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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
While journalism, television, movies, music and informational mass media are all treated extensively in multiple articles, they also share several important characteristics as American mass media that set them apart from the structure and experience of other world media. These include the near absence of government ownership and regulations, their structures of corporate consolidation and their global presence combined with national insularity.
Newspapers and publishing established independence in 1791 before the American century on the basis of Bill of Rights’ provisos for Freedom of the Press. The 1st Amendment, guaranteeing the freedom of speech, has allowed American media to be free generally from the handicap of official government censorship and control (except in certain emergencies), and has patterned the landscape of later media. However, the 1st Amendment also guarantees freedom of money. In the early twenty-first century while everybody can express views freely, only those with deep pockets can easily reach the masses. Newspapers, television and other media pay attention to advertisers, political war chests and markets.
Even though airwaves are generally seen as public goods, the government has not owned and rarely censored them. Instead, government regulation has ensured an unquestioned culture of commercial broadcasting based loosely on the concept of the free markets in which radio and television networks are primarily funded through advertising. Another strongly held American belief in this realm is that competition benefits the consumer because it leads to “higher-quality” works, at least in a technical sense. This, however, prevents people with limited resources from producing and distributing works or reaching a wide audience trained to expect certain standards of “production values.” While electronic media have taken shape as a free-for-all field, they have increasingly been viewed as commodities in the marketplace. Many Internet browsers rely increasingly on their advertising revenues.
Though relatively free, American broadcasting companies are under the supervision of the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). All media companies have to apply for a license from the FCC: to broadcast is a privilege, not a right. During the 1960s, for example, the FCC imposed rules for mandatory hours for educational and children’s television, and the fairness doctrine that guaranteed the airing of opposing views.
However, with bills culminating in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress clearly favored deregulation. These changes range from the national percentage of television stations a company can own (from 25 percent to 35 percent), to longer intervals between license renewal, to the complete deregulation of cable rates. The FCC has effectively allowed broadcasters unlimited power to own the media.
Still, media are not unchecked. Concerns over violence and sexuality generate grassroots responses that government has capitalized on so that media industries adopt self-censorship, from the Hollywood Production Code (1930s to 1960s) to film and television rating systems, to the proposed V-Chip. The mass-media industries polish their public image as responsible broadcasters even as they respond to less civic-minded markets.
While the government created public broadcasting channels in both radio (NPR) and television (CPB) in the 1960s, both have operated as independent corporations. There was initial debate on whether they should be funded by taxes or by allocation from Congress. It was decided that taxing broadcasting involved too much government intervention. Therefore, federal and other public funding (including corporate sponsorship) has become a hotbed for politics. In 1999, for example, Governor Jesse Ventura eliminated public funding for Minnesota Public Broadcasting, leaving them to rely on corporate underwritings and members’ support. Reliance on public funding and corporate sponsorship has restricted the public broadcasting corporations’ ability to be independent, once again, making it harder for minority viewpoints to air. Direct government-owned media have been limited to propaganda channels (Voice of America) and military media.
Freedom, hence, has not produced democratic media. Instead, corporations have centralized mass media—whether newspaper publishers, radio chains, television networks, music producers, cable suppliers or toll booths on the information highway.
Since the 1980s, in fact, critics have noted the dramatic vertical integration of multiple media, coupled with the idea of synergy, in huge conglomerates like AOL/Time Warner or ABC/Disney. With mass media in the hands of a few unregulated big companies, which have ties with other non-mass-media companies, like GE, an over-riding commercialism can shape culture and politics. There is a further fear that the news departments in many of these companies will adopt self-censorship measures for selfpreservation.
While alternatives exist—public access on cable, independent film, grassroots video, micro-radio—they are peripheral to the audience and revenues of these mega-corporations.
