedia, 44, 89, 400–401
Wildmon, Donald, 167
Wild Strawberries, 229
“Wild Wild Young Men,” 114
Will, George, 273
Will & Grace, 66, 188
Williams, Alex T., 409
Williams, Brian, 191
Williams, Ian, 99
Williams, Tennessee, 23
Williams, Wendy, 159
Williamson, “Sonny Boy,” 114
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Wilmore, Larry, 178, 473–474
Wilson, Lauren M., 430
Wilson, Woodrow, 145, 391, 463
Wind Rises, The, 233
Winehouse, Amy, 125, 230
Winfrey, Oprah, 162, 331, 417
Wings of the Dove, The, 245
Winston, James, 430
Winter, Jeanette, 336
Wintergirls (Anderson), 500
Winter’s Bone, 227
Wired, 302, 310
Wired.com, 302
Wireless Ship Act (1910), 145–146, 151
Wireless Telephone Company, 143
wire services, 255–256, 259, 273
Witcher, The, 86
Without a Trace, 438, 526
Wix, 44
Wiz, The, 178
Wizard of Oz, The, 217
WJZ, 147
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WNAC, 147
Wolfe, Tom, 261–262
Wolf of Wall Street, The, 523
Wolfram Alpha, 51
Wolters Kluwer, 337
Woman’s Day, 300–301, 305
Woman’s Home Companion, 300
women
advertising and, 356, 369, 375
books and, 324
journalism and, 463
magazines and, 291, 293–294, 301, 305
media research and, 496
movie industry and, 228
music and, 114, 119, 123–125, 134
newspapers and, 270, 275
PR and, 392
suffrage and, 25, 271, 291
Women & Information Technology, National Center for, 90
women’s movement, 120, 254, 257, 261, 305
Wonderwall, 302
Wonder Years, The, 189
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Woo, John, 232
Wood, Natalie, 235
Woodley, Shailene, 331
Woodruff, Bob, 192
Woodstock concert, 121
Woodward, Bob, 452
Wooga, 95
Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 252
WordPress, 44
World Cities Cultural Forum, 334
World Cup, 193
World Journal (U.S. Chinese-language paper), 269
World of Warcraft, 45, 75–76, 81–82, 84, 87, 94, 96–97
World’s Fair (1939), 176
World Trade Organization (WTO), 425
World War I, 145, 260, 271, 296, 298
book industry and, 321, 325
Committee on Public Information and, 391
free press and, 510, 511
movie industry and, 222, 246, 440, 521
propaganda and, 391, 484
World War II, 108–109, 271, 491
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advertising and, 356–357, 393, 489
book industry and, 321, 325, 327
free press and, 511
news coverage of, 150, 283, 297–299
post-war era, 224, 226, 228–229, 235, 303, 327–328, 422, 481–482
Wozniak, Steve, 54
WPP, 358–359, 364, 369, 392–393
Wreck-It Ralph, 227, 427
WRFU, 168
WSM, 159
WTBS, 181, 192
Wu, Brianna, 88–89
WURV-FM, 169
WWD Fashion, 305
Xaxis, 364
Xbox, 49, 52, 56, 74, 83–87, 93–94, 97, 349, 433
xenophilia, 128
X-Files, The, 23, 26, 190
Xfinity, 186, 242
Xlibris, 342
XL Recordings, 106, 127
X-Men, 242, 428
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X-Men, 94, 326
Yahoo!, 42–43, 52, 62, 278–280, 333, 363–364, 434
Yahoo-ABC News, 249
Yale University, 279
Y’all, 313
Yang, Jerry, 43
Yardbirds, 119
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, 123
Yeats, William Butler, 23
Yeerum, Tatchakorn, 386
Yellow Kid, The, 257
Yelp, 51
Yeoh, Michelle, 232
Yo La Tengo, 133
“You Can’t Hurry Love” (Supremes), 121
Young, Andre “Dr. Dre,” 111
Young and the Restless, The, 190
Young Frankenstein, 19
Young & Rubicam, 359
Your Show of Shows, 188
Youth’s Companion, 306
YouTube, 11–13, 22, 25, 43, 62, 103, 348, 429, 434
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audience of, 352
blurring media lines and, 39
citizen journalism and, 48, 446
“Friday” video on, 372
“Gangnam Style” on, 132
Google and, 45, 54, 204, 242, 349, 433, 435
movies and, 242–243
music and, 125, 130, 133–134
original programming and, 210
streaming and, 112, 174, 185
time shifting and, 487
TV and, 204–205
YouTube Red, 433
Zappos, 343, 349
Zaxxon, 82
Zelda, 79, 82
Zenger, Anna Maul, 254
Zenger, John Peter, 254
Zhang, Ziyi, 232
Zhang Yimou, 232
Ziff Davis, 85
Zimatore, Carolyn, 345
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Zimmerman, Robert Allen. See Dylan, Bob
Zine Club, 314
zines, 312, 314
Zippy the Pinhead (Griffith), 328
zoetrope, 217–218
Zombies, 119
Zook, Kristal Brent, 430
Zootopia, 18
Zuckerberg, Mark, 50, 55, 70
Zukor, Adolph, 221–223
Zworykin, Vladimir, 176
zydeco, 121
Zynga, 95, 434
Zynga Poker, 95
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See media in action on LaunchPad launchpadworks.com
Throughout this book, the text directs you to LaunchPad for Media & Culture, where videos complement the material in the text. Here is a list of all the videos featured in the book, sorted by chapter. For directions on how to access these videos online, please see the instructions on the next page.
