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The display of spirituality, faith and religion is not a new phenomenon among black women in the United States, nor is it new to the world of media. Africans came to the Americas with their own sense of spirituality and religion, and the awareness of a higher being became the mortar that bound the community together during the trials of enslavement and subsequent oppression. Not surprisingly, this legacy of worship continues to provide solace and strength, with black women at the helm.

It is near impossible to have a discussion of black women in reality television without mentioning the infamous Angry Black Woman (ABW). In fact, some critiques have argued reality television is damaging for black women since many shows focus heavily on this character. 1 This stereotypical characterization of black women is long-standing, due largely to its constant inclusion in media messages. As noted in chapter one, audiences were first officially introduced to her in the 1920s as Sapphire Stevens from the Amos ‘n’ Andy Show ; and her character continued to resurface throughout the years, across several different genres. Despite the many time periods through which this image has traveled, the key characteristic of the Sapphire— her unexplainable anger and aggression— seem to resonate in many modern day images of black women.

Reality programs rose to prominence based on claims that the shows depicted “real life,” but in recent years many shows have come under fire for being anything but “reality.” Orbe (1998) suggests viewers are drawn to such programs based on the notion that they show “real people in everyday interactions,” and there is a certain level of “unpredictability that comes with reality.” However, what has become predictable and potentially problematic, over the past two decades, are the negative stereotypes associated with African American women on these programs. This skewing of reality is particularly significant when we consider the limited opportunities these shows provide viewers to witness the many facets of black womanhood. From the head-bobbing and finger-waving of Alicia Calaway on season two of the hit show Survivor to the on-and-off-air mudslinging between Kenya Moore and NeNe Leakes of Real Housewives of Atlanta fame, black women are portrayed as disloyal, bitchy, lazy, difficult to work with, and a threat to others.

Although African-American women are still underrepresented in narrative television, reality television appears to be a site where one can find many portrayals of them. As other scholars have explained, the representations of African American women in reality television are usually negative, generally presenting them as loud, angry, and without “class.” However, there has been little research on the complicated relationships of black motherhood, black wifehood, and their portrayals on reality television. One black mother who illustrates this tense interaction is Tameka “Tiny” Harris, nee Cottle, formerly of the 1990s girl group Xscape, and star of two reality television programs— BET’s Tiny & Toya , and VH1’s T.I. and Tiny: The Family Hustle . Though both programs prominently feature Cottle, BET’s program constructs Tiny as an emotionally strong and pragmatically capable business woman who maintains the emotional health and financial stability of her family while her relational partner/husband, rapper Tip “T.I.” Harris, is serving time in prison. However, upon T.I.’s return home, The Family Hustle presents Tiny as having little business savvy and as overly permissive with their blended family. This is a dangerous portrayal, given that reality TV purports to disseminate some version of “reality” to its viewers.

Tyra Banks, supermodel and producer, is the creator of the reality show America’s Next Top Model ( ANTM ), which is now in its twenty-second cycle, and features contestants who present themselves to a panel of judges for modeling critique. ANTM has been nominated for twenty-nine awards, including the GLAAD Media Award and Image Award, and the show has received five awards in 2009 from the Teen Choice Award and the Director’s Guild of America Award. Further, ANTM is currently shown in over 120 countries. The winner of each cycle receives a featured spread in a magazine, a modeling contract with a prominent agency, and a $100,000 modeling contract from a cosmetics company. In 2005, however, there was an infamous episode— dubbed the “Tyra Tyrade,” —where Tyra Banks yelled at a contestant whom she had just eliminated from the show. This episode was parodied more than any other ANTM episode, with the penultimate parody shown on a 2007 episode of Family Guy (a primetime cartoon television show with millions of viewers each week), where Tyra turns into a lizard and eats the model. While this episode is now nine years old, parodies from as recently as 2014 continue to live on and, as we argue, perpetuate negative stereotypes of black womanhood, particularly as related to the Sapphire mediated stereotype— loud, bossy, angry black woman. From the various interpretations of the “Tyra Tyrade,” it is clear that those who created the parodies covertly and overtly ventured into maintaining white supremacist stereotypes of black womanhood— where one is supposed to be beautiful, a jezebel, or a mammy, but not a Sapphire. Continuing the marginalizing mediated tradition, in almost every parody, the Tyra character becomes the object of ridicule for being “excessively black” and outside the parameters of her hegemonically prescribed role, because she demonstrated negative emotions resulting in an assertion of her power as the expert.