Nor is the impact of these mass media limited to the US. Many major media conglomerates are global, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Incorporated. They are, however, American based. American productions like Hollywood films and television are distributed all over the world. Hollywood blockbusters and television series outdraw even the most popular local works, except in a few markets (India, Hong Kong and Iran, for example). Meanwhile, Hollywood’s huge national market is rarely disturbed by foreign films that make it beyond art-house distribution. Popular music, infused by an African American beat, has reshaped global traditions while absorbing new sounds and artists from Great Britain and, more recently from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. While television faces cultural differences and tight government controls abroad, American productions of night-time soaps, dramas and even highly American sitcoms alarm foreign purists with their popularity (and become bargaining chips for regional and private networks). MTV, as both producer and distributor, reaches sixty-four countries with relatively transnational, yet homogenous products. In cable news, CNN is transmitted to 210 countries and territories worldwide. With the Internet as well, American corporate and technological domination seems to be evolving from this pattern within a new mass medium.
Industry:Culture
Started by Garry Trudeau, while a Yale undergraduate in the late 1960s, this comic strip gained wide syndication and notoriety in the early 1970s as a vehicle for political satire which was set in the lives of a group of college students. The Watergate scandal provided fodder for some of the strip’s most outrageous and insightful segments—a handful of which prompted newspapers to either relocate the strip from the comics page to the editorial page or to remove it entirely In 1975, Trudeau won the Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning, thus becoming the first four-panel comic-strip cartoonist to win the award.
Industry:Culture
Train stations tell the stories of railroads since the Second World War. Once, they were the temples of nineteenth-century American civic progress. Transcontinental railroads (built by immigrant Irish, Chinese and Mexicans as well as African Americans) united peoples and goods, and stations became marble and gilt gateways for cities. Cities and companies competed; even small towns vied for connections and identity within national mass transportation. The demolition of New York City, NY’s Pennsylvania Station in 1963, a rallying point for historic preservation, and the conversion of other once-proud stations to museums (Savannah, GA), malls (Cincinnati, OH) and abandonment shows railroads’ loss of position to automobiles, trucks and airplanes. Despite 1990s plans for a new “old” Penn Station in New York—in the shell of a central post office now more effectively connected to trucks and air—outside the Northeast and some Pacific Rim routes, new generations of Americans experience domestic railroads as nostalgic rides in amusement parks or along special, scenic routes. Even in media, railroads belong to westerns, film noir and Disneyworld rather than contemporary life.
American railroads emerged in a constant interaction of government interests and private speculation. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Interstate Commerce Commission had taken control over the worst excesses of cut-throat capitalism and corruption. Trains were taken over temporarily by the government in the First World War and remained strong and central economically through the Second World War. They were also embedded in popular culture as film backdrops, settings for arrivals and departures for war, college and new lives, and the tracks on which presidential campaigns and hoboes rode.
By the 1950s, diesel engines were replacing steam and panoramic cars added new dimensions to western runs. Yet, the Interstate Highway system slowly ate into freight and passenger revenues. Trucks were more flexible in cargo, while pipelines and barges also cut into cargo profits. Expanding airlines later captured passengers and rapid delivery. Meanwhile, railroads, with a century of contracts and regulations, found themselves unable to trim budgets or staff while taxed to pay for new airports. By 1965 railroads carried only 18 percent of total intercity passenger service and only 44 percent of freight. Most ran deficits and sought to consolidate via mergers; the giant Penn Central declared bankruptcy in 1970.
Here, government intervention was called upon to save public service. Amtrak was created in 1971, providing government support to maintain a multicompany national passenger service. A similar freight plan, Conrail, built on the Penn Central and other bankrupt northeastern lines in 1976. Corporate mergers consolidated other regional freight service as railroads steadily cut workers and lines, increasing efficiency and ultimately stabilizing freight handling. President Carter promoted deregulation in 1980, allowing railroads to change rates and compete with other transport. In 1995 rail freight doubled its 1944 peak, although only holding 37 percent of the market. Conrail was sold to the public in 1984, although Amtrak continued to struggle, despite its rapid reserved Metroliner service in the Northeast and vacation packages. Clinton eliminated the ICC in 1995.