Chapter 1: Mass Media and the Cultural Landscape 30 Rock and Corporate Mergers Agenda Setting and Gatekeeping (see p. 14) The Simpsons and Soccer The Media and Democracy
Chapter 2: The Internet, Digital Media, and Media Convergence The Internet in 1995: The Net (see p. 44) Net Neutrality (see p. 62) Anonymous and Hacktivism User-Generated Content
Chapter 3: Digital Gaming and the Media Playground Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate Video Games at the Movies: Resident Evil (see p. 86) New Games Journalism Tablets, Technology, and the Classroom
Chapter 4: Sound Recording and Popular Music Recording Music Today (see p. 110) Alternative Strategies for Music Marketing (see p. 131) Music On Screen: “Uptown Funk” Touring On Screen: Katy Perry Streaming Music Videos (see p. 134)
Chapter 5: Popular Radio and the Origins of Broadcasting Talk Radio On Screen Radio: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (see p. 165) Going Visual: Video, Radio, and the Web (see p. 162) Streaming Music: “Bad Blood”
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http://launchpadworks.com
Chapter 6: Television and Cable: The Power of Visual Culture Television Networks Evolve (see p. 185) Television Drama: Then and Now (see p. 190) What Makes Public Television Public? (see p. 195) Changes in Prime-Time Wired or Wireless: Television Delivery Today
Chapter 7: Movies and the Impact of Images Breaking Barriers with 12 Years a Slave (see p. 227) Race in Hollywood: Tyler Perry The Theatrical Experience and The Hobbit More than a Movie: Social Issues and Film (see p. 244) Technology in Gravity
Chapter 8: Newspapers: The Rise and Decline of Modern Journalism Investigative Journalism On Screen: All the President’s Men Newspapers and the Internet: Convergence (see p. 263) News Aggregation and Arianna Huffington Community Voices: Weekly Newspapers (see p. 276) Newspapers Now: Balancing Citizen Journalism and Investigative
Reporting
Chapter 9: Magazines in the Age of Specialization The Power of Photojournalism Magazine Specialization Today (see p. 303) Narrowcasting in Magazines (see p. 309) Magazines On Screen: 13 Going on 30
Chapter 10: Books and the Power of Print Books in the New Millennium: Anne Rice and Others Discuss the Future of the Publishing Industry (see p. 332) Self-Publishing On Screen: 50 Shades of Grey Based On: Making Books into Movies with Tom Perrotta and Anne Rice
(see p. 330) Banned Books On Screen: Huck Finn Turning the Page: Books Go Digital
Chapter 11: Advertising and Commercial Culture Advertising in the Digital Age (see p. 365) Advertising and Effects on Children (see p. 373) Product Placement in the Movies: E.T. Blurring the Lines: Marketing Programs Across Platforms
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Chapter 12: Public Relations and Framing the Message Give and Take: Public Relations and Journalism (see p. 403) Filling the Holes: Video News Releases Going Viral: Political Campaigns and Video
Chapter 13: Media Economics and the Global Marketplace Disney’s Worldwide Hit: Frozen (see p. 426) The Impact of Media Ownership (see p. 438) The Money behind the Media Eugene Mirman vs. Time Warner Cable
Chapter 14: The Culture of Journalism: Values, Ethics, and Democracy
The Contemporary Journalist: Pundit or Reporter? (see p. 468) Fake News/Real News with Joe Randazzo of The Onion (see p. 469) Journalism Ethics: What News Is Fit to Print? The Objectivity Myth Shield Laws and Non-Traditional Journalists
Chapter 15: Media Effects and Cultural Approaches to Research Media Effects Research (see p. 488) TV Effects: 2 Broke Girls
Chapter 16: Legal Controls and Freedom of Expression Stephen Colbert Interviews John Seigenthaler Bloggers and Legal Rights (see p. 527) Bullying Converges Online The First Amendment and Student Speech Freedom of Information
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目录
Cover 2 Inside Front Cover 3 Promo Spread-Recto Facing 4 Quote Spread-Verso 5 Quote Spread-Verso 6 Title Page 7 Copyright 9 About the Author 11 Brief Contents 13 Preface 15 Contents 26 1: Mass Communication: A Critical Approach 56
Culture and the Evolution of Mass Communication 63 Oral and Written Eras in Communication 65 The Print Revolution 65 The Electronic Era 67 The Digital Era 68 The Linear Model of Mass Communication 69 A Cultural Model for Understanding Mass Communication 69
The Development of Media and Their Role in Our Society 71 The Evolution of Media: From Emergence to Convergence 71 Media Convergence 72 Stories: The Foundation of Media 76 The Power of Media Stories in Everyday Life 77 Agenda Setting and Gatekeeping 78
Surveying the Cultural Landscape 81 Culture as a Skyscraper 81 Examining Ethics: Covering War 82 Case Study: Is Anchorman a Comedy or a Documentary? 89 Culture as a Map 94
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Cultural Values of the Modern Period 97 Shifting Values in Postmodern Culture 100
Critiquing Media and Culture 104 Media Literacy and the Critical Process 104 Media Literacy and the Critical Process 105 Benefits of a Critical Perspective 110
Chapter Review 111 LaunchPad 113
Part 1: Digital Media and Convergence 116 2: The Internet, Digital Media, and Media Convergence 118
The Development of the Internet and the Web 123 The Birth of the Internet 123 The Net Widens 125 The Commercialization of the Internet 127
The Web Goes Social 133 Types of Social Media 134 The Net (1995) 133 Social Media and Democracy 138 Examining Ethics: “Anonymous” Hacks Global Terrorism 138
Convergence and Mobile Media 144 Media Converges on Our PCs and TVs 144 Mobile Devices Propel Convergence 145 The Impact of Media Convergence and Mobile Media 146 The Next Era: The Semantic Web 149
The Economics and Issues of the Internet 151 Ownership: Controlling the Internet 151 Targeted Advertising and Data Mining 156 Global Village Designed in California, Assembled in China 157
Security: The Challenge to Keep Personal Information Private 162
Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Tracking and Recording Your Every Move 162
Appropriateness: What Should Be Online? 166
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Access: The Fight to Prevent a Digital Divide 166 Net Neutrality: Maintaining an Open Internet 168 Net Neutrality 169 Alternative Voices 170
The Internet and Democracy 172 Digital Job Outlook 173
Chapter Review 175 LaunchPad 177
3: Digital Gaming and the Media Playground 179 The Development of Digital Gaming 185
