Cultural and Critical Studies 2006 Abstracts
Cultural and Critical Studies Division
Circling the Wagons: Containing the Impact of the Downing Street Memo Story in the United States • Douglas Bicket, St. John Fisher College and Melissa Wall, California State University, Northridge • The paper expands the concepts of boundary maintenance and news repair beyond the domestic news realm, and considers them as mechanisms by which the U.S. mainstream news media contain and limit the effectiveness of influences from UK and other foreign news sources in the U.S. public sphere. The focus is on the “Downing Street Memo” story, whose impact was clearly limited by U.S. mainstream media forces employing news repair strategies to downgrade its significance.
Media Criticism as Competitive and Collective Discourse: Defining Reportage of the Abu Ghraib Scandal • Matt Carlson, University of Pennsylvania ? Media criticism is best understood as a competitive dialogue occurring across different spheres. However, each sphere has its own norms and presuppositions as an interpretive community. As a site for inquiry, the paper tracks criticism surrounding reportage of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in spring 2004 in four spheres: within the news, the journalism trade press, from the left, and from the right. Criticism either upholds journalistic norms or condemns underlying framework of news.
Counting from Ten Backwards: The New York Times Coverage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement as Anesthesia for a Critical Discussion of Globalization • Kristin Comeforo, Berkeley College • The current study analyzed NY Times framing of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The goal was to understand how a corporate, profit-oriented media would cover an issue that promised great financial rewards to transnational corporations. Through the framing of CAFTA as a business issue, the privileging of politicians as key sources, and the lack of historical context, findings suggest that the NY Times performed an anesthetizing function that silenced the critical debate of globalization.
Darfur: International Neglect and News Media Silence in the Face of Genocide • Chinedu (Ocek) Eke, Elon University • This paper examines the conflict in Darfur described by many, including the President of the United States, as an ongoing genocide. To this end, I argue that the dearth of news media coverage, particularly of television news, on one of the most egregious human rights violations of our time has kept the public largely in the dark on the scope of the genocide while prolonging the plight of Darfurians.
A Postmodern Critique of Framing and Power: A Response to Durham • J. Collin English, Portland State University • The following paper offers a postmodern critique of the concept of framing using the theories of Jean François Lyotard. It is written in response to the postmodern critique published by Frank Durham (1998; 2003). It offers the discussion a concept of power as it relates to the legitimation of knowledge and the concept of framing.
Tracing the Blame Game: Constructions of Victimization in The New York Times, 1920-2003 • Katie Foss, University of Minnesota • This paper explores how media coverage has historically constructed the role of the crime victim using a discourse analysis of The New York Times. Findings indicate that shifts in discussions of innocence, culpability, restitution, credibility and criminal’s rights generally follow trends in victimization, reflecting early victimology theories and debates in the victim’s movement. Increasingly, though, recent discourse questions female victim credibility, depriving her of restitution, whilst reinforcing hegemonic structures by assisting the criminal’s liberation.
The Claims of Multiculturalism and Journalism’s Promise of Diversity • Theodore L. Glasser, Isabel Awad and John W. Kim, Stanford University • Claims for diversity in American journalism rest on a model of democracy, pluralism, that conserves existing arrangements and leaves many cultural groups at the margins of society. An alternative model of democracy, multiculturalism, posits a more inclusive society and proffers an entirely different conception of journalism diversity.
Overcoming Modernity: The Relevance of Gianni Vattimo to Mass Communication Research • Rochelle Green, University of Oregon and Bastiaan Vanacker, University of Minnesota • This interdisciplinary research paper seeks to ascertain the importance of Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo to the field of mass communication research by situating his work in The Transparent Society and “Democracy, Reality, and the Media: Educating the Ubermensche” with several other important scholars in the field. We argue that Vattimo’s work enables research to venture beyond the effects-centered orientation that has long dominated the field.
Wave goodbye to the smoke-filled bar: An analysis of the New York Times’ multiple roles in the struggle for and against cigarette smoke • Robert L. Handley, University of Texas at Austin • The New York Times has taken a stance against smoking by banning cigarette ads and editorializing in favor of “anti-smoking” bills. However, analysis of the paper’s coverage of New York City’s own legislation suggests that its journalists contradicted that stance. First, journalists ignored the public and bar employees while sourcing the City and bar owners. Second, journalists framed the bill as the end, rather than the beginning, of a way of life.
