Mad Men, using the historical backdrop of the many events that came to demarcate the 1960s, has presented a beautifully-styled rendering of this tumultuous decade, while teasing out a number of themes that resonate throughout the show and connect to the contemporary discourses that dominate today's political landscape. The chapters of this book analyze the most important dimensions explored on the show, including issues around gender, race, prejudice, the family, generational change, the social movements of the 1960s, our understanding of America's place in the world, and the idea of work in the post-war period. Mad Men and Politics provides the reader with an understanding not only of the topics and issues that can be easily grasped while watching, but also contemplates our historical perspective of the 1960s as we consider it through the telescope of our current condition.

Product Description: This innovative collection investigates the ways in which television programs around the world have highlighted modernization and encouraged nation-building. It is an attempt to catalogue and better understand the contours of this phenomenon, which took place as television developed and expanded in different parts of the world between the 1950s and the 1990s...read more

Over the last half of the twentieth century, television has become the predominant medium through which the public accesses information about the world. Through the news, situation comedies, police dramas, and commercials, we learn about the world around us, and our role within it. These genres, narratives, and cultural forms are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that show the world as we might never see it in real life. How Television Shapes Our Worldview brings together a diverse set of scholars, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks to interrogate the ways through which television molds our vision of the outside world. The essays include advertising and public relations analyses, audience interviews, and case studies that touch on genres ranging from science fiction in the 1970s to current “reality” television. Television truly provides a powerful influence over how we learn about the world around us and understand its social processes.

Product Description: In September 2007 the BBC rounded up an international group of ?the usual suspects? for a conference. Public broadcasters, policy makers and media researchers from Britain and beyond deliberated Repositioning Public Service Broadcasting: The BBC Charter Renewal and its Global Aftermath...read more

Product Description: In the mid-1980s, Neil Postman claimed that television made entertainment the natural format for the representation of all experience. While Postman's argument still is pertinent to a description of contemporary television shows, it also seems increasingly more accurate to argue that 'reality-based' entertainment is quickly becoming the referential format for televisual representations of our experience in the 21st century...read more

Cultural studies scholarship on the television talk show, especially the "audience discussion" genre, was guardedly hopeful about its democratic or feminist potential. In this exciting new volume, Kathleen Dixon investigates the relationship between the talk genre and democracy, but through a new emphasis on art, broadly defined. The Global Village Revisited: Art, Politics, and Television Talk Shows explores three case studies from Belgium, Bulgaria, and the United States, and reveals how these cases interanimate to produces a new view of the talk show as a global phenomenon, and as a negotiation among the forces of late capitalism, the unnamed but still palpable audience, and the individual rhetors, artists, and technicians who make the shows. Dixon treats the globalization of media and culture as a dynamic process that yields different results according to time and place. While the way in which television talk shows serve democracy may be hard to define precisely, The Global Village Revisited demonstrates the importance and necessity of this question in cultural studies.

The significant changes that have swept the television industry over the last two decades, most notably a shift to deregulation in broadcast media, prompt a discussion on how to ensure that meaningful content is available to the viewer. Television and Public Policy analyzes the current state of television systems in a selected group of countries by exploring the political, economic, and technological factors that have shaped the sector in such a short span of time. Consequently, by positioning the television sector within issues of media policy and the regulatory framework, the book questions what these trends mean for television, and the historical, political, and cultural role in our societies. Television and Public Policy distinguishes itself in several ways:*It is a global project in its comparative scope and subject area. Contributors represent countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.*It is contemporary and filled with information largely absent in current literature.*It offers original analysis of the contemporary television sector. This book speaks to a broad range of academics, postgraduate, and undergraduate students, and can serve as a key resource for courses ranging from media studies, to development studies, international relations, and law.

Product Description: The belief that the media plays a central role in a functioning democracy anchors this examination of the constant give-and-take between politics and the media. The variety of themes addressed includes opinion polls and public opinion, how national identity is shaped by the media, and the loss of public trust in politicians...read more

Product Description: In 1995, United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said, "CNN [the Cable News Network] is the sixteenth member of the [fifteen member United Nations] Security Council," Scholars as well as diplomats have recognized the existence of a link between communications and diplomacy, but up until now the implications of this relationship have been left unexplored...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The subject of Television and Elections, 2nd Edition is "Television in Politics." The book contains information on informing the electorate, news coverage of elections, the issue of free television time for candidates, paid political advertising, campaign and election debates, and regulation...read more

Product Description: This book examines the present and future of televised election debates, from the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debate of 1960 to the age of digital interactive multimedia. A number of contributors, from various perspectives - debate producers, participants and pundits - and from a variety of countries - Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, UK, Israel - discuss the significance of TV debates in what is the first international study of this important political phenomenon...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this book Chris Barker situates television as a cultural phenomenon in the context of global modernity. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In this broad-ranging text, Peter Dahlgren clarifies the underlying theoretical concepts of civil society and the public sphere, and relates these to a critical analysis of the practice of television as journalism, as information and as entertainment. He demonstrates the limits and the possibilities of the television medium and the formats of popular journalism. These issues are linked to the potential of the audience to interpret or resist messages, and to construct its own meanings. What does a realistic understanding of the functioning and the capabilities of television imply for citizenship and democracy in a mediated age?

Product Description: In recent years political campaigns in Western democracies have relied increasingly upon television advertising to promote candidates and//or political parties. Campaigns in North America were the first to channel political messages in this way and many European campaigns have been based on the United States models...read more

Product Description: The essays in this volume investigate the impact of all media, including the emerging technologies, on the social, cultural, economic and political climate in the context of aesthetic values, and issues of gender, race and class. Transmission examines the array of forces moving the contemporary video landscape forward, comparing the past with the present as well as the future as it looks at the impact of video on commercial television, the relationship of media to the social causes it (mis)represents and the effects of new communication tools on participating constituents...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays from around the world examines how television influences, affects and reflects different cultures. The force of television as a homogenizing force, or global policeman, acting on behalf of Western, predominantly American capitalism, is widely acknowledged...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays from around the world examines how television influences, affects and reflects different cultures. The force of television as a homogenizing force, or "global policeman": acting on behalf of Western, predominantly American capitalism, is widely acknowledged...read more

Challenging the assumption that television dominates American life, a cultural critic analyzes such television 'events' as the Rodney King beating and the Clarence Thomas hearings--to prove that television's claim to power is overestimated. 25,000 first printing. National ad/promo.

Product Description: This volume represents one of the first major scholarly efforts to unravel the psychological and symbolic processing of political advertising. Utilizing survey, experimental, qualitative, and semiotic methodologies to study this phenomenon, the contributors to Television and Political Advertising trace how political ads help to interpret the psychological reality of the presidential campaign in the minds of millions of voters...read more

Product Description: These two volumes represent the first major scholarly effort to unravel the psychological and symbolic processing of political advertising. Utilizing survey, experimental, qualitative, and semiotic methodologies to study this phenomenon, the contributors to Television and Political Advertising trace how political ads help to interpret the psychological reality of the presidential campaign in the minds of millions of voters...read more

Product Description: This book offers an analysis of a range of different British and American television series from the 1950s to the present day. Three broad categories are used to organize the analysis: "human nature" ("Bonanza", "The Untouchables", "The Invaders", "Star Trek"); "pop" ("The Prisoner", "The Avengers", "The Man from UNCLE", "Mission: Impossible") and the police series ("Hawaii 5...read more