Mechanical Gaming 185 The First Video Games 187 Arcades and Classic Games 189 Consoles and Advancing Graphics 189 Gaming on PCs 194
The Internet Transforms Gaming 195 MMORPGs, Virtual Worlds, and Social Gaming 195 Convergence: From Consoles to Mobile Gaming 197
The Media Playground 200 Video Game Genres 200 Case Study: Finding Positive Effects in Digital Games 203 Communities of Play: Inside the Game 211 Communities of Play: Outside the Game 213
Trends and Issues in Digital Gaming 216 Electronic Gaming and Media Culture 216 Video Games at the Movies 216 Electronic Gaming and Advertising 217 Addiction and Other Concerns 218 Global Village Global Controversy: The Gender Problem in Digital Games 220
Regulating Gaming 224 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: First-Person Shooter Games: Misogyny as Entertainment? 225
The Future of Gaming and Interactive Environments 228 The Business of Digital Gaming 229
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The Ownership and Organization of Digital Gaming 229 The Structure of Digital Game Publishing 232 Selling Digital Games 235 Alternative Voices 237
Digital Gaming, Free Speech, and Democracy 238 Digital Job Outlook 239
Chapter Review 240 LaunchPad 242
Part 2: Sounds and Images 244 4: Sound Recording and Popular Music 246
The Development of Sound Recording 252 From Cylinders to Disks: Sound Recording Becomes a Mass Medium 252
From Phonographs to CDs: Analog Goes Digital 254 Convergence: Sound Recording in the Internet Age 257 Recording Music Today 257 The Rocky Relationship between Records and Radio 261
U.S. Popular Music and the Formation of Rock 263 The Rise of Pop Music 264 Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay 265 Rock Muddies the Waters 268 Battles in Rock and Roll 274
A Changing Industry: Reformations in Popular Music 277 The British Are Coming! 277 Motor City Music: Detroit Gives America Soul 279 Folk and Psychedelic Music Reflect the Times 279 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Music Preferences across Generations 282
Punk, Grunge, and Indie Respond to Mainstream Rock 284 Hip-Hop Redraws Musical Lines 288 The Reemergence of Pop 291
The Business of Sound Recording 293 Music Labels Influence the Industry 293 Making, Selling, and Profiting from Music 295 Global Village Blank Space: What Kind of Genius Is 296
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Max Martin? 296
Alternative Strategies for Music Marketing 303 Case Study: Psy and the Meaning of “Gangnam Style”132 303
Alternative Voices 307 Streaming Music Videos 308
Sound Recording, Free Expression, and Democracy 309 Digital Job Outlook 310
Chapter Review 311 LaunchPad 313
5: Popular Radio and the Origins of Broadcasting 316 Early Technology and the Development of Radio 321
Maxwell and Hertz Discover Radio Waves 322 Marconi and the Inventors of Wireless Telegraphy 323 Wireless Telephony: De Forest and Fessenden 324 Regulating a New Medium 327
The Evolution of Radio 331 Building the First Networks 332 Sarnoff and NBC: Building the “Blue” and “Red” Networks 334
Government Scrutiny Ends RCA-NBC Monopoly 336 CBS and Paley: Challenging NBC 336 Bringing Order to Chaos with the Radio Act of 1927 338 The Golden Age of Radio 340
Radio Reinvents Itself 345 Transistors Make Radio Portable 345 The FM Revolution and Edwin Armstrong 347 The Rise of Format and Top 40 Radio 349 Resisting the Top 40 350
The Sounds of Commercial Radio 352 Format Specialization 352 Case Study: Host: The Origins of Talk Radio 354 Nonprofit Radio and NPR 358 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Comparing Commercial and Noncommercial Radio 360
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New Radio Technologies Offer More Stations 363 Going Visual: Video, Radio, and the Web 363 Radio and Convergence 364 Global Village Radio Goes Local, Global, and Local Again 365
Radio: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow 369 The Economics of Broadcast Radio 371
Local and National Advertising 371 Manipulating Playlists with Payola 372 Radio Ownership: From Diversity to Consolidation 372 Alternative Voices 376
Radio and the Democracy of the Airwaves 378 Digital Job Outlook 379
Chapter Review 380 LaunchPad 382
6: Television and Cable: The Power of Visual Culture 385 The Origins and Development of Television 391
Early Innovations in TV Technology 391 Electronic Technology: Zworykin and Farnsworth 392 Controlling Content—TV Grows Up 395
The Development of Cable 399 CATV—Community Antenna Television 399 The Wires and Satellites behind Cable Television 400 Cable Threatens Broadcasting 401 Cable Services 402 Case Study: ESPN: Sports and Stories 403 DBS: Cable without Wires 407
Technology and Convergence Change Viewing Habits 409 Television Networks Evolve 409 Home Video 409 The Third Screen: TV Converges with the Internet 410 Fourth Screens: Smartphones and Mobile Video 413
Major Programming Trends 414 TV Entertainment: Our Comic Culture 414 TV Entertainment: Our Dramatic Culture 417
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TV Entertainment: Our Dramatic Culture 417 Television Drama: Then and Now 420 TV Information: Our Daily News Culture 422 Reality TV and Other Enduring Genres 425 Public Television Struggles to Find Its Place 427 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: TV and the State of Storytelling 427
Regulatory Challenges to Television and Cable 431 Government Regulations Temporarily Restrict Network Control 431
What Makes Public Television Public? 431 Balancing Cable’s Growth against Broadcasters’ Interests 433 Franchising Frenzy 437 The Telecommunications Act of 1996 438
The Economics and Ownership of Television and Cable 440 Production 441 Distribution 443 Syndication Keeps Shows Going and Going … 444 Measuring Television Viewing 447 The Major Programming Corporations 451 Tracking Technology Binging Gives TV Shows a Second Chance—and Viewers a Second Home 451
Alternative Voices 456 Television, Cable, and Democracy 457
Digital Job Outlook 460 Chapter Review 461
LaunchPad 463 7: Movies and the Impact of Images 466
Early Technology and the Evolution of Movies 472 The Development of Film 472 The Introduction of Narrative 476 The Arrival of Nickelodeons 477
The Rise of the Hollywood Studio System 478 Production 480 Distribution 481