Politicians and entrepreneurs have nonetheless sought to keep passenger travel alive and connecting their regions. In the late 1990s, the Northeast prepared for new highspeed trains. Auto-trains connected northern vacationers and Florida, while West Coast lines and regional connector systems grew. Another rapid line is proposed for Florida, to connect Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville and Miami. Still, these generally demand government subsidies, which raise questions among citizens and representatives for whom rail service is no longer a daily concern. Problems with wastes and safety have also been raised with regards to passenger and freight lines—a 1999 television movie, for example, featured a run-away train carrying nuclear waste.
Commuter rails are more limited and secure, with government subsidies, especially on the East Coast. Yet, cars and highways carry the future for most Americans. At the same time, railroads may provide warnings for subsequent developments in mass transportation and mass media, where negotiations of government responsibility over public goods and private profits continue.
Industry:Culture
While perhaps best known through national contests (Miss America, etc) or international pageants like Miss Universe, beauty pageants represent a much more complex system, defining femininity on the basis of body, face and personality (with occasional nods to talent or intellect). Pageants begin in babyhood—children and teen competitions have gained notoriety as exploitative arenas—and continue through Mrs America and events for older women. They may also represent localities and special events (as in the movie Miss Firecracker, 1989), ethnic groups (Miss Chinatown USA) or company sponsorship (Miss Rheingold was a famous brewery advertising device in New York City, NY).
While touted as a step to stardom for some, they tend to be minor triumphs for most, often at great cost. While similar male events have emerged, they are eclipsed by more athletic or muscular competitions. “Drag” contests, however, do replicate and parody the female values of the pageants.
Industry:Culture
The very attempt to define cultural studies would be seen by many of its practitioners as reductive and antithetical to the free-roaming spirit of a subject which, despite an extended and distinguished history still prides itself on its ability to resist rigid disciplinary frameworks. During its evolution, cultural studies has incorporated a variety of approaches, yet has held them intact within itself rather than absorbing and conflating them. As such it should be seen less as a melting-pot than a cage of bees, where feminism, anthropology, film criticism, Marxism, postcolonialism, literary criticism, postmodernism and queer theory swarm in debate. As a consequence, it currently has no single established methodology.
Nevertheless, certain trends and patterns can be drawn from this seeming chaos, including a history which most would agree stretches back at least to Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958).
Cultural studies in Britain established a solid base through Hoggart’s creation, with Stuart Hall, of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964. It would be inaccurate to draw any kind of “house style” from the debates within the Birmingham School, but we can identify an interest in “subcultural” fashions and behavior and in audience interpretation of popular texts, made more urgent through an engagement with feminism, with questions of “race” and identity and with the Gramscian notion of “hegemony,” as it applied to 1970s Britain.
These approaches to cultural studies were not exported directly across the Atlantic, but reached the United States through the filter of French theory—Bourdieu, Foucault and de Certeau—whose stress on a decentered micropolitics of society had increasing relevance to the complex and fragmented cultures of 1980s North America. In practice, cultural studies in the USA has developed as a mutated anthropology: an investigation into the urban tribes of sunbathers, mall shoppers and romance readers which interrogates popular cultures and “subcultural” fan groups. As such, it brings the unseen—the trivial, the homemade, the “minority” reading—to light, and makes the familiar seem alien.
Despite the shifts in content and focus, these studies invariably have in common with both their French and British counterparts a grounding in issues of cultural power and its relation to media representation. John Fiske’s work on the quintessential landscapes and landmarks of the 1980s were highly influential here, although others have since questioned his optimism in the supposedly transformative power of audience readings.