Free-Linking Indirect Speech: Its Practical & Ideological Use in Journalistic Discourse • Joseph C. Harry, Slippery Rock University • The concept of Free-Linking Indirect Speech [FLIS] is introduced to account for certain kinds of indirect quotation occurring in newspaper stories. FLIS is a hybrid concept mixing two concepts in existing communication and linguistic literatures – “linking discourse” and free-indirect speech. Instances of FLIS within newspaper stories are analyzed to show how this reported speech mode, within the rhetoric of objectivity, reveals varying levels of the reporter’s practical and ideological intervention in journalistic discourse.
The Daily Show: News or Something Like It? • Paul Myron Hillier, University of Georgia • Much of what is written about “The Daily Show” critiques the show itself. This paper, however, asks two interrelated questions. First, why do so many people regard TDS as “news,” or at least a forum for civic engagement? And, second, how does TDS speak to a larger social system? This paper situates TDS and the texts about it in a relationship to broader cultural and social forces.
Local News, National Story: Television’s Construction of Viewer Subject Positions during the Iraq War • Wendy Hilton-Morrow, Augustana College • This paper considers why local television news may appeal to viewers during times of national news events. Based on textual analysis of coverage of the Iraq War, it finds that subject positions constructed by local news provided viewers incentive to continue watching by responding to exigencies related the to national event. Specifically, subject positions may have soothed viewers’ feelings of helplessness related to the war.
Separate Audiences, Separate Stories, Same Product: A Qualitative Exploration of the Emergent Ideological Themes in General vs. African American Television Advertising • Karie Hollerbach, Southeast Missouri State University • Advertising intentionally gives meaning to both people and products. Its primary function is to increase product sales, but it communicates norms and evaluations about all types of other things. How would the ideological and cultural themes in advertising differ if a comparison were made between product advertising created and placed to reach two ethnically different market segments?
Habermas on Media Dualism: An Outline of the Empirical and Rational Dimensions of Mass Communication • Thomas Hove, University of Wisconsin, Madison • This discussion supplements previous commentaries on Habermas’s theories of rationality and their relevance to communication research. It explicates his accounts of the various media forms that are necessary for achieving social integration, and the institutional conditions that both support and work against the ideals of communicative rationality. Finally, it suggests that Habermas’s work can provide a more precise theoretical schema for associating specific types of motivation with specific media forms.
Laïcité, the Muslim Headscarf, and the French Public School: A News Analysis, • Shazia Iftkhar, University of Wisconsin-Madison • This paper analyzes press coverage of the 2003 debate over a law banning the Muslim headscarf in French public schools — a debate representing a cultural struggle over the nation. Using theories of the public sphere, universality and citizenship, it examines how the issue was represented and the concept of secularism (laïcité) invoked by social actors. Secularism appears as an incontestable first principle that limits critique, favors powerful actors and excludes minority voices.
A Discourse Analysis of Elite American Newspaper Editorials: The Case of Iran’s Nuclear Program • Foad Izadi, Louisiana State University and Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria, Louisiana State University • This study employs Said’s concept of Orientalism and van Dijk’s concept of ideological square to analyze three elite American newspapers’ editorial coverage of Iran’s nuclear program. A critical discourse analysis of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal editorials from1984 to 2004 identified six Orientalist themes. The study finds that The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post more predominantly drew upon Orientalist arguments than did The New York Times.
Does Technology Manifest Social Sensibility in South Korea?: Focusing on Korean Advertisements of Mobile Phone • Hyejung Ju, University of Oklahoma • Technology has culturally specific meanings. Technology becomes closely associated with the mode of living and social sensibility. Technology is articulated in feelings like intimate, natural, and even romantic. Men’s happiness and success is equated with the technological progress. I define this tendency as “technological culture.” I specifically reveal this tendency in South Korean context by semiotic analysis of Korean mobile phone advertisements.
Marketizing National Identity After Communism: The Case of Branding Bulgaria • Nadia Kaneva, University of Colorado at Boulder • This paper examines the emerging phenomenon of nation branding as it relates to post-communist countries. Following materialist cultural studies, it offers a critique through an empirical investigation of a project titled, Branding Bulgaria. First, the study documents the main activities of the Branding Bulgaria project. Second, it analyzes the discursive strategies used by project participants to legitimize nation branding. Finally, it outlines several implications of nation branding in relation to post-communist transformations in Bulgarian society.