An old adage prescribed that “art imitates life.” If one believes this to be true, then it is plausible that entertainment is a source from which information about everyday life can be gleaned? Can U.S. television shows provide a looking glass into how Americans perform certain aspects of their lives? For a “real” look into how careers are performed, I have examined content from a reality television show which bears a title that implies something about the cast— the Bravo Network’s Real Housewives of Atlanta series. This show was chosen for two reasons. First, The Real Housewives of Atlanta is the most popular show among the “Housewives” franchise. Thus with each airing of the show, those who watch have the opportunity to learn more about the career aspirations, roles, and behaviors, of the cast members. Second, this is the only show within The Real Housewives franchise that features a primarily black cast. As such, the question emerges— can this show provide insight into the way black women construct their career roles? Another goal of this study is to determine how cast members construct notions of housewifery. Hence, throughout this chapter, readers will see that these women are not the typical “housewives,” rather they have reinvented what it means to be a housewife in the modern age.

The premise of the show revolves around six preachers in the Los Angeles area. They each pastor churches ranging from 3,500– 4,000 members; however, one pastor’s church has nearly 20,000 members (season 1: episode 1). A multitude of cameras follow the stories of each of the pastors’ lives, their relationships with each other, as well as their wives relationships with one another. The show has five black male preachers and one white male preacher. In season 1, all of the pastors— except for two— are married; one of the unmarried pastors is engaged to the mother of his child, and the other has a long-standing relationship with a female friend who frequently appears on the show. As viewers watch the show, they are given a glimpse into the world of evangelical preachers. Although at first glance the show seems to only focus on the men, the women provide an interesting glimpse at what it means to be a preacher’s wife, fiancée, or female companion. There were a total of eight episodes that aired over the course of two months. This chapter explores how black women and their friendships are portrayed on Preachers of L.A. — including the one white woman on the show. It also examines their discourse between one another— using critical race feminism to analyze the roles of these women as first ladies (a term used to describe the wives of pastors), their relationship with one other, and the conversations they have surrounding sex, marriage, relationships, and friendships. The chapter focuses on the first season of the show, which began in the fall of 2013. The show was later renewed for a second season, which began airing late summer 2014. This critique attempts to bring awareness to black women in the church and the discourse that perpetuates the stereotypes of black women on television. It also aims to initiate further conversations on various stereotypes— regardless of context— that have the potential to bear negatively on black women.

Since the late 1990s, there has been a crucial and substantial transformation in China’s television system involving institutional, structural and regulatory changes. Unravelling the implications of these changes is vital for understanding the politics of Chinese media policy-making and regulation, and thus a comprehensive study of this history has never been more essential. This book studies the transformation of the policy and regulation of the Chinese television sector within a national political and economic context from 1996 to the present day. Taking a historical and sociological approach, it engages in the theoretical debates over the nature of the transformation of media in the authoritarian Chinese state; the implications of the ruling party’s political legitimacy and China’s central-local conflicts upon television policy-making and market structure; and the nature of the media modernisation process in a developing country. Its case studies include broadcasting systems in Shanghai and Guangdong, which demonstrate that varied polices and development strategies have been adopted by television stations, reflecting different local circumstances and needs. Arguing that rather than being a homogenous entity, China has demonstrated substantial local diversity and complex interactions between local, national and global media, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese media, politics and policy, and international communications.

Violent television programs are highly preferred by children. They stimulate their emotions and increase curiosity about violence-related issues. This means that watching violent television programs has an impact upon their way of perceiving the world around them and acting in response to it. This study investigated the impacts of watching violent television programs on secondary school children in Tanzania. The specific objectives were: to examine children's accessibility to the TV, ascertain the types of violent TV programs and the time children spend watching them, determine the ways in which watching violent TV programs affects their academic performance, find out the impact of watching violent TV programs on their discipline, and examine the role of parents in addressing the impacts of watching violent TV programs upon their children. Results indicate that most secondary school children watch violent TV programs at home in the sitting rooms. They spend an average of three hours per day on weekdays, and seven-and-half hours on weekends, watching movies, music, drama, and informational programs that were identified as the most violent ones. Obviously, spending lots of time watching violent TV programs decreases children's academic performance and discipline. This book is important because it discusses the parents' role in discouraging and limiting children from watching violent TV programs, and choosing appropriate TV programs for them.

Over the last decade Spain and Mexico have both produced an extraordinary wealth of television drama. Drawing on both national practices of production and reception and international theories of textual analysis this book offers the first study of contemporary quality TV drama in two countries where television has displaced cinema as the creative medium that shapes the national narrative. As dramatized societies, Spain and Mexico are thus at once reflected and refracted by the new series on the small screen.

