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Five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Louisiana, life remained not normal still for many residents of the city. And while mainstream news organizations remembered the fifth anniversary of the hurricane with extensive coverage, it was the work of filmmaker Spike Lee and television program creators David Simon and Eric Overmyer that perhaps created the greatest buzz about the fifth anniversary of Katrina in 2010. Spike Lee’s first documentary, When the Levees Broke , was released in 2006. It documented what happened in New Orleans through the voices of local residents, politicians, and experts during and immediately after the storm.

Picture this: a comedy about an overweight Black woman who lives with and takes care of a white family. Joking all the way, she cooks, cleans, helps the father of the family, and comforts the children. Then at one point, we see the father holding his gun and pointing toward the door. The Black woman enters and jumps up and down, screaming, “Massa! Massa! Massa! Please don’t shoot!” It is easy to imagine these scenes in a 1930s film about the antebellum South. But they are actually from the first episode of a 1980s sitcom.

Although the cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (CBS, 1972–1984) averaged only nine new episodes a year during its twelve-year run (compared to a more standard production cycle of twenty-five to sixty new episodes a year for other cartoons), the show remained a highly popular option for young viewers on late Saturday mornings. By the time of the series’ network premiere in 1972, the cartoon’s animated African American stars—Weird Harold, Dumb Donald, Fat Albert, Rudy, Mushmouth, Bucky, Russell, and Bill—were familiar and recognizable to American audiences as originating from Bill Cosby’s boyhood community of North

In the first episode of Black Journal , before the opening credits, comedian Godfrey Cambridge appears dressed in overalls and a painter’s cap with a paint roller in hand and methodically paints the television frame. To the viewer, it appears that his or her television is being painted black from the inside—a potent visual symbol from the first national Black public affairs program. Initially, though, the symbol emphasizes a visual challenge to the absence of Black faces on television—a show that “looks” Black, because of the visibility of its Black hosts and reporters, but where whites still have significant

Although discourses regarding 1980s representations of Blackness on television heavily focus on The Cosby Show, its NBC spin-off series, A Different World, depicting student life at a historically Black college, was equally groundbreaking and deserving of critical attention. Looking to transfer the appeal and audience share of The Cosby Show to A Different World, the spin-off show’s first season centered on the life of The Cosby Show’s star Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet) at Hillman College. A Different World’s story provides an illuminating case study of the role and power of television producers, highlighting their influence over a show’s narrative and

This project has been engaging my thoughts for nearly a decade. I was forced to actually address it while sitting in our temporary home in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, watching world satellite TV with virtually no Blacks on it. In Nigeria, I became acquainted with Paris-based Fashion TV, U.S.-based Style Network, and the Australian production McLeod’s Daughters. Outside of M-Net’s Africa Magic, a network dedicated to showing Nollywood productions primarily, television was anything but Black. This whitening of the televisual frame, even in Black Africa, made me begin to consider the dearth of knowledge circulating about Black television programming, even when abundance

Through close readings of contemporary made-in-Singapore films (by Jack Neo, Eric Khoo, and Royston Tan) and television programs (Singapore Idol, sitcoms, and dramas), this book analyzes the prospects of resistance in an advanced capitalist-industrial society with "global city" aspirations.

Shanti Kumar's Gandhi Meets Primetime examines how cultural imaginations of national identity have been transformed by the rapid growth of satellite and cable television in postcolonial India. To evaluate the growing influence of foreign and domestic satellite and cable channels since 1991, the book considers a wide range of materials including contemporary television programming, historical archives, legal documents, policy statements, academic writings and journalistic accounts. Kumar argues that India's hybrid national identity is manifested in the discourses found in this variety of empirical sources. He deconstructs representations of Mahatma Gandhi as the Father of the Nation on the state-sponsored network Doordarshan and those found on Rupert Murdoch's STAR TV network. The book closely analyzes print advertisements to trace the changing status of the television set as a cultural commodity in postcolonial India and examines publicity brochures, promotional materials and programming schedules of Indian-language networks to outline the role of vernacular media in the discourse of electronic capitalism. The empirical evidence is illuminated by theoretical analyses that combine diverse approaches such as cultural studies, poststructuralism and postcolonial criticism.

