Search

Researchers should take a more multidimensional approach to analysis of television news. News workers approach routine news production and the making of 'media events' differently, and suffuse all news content with meaning through their use of a narrative approach. The preparation of news content is influenced by news workers' perceptions of several audiences, including both colleagues and viewers. The broadcasting of 'media events,' such as the verdict in the Reginald Denny trial, is discussed and analysed with a multidimensional approach.

My Life By Bill Clinton Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 957 pages. $35 (cloth), $17.95 (paper) Producing a sociological review of My Life presents an interesting and unusual set of challenges. [...]

This article examines the rise of meta-commentary in US media, and considers the consequences it has for the social construction and the performance of intellectual expertise. Media meta-commentary is defined as critical reflection about media practices and performances, in which the primary basis for criticism is the comparison of different media formats. Meta-commentary began to emerge with the differentiation of the aesthetic sphere and the development of a new kind of expert, the cultural critic. Cultural criticism led to a proliferation of expert performance styles, including a type of counter-performance that rejects the somber and serious nature of traditional intellectual practices. By the 1980s, these new styles of intellectual performance were being reinforced by important institutional and regulatory changes within the media industry, and ultimately by the proliferation of new digital technologies and DIY culture. By the twenty-first century, media meta-commentary had become a distinctive and peculiar form of expert discourse, which legitimates the act of criticism while also relativizing it. The current environment suggests two possible outcomes: a hopeful one that encourages greater reflexivity, and a more ominous one that points toward populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]