In opposition to popular disparaging of television as an artistic medium, television can be considered as having its own aesthetics and can be placed in the category of fine arts (as opposed to folk arts). Television art can and should be distinguished from video art and film art in the ways in which it imitates reality; program content and…

Even though television scholar Herbert Zettl singlehandedly created the term "television aesthetics" by proclaiming that TV is an art, television studies are still excluded from the respectable divisions and disciplines of knowledge. Television is considered the epitome of mass culture/kitsch, and the very idea of a TV…

It is indeed a problem, perhaps even a crisis, that many Americans are ignorant of "The Tempest," the Civil War, the location of the Persian Gulf, the Constitution, or the chief justice of the Supreme Court. However, if conservative humanists continue to ostracize, scorn, and ignore both media studies and the media themselves, the result will not…

The image of the family as a secure refuge against a threatening outside world has persisted in the television sitcom since its inception in the early 1950s. Although some television programs have dealt with major problems directly, most, including the sitcom, have completely ignored them. Harnessing hysteria over the possibility of a nuclear…

Rock videos have their antecedents in film and television images, although music in films is usually background music. Television made possible the live transmission of musical numbers with visuals. The musical television commercial is an amalgam of conventions, with background music suddenly erupting into text, unheard by the characters but…