The political economy of Reali-TV (original) (raw)

The political-economic origins of Reali-TV

Reality TV: Remaking television culture, 2d Ed. , 2009

From the sea change in American 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.” 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. In this essay I offer a rough categorization of these programs, sketch the industrial context from which they emerged, and point to the economic problems they were meant to solve. I focus mostly on the distinctive conditions of prime-time series, putting aside made-for-TV docudramas and entire cable channels (such as Court TV) that may have similar production practices and genres.

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.

Fetishism or Ideology? A Contribution to the Political Economy of Television

A dominant approach to the political economy of television argues that television produces " audience commodity " , which is sold to advertisers. It situates the economic effects of television within the sphere of subjects and subjectivity. This article presents a different approach, according to which television produces objects. Television advertising produces brands as economic objects possessing qualities that material goods cannot provide. For that purpose, the article explores a theoretical reconfiguration of the critical study of television: instead of basing it on ideology, which is primarily an epistemological category, it proposes to ground it on fetishism, understood as an ontological category. This change entails a shift in the topology of critique of the visual image. While the ideological paradigm regards images as inverted representations of reality, in fetishism, according to Marx, things " appear as what they are ". This article argues that broadcast television is the distinctive fetishistic visual medium, in both the Marxian and the psychoanalytic senses of the term. Its fetish character qualifies it to production through visual presentation.

The structural transformation of the televisual public sphere

This dissertation poses that the digital transition is best understood as simultaneously a technological and cultural phenomena. As a physical change in the means of distribution, transmission, and reception of media content, the digital transition is an important factor in changing technological, aesthetic, and legal norms. As a cultural form, the digital is positioned as a moderator between continuity and discontinuity. Through a reading strategy inspired by Walter Benjamin this dissertation reads the physical and cultural implications of the digital transition in television in the United States through political categories. The chapters are case studies in the adoption of digital televisions for home use, digital television production technologies, digital transmission technologies, and digital distribution systems. Each case study examines the tenuous production of publics in the context of the dialectical pressures of the digital. By taking this approach I intend to contribute to the rhetorical dimension of television studies, the digital turn in rhetorical and public sphere studies, and the legal and aesthetic dimensions of production studies. The dialectical approach to the digital allows the study of television to theorize the trajectory of emerging media and the political implications of that movement.

Moving beyond the "Vast Wasteland": Cultural Policy and Television in the United States

Television & New Media, 2000

In the United States, there are two basic positions on television and cultural policy. The dominant position, promoted by the television industry and by free-market conservatives, is that television culture is best left in the hands of commerce: if the people want certain types of programming, then the market will provide them. This view can be traced to the free-market ideology that permitted U.S. broadcasting, unlike most European models, to develop as a commercially sponsored, private enterprise.

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.

Realities of Change: The changing nature of television in the past twenty years

This thesis argues that in order to understand the changes that have occurred in the television industry and television spectatorship since the mid-1990s, it is important to look at the transitions which have occurred in three key areas: 'textual production', 'reception and response', and 'economics'. Textual production refers to the various industrial structures which surround the creation of a text and impact its content; reception and response refers to the ways in which an audience receives their television content, and the methods by which they communicate about it with each other and with content creators; and lastly, economics refers to the variety of financial, commercial, and regulatory structures that surround the production, distribution and reception of the television text. By providing historical context in order to contrast and highlight the shifts in these key areas, as well as the technological environment in which they occur, a holistic understanding of the period can be gained, through the framework of a circuit model. This thesis argues that the changes that occurred during this period in the primary nodes of textual production, reception and response, and economics are interrelated, and could not have occurred independently of each other.

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.