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The Studio System’s Golden Age 485 Hollywood Narrative and the Silent Era 485 The Introduction of Sound 486 The Development of the Hollywood Style 487 Breaking Barriers with 12 Years a Slave 490 Outside the Hollywood System 491 Case Study: Breaking through Hollywood’s Race Barrier 493 Global Village Beyond Hollywood: Asian Cinema 500
The Transformation of the Studio System 504 The Hollywood Ten 504 The Paramount Decision 505 Moving to the Suburbs 506 Television Changes Hollywood 507 Hollywood Adapts to Home Entertainment 508
The Economics of the Movie Business 510 Production, Distribution, and Exhibition Today 510 The Major Studio Players 515 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: The Blockbuster Mentality 516
Convergence: Movies Adjust to the Digital Turn 519 Alternative Voices 521
Popular Movies and Democracy 523 More Than a Movie: Social Issues and Film 523 Digital Job Outlook 525
Chapter Review 526 LaunchPad 528
Part 3: Words and Pictures 531 8: Newspapers: The Rise and Decline of Modern Journalism 533
The Evolution of American Newspapers 539 Colonial Newspapers and the Partisan Press 539 The Penny Press Era: Newspapers Become Mass Media 541 The Age of Yellow Journalism: Sensationalism and Investigation 544
Competing Models of Modern Print Journalism 549 “Objectivity” in Modern Journalism 549
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“Objectivity” in Modern Journalism 549 Interpretive Journalism 552 Literary Forms of Journalism 554 Contemporary Journalism in the TV and Internet Age 556 Newspapers and the Internet: Convergence 557
The Business and Ownership of Newspapers 559 Consensus versus Conflict: Newspapers Play Different Roles 559
Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Covering the News Media Business 562
Newspapers Target Specific Readers 565 Newspaper Operations 571 Case Study: Alternative Journalism: Dorothy Day and I. F. Stone 572
Newspaper Ownership: Chains Lose Their Grip 577 Joint Operating Agreements Combat Declining Competition 579
Challenges Facing Newspapers Today 581 Readership Declines in the United States 581 Going Local: How Small and Campus Papers Retain Readers 582
Community Voices: Weekly Newspapers 582 Blogs Challenge Newspapers’ Authority Online 583 Convergence: Newspapers Struggle in the Move to Digital 584
New Models for Journalism 588 Alternative Voices 590
Newspapers and Democracy 593 Digital Job Outlook 595
Chapter Review 596 LaunchPad 597
9: Magazines in the Age of Specialization 600 The Early History of Magazines 606
The First Magazines 606 Magazines in Colonial America 607 U.S. Magazines in the Nineteenth Century 608
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National, Women’s, and Illustrated Magazines 609 The Development of Modern American Magazines 611
Social Reform and the Muckrakers 612 The Rise of General-Interest Magazines 613 Case Study: The Evolution of Photojournalism 617 The Fall of General-Interest Magazines 621 Convergence: Magazines Confront the Digital Age 625
The Domination of Specialization 628 Men’s and Women’s Magazines 628 Magazine Specialization Today 629 Tracking Technology Paper Still Dominates Magazines in the Digital Age 629
Sports, Entertainment, and Leisure Magazines 632 Magazines for the Ages 634 Elite Magazines 634 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Uncovering American Beauty 635
Minority-Targeted Magazines 637 Supermarket Tabloids 638
The Organization and Economics of Magazines 640 Narrowcasting in Magazines 640 Magazine Departments and Duties 640 Major Magazine Chains 644 Alternative Voices 646
Magazines in a Democratic Society 648 Digital Job Outlook 650
Chapter Review 651 LaunchPad 652
10: Books and the Power of Print 655 The History of Books, from Papyrus to Paperbacks 662
The Development of Manuscript Culture 663 The Innovations of Block Printing and Movable Type 664 The Gutenberg Revolution: The Invention of the Printing Press 665
The Birth of Publishing in the United States 666
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Modern Publishing and the Book Industry 670
The Formation of Publishing Houses 670 Types of Books 671 Case Study: Comic Books: Alternative Themes, but Superheroes Prevail 675
Trends and Issues in Book Publishing 681 Based On: Making Books into Movies 681 Influences of Television and Film 681 Audio Books 683 Convergence: Books in the Digital Age 684 Books in the New Millennium 683 Preserving and Digitizing Books 686 Censorship and Banned Books 687 Global Village Buenos Aires, the World’s Bookstore Capital 688
Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Banned Books and “Family Values” 690
The Organization and Ownership of the Book Industry 693 Ownership Patterns 693 The Structure of Book Publishing 694 Selling Books: Brick-and-Mortar Stores, Clubs, and Mail Order 697
Selling Books Online 700 Alternative Voices 701
Books and the Future of Democracy 703 Digital Job Outlook 706
Chapter Review 707 LaunchPad 708
Part 4: The Business of Mass Media 711 11: Advertising and Commercial Culture 713
Early Developments in American Advertising 720 The First Advertising Agencies 720 Advertising in the 1800s 721 Promoting Social Change and Dictating Values 725 Early Ad Regulation 727
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The Shape of U.S. Advertising Today 728 The Influence of Visual Design 728 Types of Advertising Agencies 729 The Structure of Ad Agencies 732 Trends in Online Advertising 738 Advertising in the Digital Age 741
Persuasive Techniques in Contemporary Advertising 745 Conventional Persuasive Strategies 745 The Association Principle 748 Case Study: Super Bowl, Supersized: $4.5 Billion in Ad Spending over 50 Years 748
Advertising as Myth and Story 752 Product Placement 753 Examining Ethics: Do Alcohol Ads Encourage Binge Drinking?371 755
Media Literacy and the Critical Process: The Branded You 757
Commercial Speech and Regulating Advertising 759 Critical Issues in Advertising 760 Advertising and Effects on Children 761 Global Village Smoking Up the Global Market 766 Watching Over Advertising 769 Alternative Voices 772
Advertising, Politics, and Democracy 774 Advertising’s Role in Politics 774 The Future of Advertising 775 Digital Job Outlook 776
Chapter Review 777 LaunchPad 779
12: Public Relations and Framing the Message 782 Early Developments in Public Relations 788
P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill 788 Big Business and Press Agents 790 The Birth of Modern Public Relations 791
The Practice of Public Relations 796
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Approaches to Organized Public Relations 796
