Even though it’s frequently asserted that we are living in a golden age of scripted television, television as a medium is still not taken seriously as an artistic art form, nor has the stigma of television as “chewing gum for the mind” really disappeared. -/- Philosopher Martin Shuster argues that television is the modern art form, full of promise and urgency, and in New Television, he offers a strong philosophical justification for its importance. Through careful (...) analysis of shows including The Wire, Justified, and Weeds, among others; and European and Anglophone philosophers, such as Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and John Rawls; Shuster reveals how various contemporary television series engage deeply with aesthetic and philosophical issues in modernism and modernity. What unifies the aesthetic and philosophical ambitions of new television is a commitment to portraying and exploring the family as the last site of political possibility in a world otherwise bereft of any other sources of traditional authority; consequently, at the heart of new television are profound political stakes. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Introduction - the Small Screen and Morality - Morality on Television - Sociology and the Moral OrderTelevisuality: Style and the Small ScreenThe Phenomenology of Television - Society and the Small Screen - Mediating Morality- Television and the Imaginary - Conclusion.

Mass media have been accused of cultivating anti-immigrant sentiments in Western societies. Most studies on this topic, however, have not made a distinction between the types of television program (information vs. entertainment) or television station (public vs. commercial). Adopting a comparative approach, we use data from the six waves of the European Social Survey (ESS, 2002–2012, n = 162,987) to assess the relationship between individual and aggregate level patterns of television consumption and anti-immigrant sentiments in European societies. (...) Individual television viewing time is positively associated with anti-immigrant sentiments, while frequent exposure to news and information programs is associated with lower levels of anti-immigrant sentiments. At the aggregate level we observe a positive effect of the total viewing time in society on anti-immigrant sentiments. In the conclusion we offer some suggestions on how this effect could be explained. (shrink)

L’émission Loft Story représente l’apogée de la néo-télévision. Elle a instauré un contrat de communication avec le public qui a mêlé la plupart des éléments caractéristiques de la télévision contemporaine. Participation du public au programme, symbolisée par la présence à l’écran de personnes anonymes issues de la société civile et par une interactivité poussée exprimée par les votes. Imbrication difficile à décrypter pour le téléspectateur entre réalité et fiction. Dimension ludique du programme et vécu en direct qui entretiennent le double (...) phénomène d’identification et de distanciation. Mise en scène de la dimension relationnelle de la vie privée. Écho de la culturelle adolescente, surtout dans son aspect interrelationnel. Utilisation du média comme acteur de la vie sociale, et notamment comme agent de promotion professionnelle.The show Loft Story represents the most extreme form of « neotelevision ». The communication contract it proposes to its audience brings together most of the elements that characterize modern television. 1) Public participation in the programme . 2) Unability for viewers to clearly sort out what pertains to reality and what belongs to fiction. 3) Playful dimension of a live broadcast that simultaneously triggers identificatory and distancing processes. 4) Focus on the private realm and on its relational dimension. 5) Particular attention paid to adolescent cultures, especially in their interrelational aspects. 6) Transformation of the medium into a social actor in its own right, specially as an agent of professional promotion. (shrink)

This article aims to reflect the efforts of the Ethnic Greek Minority that resides mainly in southern Albania, in the villages of Dropoli in Gjirokastra town, to have its own television programs in the Greek language. Further to the editions of the printed media and the radio broadcasts in the Greek language that were dedicated to the Greek Minority, there arouse the need for television programs in the Greek language which would be another dimension in reflecting the worries, (...) the problems, the traditions and the culture of the Greek Minority in Albania. Although the airtime of the programs in the Greek language, their frequency and the period in which they were broadcasted were short term, there remains undisputed their value in terms of the contribution to the social, political, economic and cultural life of the Greek Minority residing in Albania. The study of the Ethnic Greek Minority media in Albania is an unstudied field, so, in this article we aim to fill this gap somehow by providing a modest contribution, which may serve to many future researchers who will conduct studies of such topics. (shrink)