If the North American academy gave cultural studies a boost in popularity and respectability it also prompted a crisis: the expansion of the subject across universities and conferences meant that this “counter-discipline” had itself become an established and increasingly profitable media industry Even as cultural studies becomes a truly international force, with important contributions from Australia, Italy Hong Kong and even the virtual nation-states of the Internet, this paradox continues to hover over the subject and its practice.
Industry:Culture
The 1990s ratings dominance of ER (NBC, 1994–) grew from a long tradition of telling stories of life and death through the heroic figure of the doctor. Its roots lie in movies like Young Dr. Kïldare (1938) and Now Voyager (1942) as much as the transformation of the American physician him/herself. Like ER, many shows have balanced disease and trauma, of which they may in fact provide public information, and the human character of the medical staff confronting them.
Early medical shows, from the 1950s Medic (NBC, 1954–6) onwards, made these issues primarily male, although nurses and female patients might provide emotional interests. Richard Chamberlain was television’s brash young Dr Kildare (NBC, 1961–6), before he became king of the miniseries. Vince Edwards defined a similar role in the rougher-hewn Ben Casey (ABC, 1961–6), with its solemn opening invocation of “Man/Woman/ Birth/Death/Infinity.” Both were based in hospitals, which also provided storylines for generations of medical shows as well as daytime soap operas like General Hospital (ABC, 1963–).
Early shows also tended to be white unless a specific point about integration was to be made. Later, the black middle class would appear in Julia (NBC, 1968–71), showcasing an African American nurse, as well as the long-running Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–92).
Bill Cosby’s character of the wise, warm Dr Clifford Huxtable, however, drew on another tradition of medical representation—the kindly family practitioner epitomized by Robert Young in the long-running Marcus Welby, M.D., (ABC, 1969–76). Young was already known to many viewers as the sitcom father in Father Knows Best (CBS, NBS, ABC, 1954–63); working with a younger sidekick and Hispanic nurse, he covered not only a catalog of American diseases, but also topics such as sex-change operations. Like his precursors, he rarely lost a patient or faced existential or political crises.
The medical format has also been adapted to different contexts and programming stressing youth, age, gender (a few nursing shows as well as the doctor hunk) and intersecting with other formats. Quincy, M.E. (NBC, 1976–83) and Diagnosis Murder (CBA, 1993–) blended doctor and crime stories, while Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman (CBS, 1993–9) brought the respectable female physician to the Old West.
The ensemble cast of St. Elsewhere (NBC, 1982–8), with its fallible physicians, provided a precursor to both the action-driven ER (where hunk male doctors still outnumber females) and its sometimes more surreal rival Chicago Hope (CBS, 1994–).
Together, these shows have broached medical issues ranging from AIDS to healthcare cutbacks, interwoven with yuppie personal dilemmas of job versus work, gender and racial discrimination and dealing with older parents. Malfeasance and malpractice became issues as well in all these shows.
Medical comedies have been less compelling overall. Yet M*A*S*H used bloody medical humor to examine the premises of war (albeit a distant Korea) and to become one of America’s mostwatched series. Bob Newhart also brought clinical psychology into a sitcom.
Doctor/medical shows intersect with changing attitudes and issues in American health, although almost all have taken for granted the social transformation of American medicine, in which the doctor has become wealthy, glamorous and powerful in association with his/her control of life and death. Moreover, these roles are reinforced by medical reporting on television, especially in local reports and information shows, and by the apparent roles of physicians in television advertising over decades. While these shows may educate audiences about disease, the need to entertain, resolve and attract transforms the image of the physician healer and expectations for medicine itself.
Industry:Culture
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting established National Public Radio in 1970. It provides quality news and cultural programming to local public-radio stations. Its first program (April 19, 1971) featured the United States Senate’s deliberations on the Vietnam War. That same year, All Things Considered had its debut, but its morning counterpart Morning Edition waited until 1979 to appear. Financial troubles have plagued NPR, despite the popularity of the jazz, plays, concerts and classical music featured in its programming. With financial restructuring, the majority of NPR’s income comes from member station fees and dues and only 4 percent from government sources.
