How Television Shapes Our Worldview

Media Representations of Social Trends and Change

Deborah A. Macey, Kathleen M. Ryan, Noah J. Springer

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2014
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780739187050
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Over the last half of the twentieth century, television has become the predominant medium through which the public accesses information about the world. Through the news, situation comedies, police dramas, and commercials, we learn about the world around us, and our role within it. These genres, narratives, and cultural forms are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that show the world as we might never see it in real life. How Television Shapes Our Worldview brings together a diverse set of scholars, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks to interrogate the ways through which television molds our vision of the outside world. The essays include advertising and public relations analyses, audience interviews, and case studies that touch on genres ranging from science fiction in the 1970s to current "reality" television. Television truly provides a powerful influence over how we learn about the world around us and understand its social processes.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Section I: Not Necessarily the News
• Chapter 2: A Bigger Screen for a Narrower View
• Chapter 3: Measuring the Messenger: Analyzing Bias in Presidential Election Return Coverage
• Chapter 4: Television, Islam, and the Invisible: Narratives on Terrorism and Immigration
• Section II: Boy (and Girl) Meets World
• Chapter 5: “Your Dreams Were Your Ticket Out”: How Mass Media’s Teachers Constructed One Educator’s Identity
• Chapter 6: Defying Gravity: Fox’s Glee Provides a Bold Forum for Queer Teen Representation
• Chapter 7: Friendship and the Single Girl: What We Learned about Feminism and Friendship from Sitcom Women in the 1960s and 1970s
• Section III: America’s Most Wanted
• Chapter 8: Epic Failures: Media Framing and the Ethics of Scapegoating in Baseball
• Chapter 9: Eyewitnesses to TV Versions of Reality: The Relationship between Exposure to TV Crime Dramas and Perceptions of the Criminal Justice System
• Chapter 10: Paramilitary Patriots of the Cold War: Women, Weapons, and Private Warriors in The A-Team and Airwolf
• Section IV: The More You Know
• Chapter 11: Lisa and Phoebe, Lone Vegetarian Icons: At Odds with Television’s Carnonormativity
• Chapter 12: Television and the Environment: More Screen–Less Green
• Chapter 13: From Welby to McDreamy: What TV Teaches Us about Doctors, Patients, and the Health Care System
• Section V: The Voice
• Chapter 14: Made Impossible by Viewers Like You: The Politics and Poetics of Native American Voices in US Public Television
• Chapter 15: “Real” Black, “Real” Money: African American Audiences on The Real Housewives of Atlanta
• Chapter 16: He Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules: Tyler Perry Presents “The Tyler Perry Way”
• Chapter 17: Viewing 90210 from 12203: Affluent TV Teens Inspire a Cohort of Middle-Class Women
• Section VI: Futurama
• Chapter 18: The Construction of Taste: Television and American Home Décor
• Chapter 19: Bordertown: Manufacturing Mexicanness in Reality Television
• Chapter 20: Cyborgs in the Newsroom: Databases, Cynicism, and Political Irony in The Daily Show
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• About the Editors