Cet article vise à éclairer le rôle de la télévision et d’Internet dans la campagne de 2010 qui a abouti à l’élection de Dilma Rousseff à la présidence du Brésil. Ce faisant, il s’agit de considérer, d’une part, l’analyse d’un expert en communication politique sur l’influence des réseaux sociaux et des médias traditionnels dans les élections remportées par la candidate du Parti des Travailleurs ; d’autre part, de discuter les positions de Dominique Wolton sur le journalisme, Internet, l’information, l’opinion et (...) la communication, en correspondance avec différents points de vue intellectuels à propos d’un événement politique majeur.This article aims at shedding light on the role of television and Internet during de 2010 campaign, up to the election of Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil. While taking into consideration a political communication expert’s analysis about the influence of social networks and traditional medias in the election of the Partido dos Trabalhadores candidate, it discusses the ideas of Dominique Wolton on journalism, Internet, information, opinion and communication, at the intersection with various intellectuals thoughts in regards to a major political event. (shrink)

In this important new book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of "live" recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that the (...) so-called "natural" conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached? As Derrida and Stiegler discuss the role of teletechnologies in modern society, the political implications of Derrida's thought become apparent. Drawing on recent events in Europe, Derrida and Stiegler explore the impact of television and the internet on our understanding of the state, its borders and citizenship. Their discussion examines the relationship between the juridical and the technical, and it shows how new technologies for manipulating and transmitting images have influenced our notions of democracy, history and the body. The book opens with a shorter interview with Derrida on the news media, and closes with a provocative essay by Stiegler on the epistemology of digital photography. In Echographies of Television, Derrida and Stiegler open up questions that are of key social and political importance. Their book will be of great interest to all those already familiar with Derrida's work, as well as to students and scholars of philosophy, literature, sociology and media studies. (shrink)

The evidence reveals that young children are targeted by food and beverage advertisers but are unable to comprehend the commercial context and persuasive intent of marketing. Although the First Amendment protects commercial speech, it does not protect deceptive and misleading speech for profit. Marketing directed at children may fall into this category of unprotected speech. Further, children do not have the same First Amendment right to receive speech as adults. For the first time since the Federal Trade Commission's original attempt (...) to regulate marketing to children in the 1970s , the political, scientific, and legal climate coalesce to make the time well-suited to reevaluate the FTC's authority for action. This paper analyzes the constitutional authority for the FTC to regulate television food marketing directed at children as deceptive in light of the most robust public health evidence on the subject. (shrink)

This study reports the findings of a survey of television news directors drawn from a Radio?Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) sample. Rationale for the study centers around an apparent trend in television news to extend its ethical boundaries to include high proportions of sensationalism, privacy invasion, deception, unfair reporting, and the like. Five principles of journalism ethics? truth, justice, freedom, humaneness, and stewardship?are used as the framework for discussing results of 34 ethical questions. Results show most news (...) directors clearly favor traditional ethical solutions to ethical questions related to truth, justice, freedom, and stewardship principles. There is more disagreement among news directors in responses related to humaneness. (shrink)

Le chez-soi a toujours été travaillé par l'autre, et par l'hôte, et par la menace de l'expropriation. Il ne s'est constitué qu'à l'ombre de cette menace. Néanmoins, on assiste aujourd'hui à une expropriation nouvelle, à une déterritorialisation, à une délocalisation, une dissociation si radicales du politique et du local, du national, de l'Etat-national et du local, que la réponse, il faudrait dire la réaction, cela devient - je veux être chez moi, je veux être chez moi, je veux être chez (...) moi enfin, avec les miens, auprès de mes proches. Cela n'est même pas une réponse d'ailleurs, ce n'est pas une réactivité secondaire qui vient en quelque sorte compenser, réagir après-coup, non, c'est le même mouvement. Il appartient à la constitution du propre et relève de cette loi d'ex-appropriation dont je parlais plus haut - pas d'appropriation sans possibilité d'expropriation, sans la confirmation de cette possibilité. Prenons l'exemple de la télévision. La télévision introduit dans le chez-moi l'ailleurs, et le mondial, à chaque instant. Je suis plus isolé, plus privatisé que jamais, avec chez moi l'intrusion en permanence, par moi désirée, de l'autre, de l'étranger, du lointain, de l'autre langue. (shrink)