Industry:Culture
The Bible belt is a state of mind that begins at the edge of town and extends either side of a line from Virginia Beach to Tulsa, encompassing the South, Texas and much of the Midwest. It contains a subset of characteristically American religious figures—not Quakers, Amish or other refugees; not emigrant establishmentarians like Catholics or Muslims; not even Elmer Gantry; but home-grown Calvinists. Its roots are the “second great awakening” on the Western frontier that ushered in the nineteenth century and the fundamentalist movement at the turn of the twentieth century Populating this state of mind are several generations of white and, more recently, African American southerners who use the Bible as a manual first for speech, then for thought and, ultimately, as a substitute for historical imagination.
It was this that H.L. Menken caricatured in the 1925 Scopes trial as America’s Bible belt. When not actively derisory, the term has always registered port-city condescension towards the interior upland of the South and Midwest, and particularly towards the centrality of the Bible to the people whose rapid settlement of America’s first West outran the educational and other institutions developed by the colonial bourgeoisie from Boston to Savannah. Unlike the religious utopianism that organized New England or the Episcopalianism of the tidewater, a religiosity of personal spirituality, Bible study and self-reliance carried early settlement beyond the colonial fringe. Such was the provincialism of Menken as to mis-recognize both its historical context and its social critique.
What arose as frontier religiosity developed as a critique of industrializing, Social Darwinist America. Mindful of community while profoundly skeptical about mass society its underlying Calvinism fostered individualism, striving, personal rather than social perfection and rejection of intermediaries that also took anti-immigrant and antiintellectual turns. Between the Scopes trial and the onset of desegregation, it became discredited on the left for social quietism and migrated to the political right, overcoming a century of suspicion of comfortable establishments and profound alienation from secular powers.
That transformation has accelerated with tensions over the modernization and increasing standardization of education since the Second World War. Turn-of-the-century battles over evolutionism have been rejoined over creationism, which is more Sunbelt than Bible belt in its embrace of the models and language of science. Political movements in Arkansas and Louisiana resulted in laws mandating “equal time” for teaching creationism alongside evolution in statefunded schools, which points to an underlying populism strong enough to overcome strong religious commitment to the separation of church and state. This migration to modernity at least as technique, is nowhere more evident than in the refinement of televangelism by Christian media preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who both reach a national audience and founded alternative modern religiously based universities that bracket the historic Bible belt.
Industry:Culture
The legal gambling industry has experienced almost unparalleled growth in the past twenty-five years. In 1976 Americans bet $17.3 billion legally by 1996 they bet $586.5 billion. According to a 1999 Gallup Poll, 70 percent of adults and 26 percent of teens have taken part in some form of legal gambling, with lotteries being the favorite form of betting for most Americans. Fifty-seven percent of Americans have purchased a lottery ticket within the last year, while 31 percent have gambled in a casino. But these figures represent a fraction of the gambling that occurs in the United States, since much sports gambling is still illegal.
Until 1988 (leaving aside gambling on Wall Street), legal gambling included statecontrolled lotteries, casinos in and around Las Vegas, NV (since 1931) and in Atlantic City, betting at horseand dog-racing tracks (legal in thirty-six states) and all sports betting in Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Oregon. In that year, Congress passed the Indian Gambling Regulatory Act, allowing Native Americans to operate casinos on their land, and this was followed by other communities endeavoring to cash in on expected gambling revenues. In 1989 Iowa became the first of several states to legalize riverboat gambling, and by the end of the 1990s there were over 170 casinos in twenty-five states.
State lotteries began in New Hampshire in 1964, followed by New York State in 1967 and New Jersey in 1970. Within a year, lottery sales had surpassed the $100 million mark, and they were quickly adopted by numerous states, spreading by 1999 to thirtyseven states and the District of Columbia. In 1988 the Multi-State Lottery Association began combining lottery efforts in several states, leading ten years later to the worldrecord jackpot of $295.7 million for its “Powerball” game. States have used their lottery revenues for many things, initially largely for funding education and support for older citizens, but more recently for building new sports stadiums. While gambling has benefited some communities, others have suffered—from the displacement of residents occurring in Atlantic City to the organizedcrime involvement in the Las Vegas industry to the problems associated with addiction.
