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Media Matters

Race and Gender in U.S. Politics

1996
•
Author:

John Fiske

Media Matters

Leading cultural critic examines the debate carried out through television, talk radio, and low-tech media that enabled the political defeat of Reaganism.

Illustrates how people engaged in struggles over race, class and gender have influenced the way the nation made sense of key media events such as the O. J. Simpson murder trial, the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, the L.A. riots, and the family values debate between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown. Fiske explores how women, African Americans, Korean Americans, and Latinos used the low-tech media of telephones, home video, fax machines, rebel radio, and private conversations to counter the voices that dominated the mainstream.

“This is one of the most valuable resources on contemporary American culture I have read. Urgently argued and compellingly insightful, it reminds the reader of the necessity for balance as a democratic practice and of a commitment to the scholarly unlayering of those voices least likely to be given forum in the raging information wars. What emerges is nuanced, revelatory, and compassionately visionary.” --Patricia Williams author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights

This is one of the most valuable resources on contemporary American culture I have read. Urgently argued and compellingly insightful, it reminds the reader of the necessity for balance as a democratic practice and of a commitment to the scholarly unlayering of those voices least likely to be given forum in the raging information wars. What emerges is nuanced, revelatory, and compassionately visionary.

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Patricia Williams, author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights

• Dan Quayle chastises Murphy Brown, and the press goes ballistic.
• Anita Hill testifies, and the whole nation tunes in.
• An amateur video leads to a trial whose outcome sparks a mass uprising in Los Angeles.
Is the world out of whack? Are media events and "real" ones mixing and combusting? Or does such a mixture, as John Fiske suggests, merely bring some balance to a picture already badly skewed? In this book, Fiske, a prominent cultural critic, shows how events like these contributed to the nation's shift away from Reaganism.
The United States is undergoing a mood swing, Fiske tells us, and the fierce battle over cultural meaning reveals how this change is negotiated in the media. His damning analysis of the repressive discourse of the Right, exemplified by Rush Limbaugh, CNN, Dan Quayle, Pat Buchanan, and George Bush, is set in counterpoint to an account of how the "weaker" voices in our society make themselves heard.
Exploring the media's treatment of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, the L.A. riots, and the family values debate between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown, Fiske shows how minority groups influenced the way the nation made sense of these key events. Here we see how women, African Americans, Korean Americans, and Latinos used the low-tech media of telephones, home video, fax machines, rebel radio, and private conversations to counter the voices that dominated the mainstream. Underlying this analysis is a model of U.S. culture as a swirling mixture of different currents of meaning, some of which surfaced in the early 1990s in surprising and important ways.

Contents
1. Murphy Brown, Dan Quayle, and the Family Row of the year
2. Hearing Anita Hill (and Viewing Bill Cosby)
3. Los Angeles: A Tale of Three Videos
4. Blackstream Knowledge: Genocide
5. Technostruggles

• National publicity campaign
• Targeted advertising campaign including The Nation, The
New Republic, Voice Literary Supplement, Publishers Weekly
• Advance reviewer galleys
• Radio interviews

Media Matters

John Fiske is professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of eight books, including Power Plays, Power Works (1994), Understanding Popular Culture (1989), Reading the Popular (1989), and Television Culture (1987).

Media Matters

This is one of the most valuable resources on contemporary American culture I have read. Urgently argued and compellingly insightful, it reminds the reader of the necessity for balance as a democratic practice and of a commitment to the scholarly unlayering of those voices least likely to be given forum in the raging information wars. What emerges is nuanced, revelatory, and compassionately visionary.

—

Patricia Williams, author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights

“John Fiske has written a provocative book that details the eroding line between ‘media’ and ‘real’ events and helps readers to understand how people from previously exploited minority groups have begun to influence the nation’s reactions to media events.” Minneapolis Skyway News

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“Unlike the do-gooder positivists, TV theorist John Fiske has long argued that there is no inherent meaning in images at all. In his ninth book, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change, Fiske again attempts to break through the myth of ‘realistic images’ from a slightly different angle. . .Fiske challenges the distinction between the ‘real’ and that which is constructed by the ‘media’ to argue that all events are, in fact, mediated, and are made real only through discourse. . . .Even more useful is his conscious blurring of fictional and nonfictional texts. . . . .Fiske’s analysis offers his reader/viewer a viable analytical road map. Meanwhile, social scientists remain tangled within a viewer-response theory that creates fabrics of (imaginary) positive or negative values. . . . . The more we differ in our opinion, the better. Because it is at the core of such disagreement, where Fiske’s ‘fluidity, contradiction, and uncertainty’ meet, that usable politics might finally be found.” Village Voice

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“Fiske has found a mother lode of raw material in U.S. news coverage. . . Fiske strips away the spin-doctored words that hide real meaning in what the players in these sordid affairs had to say. He finds plenty of evidence to display in all its bloodiness that open sore of racism in the United States.” The Record, Kitchener, Ontario

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“Much of Fiske’s prose is compelling, full of well argued points. . . . . His lively analysis of the discourse surrounding various media events is interesting and engaging, and would serve as an excellent introduction for undergraduates or first-year graduate students to Fiske’s critical perspective. . . . . Fiske’s well-documented treatment of events and his careful analysis of media discourse challenges whites to consider how the discourse of domination can conceal racism from the view of the political and economic elite.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media

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