Seeks evidence from media artifacts to reveal aesthetic, cultural,
ideological, generic, and historical dimensions from classic
television broadcasts See It Now, Edward R. Murrow and Fred W.
Friendly's early documentary television program, has come to be
recognized as the exemplar of nonfiction television. One important
element in its reputation is a series of four telecasts directly
dealing with abuses of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. This book is
about those programs, but it is also about the early 1950s in
America, the troubled era in which these programs were broadcast.
This book is, then, both cul tural history and media analysis. As
media analysis, this book seeks to understand the symbolic form,
the aesthetic construction, and the subsequent experience that
these four programs offered viewers. This sort of critical analy
sis is a development of recent vintage in American media studies.
Whereas a decade ago television and the media were studied largely
through an empiricist social scientific paradigm, now humanistic
approaches to media discourses engage the interest of scholars in
history, rhetoric and communication, political science,
anthropology, and American studies. As case study, then, this book
bridges classical humanist and contemporary mass media approaches,
and as we go, I shall essay the utility of humanistic methods for
the understanding and explication of mass media that is primarily
visual in nature. As cultural history, this book seeks to
illuminate a unique era in the recent American past. My aim is to
understand the programs as articulations of public "common sense"
and as artifacts that help convey this common sense. Thus, a second
theme of this book will be to locate-through the analysis of public
discourse cast in the television documentary form--an American
ideology: a set of "templates" that both ground the programs and
reveal the cultural assumptions of the historical period. In
addition, from a slightly different historical perspective, our
increased understanding of these See It Now broadcasts gives us an
appreciation of the development of the television industry and the
genre of television documentary. Coming at a time when few
Americans had television sets, these See It Now programs coincided
with an exponential increase in television ownership and
popularity. As an elaborate defense of free speech for the medium,
these documentaries may have helped to establish autonomy and a
direction for a nascent broadcasting industry. More specifically,
as the paradigm for the television documentary and as the first
regularly scheduled documentary series, these See It Now programs
shaped expectations and set the benchmark to which all nonfiction
television, from Twentieth Century to White Paper to Sixty Minutes,
has been compared. Thus, a third theme will be the implications of
these seminal programs for media institutions and for the genre of
television news documentary.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(1)
(2)
(1)
(1)