By and large, contemporary news stories are stories about a particular nation, told to an audience that is seen and addressed in national terms. However, the understanding of the exact ways in which national imagination becomes engrained in the narrative conventions of news reporting is still rather limited, in particular when it comes to audiovisual genres. This article aims to fill a part of this blank by examining the links between national imagination and the narrative conventions of television news. (...) Building on existing debates about different modes of news reporting, the article distinguishes two distinct sets of narrative conventions at work in television news: one typically found in routine reporting, the other characteristic of crisis and celebratory reporting. It is argued that each of these two sets of conventions is tied to a different form of nationalism, and normally arises in a different political climate. Links between national imagination and narrative conventions vary accordingly. To demonstrate this, the article provides a comparative analysis of narrative structures in selected samples of television news bulletins broadcast in the early 1990s in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The concluding section reflects on the external validity of the chosen case study and surveys supportive evidence from four other relevant cases, drawn from the UK and Israel. (shrink)

This study focuses on how Israeli Arab citizens perceive their media representations on Israeli television and why they consume television broadcasts even though they are marked mostly by negative representations. A new concept – “Communication Boundary Situation” – a development of Jaspers’ “Boundary Situation” theory, is the theoretical framework for the article. The empirical data was collected by conducting semi-structured in-depth interviews. The findings point to different attitudes among the interviewees towards their representation in various television genres, (...) in particular, in advertising as compared to satire and drama. The suggested theoretical framework and its empirical implementation might be useful in examining how various minorities perceive their media representations in other countries. (shrink)

_Television and Common Knowledge_ Edited by Jostein Gripsrud London: Routledge, 1999 ISBN 0-415-18929-2 209 pp.

This article examines the significant relationship that existed between commercial British television and the study of animal behaviour. Ethological research provided important content for the new television channel, at the same time as that coverage played a substantial role in creating a new research specialism, the study of primate facial expressions, for this emergent scientific discipline. The key site in this was a television and film unit at London Zoo administered by the Zoological Society and Granada TV. (...) The Granada unit produced ‘Animal expressions’, a twenty-five-minute television film based on research on monkeys and apes by the Dutch postgraduate student and soon-to-be-leading-authority Jan van Hooff. Recovering the production and multiple uses of ‘Animal expressions’, this paper offers the first sustained historical analysis of science on commercial television. I show how Granada patronage helped Van Hooff to support his argument that human expressions such as smiling and laughter shared common evolutionary origins with similar facial movements in nonhuman primates. Emphasizing the mutual shaping of science and ITV, I argue that ‘Animal expressions’ repurposed televisual conventions of framing talking heads, and blended serious science with the comedy of ‘funny faces’, thereby epitomizing Granada's public-service strategy at a time when commercial television was defending itself from criticism in the Pilkington report. (shrink)

Western societies are confronted with a growing number of overweight and obese children. Past studies have pointed to excessive television viewing as one of the causes of this phenomenon. The aim of the current study was to examine the influence of parental mediation and modeling on TV use and obesity among pre-school children. A survey conducted among 608 parents of two-and-a-half to six year olds shows that obese children watch significantly more television, show more affinity towards television (...) and more often have a TV set in their bedroom than normal weight and overweight children. For girls, parental restrictions on television viewing are negatively associated with their BMI. For boys, no similar relationship can be found. This study suggests that taking into account possible differences in television viewing behavior between pre-school boys and girls and paying attention to a wide range of television viewing variables can be fruitful for further research. (shrink)

En France, les personnes issues des minorités, principalement d'origine extra-européenne , sont susceptibles de connaître la discrimination, la stigmatisation mais aussi l'exclusion. La télévision, en tant que « lieu de reconnaissance », constitue un enjeu important pour ces populations. Cependant, le petit écran semble marginaliser depuis toujours ces minorités visibles non seulement en leur laissant une place limitée à l'antenne mais aussi en leur renvoyant des images majoritairement caricaturales et dévalorisantes d'elles-mêmes. Une enquête qualitative auprès de 43 individus d'origine africaine (...) et antillaise montre que les minorités sont capables de mettre en place des réactions défensives ou stratégies identitaires afin de réduire le décalage certain entre leur identité sociale - souvent dépréciatrice - et leur identité personnelle , prenant les médias comme ressources pour l'action.In France, persons belonging to minorities, mainly non-European origin , are likely to experience discrimination, stigmatization but also exclusion. Television as a "place of recognition," is an important issue for these people. However, the small screen seems to marginalize always visible minorities by giving them not only a limited role in the antenna but also by returning images mostly caricatures and demeaning to themselves. A qualitative survey of 43 individuals of African and Caribbean origin shows that minorities are able to implement defensive reactions or identity strategies to reduce the gap between some social identity - often dépréciatrice - and their personal identity , taking the media as resources for action. (shrink)

Kat Williams and Scott R. Stroud’s essay is about televised debates, but it is also about the value of television in a democracy. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that television is devoid of serious content, that it is superficial. But while the debates contain superficialities, they also reveal substantive issues about the candidates, the electorate, and the state of our democracy.

