Television Studies

In Black Power TV, Devorah Heitner chronicles the emergence of Black public affairs television starting in 1968. She examines two local shows, New York's Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant and Boston's Say Brother, and the national programs Soul! and Black Journal. These shows offered viewers radical and innovative programming: the introspections of a Black police officer in Harlem, African American high school students discussing visionary alternatives to the curriculum, and Miriam Makeba comparing race relations in the United States to apartheid in South Africa. ...

As Laura Linder asserts, increased concentration of media ownership has resulted in the homogenization of public discourse. Packaged, commercialized messages have replaced the personalized and localized opinions necessary for the uninhibited marketplace of ideas envisioned in the First Amendment. Narrowcast outlets such as talk radio give vent to individual voices, but only to a limited, predefined audience. The media have led a social shift toward splintering and compartmentalization, away from pluralism and consensus. Public access television provides an alternative to this trend, requiring active public participation in the process of developing community-based programming through the dominant medium of television. ...

The environment for public, educational, and governmental (PEG) cable channels is being roiled by public policy and budgetary changes at the federal, state, and local levels and by technological changes in cable networks. More than 100 PEG access centres -- which provide community groups and individuals free access to video production facilities and equipment, training, and programming time -- have closed since 2005, and many more may close when provisions in recently enacted state laws that eliminate requirements for cable companies to provide funding support take effect. This book examines the challenges and policy considerations facing small-market television.

Before the Internet, camcorders, and hundred-channel cable- systems--predating the Information Superhighway and talk of cyber-democracy--there was guerilla television. Part of the larger alternative media tide which swept the country in the late sixties, guerilla television emerged when the arrival of lightweight, affordable consumer video equipment made it possible for ordinary people to make their own television. Fueled both by outrage at the day's events and by the writings of people like Marshall McLuhan, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson, the movement gained a manifesto in 1971, when Michael Shamberg and the raindance Corp. published Guerilla Television. As framed in this quixotic text, the goal of the video guerilla was nothing less than a reshaping of the structure of information in America. In Subject to Change, Deidre Boyle tells the fascinating story of the first TV generation's dream of remaking television and their frustrated attempts at democratizing the medium. ...

Long before digital devices put the means of media production and distribution into “users’” hands, and participatory culture became an academic and industry buzzword, community media have provided everyday people access to the channels of public communication. From a historical perspective, then, community media constitute a prefigurative form of contemporary social media practice: a dynamic, contested, and frequently messy means of cultural expression, civic engagement, and democratic communication. ...

Public access television has been one of the most interesting and controversial
developments in the intersection between media and democracy within the past several
decades. ...

This is the main article index for the field of Communications.

The online version of 3 separate ISI indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index and, Social Sciences Citation Index.