he first concerns the regulation and control of satellites.

Most writers in this vein point to the emergence of satellite broadcasting, and global media corporations, as evidence for the fact that we are living in an age in which the necessary media infrastructure for a global public sphere does already exist. If there is indeed a global public sphere coming into being, then we should be able to find concrete television and radio channels, or newspapers and magazines, that embody that sphere.

a global public sphere is emerging and growing relative to the state-based forms

The first is to note that the public sphere can be usefully contrasted with the notion of ‘public opinion’, which is its major competitor for discussing the role of the media in contemporary democracy.

This Eurocentric representation of the world was part of Eurocentric action in the world, for knowing and doing are continuous. European-derived societies have retained it as one of their commonest maps, if not the normal one, because we are still engaged in much the same global enterprise as the seventeenth-century helmsmen ....

The maps gave us the objective, all-seeing, all-powerful truth of the world.

In the first the sampled minia-turization of reality (which is what a text is) is taken as representative of the whole.

Direct cinema techniques such as handheld cam-eras and the use of available lighting made shows without reenactments (such as Cops and the network newsmagazines) particularly cheap.

The home video and hidden-video programs likewise avoided professional union talent, as have mor~ recent experiment-based shows.

As a fiscal strategy, Reali-TV emerged in the late 198os in response to the economic restructuring of U.S. television.

These production techniques are combined differently in numerous Reali-TV formats, which can be distinguished according to how much , each relies on nontraditional labor

"The piece was fine, it really was, a pretty good piece-solid, moving. But you know, I just find that whole war over there very depressing."

We lived in a country at peace for the first time in decades-or so it seemed. Who cared ahout far-off places with obscure problems?

Foreign correspondents like myself came to be regcuded as alarmists, waving our arms from remote places like Rwanda or Yugoslavia, trying in vain to attract attention.

Newspapers and radio were still the main source of news, but CBS television provoked controversy in August 1950 by reporting an infantry landing while it was under way-a security breach that was a harbinger of future tensions between those who waged war and those who covered it.

You could argue in defense of journalism that it takes time to adapt to such radical change,

"We're at the point now \vhere even if you do well in the ratings-that is, how many homes tune in at a given time-it doesn't end the pressure. Because \vhat now they sell on are the demographics. The preferred demo-graphic is eighteen-to-forty-nine, and within that the plat-inum demographic is males eighteen-to-twenty-four, because it's hard to get them to try television."

t the time, each of the networks had a documentary series branded with the network imprimatur: CBS Reports, NBC White Paper, ABC Close Up.

As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer af-ford such ignorance. But we still haven't fully awakened to our new condition.

After he had been back for a while, Liebling wrote, he "began to get stupid too"-growing a little bored by the hys-teria of new arrivals from Emope.

The show's emphasis on family dynamics ~as a constant topic of focus group discussions, par-ticularly for women.

Here we need to pay attention to what is left out of the picture that makes it more attractive to white viewers (we will examine this issue more closely in a later chapter).

I tkink that ~osby is much more true to life; you can put yourself rtght mto the ptcture.

One female respondent, for example, confessed to being "not mature" enough in handling her own problems wi~h male teenage sons and.~~i\f,~Jii:iSi~ aftershesaw the ~-~Y.J.h!!!..Qli!!X ... hi!nsUs:&i .. ,s.uch,.a~.ptabl~an,,, S~e w1~etf· th:at . sh~ · h:ad handled a similar situation as Clair had

We are returned to television's central ambiguity: we know that these characters are not real, yet we gain pleasure from them in part because they seem real. Of course people know that Clair Huxtable is a fictional TELEVISION AND REALITY 23 character enacted by Phylicia Rashad.

Once we allow ourselves this degree of familiarity, it is possible to see how fantasy and reality fade quietly into one another, how our TV friends and acquaintances take their place within our "real" world and jostle for attention and support with our "real" friends and family.

18 TELEVISION AND REALITY than on news or current affairs. It is revealing to think about talk about different forms of television.