In January 1987, the Indian state-run television began broadcasting a Hindu epic in serial form, The Ramayana, to nationwide audiences, violating a decades-old taboo on religious partisanship. What resulted was the largest political campaign in post-independence times, around the symbol of Lord Ram, led by Hindu nationalists. The complexion of Indian politics was irrevocably changed thereafter. In this book, Arvind Rajagopal analyses this extraordinary series of events. While audiences may have thought they were harking back to an epic golden age, Hindu nationalist leaders were embracing the prospects of neoliberalism and globalisation. Television was the device that hinged these movements together, symbolising the new possibilities of politics, at once more inclusive and authoritarian. Simultaneously, this study examines how the larger historical context was woven into and changed the character of Hindu nationalism.

Coverage of Mexican-American youth gangs has been a staple of local television news in the United States for decades, and its form and content have come to embody many journalistic cliches: the rising tide of violence, the spread of drug addiction, the alienated minority youth. But as this bold new study argues, these stories contain gross exaggerations that lead to the reinforcement of stereotypes about Mexican-American young people and the Mexican-American community in general. Indeed, the police and community leaders greatly influence the content of this coverage by deciding what information to make available to the news media, while reporters select certain sources and ignore others, thus slanting the story even further. Source: Publisher

Established in 2004, Maori Television has had a major impact on the New Zealand broadcasting landscape. But over the past year or so, the politics of Maori Television have been brought to the foreground of public consciousness, with other media outlets tracking Maori Television's search for a new CEO, allegations of editorial intervention and arguments over news reporting approaches to Te Kohanga Reo National Trust.Based on a Marsden Grant and three years of interviews with key stakeholders – staff, the Board, other media, politicians, funders and viewers – this is a deep account of Maori Television in its first ten years. Jo Smith argues that today's arguments must be understood within a broader context shaped by non-Maori interests. Can a Maori broadcaster follow both tikanga and the Broadcasting Standards Authority? Is it simply telling the news in Maori, or broadcasting the news with a Maori perspective? How can it support te reo Maori at the same time as appeal to all New Zealand? How does it function as the voice of its Maori stakeholders?Offering five frameworks to address the challenges of a Maori organisation working within a wider non-Maori context, this is a solidly researched examination of Maori Television's unique contribution to the media cultures of Aotearoa New Zealand.

The culture of television in Indonesia began with its establishment in 1962 as a public broadcasting service. From that time, through the deregulation of television broadcasting in 1990 and the establishment of commercial channels, television can be understood, Philip Kitley argues, as a part of the New Order’s national culture project, designed to legitimate an idealized Indonesian national cultural identity. But Professor Kitley suggests that it also has become a site for the contestation of elements of the New Order’s cultural policies. Based on his studies, he further speculates on the increasingly significant role that television is destined to play as a site of cultural and political struggle.

This chapter unpacks the tension between secular, modern values and conservative, Islamic interpretations within the Indonesian middle class by taking the consumption of Turkish popular cultural products as a case. The chapter explicates the social responses towards the first Turkish television drama aired on terrestrial, private television in Indonesia: The Magnificent Century (Muhtesṃem Yüzyıl/Abad Kejayaan). This chapter understands the reproduction of secular and conservative Islamic values, while in contestation, as a response to broader global, market-capitalist developments. It finds that in response to audience criticism regarding the “un-Islamic” portrayal of the epoch in the drama—specifically the depiction of women as concubines—television stations enlisted the services of Muslim clerics to correct or justify the representation of historical facts. This reveals that market-driven self-censorship has opened up ways for Muslim clerics to influence television content. As such, the chapter argues that market-capitalist forces discursively use Islamic authority as a way to legitimise the halal consumption of Turkish drama among Indonesian Muslim audience at the expense of programme diversity.

This chapter explores the social and cultural factors that have contributed to the success of Turkish programs in the Arab world. Following the cancelation of Turkish serials on the Arab world’s largest networks in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, this chapter will explore how dedicated Arab fans are continuing to watch Turkish shows via alternative platforms after having seen them become such a large part of their daily lives and a permanent fixture on their screens in recent years. By using the Gulf State of Qatar as a departure point, it will examine why Turkish content resonates so closely with female Arab audiences, while also determining their viewing motivations and how Turkish serials have managed to fill a void among its viewers that Arab media has failed to satisfy. At the same time, this chapter will discuss why Turkish dramas have been widely perceived as a women’s genre despite being prime-time serials in Turkey.

Satellite television has not only provided migrant communities with stronger ties to their home countries but also enabled second-generation migrants in particular to know more about their country of origin beyond their family ties. The aim of this chapter is to explore the ways in which Turkish television contributes towards the making of the transnational identity of the “twice minority” group of Alevi Kurds through what I call mediatised culturalisation. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews that I conducted with the second-generation members of the Alevi Kurdish community in London in 2016, I explore the role of Turkish television in contesting the boundaries of transnational social imaginaries of the second-generation viewers.

