Tabloid Culture-PB [Paperback]

Kevin Glynn (Author), Kevin Glynn (Author), Glynn (Author)

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Product Details

Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press (September 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822325691
ISBN-13: 978-0822325697
Product Dimensions: 23.5 x 15.4 x 2.3 cm
Shipping Weight: 499 g
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,351,569 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

"At last, a book that treats tabloidism seriously! Glynn's multidimensional study - analytical, historical and theoretical - shows us how tabloid TV became the genre that reshaped the media environment of the 1980s and 1990s. Glynn's treatment of the phenomenon itself and of the controversies around it provide insights into contemporary media culture that we cannot ignore. No one who is interested in how changing notions of popular culture shape both the commercial and textual forms of contemporary media can afford to miss this book." - John Fiske, University of Wisconsin, Madison Collins, author of Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Age of Information "This is a very smart book about aspects of contemporary media culture that have never been more visible nor more in need of rigorous analysis." - Jim Collins

Book Description

During the latter half of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, television talk shows, infotainment news, and screaming supermarket headlines became ubiquitous in America as the 'tabloidisation' of the nation's media took hold. In "Tabloid Culture" Kevin Glynn draws on diverse theoretical sources and an unprecedented range of electronic and print media in order to analyse important aspects and key debates that have emerged around this phenomenon. Glynn begins by situating these media shifts within the context of Reaganism, which gave rise to distinctive ideological currents in society and led the socially and economically disenfranchised to access new forms of information via the exploding television industry.He then tackles specific daytime talk shows and tabloid newscasts such as "Jerry Springer" and "A Current Affair", reality-TV programs such as "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted", and two different supermarket tabloids' coverage of the O.J. Simpson case. "Tabloid Culture" is the first book to treat these diverse yet related media forms and events in tandem. Rejecting the elitist dismissal of sensationalist media, Glynn instead traces the cultural currents and countercurrents running through their forms and products.Locating both reactionary and oppositional meanings in these texts, he demonstrates how these particular media genres draw on and contribute to important cultural struggles over the meanings of race, sexuality, gender, class, 'normality', 'truth', and 'reality'. The study ends by discussing how the growing use of the Internet provides an entirely new realm in which such material can circulate, distort, inform, and flourish. This innovative and provocative study of contemporary mainstream media culture in the United States will be valuable to those interested in both print and television media, the cultural-political influence of the Reagan era, and American culture in general.

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
On May 8, 1988, John Walsh looked into the television camera with sincerity and firm resolve. Read the first page

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Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Illuminating Examination of What Others Fear To Touch, Dec 2 2005

By Jonathan Gray - Published on Amazon.com

This review is from: Tabloid Culture-PB (Paperback)

Please do not listen to the other review of this book: it is clearly written by someone who hasn't read Glynn's carefully argued, very interesting examination of "trash" television. "John Q. Public," as he calls himself in the review, seems to make it sound so simple -- networks play things because they get ratings. But what Glynn answers in a way that all of John Q's love for PBS can't is WHY they get ratings. The answer to this question has so often been astoundingly shortsighted and downright insulting: "People watch trash TV because they're stupid, don't know any better, and never will" or something as asinine and simplistic as that.

But Glynn digs into the populist in a very interesting way, and what he finds is that these shows frequently validate everyday experiences and knowledge of everyday, working class viewers in ways that many instances of "high culture" on television don't. Glynn's point is not at all about aesthetics or artistic value (as John Q. Public assumes, having not read the book, that it is), as he largely leaves this question for the reader to answer: his point is about not just disregarding all these programs AND all their viewers because one has made such artistic judgements. In "trash" TV, Glynn finds many democratic tendencies.

At times, Glynn can overdo it, and at other times, his enthusiasm to defend overlooks, or rushes through, disturbing political content of the shows (such as inherent racism or sexism), but most of the time he is remarkably careful to balance such tensions.

This is an academic text, and so may not be ideal for everyone, though it is reasonably accessible. So, if you want to go beyond complaining that such television shouldn't exist, and if you're actually interested in why it does, and why so many people turn to it, I highly recommend this book. I share the reviewer "John Q Public's" regard for PBS, though I feel it has turned its back on many Americans, and on the real John Q Publics, so to speak. Glynn's book looks at what those John Qs are watching and starts to ask the reasons why. (For more on PBS and "the masses," though, I'd highly recommend Laurie Ouellette's *Viewers Like You?*)

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