Critical Studies in Mass Communication

Jensen, Joli

doi: 10.1080/15295039509366946pmid: N/A

Faith in the social powers of the arts allows American intellectuals to maintain a loyalty to democracy in the abstract while deploring people's concrete cultural practices. This perspective is analyzed and critiqued, and Dewey's beliefs in “art as experience” offered as an alternative that can refigure, and thereby benefit, American social thought.

Press, Andrea L.; Cole, Elizabeth R.

doi: 10.1080/15295039509366947pmid: N/A

This study is based on focus group interviews with 41 non‐activist pro‐life women conducted between 1989 and 1993. Respondents were primarily white and represented a variety of Christian denominations. Almost without exception, the pro‐life women expressed their positions on abortion by invoking what they believed to be scientific fact. They expected that natural facts would corroborate, and thus validate, their biblically‐derived morality. This juxtaposition of scientific claims with pro‐life beliefs is noteworthy because it reflects pro‐life women's distinctive relationship to mainstream cultural values more generally, and sets the stage for their response to mainstream sources of authority and information, in particular the mass media. For pro‐life women, the quest for what they called “the true facts”—the evidence of God's ways, meanings, and purposes—required wading through much that is presented in mainstream society as unbiased information. Many respondents reported that they actively searched for authorities and authoritative information that were not corrupted by the values of secular society. Paradoxically, in articulating this critique, pro‐life women drew on secular forms of argument, claiming scientific authenticity for their own sources. Ultimately, their selective viewing habits resulted in the construction of an alternative community of thought and belief.1

Stabile, Carol A.

doi: 10.1080/15295039509366948pmid: N/A

Since the early 1980s, the paradigm of resistance (which emerges from a particular reading of Gramsci's theory of hegemony) has enjoyed widespread popularity in the field of media studies. Arguing for understanding media studies as a field in Pierre Bourdieu's sense of the term, this article explores the analytical and political limits of this paradigm, and, by extension, the intellectual vision that proceeds from it.

Wasser, Frederick

doi: 10.1080/15295039509366949pmid: N/A

The American film industry no longer addresses a national audience. Hollywood's domination of international trade has altered its relationship with the domestic market. This study locates and elaborates a postwar disassociation between films and the domestic audience in changing finance and marketing practices. The development in the nineteen seventies of pre‐selling unproduced films to worldwide territories eroded the previous classic Hollywood emphasis on the American viewer. The economic history of this trans‐nationalization is an important clue to the problem of why American films contribute so little to the social fabric.

Land, F. Mitchell

doi: 10.1080/15295039509366950pmid: N/A

This article attempts to integrate both macro and micro levels of analysis to the study of one aspect of modern African culture—the Ivoirien music made popular by state television in Côte d'Ivoire. The article examines the relationship between state television and the Ivoirien popular singer and how the latter struggles within that relationship. Particular attention is focused on Côte d'Ivoire's international singing star, Alpha Blondy. The article is based upon the author's field study of Ivoirien television conducted from September 1987 to December 1989 for a period of 19 months, and extends to the present as events continue to alter the media terrain in that country.

Gandy, Oscar H.; Berger, Arthur Asa; Cooper, Thomas W.; Desmond, Roger; Downing, John D. H.; McChesney, Robert W.; Dates, Jannette L.; White, Robert A.; Cottle, Simon; LaFia, Christine; Pauly, John; Palmerton, Patricia R.

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