Those of us who are captivated by new television, often find ourselves rewatching episodes or whole series. Why? What is the philosophical significance of the phenomenon of rewatching? In what follows, I engage with the ontology of television series in order to think about these questions around rewatching. I conclude by reflecting on what the entire discussion might suggest about the medium of new television, about ourselves, and also about our world and the possibilities of art in (...) it. (shrink)

This chapter offers a critical overview of philosophical debates concerning the nature of the television medium, television’s art status, and television’s aesthetic value.

This revised edition of a standard textbook combines an examination of the cinema and television industries with a detailed analysis of their aesthetic and semiotic characteristics. John Ellis draws on his experience as an independent television producer to provide a comprehensive and challenging overview of the place of film, television and video in our daily lives and their future prospects in a changing media landscape.

This paper argues that American television fiction with supernatural themes offers Danish teenage audiences a playground for exploring different religious imaginations in a continuous process of internal negotiations; thereby transforming their imaginations. This process of the mediatization of religion is strengthened by three dominating factors: the absence of a homogenous religious worldview in Danish culture, the importance of high production values and visual credibility to supernatural concepts in these shows, and the appeal of transformed religious content in open-structured serial (...) narratives. This essay presents the findings of an empirical qualitative study of seventy-two Danish teenagers and considers two primary parameters for the case-based reception study: the teenagers' levels of fandom and their connection with institutionalized religion. In other words, how are religious imaginations transformed in relation to viewers' level of commitment to the television fiction and to traditional institutionalized religion? (shrink)

In this article I will present two arguments. First, the argument that the time travel television series historically provided viewers with a spectacular temporal and spatial alternative to the routine of everyday life, the regulation of television scheduling, and the small-world confines of domestic subjectivity. Taking the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, predominantly in a UK viewing environment, I will suggest that the special effect rendering of the time travel sequence expanded the viewer’s material universe, and affectively (...) wrenched the television set free from the strictures of scheduling and realist programming. Further, the time travel series readily and regularly took the domestic space, the ordinary day and the everyman/person into awesome environments and situations that suggested alternative lifestyles and behaviours, with a different existential tempo and rhythm. At a narrative, thematic, meta-textual, and aesthetically spectacular level, television time travel saw to the wonderful end of the working day. Case studies include Sapphire and Steal, Dr Who, and Quantum Leap. Second, the article will argue that rather than the contemporary time travel television series being an extraordinary alternative to ordinary life, they instead articulate convergence culture, deregulation, multiple channel viewing, and time-shift culture where there is no such thing as an ordinary working day or domestic viewing context. (shrink)

Written by one of the foremost and widely-respected writers in the field, this volume sheds new light on the forms and premises of the communicative experience. In doing so, it challenges the theoretical positions of marxist and "political economy of media" analysts who focus largely on the structure of economic and social power within the media. Instead, Scannell explores the structuring of engagement of the viewer/listener with the broadcaster by analysing the communicative intentions of the broadcaster and the understanding by (...) the audience of those intentions. This powerful and accessible book makes an important contribution to media studies in showing students how the history of the media can be enriched by communications theory. (shrink)

Contemporary television has been marked by such exceptional programming that it is now common to hear claims that TV has finally become an art. In Appreciating the Art of Television, Nannicelli contends that televisual art is not a recent development, but has in fact existed for a long time. Yet despite the flourishing of two relevant academic subfields—the philosophy of film and television aesthetics—there is little scholarship on television, in general, as an art form. This book (...) aims to provide scholars active in television aesthetics with a critical overview of the relevant philosophical literature, while also giving philosophers of film a particular account of the art of television that will hopefully spur further interest and debate. It offers the first sustained theoretical examination of what is involved in appreciating television as an art and how this bears on the practical business of television scholars, critics, students, and fans—namely the comprehension, interpretation, and evaluation of specific televisual artworks. (shrink)

A handbook of best practices for television and broadcast journalists, encouraging practices that the public will see as being fair, thereby helping assure that television news gathering remains free.