Not So Revolutionary After All: Reinforcing Frames in Magazine Discourse about Microcomputers • Jean P. Kelly, Otterbein College • This study investigates the hegemonic process by which the microcomputer became a common and trusted appliance in the U.S. Critical Discourse Analysis of four cases, two advertisements and two editorial feature stories, from consumer magazines published during the early years computer’s adoption revealed that a device heralded as “revolutionary” was in fact presented using frames that incorporated and legitimized traditional values, roles, and practices, such as capitalism
The News Media As Pollsters: How Media Polls Politicize Public Issues? • Sonho Kim, University of Pennsylvania • The objective of this paper is to explore the institutional contexts of producing the public opinion poll data from the perspective of social construction and political economy.
Mythical Themes in Iraq War Images, Time Magazine, 2003 • Sun-A Kim and C. Zoe Smith, University of Missouri-Columbia • Using cultural studies and ideological analysis, this study examines how photographs of the Iraq War published in Time from January 13 to December 29, 2003, portray American soldiers in non-combat situations and reflect the dominant ideologies of the U.S. government. Time’s picture packages rely on mythical themes, such as soldiers as good guys and heroes and America’s supremacy and humanitarian goals, potentially interfering with readers’ grasp of the grim, cold reality of war.
Mourning “Men Joined in Peril and Purpose”: Working-Class Heroism in News Repair of the Sago Miners’ Story • Carolyn Kitch, Temple University • This paper provides a narrative analysis of coverage of the Sago, WV coal mine accident in January 2006. Initially promising to replicate the 2002 Quecreek “miracle” rescue, the story went terribly wrong when the miners were found dead. This analysis of 235 newspaper, newsmagazine, and broadcast reports traces the news repair resulting in a new tale of a rural community with class pride, gender roles, and other “traditional” American values presumed lost.
Two-Face, Man Hands and Mimbo: Feminized and Masculinized Portrayals of Single Women on Seinfeld • K. Maja Krakowiak, Pennsylvania State University • Some recent critiques of gendered discourse argue that such discourse may revert back to traditional stereotypes or masculine female characters, both of which are ideologically problematic. The portrayals of females on the show Seinfeld are particularly relevant and potentially problematic. This paper analyzes how Elaine, the only regular female character, is masculinized while the other female characters, namely Jerry’s girlfriends, are sexualized in particular ways. The ideological implications for televised gendered discourse are discussed.
The Real and the Right: Journalistic Authority and the Coverage of Judith Miller • Lise Marken, Stanford University • Journalists derive the authority to tell true stories from their adherence to the strategies associated with objectivity. At the same time, they derive authority from the moral force that underlies narrative. This paper uses the coverage of the jailing of Judith Miller as an opportunity to explore the relationship between objective and narrative authority and see how that relationship allows journalism to reify its portrayal of the real by conflating it with the right.
“Girls With a Passion for Fashion”: The Bratz Brand as Spectacular Consumption • Matthew P. McAllister, Pennsylvania State University • This paper examines different media featuring the “tween” girl brand Bratz, originally a group of four teen fashion dolls that quickly became heavily licensed. Although most critics of Bratz highlight its sexual nature, this paper argues that the explicit consumption ideology of the brand is more problematic, pervading Bratz movies, TV episodes, books, and games. The concept of “spectacular consumption,” in which commercial forms are celebrated as mainstream culture, will be applied to Bratz.
Private Property, Development Strategy and Information Policy: Establishing a Critical View of Copyright Law • Bingchun Meng, Pennsylvania State University • This paper presents theoretical analysis of the conceptualization of copyright. By critiquing both philosophical and pragmatic justifications of copyright, I highlight the constructedness of mainstream discourse on copyright and how that is related with the global political economy of intellectual products. I then propose that copyright should be construed as policy rather than property and copyright governance is not only a regulatory regime but also a constructed discourse contingent upon the dynamics of power.
For Better or Worse: News Discourse and the Same-Sex Marriage Debate • Leigh Moscowitz, Indiana University • This paper offers a critical analysis of the same-sex marriage debate across a variety of prominent mainstream broadcast and print news texts. Employing textual analysis, I examine these dominant news discourses as a gateway into contemporary understandings of the place of homosexuality and the meaning of marriage in our modern society. This analysis shows how representations of gay coupledom were constructed to appeal to a mainstream heteronormative audience.
The Politics of ‘Compressed Development’ in New Media: A History of Korean Cable Television, 1992-2005 • Siho Nam, University of North Florida • This paper seeks to construct an interpretive history of Korean cable television. By using two distinctive yet closely related modes of inquiry: news discourse analysis and political economic analysis, it makes the case that the history of Korean cable has been largely tamed by and locked within the discourse of the state-led compressed economic development model, while the issue of diversity and other important democratic values remain unquestioned.