The marriage show was a popular reality show format that invited people to find their soulmate and marry on live television in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork which took place in the show’s studio between 2011 and 2012, this chapter explores female participants’ investment of their trust in the show. While being reluctant about finding a spouse on television, women take on registers of safety, familiarity, and secrecy to navigate the show as a safe venue. This endeavor also involved women’s safeguarding of themselves on their way to marriage. The fragility of trust in the show, therefore, indicates how women foresee risks and yet strive for securing happiness and safety in marriage in general. This affective tension, at a larger scale, is related to the increased sense of insecurity at a global scale, and the systematic failure of the family to provide the safe living environment it promises in the Turkish context.

In this contribution, I provide an in-depth rhetorical and textual analysis of a television debate program broadcast in 2015 on the mainstream television news channel, Habertürk TV in Turkey. The debate brought together women committed to varying political projects, including Kemalism, Islamism, leftist movements, Kurdish women’s movements, and feminism. I find this debate program unique because it took place at a crucial moment in Turkey’s recent history, preceding increasing restrictions on the media that eventually cost more than half of the program participants’ jobs and positions. In my analysis, I focus on how the program’s moderator and the women participants define “women’s issues” in an increasingly authoritarian and conflictual political climate where women are divided with regard to supporting or opposing the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP) political program. The results of my analysis show that “sisterhood” does not provide common ground for women in a politically polarized environment and women with more political power dominate the conservation.

This chapter examines the social transformation of the television audience of rural Turkey. Villages near a metropolitan area, which were subject to an administrative decision to be relocated, were the focus of my fieldwork 30 years ago. Several visits between 1987 and 2019 to the same location, which is inhabited by television viewers and non-viewers alike, yielded an insightful mapping of engagement with popular culture via television at the periphery in Turkey from a historical perspective. While rural inhabitants are busy with daily labor in the countryside and are not keen on watching television, they are nonetheless aware of and connected to new, nationwide cultural trends and social changes. By reflexively discussing these experiences in ethnographic fieldwork on television habits and reception in rural Turkey over a 30-year span, I avoid the traps of modern-traditional and urban-rural binaries, allowing for an exploration of the role of television in mediating social change in the rural context and thus an analysis of the various complex layers and processes of mediatization among rural audiences.

La production de fictions sérielles turques est en constant développement. Ces fictions ont un très grand succès au niveau local (Tanriöver, 2011 ; Öztürkmen, 2018), avant d’être exportées au-delà des frontières turques depuis les années 2000, d’abord dans des pays sous l’influence culturelle de l’ancien Empire ottoman (à savoir les Balkans et le Moyen-Orient, puis au-delà (en Amérique latine, en Chine, au Pakistan, en Inde, au Bangladesh, etc.), faisant de la Turquie un leader mondial en matière de production et d’exportation. La Grèce est devenue un grand consommateur de fictions sérielles turques et les forts taux d’audience que ces dernières y réalisent ont conduit certains chercheurs à débattre du soft power turc. Plus précisément, en se basant sur les activités des fans des feuilletons en question (comme le tourisme en direction de la Turquie), certains ont soutenu que le visionnage des feuilletons turcs entraîne une amélioration des relations gréco-turques (Paris, 2013). En parallèle, de nombreux articles journalistiques, aussi bien en Grèce que dans d’autres pays, analysent le succès de ces feuilletons auprès du public grec comme une réussite diplomatique du gouvernement turc (Moore, 2013 ; Dimitrakopoulos, 2020).

Television delivery throughout the world has changed rapidly over the past two decades. Within South Africa, much of this global narrative is repeated. The last 25 years saw a move from a single monopoly broadcaster within the ‘public service’ tradition (but later subsumed into the apartheid political agenda), to the present situation of a multi-company, multi-platform, increasingly digital delivery, calling into question even the very definition of ‘broadcasting’. ‘Global difference’ in South Africa plays out through a relatively late start but surprisingly short catch-up period, emphasizing a demographic/socio-economic specificity that has resulted in a highly skewed television market in which the uptake of high-end technology is less widespread than in other more ‘developed’ markets, and where the taste of local programming dominates even the technologically advanced sectors. The move toward a digital system, together with the introduction of competition, has provided challenges to the regulatory regime. The majority of the audience share, however, remains with local programming, regardless of its delivery.