Marc Hooghe – Free University of Brussels, BelgiumWhen the television set first made its appearance in American households during the 1950s, some expected that the new medium would provide a major boost to civic engagement and political awareness. After all, for the first time in history all citizens would get the opportunity to witness important public events and to follow the debates in parliament.Half a century later, the tide has clearly turned for television. Several authors now argue that (...) the spread of television is one of the major causes for the decline of public life and social cohesion. Putnam considers television to be a key culprit for the gradual erosion of social capital within American society. In other research, it is stated that watching television cultivates feelings of insecurity and leads to the spread of distrust, while television is also accused of strengthening a more cynical outlook toward politics and society, in what has been labeled a “video malaise” diagnosis.Proponents of the video malaise argument, however, differ with regard to the causal mechanism they invoke to explain the negative effects of television. In his study on the decline of civic engagement in the United States, Robert Putnam relies on a time replacement effect by suggesting that the spread of television, by itself, could be responsible for as much as a quarter of the observed decline: the time spent on television is no longer available for other, more civic activities and for political participation.Other authors invoke attitudinal effects: maybe television does not affect behaviour, but it could lead to the development of specific value patterns among its audience. Opinions differ on the question whether a more negative and cynical style of covering political news is to be blamed for this effect or rather the increasing amount of entertainment programmes on commercial television.Other authors have argued against this pessimistic assessment of the influence of television. Several arguments are put forward to counter the video malaise claim. First of all, empirical evidence about the alleged negative effects of watching television is not unequivocal: most studies do not reveal significant or strong effects.Although bivariate analysis often shows a clear relation between television viewing behaviour and civic attitudes, after introducing control variables, these effects are usually quite moderate, suggesting the occurrence of self-selection effects, rather than socialization effects.Other studies show that television can also have positive effects: watching the television news is positively associated with political interest and with a more positive outlook toward the political system. Recent experiments demonstrate quite convincingly that exposure to political information on television can boost political knowledge and engagement levels.The basic argument here is that we should not only look at how many hours people spend in front of their television set, but that we should also pay attention to the kind of programmes they are watching: while amusement programmes may have negative effects, we expect a more positive outcome from news and current affairs programmes. Still other authors have argued that not only the content of the programmes is important, but also the channel people prefer.While public broadcasting could or should stimulate civic attitudes, commercial stations will show a tendency to broadcast a totally different kind of programmes, resulting in less civic-minded value patterns among its audience. Swedish and Belgian studies, at least, show marked differences in the value patterns of people preferring public broadcasting versus those who prefer commercial stations.These different arguments have resulted in an animated debate between authors like Robert Putnam, stressing the negative effects of prolonged television viewing, and others like Pippa Norris or Kenneth Newton, claiming that watching the television news is positively associated with political interest and political participation.Bringing empirical evidence into this debate is notoriously difficult. The first, and major problem is that it is almost impossible to rely on longitudinal research in order to detect television effects. Communication research therefore routinely relies on laboratory experiments, raising the question whether the results of this kind of experiment can be generalized into real world circumstances.A second problem is that thus far, we do not have access to survey data in which all three possible factors were questioned simultaneously. In fact, only in a few Western societies is the audience reached by public broadcasting large enough to be represented in a satisfactory manner in a general population survey.In this article we will rely on a 1998 Flemish population survey, which included questions about the time people spend in front of their television set, and the kind of programmes they prefer, but also the station they tune in to regularly. This survey also included various questions on participation in voluntary associations, which allows us to test Putnam’s claim that the medium exerts a negative influence on social capital by reducing civic participation, thus diminishing the time people are exposed to the experience of these ‘learning schools of democracy’.Furthermore, Belgian society offers an ideal setting to test the thesis on the importance of commercial vs. public broadcasting: the television market in the country is divided almost evenly between the public broadcasting service and various commercial stations.The survey therefore offers all the necessary material for trying to disentangle the causal mechanisms between watching television and civic attitudes and behaviour.The survey was based on official population records, resulting in 1341 face-to-face interviews, and it proved to be representative for the Dutch-speaking population of Belgium.With the results of this survey, we try to test the alleged causal mechanisms between television and civic attitudes, focusing first on Putnam’s claim that prolonged television watching reduces civic participation. Secondly, we address the claim that television has a direct impact on civic attitudes. Then we go on to analyze the impact of the programmes our respondents preferred, and the relation with the kind of station they prefer. (shrink)