Africa Remains Silent: A Look At The Coverage Of Live 8 Concerts By African Newspapers • Dorothy W. Njoroge, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale • This paper looks at how the Live 8 concerts campaigning for the cancellation of African debt during the G8 meeting in Scotland in the summer of 2005 was covered in African newspapers. Using narrative analysis, I explore themes such as the construction of the African problem and the portrayal of the West by these papers. While in some senses this coverage served as a counter hegemonic force, perspectives of dominant media are still used.
Communication Coursework and Advocacy: Service-Learning and Opposition to Torture in U.S. Prisons • Eleanor Novek, Monmouth University • As a result of media saturation coverage of abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, audiences now may be more responsive to the messages of advocacy groups that oppose torture and isolation in U.S. prisons. In the service-learning project described here, students in the author’s master’s-level communication research methods class studied the effectiveness of an advocacy group’s public awareness campaign.
Gender Roles and Femininity in the Personal TLC Series: A Qualitative Analysis of Audience Receptivity • Meghan O’Brien, Syracuse University • This study examined how women viewers perceive the portrayal of gender roles and femininity in the Personal TLC series (A Makeover Story, Perfect Proposal, A Wedding Story, and A Baby Story). The study employed three focus groups of women between the ages of 18-34, which represents the target demographic of Personal TLC. Results demonstrate that women viewers believed the shows in the Personal TLC series presented and, thereby, reinforced traditional definitions of gender roles and femininity.
“Mogul Mom vs. Mr. Mom”: Media, Myth, and Shifting Gender Roles in Hector v. Young ? Sarah Burke Odland, University of Colorado at Denver • This paper examines how the media, relying on mythical conceptions of femininity and masculinity, both reflect and shape cultural understandings about gendered labor roles within the family. Drawing on theories of relations of ruling, gender identity, and myth, the study employs critical textual analysis to explore the news discourse surrounding a high-profile custody case and the media’s struggle to make sense of shifting—and often contradictory notions about gender, marriage, family, and work.
Reading the Visual, Tracking the Global: Colonial Representations, Postcolonial Feminist Methodologies, and the Politics of Resistance • Radhika E. Parameswaran, Indiana University • This paper outlines the theoretical and historical contours of a postcolonial feminist methodology to unpack the fertile, historical symbolism of visual images, particularly the still photograph to, in order to advance our skills in the decoding the politics of resistance in our contemporary moment of globalization. The paper begins with a detailed historical genealogy of the visual’s positioning in colonial history and postcolonial nationalism.
More Than Meets the Ear: Radio, Reality, and the Portrayal of Broadcasting in New Yorker Cartoons, 1925-1954 • Randall Patnode, Xaiver University • This examination of more than 300 cartoons attempts to understand how the New Yorker presented the idea of radio broadcasting to its readers. The cartoons suggest that, in enthusiastically embracing radio, Americans demonstrated an acceptance of a new kind of intimacy, a preference for simulated experiences to authentic ones, and a tolerance for multiple and manufactured realities. All of these issues were central to the march of modernity in the first half of the 20th century.
Transcending Race? The Racial Politics of Oprah Winfrey’s Enterprise and Bill Clinton’s New Liberalism • Janice Peck, University of Colorado at Boulder • Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton are portrayed as unusually adept at bridging the black/white divide in America. Winfrey is routinely praised for her ability to cultivate a majority white following, while Clinton’s popularity among African Americans is legendary. This paper explores their reputed ability to “transcend race,” focusing on their treatment of welfare.
Myth and Narrative in Newsmagazines’ Photographic Coverage of Hurricanes, 1935-2005 • Richard K. Popp, Temple University • This study provides a narrative analysis of newsmagazines’ photographic coverage of hurricanes over the previous 70 years. Hurricane photos revealed a breakdown in narrative order. Key to this narrative collapse were tableaux that evoked stark binary oppositions. The incongruities revealed by these oppositions presented challenges to narratives about nature, technology, order, and disorder. This sense of cultural disorder may have sparked recourse to paternalistic narratives that signify the continuity of earthly and cosmic order.
Is There a Place for the Public in Media Theory? • Lana F. Rakow, Jim Abbott, Valica Boudry, Louella Lofranco and Diana Nastasia, University of North Dakota • We propose that the public remains elusive and inchoate in both media theory and practice because of the sway that models of communication hold over both academic and professional discourse. We argue that the reliance on a source-message-channel-receiver model precludes conceptualizing a role for the public as a source of conversation and deliberation. By analyzing a public event for media professionals, we uncover theoretical blocks to reconceiving the role of the public.
