Popular media may be described as television, film, radio, and print media primarily offered for the purpose of entertainment. Such popular media have been the object of critical analysis for decades, both for academic scholars and popular pundits. Our focus is not on quantitative or experimental research concerning popular media effects, but…

Reports on the perceptions of "Roots" among a nationally representative sample of black Americans. Examines viewing patterns and reactions to "Roots" in relation to seven variables: urbanicity, region, gender, age, education, and income. Suggests that, for Blacks, "Roots" was more than entertainment, and that heaviest…

Traces the development of British and Australian television criticism from the mid-seventies. Suggests a conscious study of the characteristics of television as a cultural agent and as a text within a sociocultural context. (MS)

Describes three varieties of metatelevision: audience awareness and intertextuality or medium-reflexive structure; metagenericism or genre-reflexive structure; and autodeconstruction and ilinx or text-reflexive narrative. Metatelevision relies on the ability of the viewers to recognize artifice. (NKA)

Examines the content of daytime serial dramas to determine how the narrative structure promotes a sense of involvement in viewers. Competing plot lines, the lack of a concrete sense of resolution, the pattern of episodes, and the audience's awareness of information kept secret from characters all contribute to audience involvement. (JMF)

Contrasts the development of daytime serial dramas on television with prime time series in terms of production costs, content, and format. (JMF)

The advent of electronic mass communications in the 1920s forever altered the rhetoric, the audience, and the echoes or responses of the State of the Union Address. Presidents thereafter would use the occasion to speak primarily to the public and secondarily to the Congress. The echoes of the speech that reverberate within the Congress, among the…

Addresses issues of culture, cultural politics, social power, and television audience in cultural studies. Argues that cultural studies as a field tends to analyze all cultural interpretation in terms of struggles between dominant and subordinate groups and that the text-centered approach of cultural studies misses much of television viewing's…

Cultivation theory states that television engenders negative emotions in heavy viewers. Noting that cultivation methodology contains an apparent response bias, a study examined relationships between television exposure and positive restatements of cultivation concepts and tested a more instrumental media uses and effects model. Cultivation was…

To compile a comprehensive review of English language scientific literature regarding the effects of television on human behavior, the authors of this book evaluated more than 2,500 books, articles, reports, and other documents. Rather than taking a traditional approach, the authors followed a new model for the retrieval and synthesis of…