Fetishism or Ideology? A Contribution to the Political Economy of Television (original) (raw)

“Faire (de) la télévision / Making TV”, Biens symboliques / Symbolic Goods, 6, 2020

Biens symboliques / Symbolic Goods, 2020

[English below] Réputée en perte de vitesse avec la multiplication des écrans et des nouvelles pratiques de consommation des productions audiovisuelles, la télévision est un média qui, tout en restant dominant, est en pleine mutation. La fabrique de ses programmes, rarement analysée par les sciences sociales, fait l’objet de ce dossier. On se propose d’y étudier, à travers des perspectives à chaque fois différentes, les rouages de la production audiovisuelle pour interroger les ressorts de la division du travail, les effets des contraintes (temporelles, économiques, d’audience, etc.) sur les biens produits, les mécanismes de l’internationalisation des programmes ou encore la difficile reconnaissance du statut des auteur·e·s. Supposedly losing ground with the multiplication of screens and new consumer practices for audiovisual productions, television is undergoing major transformations. Nevertheless, it remains a dominant medium. This dossier focuses on the making of television programmes—a subject rarely studied by social science. We propose to analyse, through different perspectives, the workings of audiovisual production in order to question the dynamics of the division of labour, the effects of the multiple constraints (of time, audience, budget, etc.) on the produced content, the mechanisms of the internationalization of the television programme market, and TV writers’ difficulty in gaining recognition.

American Television: Manufacturing Consumerism

University of Westminster Press

Television plays a central, highly visible role in American society as well as across the globe. It is little wonder then that scores of scholars have examined television in all its facets and from a wide range of perspectives. Equally unsur-prising, the conclusions have been diverse. Despite the flood of scholarship, as far as the author can tell, devising a critical model of the political economy of American television has not been a focus, although critical political economists , and scholars often cited by them, have of course studied popular culture and television. This chapter, then, provides a critical political-economic model of American television. It introduces a Propaganda Model for American Television (PMTV) by adapting the five filters of Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model (PM) to the American television industry and programming.

Televisionism (co-edited special issue)

The Italianist Film Issue, 2014

This special issue explores the way Italian fictional series, produced from the end of the Cold War onwards, have been instrumental in rewriting the country’s public memory, in the moment of historical and political transition that followed the disappearance of political parties belonging to the Constitutional pact established in 1945. Using the provocative neologism ‘televisionism’, i.e. the usage of television as a way to promote new historical narratives which find their political and intellectual roots in post-Cold War historical revisionism, the special issue explores different points of view and debates on the ways in which television reconfigures the relation between the past and the present.

A Sociological Analysis of Television

New genres of programmes appeared on French televisionin the 2000s. They shaped people's relations to entertainment, and to a certain extent the nature of their interests. TVredefined itself under the influence of foreign channels. Until then, France had harshly defended its cultural autonomy; but American formats eventually made their way into the media to become mainstream. Why were these broadcasts so successful? Had viewers been looking forwardto enjoying them? This paper discusses whether reality television has reflectedan evolution of French ethics. A selection of three French broadcasts is scrutinized in this regard –a quiz show (The Weakest Link), a talk show (My Own Decision) and a reality show (Loft Story). These shows reveal aspects of the ways in which television acts upon mentalities. They also threaten, according to sociological studies of the media, the quality of cultural production –in science and in the arts, in philosophy or in law –as well as democracy and political life at large.

The Television Entertainment - between Profit and Responsibility

International Journal of Communication Research, 2012

Contemporary means of communication, and especially television, have the capacity to fully exploit the primary passions. However, instead of becoming instruments of democracy they turned frequently into instruments of symbolic exploitation. Symbolic violence is that particular type of violence capable to steal or hide some meanings from a certain piece of information (which are not very clearly perceived by the collective attention) and, more important, on already-rooted social beliefs. Like any theory of magic, theory of symbolic violence is based on a theory of beliefs or, rather, on a theory of construction of beliefs about social work necessary to produce agents equipped with collection and assessment schemes capable to observe orders or commands, disguised in a particular situation or in a certain speech and, most important, to execute them all. This definition was given by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu which considers that symbolic violence is a mechanism to ensure the reproduction of power relations hidden within the social system. According to Giovanni Sartori, we believe what the eye can see. That is why, nowadays, cognitive authority becomes the most credible thing ever seen. The reason is near to us: what we can see seems to be "real" and this is the main reason to be true. This is why videocracy became an enterprise of a constantly hetero-directed strong opinion, which apparently strengthens, but in reality devoids of content the democracy as government of opinion. Television is the spokesman exhibiting a public opinion which essentially echoes his own voice.

Critical Approaches to the Study of TV - An Introduction

The Television Reader: Critical Perspectives in Canadian and US Television Studies, 2013

What is television? That flat-screen 40-inch LCD screen used to watch TV shows each day? The TV series stored in digital files (legally or illegally downloaded) on a laptop computer or mobile phone? The TV program streamed from a TV network's website on a tablet at your local coffee shop? The stories and characters that comprise the text of a prime-time TV show? Business relationships among TV production companies, TV networks, adverting corporations, and ratings firms? The copyright to a TV show, which is controlled by a vertically integrated media corporation? Orbiting satellites? The pleasure or boredom felt while watching a TV show? The effect TV has on society? The concept of "television" encompasses all of the above. This introductory chapter reviews some of the main ways of conceptualizing and studying TV. In this chapter, TV is expressed and analyzed in the four following ways: (1) as culture and mass-mediated communication;

The political economy of Reali-TV

Jump Cut, 1997

From the sea change in U.S. television in the 1980s emerged a programming trend variously described as "infotainment," "reality-based television," "tabloid TV," "crime-time television," "trash TV," and "on-scene shows."[1][open notes in new window] The welter of terms created by television critics to describe these new programs masked their underlying connection as a response to economic restructuring within the industry. This essay offers a rough categorization of these programs, sketches the industrial context from which they emerged, and points to the economic problems they were meant to solve.[2] Although my focus here is on political economy, rather than on textual or audience issues, I do not want to imply that these programs' cultural significance can be reduced to their relations of production and distribution. Yet without understanding the political-economic forces which drove the spread of this genre, textual and audience studies risk reifying it as an expression of audience demand, or of their creators, or of a cultural, discursive, or ontological shift unrelated to the needs of those who run the television industry. If this genre exhibits a kind of textual excess, its emergence reflects a relative scarcity of means. I conclude with suggestions for how textual and audience studies might link the new "reality" of television to shifts in the larger U.S. political-economy since the mid-1980s.

Soft-Core in TV Time: The Political Economy of a “Cultural Trend”

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2005

This essay deconstructs popular notions that ''sex sells'' in an increasingly sexualized U.S. popular culture by examining the specific political, social, and economic forces behind the creation and expansion of Girls Gone Wild, a home video series marketed through television infomercials. The crackdown on hard-core pornography, followed by the opening of television infomercial markets, paved the way for the series' creator to bring together the structural organization of a new soft-core video industry with the marketing aims of a cable industry eager to sell young, male ratings.