Between 1998 and 2006, a new style of television news consumption was born: “news grazing.” With remote control devices in hand, “grazers” flip through TV news channels in order to find interesting news stories. Approximately three‐fifths of the public graze, and this group tends to be younger than non‐grazers. Grazers are less likely than the rest of the public to follow “hard” news about politics and economics, and, not surprisingly, they are even less knowledgeable about public affairs than most (...) people are. (shrink)

Longtemps ignorée en France, la télévision a été un objet de légitimation académique des Sic. Les recherches d'abord inscrites dans l'interdiscipline mais oeuvrant dans une perspective mono ou transdisciplinaire ont donné naissance à une optique inter-disciplinaire qui a mis à jour toute sa portée heuristique. Favorisée par des mesures institutionnelles, la recherche sur ce média a permis de préciser un positionnement par rapport aux autres disciplines.Even if television remained marginal in France for a long time, it has constituted a (...) subject for the legitimisation of IC studies. It was first analysed by researchers belonging to this interdiscipline but working from a single or transdisciplinary perspective, and then apprehended from an interdisciplinary standpoint which brought to light its full heuristic scope. Research into this medium, which was recently made easier by institutional measures, has enabled those working in this field to define their position regarding other disciplines. (shrink)

This article argues that certain Cadbury television advertisements reflect a change in the relationship between the north and the south of England. Historically, the south of England has understood...

The aim of this study was to construct a closed-end measure of moral reasoning on interpersonal violence and to explore the relationship between television exposure and children's use of moral reasoning strategies. Participants were 377 elementary school children in fourth to sixth grade who completed questionnaires containing measures on moral reasoning and violent and non-violent television viewing. The reliability and validity of the CEMRIV as a scale of moral reasoning are discussed. Regression analyses indicated that exposure to violent (...) television content was positively related to a preference for authority-based reasoning on interpersonal violence. Violent television exposure was also a significant predictor of the preference for approval-oriented reasoning about prosocial dilemmas. Furthermore, non-violent television viewing was positively associated with a preference for perspective-based moral reasoning. These findings provide support for a mental model approach. (shrink)

Using telephone interviews among a random sample of 537 Dutch children aged 7–12 years old, we investigated the prevalence of fear reactions to television news among younger and older children and among boys and girls, what types of news items children in different age and gender groups refer to as frightening, and whether children's fear reactions to regular adult television news differed from their fear reactions to a special children's news program. Overall, 48.2 % of the children who (...) reported watching the adult or children's news programs, reported fear reactions to adult news, while 32.6 % reported fear of children's news content. For both types of news programs, younger children and girls more often reported fear than older children and boys did. The most prevalent fear-inducing news content categories were interpersonal violence, fires, accidents, and disasters, and visual depictions of the consequences of violence. (shrink)

The antihero prevails in recent American drama television series. Characters such as mobster kingpin Tony Soprano, meth cook and gangster-in-the-making Walter White and serial killer Dexter Morgan are not morally good, so how do these television series make us engage in these morally bad main characters? And what does this tell us about our moral psychological make-up, and more specifically, about the moral psychology of fiction? Vaage argues that the fictional status of these series deactivates rational, deliberate moral (...) evaluation, making the spectator rely on moral emotions and intuitions that are relatively easy to manipulate with narrative strategies. Nevertheless, she also argues that these series regularly encourage reactivation of deliberate, moral evaluation. In so doing, these fictional series can teach us something about ourselves as moral beings—what our moral intuitions and emotions are, and how these might differ from deliberate, moral evaluation. (shrink)