Performing Public Relations 798 Case Study: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis 803 Examining Ethics: Public Relations and Bananas 807 Public Relations Adapts to the Internet Age 812 Public Relations during a Crisis 813
Tensions between Public Relations and the Press 816 Elements of Professional Friction 816 Give and Take: Public Relations and Journalism 817 Shaping the Image of Public Relations 819 Alternative Voices 821
Public Relations and Democracy 822 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: The Invisible Hand of PR 822
Digital Job Outlook 826 Chapter Review 827
LaunchPad 828 13: Media Economics and the Global Marketplace 831
Analyzing the Media Economy 837 The Structure of the Media Industry 838 The Business of Media Organizations 839
The Transition to an Information Economy 842 From Regulation to Deregulation 843 Media Powerhouses: Consolidation, Partnerships, and Mergers 845
Business Tendencies in Media Industries 848 Economics, Hegemony, and Storytelling 850
Specialization, Global Markets, and Convergence 854 The Rise of Specialization and Synergy 854 Disney: A Postmodern Media Conglomerate 855 Disney’s Global Brand 856 Global Audiences Expand Media Markets 859 The Internet and Convergence Change the Game 860 Case Study: Blacks Own Just Ten U.S. Television Stations. Here’s Why. 861
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Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Cultural Imperialism and Movies
864
Social Issues in Media Economics 870 The Limits of Antitrust Laws 870 Case Study: From Fifty to a Few: The Most Dominant Media Corporations 873
The Impact of Media Ownership 875 The Fallout from a Free Market 876 Cultural Imperialism 877
The Media Marketplace and Democracy 880 The Effects of Media Consolidation on Democracy 881 The Media Reform Movement 882
Chapter Review 884 LaunchPad 885
Part 5: Democratic Expression and the Mass Media 888 14: The Culture of Journalism: Values, Ethics, and Democracy 890
Modern Journalism in the Information Age 896 What Is News? 896 Values in American Journalism 899 Case Study: Bias in the News 903
Ethics and the News Media 907 Ethical Predicaments 907 Resolving Ethical Problems 911
Reporting Rituals and the Legacy of Print Journalism 913 Focusing on the Present 913 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Telling Stories and Covering Disaster 914
Relying on Experts 917 Balancing Story Conflict 919 Acting as Adversaries 920
Journalism in the Age of TV and the Internet 921 Differences between Print, TV, and Internet News 921 Pundits, “Talking Heads,” and Politics 924 Convergence Enhances and Changes Journalism 925 The Contemporary Journalist: Pundit or Reporter? 925
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The Contemporary Journalist: Pundit or Reporter? 925 The Power of Visual Language 926 Fake News/Real News: A Fine Line 927
Alternative Models: Public Journalism and “Fake” News 929 Case Study: A Lost Generation of Journalists? 930 The Public Journalism Movement 933 “Fake” News and Satiric Journalism 935
Democracy and Reimagining Journalism’s Role 939 Social Responsibility 939 Deliberative Democracy 939 Examining Ethics: WikiLeaks, Secret Documents, and Good Journalism 940
Chapter Review 944 LaunchPad 945
15: Media Effects and Cultural Approaches to Research 948 Early Media Research Methods 954
Propaganda Analysis 955 Public Opinion Research 956 Social Psychology Studies 957 Marketing Research 959 Case Study: The Effects of TV in a Post-TV World 960
Research on Media Effects 963 Early Theories of Media Effects 963 Media Effects Research 964 Conducting Media Effects Research 967 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Wedding Media and the Meaning of the Perfect Wedding Day 973
Contemporary Media Effects Theories 975 Evaluating Research on Media Effects 980
Cultural Approaches to Media Research 981 Early Developments in Cultural Studies Research 981 Conducting Cultural Studies Research 982 Examining Ethics: Our Masculinity Problem 984 Cultural Studies’ Theoretical Perspectives 988 Evaluating Cultural Studies Research 989
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Chapter Review 993 LaunchPad 995
16: Legal Controls and Freedom of Expression 997 The Origins of Free Expression and a Free Press 1003
Models of Expression 1004 The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution 1006 Censorship as Prior Restraint 1007 Unprotected Forms of Expression 1009 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Who Knows the First Amendment? 1010
Case Study: Is “Sexting” Pornography? 1021 First Amendment versus Sixth Amendment 1024
Film and the First Amendment 1028 Social and Political Pressures on the Movies 1028 Self-Regulation in the Movie Industry 1029 The MPAA Ratings System 1031
Expression in the Media: Print, Broadcast, and Online 1033 The FCC Regulates Broadcasting 1034 Dirty Words, Indecent Speech, and Hefty Fines 1038 Political Broadcasts and Equal Opportunity 1039 The Demise of the Fairness Doctrine 1040 Bloggers and Legal Rights 1040 Communication Policy and the Internet 1041 Examining Ethics: A Generation of Copyright Criminals? 1043
The First Amendment and Democracy 1046 Chapter Review 1048
LaunchPad 1049 Extended Case Study: Analyzing the Coverage of the Volkswagen and Takata Crises 1053
What in the World Did Volkswagen Do Wrong 1054 Step 1: Description 1056 Step 2: Analysis 1057 Step 3: Interpretation 1058 Step 4: Evaluation 1059 Step 5: Engagement 1060
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Step 5: Engagement 1060 Notes 1062 Glossary 1124 Credits 1168 Index 1169
1429
• Cover
• Inside Front Cover
• Promo Spread-Recto Facing
• Quote Spread-Verso
• Quote Spread-Verso
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Brief Contents
• Preface
• Contents
• 1: Mass Communication: A Critical Approach
o Culture and the Evolution of Mass Communication
 Oral and Written Eras in Communication
 The Print Revolution
 The Electronic Era
 The Digital Era
 The Linear Model of Mass Communication
 A Cultural Model for Understanding Mass Communication
o The Development of Media and Their Role in Our Society
 The Evolution of Media: From Emergence to Convergence
 Media Convergence
 Stories: The Foundation of Media
 The Power of Media Stories in Everyday Life
 Agenda Setting and Gatekeeping
o Surveying the Cultural Landscape
 Culture as a Skyscraper
 Examining Ethics: Covering War
 Case Study: Is Anchorman a Comedy or a Documentary?