Illegal sports gambling has become mainstream from colleges to television sports shows, 90 percent of it focused on team sports (mainly football, followed by basketball and baseball). There are now more than 700 phone services offering advice and gambling tips, generating revenue in millions of dollars annually In the mid-1980s, Pete Axthelm gave point-spread picks on NBC’s pre-game NFL show, while CBS countered with Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder (until he was fired for making racist comments). All newspapers now offer betting lines, including point spreads, and many provide columns with betting tips and advice. ESPN for a short time even presented Sportsline from Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, providing lines and pre-game information on upcoming games. Growth of this illegal industry is likely to continue as Internet betting increases in popularity.
Sports gambling has been associated with many of the major sports scandals—from the beginnings of baseball in the nineteenth century through the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, to the seven college basketball point-shaving incidents from 1947 to 1950, down to more recent scandals at Tulane and Boston College. Pete Rose was banned from baseball for betting on games while he was coaching the Cincinnati Reds, and even Michael Jordan was forced to admit to a gambling problem that threatened his position in basketball.
Industry:Culture
Stress, often described as America’s number one health problem, has become so prevalent in American culture that many health professionals argue that we are currently in the throes of a “stress epidemic.” Despite this increasing awareness, definitions of stress are sometimes ambiguous. The term is simultaneously used to describe the external stimulation that causes strain on the system, the resulting internal damage and the rate of this damage. There are also different types of stress, including acute stress (short term), episodic acute stress (frequent acute stress) and chronic stress (long term). Symptoms of high stress include emotional distress (anger, irritability, anxiety and depression), insomnia, substance abuse, headaches, muscular problems, stomach and bowel problems, high blood pressure, heart palpitations, chest pain, shortness of breath, sweaty palms, cold hands or feet and dizziness. Over the long term, stress has been associated (directly or indirectly) with a number of serious conditions including cardiovascular disease, cancer, accidental injuries and suicide. Stress also aggravates many preexisting health problems.
Researchers have attempted to pinpoint exact causes of stress, but this has proven difficult since all individuals have varied levels of tolerance. A stressful event that exhausts one person may actually invigorate another. American culture has often been associated with high-stress lifestyles due to efforts to attain the “American dream,” but researchers argue that this dream may quickly turn into a nightmare if high-stress warning signals (including those mentioned above) are not addressed. One measure used to determine stress levels is the Holmes-Rahe scale. In the 1950s, psychiatrist Thomas Holmes and psychologist Richard Rahe tried to determine causes of stress by asking 5,000 people to rate the amount of stress associated with various “life-change events.” The top five most stressful events in the scale include death of a spouse, divorce, marital separation, imprisonment and death of a close family member. Other researchers have argued that the everyday hassles of life (such as rushing to meet deadlines, waiting in traffic, excessive paperwork, etc.) actually contribute more to illness than major life changes. The truth is probably somewhere in between. In either case, it is important to note the “ripple effect”: very often, one highly stressful event—such as the end of a significant relationship—may gradually spiral out of control and lead to problems in many areas of life.
As a result of the increasing awareness of the problems associated with stress, more Americans are becoming interested in various forms of stress management. Researchers have discovered that many techniques used to promote relaxation have consistently high success rates. Meditation in particular has been strongly correlated with a reduction in stress-related disorders. Muscle relaxation, music therapy, biofeedback, rhythmic breathing, proper nutrition and regular exercise are all highly effective methods of managing stress. A strong, trustworthy support system and the commitment to maintaining a balanced lifestyle are also crucial elements of any stress-management program.
Industry:Culture