Cet article retrace une étape essentielle dans l'histoire de la télévision européenne de service public : la transformation des représentations de son public - d'un public avide de savoir, à la fois de droite et de gauche, elle est passée à un public populaire qui vient en nombre chercher le loisir immédiat, une nouvelle forme de la «populace» d'Ancien Régime. Ce changement a précédé la mesure d'audience qui l'incarne et le confirme aujourd'hui. Le passage d'un public à l'autre pose un (...) défi à la pensée de la culture populaire, emprisonnée l'élitisme traditionnel, le néo-élitisme «de gauche» qui s'avance masqué , un néo-populisme qui donne le primat au texte et un déni du public populaire traité comme une fiction . Contre une pensée globale du populaire qui traite ensemble « le » public populaire et « la » télévision, il faut dépasser les hiérarchies culturelles implicitement ou explicitement à l'oeuvre dans les paradigmes dominants.This article recalls a major episode in the history of European public service television: the transformation of the representations of the public - from a "popular" audience, eager to be educated which came both from the right and the left, which still had a revolutionary people in view, the public became a popular audience eagerly seeking disreputable leisure in throngs: a return of the Ancient Regime's rabble. This episode constitues a challenge for theories of popular culture, all too often imprisonned traditional elitism, neo-elitism which claims than a non manipulated popular audience would have a "better taste", a neo-elitism, a neo-populism which rehabilitates the popular audience by dissolving it into the texts , and finally a denial of popular audiences treated as a "fiction" . Against a global view of television and its audience, it is necessary to go beyond the cultural hierarchies implicitly or explicitly at work in the dominant paradigms. (shrink)

In recent years many scholars seem to agree that viewers’ interpretations play a prominent role in the influence of television news. However, a clear concept of ‘interpretation’ is still missing. This article proposes to conceptualize interpretation as the ‘representation’ of a news item as constructed and reported by a news viewer. More specifically, we look at this representation in terms of its complexity. Two aspects are important: first, the fundamental elements viewers use in their interpretation, and second, how the (...) viewer relates these elements to one another on a more abstract level. Together, differentiation and integration represent the complexity of the viewer’s interpretation of a television news item. The article provides definitions of these concepts and argues that interpretive complexity can be useful in studying the influence of television news. It concludes by outlining research questions in the field of television news using interpretive complexity. (shrink)

John Corner _Critical Ideas in Television Studies_ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-19-874221-5 hb; 0-19-874220-7 pb 139 pp.

Jacques Derrida _Echographies de la television. Entretiens filmes_ Paris: Editions Galilee / Institut national de l'audiovisuel, 1996 ISBN: 2-7186-0480-8 187 pp.

This manuscript provides coverage of an inquiry into the depiction of the roles assumed by high school models in television commercials. Hypotheses propose that learning-related activities are less often presented than other activities and when presented tend to be less favorable than other activities. The study produces evidence to the effect that scholastic roles occupy a less important position and are less favorably depicted, as compared to other roles. However, a large proportion of the models in the advertisements were (...) presented in a positive manner. (shrink)

This study explored the relationship between both overall television viewing and romantic youth drama viewing, as well as of females’ concerns about boys’ attractiveness expectations on the one hand, and body image dissatisfaction on the other. Participants were 411 adolescent girls who completed self-report measures on body dissatisfaction, television viewing, and concerns about appearance expectations. Our results indicated that there was both a direct and indirect relationship between romantic youth drama viewing and body satisfaction. Girls who spent more (...) time watching romantic youth drama displayed lower levels of body satisfaction. In addition, romantic youth drama viewing had a significant positive impact on concerns about boys’ attractiveness expectations, which had an indirect effect on body satisfaction. (shrink)

L'évolution de la mesure d'audience TV est indissociable des principales étapes qui ont mené d'une télévision publique en situation de monopole à un système mixte public/privé. Les résultats du panel postal de l'ORTF, premier dispositif fiable et permanent , sont réservés aux seuls dirigeants des chaînes, afin d'éclairer une politique de programmes encore volontariste, tandis que le CESP mène une enquête parallèle à destination de la profession publicitaire. La montée de la compétition entre chaînes publiques s'accompagne de l'attention croissante accordée (...) à l'audience et, en 1982, la mise en place de l'audimétrie-foyer représente une véritable révolution, par la rapidité et la précision des résultats obtenus. Avec l'arrivée des chaînes commerciales et la concurrence entre diffuseurs qui en résulte, les publicitaires sont en mesure d'exiger leur participation au contrôle de l'outil géré par Médiamétrie et imposent l'audimétrie individuelle , qui permet un suivi par cible.The evolution of TV audience research is indissociably linked to the main stages of television’s own history which saw it progress from a single state-owned channel with no competition to a system where public and commercial channels co-exist. Results from the ORTF postal panel set up in 1969, the first reliable and permanent measuring device, are only given to channel executives to help shed some light on a programming policy which is still volontarist. The CESP also conducts a parallel survey used by advertisers. The rise in competition between public channels has gone hand-in-hand with the growing attention paid to audience ratings and the introduction, in 1982, of rating measurement meters represented a real revolution since results are accurate and rapidly obtained. The arrival of commercial channels and the resulting competition between broadcasters meant that advertisers were able to demand a say in the control of the “Médiamétrie” audience ratings system and imposed the introduction of the TV “people meter” which permits the calculation of target audiences. (shrink)