 Culture as a Map
 Cultural Values of the Modern Period
 Shifting Values in Postmodern Culture
o Critiquing Media and Culture
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process
 Benefits of a Critical Perspective
o Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
• Part 1: Digital Media and Convergence
o 2: The Internet, Digital Media, and Media Convergence
 The Development of the Internet and the Web
 The Birth of the Internet
 The Net Widens
 The Commercialization of the Internet
 The Web Goes Social
 Types of Social Media
 The Net (1995)
 Social Media and Democracy
 Examining Ethics: “Anonymous” Hacks Global Terrorism
 Convergence and Mobile Media
 Media Converges on Our PCs and TVs
 Mobile Devices Propel Convergence
 The Impact of Media Convergence and Mobile Media
 The Next Era: The Semantic Web
 The Economics and Issues of the Internet
 Ownership: Controlling the Internet
 Targeted Advertising and Data Mining
 Global Village Designed in California, Assembled in China
 Security: The Challenge to Keep Personal Information Private
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Tracking and Recording Your Every Move
 Appropriateness: What Should Be Online?
 Access: The Fight to Prevent a Digital Divide
 Net Neutrality: Maintaining an Open Internet
 Net Neutrality
 Alternative Voices
 The Internet and Democracy
 Digital Job Outlook
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
o 3: Digital Gaming and the Media Playground
 The Development of Digital Gaming
 Mechanical Gaming
 The First Video Games
 Arcades and Classic Games
 Consoles and Advancing Graphics
 Gaming on PCs
 The Internet Transforms Gaming
 MMORPGs, Virtual Worlds, and Social Gaming
 Convergence: From Consoles to Mobile Gaming
 The Media Playground
 Video Game Genres
 Case Study: Finding Positive Effects in Digital Games
 Communities of Play: Inside the Game
 Communities of Play: Outside the Game
 Trends and Issues in Digital Gaming
 Electronic Gaming and Media Culture
 Video Games at the Movies
 Electronic Gaming and Advertising
 Addiction and Other Concerns
 Global Village Global Controversy: The Gender Problem in Digital Games
 Regulating Gaming
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: First-Person Shooter Games: Misogyny as Entertainment?
 The Future of Gaming and Interactive Environments
 The Business of Digital Gaming
 The Ownership and Organization of Digital Gaming
 The Structure of Digital Game Publishing
 Selling Digital Games
 Alternative Voices
 Digital Gaming, Free Speech, and Democracy
 Digital Job Outlook
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
• Part 2: Sounds and Images
o 4: Sound Recording and Popular Music
 The Development of Sound Recording
 From Cylinders to Disks: Sound Recording Becomes a Mass Medium
 From Phonographs to CDs: Analog Goes Digital
 Convergence: Sound Recording in the Internet Age
 Recording Music Today
 The Rocky Relationship between Records and Radio
 U.S. Popular Music and the Formation of Rock
 The Rise of Pop Music
 Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay
 Rock Muddies the Waters
 Battles in Rock and Roll
 A Changing Industry: Reformations in Popular Music
 The British Are Coming!
 Motor City Music: Detroit Gives America Soul
 Folk and Psychedelic Music Reflect the Times
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Music Preferences across Generations
 Punk, Grunge, and Indie Respond to Mainstream Rock
 Hip-Hop Redraws Musical Lines
 The Reemergence of Pop
 The Business of Sound Recording
 Music Labels Influence the Industry
 Making, Selling, and Profiting from Music
 Global Village Blank Space: What Kind of Genius Is Max Martin?
 Alternative Strategies for Music Marketing
 Case Study: Psy and the Meaning of “Gangnam Style”132
 Alternative Voices
 Streaming Music Videos
 Sound Recording, Free Expression, and Democracy
 Digital Job Outlook
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
o 5: Popular Radio and the Origins of Broadcasting
 Early Technology and the Development of Radio
 Maxwell and Hertz Discover Radio Waves
 Marconi and the Inventors of Wireless Telegraphy
 Wireless Telephony: De Forest and Fessenden
 Regulating a New Medium
 The Evolution of Radio
 Building the First Networks
 Sarnoff and NBC: Building the “Blue” and “Red” Networks
 Government Scrutiny Ends RCA-NBC Monopoly
 CBS and Paley: Challenging NBC
 Bringing Order to Chaos with the Radio Act of 1927
 The Golden Age of Radio
 Radio Reinvents Itself
 Transistors Make Radio Portable
 The FM Revolution and Edwin Armstrong
 The Rise of Format and Top 40 Radio
 Resisting the Top 40
 The Sounds of Commercial Radio
 Format Specialization
 Case Study: Host: The Origins of Talk Radio
 Nonprofit Radio and NPR
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Comparing Commercial and Noncommercial Radio
 New Radio Technologies Offer More Stations
 Going Visual: Video, Radio, and the Web
 Radio and Convergence
 Global Village Radio Goes Local, Global, and Local Again
 Radio: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
 The Economics of Broadcast Radio
 Local and National Advertising
 Manipulating Playlists with Payola
 Radio Ownership: From Diversity to Consolidation
 Alternative Voices
 Radio and the Democracy of the Airwaves
 Digital Job Outlook
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
o 6: Television and Cable: The Power of Visual Culture
 The Origins and Development of Television
 Early Innovations in TV Technology
 Electronic Technology: Zworykin and Farnsworth
 Controlling Content—TV Grows Up
 The Development of Cable
 CATV—Community Antenna Television
 The Wires and Satellites behind Cable Television
 Cable Threatens Broadcasting
 Cable Services
 Case Study: ESPN: Sports and Stories
 DBS: Cable without Wires
 Technology and Convergence Change Viewing Habits
 Television Networks Evolve
 Home Video
 The Third Screen: TV Converges with the Internet
 Fourth Screens: Smartphones and Mobile Video
 Major Programming Trends
 TV Entertainment: Our Comic Culture
 TV Entertainment: Our Dramatic Culture
 Television Drama: Then and Now
 TV Information: Our Daily News Culture
 Reality TV and Other Enduring Genres
 Public Television Struggles to Find Its Place
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: TV and the State of Storytelling
 Regulatory Challenges to Television and Cable
 Government Regulations Temporarily Restrict Network Control
 What Makes Public Television Public?