Accordingly, we can, and indeed do, hold two conflicting ideas in our minds without ever realizing it. Such thinking allowed many people to vote for Ronald Reagan (because he made them feel good about being "American") though they disagreed, with many of his specific policies on matters of great importance

And then there is the cuddliest and most beloved of TV Dads: Bill Cosby, who, as Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, lives in perfect peace, and in a perfect brownstone, with his big happy family, and never has to raise his hand or fist, but retains the absolute devotion of his wife and kids just by making lots of goofy faces.

Some of the more positive evaluations of the show have made this interesting point: the discourse of discrimination that does find its way into the script is not about racism but sexism.

Any attempt to change the form or content of mainstream television will come up against two powerful bastions of conservatism: the profit-oriented predilections of network and advertising executives, and the expectations and tastes of well-conditioned TV au-diences.

T_he Cosby Show~ however, portrays comedic black characters with dignity . an4Jiilmanity.

There had been plenty of long-running police procedurals on tele-vision, both episodic and serial.

“privileges an engaged, con-textually rich and nuanced type of qualitative social research, in which finegrained daily interactions constitute the lifeblood of the data produced,”

If the first thing everyone notes aboutThe Wireis its authentic way ofrevealing broad social and economic arrangements through its groundingin a realist observation of daily lives in each of the institutions portrayed—police, unions, drug trade, city government, schools, media

“is part of a longline of literary works that are often able to capture the complexity of urbanlife in ways that have eluded many social scientists”

Ap-parently, having paid the toll to get access to cable, subscribers organ-ized much of their leisure time around the consumption of its channels.

This emphasis on melodrama has meant a shift from social contro-versies to domestic controversies. Hosts like Ricki Lake, Richard Bey, Jenny Jones, and Jerry Springer have further revolutionized the talk show; they engage their guests and their audience in highly charged arguments about the guests' personal lives, focusing mainly on sexual relations, familial ties, and emotional crises. T

The networks' continuing struggle for control of a female viewer-ship, and thereby for dominance of daytime ratings and the lion's share of daytime profits, still relies on the serial melodramas that are nation-ally distributed from ABC, CBS, and NBC to their affiliates.

Less often noted in the standard histories is the phenomenon of daytime talk shows for women. As Michele Hilmes's research on the daytime host Mary Margaret McBride demonstrates, daytime radio also included talk shows organized around a host who often rose to celebrity status.8

Enlightened sexism is a manufacturing process that is produced, week in and week out, by the media.

What the media have been giving us, then, are little more than fanta-sies of power.

Indeed, eight years earlier, career antifeminist Christina Hoff Som-mers huffed in her book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Femi-nism Is Harming Our Young Men,

They demanded, in their colossal, intercontinen-tal hit "Wannabe," that boys treat them with respect or take a hike.

For the culture industry is not at all disturbed bv the idea that none of its creations are serious, that every-thing is simply merchandise and entertainment.

They tirelessly assail the spectato with open and hidden " Perhaps the btter have priority in tl programming because they are psychotechnically more effective.

The main difference lies precisely in the brevity of the television dramas: most often they are a quarter-hour, at most a half-hour long.

In order to show how these programs affect their viewers, one must recall the all too familiar notion of the multilayered structure of aesthetic works: the fact that no work art on its own communicates its actual

It is impossible to prophesy what will become of television.

However, notions to the effect that television as the culmination of mass culture is the authentic expression of the collec-tive unconscious falsify the object by putting the emphasis in the wrong place.

The little men and women who are delivered into one's home become playthings for unconscious perception. There is much in this that may give the viewer pleasure: they arc, as it were, property, at his disposal, and he feels superior to them

more completely the becomes <ippearance, the more impervi-the appearance ideology

With this ricturc of the housewife in mind, the media producer had one primary job-teaching her how to huy products. Again. the magil-zine format wa~ perfect for this bcciluse each discrete narrative segment could portray an integrilted sales message.

One of DuMont's first programs. for example, was a shopping show (alternatively called At Your Service and Shoppers Matinee) that consisted of twenty-one entertainment seg-ments, all of which revolved around different types of "women's issues."

The first network to offer a regular daytime schedule was DuMont, which began operations on its owned and operated station WABD in New York in November of 1948.

Browne concentrates not on the individual text, but rather on the entire TV schedule, which he claims is ordered according to the logic of the workday of both men and women.