Global television has enabled cultures across the world to meet within the virtual space and interact in terms of decoding, meaning making and appropriating messages. It is also the case of the Romanian audience, a local community of viewers who have long been exposed to highly censored and restrictive programming (under the communist regime) and who are now enabled to identify with the (western) communities they have aspired to. We intend to illustrate our case with TV advertisements, which, generally, (...) provide abundant material for television viewers, with socio-culturally determined profiles, to re-construct meanings into either coincidental or disjunctive semantic outputs. Since the act of consumption is productive, we aim to show that in spite of the possibly conflicting readings of the poly- and multi-semantics of the ads, viewers can coalesce into interpretative communities irrespective of their cultural make and cooperate towards the production of a joint meaning. We consider that this is an illustration of transculturalism at the level of a local audience interacting with the symbolic representations of cultures elsewhere on television. (shrink)

This article lies at the intersection of two problems: the one concerning the potential of fictional works to inform us about our social reality and foster our understanding of its various aspects, and the one concerning their potential to engage with philosophical issues. I bring these two together by analyzing the hit television series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. According to my interpretation, the series is informative about our social world, and it raises philosophical concerns about it. This (...) makes it well-equipped to fulfill the educative function attributed to mass art by Noël Carroll, and to stand out as an example of what he calls popular philosophy. To support this interpretation, I rely on contemporary views regarding the nature of our engagements with fictional narratives. I then explore how philosophical concerns are generated and I elaborate on the role they have in deepening one’s understanding of one’s social circumstances. I further show how the series provides innovative and independent philosophical knowledge by means specific to the medium of generic serialized fiction. The central part of my argument is an analysis of the narrative strategies which enable the informative and philosophical aspects of the series to generate the series’ educative function. (shrink)

Ethical sensitivity is a precursor to mora1 judgment in that a person must recognize the existence of an ethical problem before such a problem can be resolved. It is an important concept, yet it has received little attention from ethics scholars. This preliminary and exploratory study indicates that ethical sensitivity can be identified in viewers' reactions to and evaluations of ethically controversial television news stories, that diferent levels of ethical sensitivity are evident in discussions of television news stories, (...) and that there are at least 3 dimensions by which ethnic sensitivity may be evaluated: time, breadth, and depth. (shrink)

Television content that contains non-stereotypical representations of ethnic minorities and models positive intercultural interactions may potentially aid in reducing the prejudices of its viewers. However, the exact effect has yet to be demonstrated. Furthermore, the cognitive mechanisms behind such an effect remain unclear. This article tests hypotheses derived from social identity theory and social learning theory that attribute this effect to the identification patterns with ingroup and outgroup characters in television drama. In an experiment, participants either watched episodes (...) of a multicultural drama or a regular soap series. Results showed that viewers of multicultural drama had lower perceptions of ethnic threat. Moreover, this effect was mediated by identification with characters, namely, increased identification with outgroup and lowered identification with ingroup characters resulting in lower ethnic threat. The results suggest that short term viewing effects are best explained with social identity theory. The implications for long term effects and the possible role of social learning are analyzed in the discussion. (shrink)

Television medical dramas frequently depict the practice of medicine and bioethical issues in a strikingly realistic but sometimes inaccurate fashion. Because these shows depict medicine so vividly and are so relevant to the career interests of medical and nursing students, they may affect these students' beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions regarding the practice of medicine and bioethical issues. We conducted a web-based survey of medical and nursing students to determine the medical drama viewing habits and impressions of bioethical issues depicted (...) in them. More than 80% of medical and nursing students watch television medical dramas. Students with more clinical experience tended to have impressions that were more negative than those of students without clinical experience. Furthermore, viewing of television medical dramas is a social event and many students discuss the bioethical issues they observe with friends and family. Television medical dramas may stimulate students to think about and discuss bioethical issues. (shrink)