 Balancing Cable’s Growth against Broadcasters’ Interests
 Franchising Frenzy
 The Telecommunications Act of 1996
 The Economics and Ownership of Television and Cable
 Production
 Distribution
 Syndication Keeps Shows Going and Going …
 Measuring Television Viewing
 The Major Programming Corporations
 Tracking Technology Binging Gives TV Shows a Second Chance—and Viewers a Second Home
 Alternative Voices
 Television, Cable, and Democracy
 Digital Job Outlook
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
o 7: Movies and the Impact of Images
 Early Technology and the Evolution of Movies
 The Development of Film
 The Introduction of Narrative
 The Arrival of Nickelodeons
 The Rise of the Hollywood Studio System
 Production
 Distribution
 Exhibition
 The Studio System’s Golden Age
 Hollywood Narrative and the Silent Era
 The Introduction of Sound
 The Development of the Hollywood Style
 Breaking Barriers with 12 Years a Slave
 Outside the Hollywood System
 Case Study: Breaking through Hollywood’s Race Barrier
 Global Village Beyond Hollywood: Asian Cinema
 The Transformation of the Studio System
 The Hollywood Ten
 The Paramount Decision
 Moving to the Suburbs
 Television Changes Hollywood
 Hollywood Adapts to Home Entertainment
 The Economics of the Movie Business
 Production, Distribution, and Exhibition Today
 The Major Studio Players
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: The Blockbuster Mentality
 Convergence: Movies Adjust to the Digital Turn
 Alternative Voices
 Popular Movies and Democracy
 More Than a Movie: Social Issues and Film
 Digital Job Outlook
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
• Part 3: Words and Pictures
o 8: Newspapers: The Rise and Decline of Modern Journalism
 The Evolution of American Newspapers
 Colonial Newspapers and the Partisan Press
 The Penny Press Era: Newspapers Become Mass Media
 The Age of Yellow Journalism: Sensationalism and Investigation
 Competing Models of Modern Print Journalism
 “Objectivity” in Modern Journalism
 Interpretive Journalism
 Literary Forms of Journalism
 Contemporary Journalism in the TV and Internet Age
 Newspapers and the Internet: Convergence
 The Business and Ownership of Newspapers
 Consensus versus Conflict: Newspapers Play Different Roles
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Covering the News Media Business
 Newspapers Target Specific Readers
 Newspaper Operations
 Case Study: Alternative Journalism: Dorothy Day and I. F. Stone
 Newspaper Ownership: Chains Lose Their Grip
 Joint Operating Agreements Combat Declining Competition
 Challenges Facing Newspapers Today
 Readership Declines in the United States
 Going Local: How Small and Campus Papers Retain Readers
 Community Voices: Weekly Newspapers
 Blogs Challenge Newspapers’ Authority Online
 Convergence: Newspapers Struggle in the Move to Digital
 New Models for Journalism
 Alternative Voices
 Newspapers and Democracy
 Digital Job Outlook
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
o 9: Magazines in the Age of Specialization
 The Early History of Magazines
 The First Magazines
 Magazines in Colonial America
 U.S. Magazines in the Nineteenth Century
 National, Women’s, and Illustrated Magazines
 The Development of Modern American Magazines
 Social Reform and the Muckrakers
 The Rise of General-Interest Magazines
 Case Study: The Evolution of Photojournalism
 The Fall of General-Interest Magazines
 Convergence: Magazines Confront the Digital Age
 The Domination of Specialization
 Men’s and Women’s Magazines
 Magazine Specialization Today
 Tracking Technology Paper Still Dominates Magazines in the Digital Age
 Sports, Entertainment, and Leisure Magazines
 Magazines for the Ages
 Elite Magazines
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Uncovering American Beauty
 Minority-Targeted Magazines
 Supermarket Tabloids
 The Organization and Economics of Magazines
 Narrowcasting in Magazines
 Magazine Departments and Duties
 Major Magazine Chains
 Alternative Voices
 Magazines in a Democratic Society
 Digital Job Outlook
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
o 10: Books and the Power of Print
 The History of Books, from Papyrus to Paperbacks
 The Development of Manuscript Culture
 The Innovations of Block Printing and Movable Type
 The Gutenberg Revolution: The Invention of the Printing Press
 The Birth of Publishing in the United States
 Modern Publishing and the Book Industry
 The Formation of Publishing Houses
 Types of Books
 Case Study: Comic Books: Alternative Themes, but Superheroes Prevail
 Trends and Issues in Book Publishing
 Based On: Making Books into Movies
 Influences of Television and Film
 Audio Books
 Convergence: Books in the Digital Age
 Books in the New Millennium
 Preserving and Digitizing Books
 Censorship and Banned Books
 Global Village Buenos Aires, the World’s Bookstore Capital
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Banned Books and “Family Values”
 The Organization and Ownership of the Book Industry
 Ownership Patterns
 The Structure of Book Publishing
 Selling Books: Brick-and-Mortar Stores, Clubs, and Mail Order
 Selling Books Online
 Alternative Voices
 Books and the Future of Democracy
 Digital Job Outlook
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
• Part 4: The Business of Mass Media
o 11: Advertising and Commercial Culture
 Early Developments in American Advertising
 The First Advertising Agencies
 Advertising in the 1800s
 Promoting Social Change and Dictating Values
 Early Ad Regulation
 The Shape of U.S. Advertising Today
 The Influence of Visual Design
 Types of Advertising Agencies
 The Structure of Ad Agencies
 Trends in Online Advertising
 Advertising in the Digital Age
 Persuasive Techniques in Contemporary Advertising
 Conventional Persuasive Strategies
 The Association Principle
 Case Study: Super Bowl, Supersized: $4.5 Billion in Ad Spending over 50 Years