Activists as Interpretive Communities: Rituals of Consumption and Interaction in an Alternative Media Audience • Jennifer Rauch, Long Island University • This multiple-method study bridges a disturbing gulf between our knowledge of social-movement actors and theories about alternative media by considering the ritual uses of news in an activist audience. In interviews, activists downplayed their consumption of corporate media, but diaries confirmed that they used a wide range of both alternative and mainstream sources.
Advertising Sex and the City or Commodifying Identity? • Sara Roedl, Southern Illinois University Carbondale • This feminist rhetorical criticism examines the manner in which a series of four Sex and the City print advertisements invite viewers to identify with the show’s main characters. A contradiction exists between the independent, self-sufficient women purportedly portrayed on the show and the stereotypical images shown in the ads. Shared themes fostering these representations are identified.
Framing Difference in Transnational Perspective: Constructing Roma and Non-Roma in Film • Adina Schneeweis, University of Minnesota • This study explores the social construction of Roma as other in two films from Western and Eastern Europe. The findings of a framing analysis lend support to the literature on difference. Latcho Drom’s focus on victimization maintains Roma in a position of struggle, oppressed and discriminated against. Conversely, Black Cat, White Cat depicts a world with its own structure and reality, in which the Roma take on the construction of non-Roma as others.
Quarantined Discourses in the Genre Identification of Lifestyle Television • Madeleine E. Shufeldt, University of Colorado-Boulder • Rarely the subject of scholarly attention, the 1990s profusion of lifestyle –and specifically home and garden – television programs has aroused numerous evaluations in the popular press. Studying these accounts reveals certain privileged discourses and causal explanations for the trend. This paper explores what generic identification the privileged discourses support and argues that the neglect of industry economics, television history and class and gender politics serves to naturalize this television trend.
Black Widows: Gendered Representations of Chechen Women rebels in American News • Sara Struckman, University of Texas • This paper explores how The New York Times provides gendered representations of Chechen women rebels in its coverage of the Chechen’s struggle for independence. Because The Times questioned the “black widow” explanation (women avenging the death of a male family member), it found other reasons to explain violent women.
Art in Politics, Culture in Communication – The Billboard in Indian Elections • Shyam Tekwani, Nanyang Technological University • This paper will explore the tradition of billboard and poster campaigns in Indian elections as a political and propagandistic medium, analyze the social, cultural and artistic traditions of India that are reflected through them, and demonstrate the way in which their pre-eminence in Indian political life represents a unique tradition of mass communication that is grounded in the nation’s culture and its socio-political development.
A Critical Discourse Analysis of Chinese and US Newspapers’ Coverage of 2004 Taiwan Presidential Election • Lu Wei, Washington State University • In this article, I compare the discourse of Chinese and US newspapers’ coverage of 2004 Taiwan presidential election, a critical issue of Sino-US political interaction. Both macro-analysis of headlines and thematic organization and micro-analysis of lexical choices, news actors and quotations are conducted to demonstrate the contextual and textual elements of the discourse. The findings reveal that the two newspapers had very different discursive construction of the election so that different ideologies could be supported.
A Tale of “Good” and “Evil”: Ideograph “Evil” in the Presidential Rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush • Magdalena Wojcieszak, University of Pennsylvania • This paper scrutinizes the origin of the ideograph “evil” and elucidates its specific connotations within and across the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. It locates “evil” in the founding myth of the American nation and suggests that ideas such as uniqueness, God’s alliance, and universal mission are associated with “evil.” Also, analysis of its applications in the rhetoric of Reagan and Bush demonstrates that its connotation is not stable.
Consumer Education and Middle-Class Identity Construction in Chinese Television • Janice Hua Xu, Western Connecticut State University • This paper studies the development of television formats catering to the emerging middle class by examining influential consumer guide and lifestyle programs of major television stations in China. The paper also analyzes factors contributing to the popularity of this genre and new trends affecting its outlook in the Chinese television industry. The author suggests that television plays an important role in the manifestation of social identities through mediated imagination and participation by selected audience groups.
“Scoop was King”: Media Competition, Markets and Masculinity • Mary Lynn Young, University of British Columbia • This paper examines how journalists develop an elaborate taxonomy of gendered news techniques to gain the upper hand in competitive media environments. Gendered working practices are an entrenched part of the professional knowledge system surrounding media competition in Canada, normalizing distinct and lesser roles for women journalists. These roles also change over time such that the gendered state of Canadian journalism is maintained, but in varying ways and forms depending on the historical context.
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