 Advertising as Myth and Story
 Product Placement
 Examining Ethics: Do Alcohol Ads Encourage Binge Drinking?371
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: The Branded You
 Commercial Speech and Regulating Advertising
 Critical Issues in Advertising
 Advertising and Effects on Children
 Global Village Smoking Up the Global Market
 Watching Over Advertising
 Alternative Voices
 Advertising, Politics, and Democracy
 Advertising’s Role in Politics
 The Future of Advertising
 Digital Job Outlook
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
o 12: Public Relations and Framing the Message
 Early Developments in Public Relations
 P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill
 Big Business and Press Agents
 The Birth of Modern Public Relations
 The Practice of Public Relations
 Approaches to Organized Public Relations
 Performing Public Relations
 Case Study: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis
 Examining Ethics: Public Relations and Bananas
 Public Relations Adapts to the Internet Age
 Public Relations during a Crisis
 Tensions between Public Relations and the Press
 Elements of Professional Friction
 Give and Take: Public Relations and Journalism
 Shaping the Image of Public Relations
 Alternative Voices
 Public Relations and Democracy
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: The Invisible Hand of PR
 Digital Job Outlook
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
o 13: Media Economics and the Global Marketplace
 Analyzing the Media Economy
 The Structure of the Media Industry
 The Business of Media Organizations
 The Transition to an Information Economy
 From Regulation to Deregulation
 Media Powerhouses: Consolidation, Partnerships, and Mergers
 Business Tendencies in Media Industries
 Economics, Hegemony, and Storytelling
 Specialization, Global Markets, and Convergence
 The Rise of Specialization and Synergy
 Disney: A Postmodern Media Conglomerate
 Disney’s Global Brand
 Global Audiences Expand Media Markets
 The Internet and Convergence Change the Game
 Case Study: Blacks Own Just Ten U.S. Television Stations. Here’s Why.
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Cultural Imperialism and Movies
 Social Issues in Media Economics
 The Limits of Antitrust Laws
 Case Study: From Fifty to a Few: The Most Dominant Media Corporations
 The Impact of Media Ownership
 The Fallout from a Free Market
 Cultural Imperialism
 The Media Marketplace and Democracy
 The Effects of Media Consolidation on Democracy
 The Media Reform Movement
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
• Part 5: Democratic Expression and the Mass Media
o 14: The Culture of Journalism: Values, Ethics, and Democracy
 Modern Journalism in the Information Age
 What Is News?
 Values in American Journalism
 Case Study: Bias in the News
 Ethics and the News Media
 Ethical Predicaments
 Resolving Ethical Problems
 Reporting Rituals and the Legacy of Print Journalism
 Focusing on the Present
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Telling Stories and Covering Disaster
 Relying on Experts
 Balancing Story Conflict
 Acting as Adversaries
 Journalism in the Age of TV and the Internet
 Differences between Print, TV, and Internet News
 Pundits, “Talking Heads,” and Politics
 Convergence Enhances and Changes Journalism
 The Contemporary Journalist: Pundit or Reporter?
 The Power of Visual Language
 Fake News/Real News: A Fine Line
 Alternative Models: Public Journalism and “Fake” News
 Case Study: A Lost Generation of Journalists?
 The Public Journalism Movement
 “Fake” News and Satiric Journalism
 Democracy and Reimagining Journalism’s Role
 Social Responsibility
 Deliberative Democracy
 Examining Ethics: WikiLeaks, Secret Documents, and Good Journalism
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
o 15: Media Effects and Cultural Approaches to Research
 Early Media Research Methods
 Propaganda Analysis
 Public Opinion Research
 Social Psychology Studies
 Marketing Research
 Case Study: The Effects of TV in a Post-TV World
 Research on Media Effects
 Early Theories of Media Effects
 Media Effects Research
 Conducting Media Effects Research
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Wedding Media and the Meaning of the Perfect Wedding Day
 Contemporary Media Effects Theories
 Evaluating Research on Media Effects
 Cultural Approaches to Media Research
 Early Developments in Cultural Studies Research
 Conducting Cultural Studies Research
 Examining Ethics: Our Masculinity Problem
 Cultural Studies’ Theoretical Perspectives
 Evaluating Cultural Studies Research
 Media Research and Democracy
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
o 16: Legal Controls and Freedom of Expression
 The Origins of Free Expression and a Free Press
 Models of Expression
 The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution
 Censorship as Prior Restraint
 Unprotected Forms of Expression
 Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Who Knows the First Amendment?
 Case Study: Is “Sexting” Pornography?
 First Amendment versus Sixth Amendment
 Film and the First Amendment
 Social and Political Pressures on the Movies
 Self-Regulation in the Movie Industry
 The MPAA Ratings System
 Expression in the Media: Print, Broadcast, and Online
 The FCC Regulates Broadcasting
 Dirty Words, Indecent Speech, and Hefty Fines
 Political Broadcasts and Equal Opportunity
 The Demise of the Fairness Doctrine
 Bloggers and Legal Rights
 Communication Policy and the Internet
 Examining Ethics: A Generation of Copyright Criminals?
 The First Amendment and Democracy
 Chapter Review
 LaunchPad
o Extended Case Study: Analyzing the Coverage of the Volkswagen and Takata Crises
 What in the World Did Volkswagen Do Wrong
 Step 1: Description
 Step 2: Analysis
 Step 3: Interpretation
 Step 4: Evaluation
 Step 5: Engagement
• Notes
• Glossary
• Credits
• Index