The Paramilitary Hero on Turkish Television: A Case Study on Valley of the Wolves explores the representation and reception of nationalism and masculinity in Turkey through an examination of the popular television serial, Valley of the Wolves which has been aired on Turkish television since 2003. This detailed examination of the show demonstrates a particular discourse of nationalism, namely the Turkish Islam synthesis embedded in a gender-specific regime in which the paramilitary hero is placed at the centre. The study draws on thirty-seven in-depth interviews with viewers of the programme from different social backgrounds. These viewers read the serial from various perspectives in the light of their gendered experiences, suggesting that the relationship between text and audience is not necessarily predetermined by the former, but is rather constructed through an interdiscursive process. The book also examines the pleasures of the “contesting” readers of Valley of the Wolves, drawing on the audience interviews, and argues that critical approaches to a particular media text do not present a barrier to audience pleasures.

The kingdom of Bhutan drew the international spotlight in 1999 when it became the last nation on earth to introduce broadcast television. It was a deliberate and strategic move by a country that for centuries had chosen to isolate itself from the rest of the world, turning inward to nurture its own culture. The small Himalayan country, whose population in 2013 was estimated at just 733,000, 1 sits uneasily between two feisty behemoths  – China and India – each with over a billion people and an ongoing history of border disputes. Bhutan has long been wary of being swamped, either politically or culturally, by these larger neighbours, as well as the world beyond (Penjore  2004 ).

Similar to the other countries discussed in this volume, elite dominance over mass media has been a main characteristic of Filipino history. Foreign-educated Filipino intellectuals from wealthy families founded the early periodicals that demanded reform and/or independence from Spanish colonization in the late nineteenth century (Anderson 1983 ). Today, ‘old rich’ landowning families own and operate television networks, radio stations, and newspapers not only as part of prestigious and profi table media conglomerates, but also in connection with their interests in industries as varied as oil and agriculture to insurance, shipping, and mining.

On 19 September 2006, the fi rst indication many people in Thailand received that the country was undergoing another military coup d’ é tat, the eighteenth such putsch since 1932, was when the nation’s six free-to-air television networks suddenly suspended regular programming and, channel by channel, started to broadcast a generic mix of royal news and light entertainment (Connors and Hewison 2008). Final confi rmation came again via television later that evening in the form of an offi cial announcement, broadcast at regular intervals across all stations from a central feed, in which the armed commanders in chief behind the coup – the awkwardly titled ‘Administrative Reform Group under the Democratic System with the King as the Head of State’ – explained apologetically that they had temporarily taken control of the nation’s airwaves, as indeed of the nation, exhorting viewers to remain calm and reassuring them that normalcy would soon be restored, at which point broadcasting reverted to the same steady flow of innocuous entertainment programming. For all its exceptional gravity, the 2006 coup’s strategic blend of direct state interventionist control of broadcasting combined with a more indirect use of escapist entertainment as populist pacifi er is arguably a structural characteristic of Thai television history writ large.

Since their development in their current format in the early 1990s as a means to attract female viewers in their twenties, Japanese prime-time television dramas-known commonly as ‘ dorama ’ 1 —have featured working women. Even police procedurals, medical dramas, and serials based on ‘ shojo manga ’ (graphic novels for girls) depict women working outside the home. The dorama most watched by Japanese audiences older than age 25, and those that continue to attract global fans, present the daily lives of independent women working in Tokyo. The protagonists enact fantasies about female professionals while depicting real issues facing the larger generations they represent. Viewers may not want to be these characters, but they can see aspects of themselves in them.

The construction of a problem, be it a crisis or a moral panic, is an attempt of policing and control, for the maintenance of hegemony and authority (Hall et al. 1978 ). A problem emerges as a problem only when it is out of its proper place, just like dirt becomes dirt only when it is not properly placed in the earth. The elimination of dirt is necessary in maintaining the cleanliness of the social order (Douglas 2002 ). In other words, it is the need for a particular social arrangement that constitutes the existence of a problem. Taiyu, the lingua franca of the Taiwanese, became a problem of dialect (called Minnanyu) to be eliminated when the KMT colonial regime moved to Taiwan, building it as a Chinese nation and instituting Mandarin as the national language. Television is central to the building of the Chinese nation. Taiyu serial dramas were broadcast soon after the fi rst network was established in 1962, but have been constructed as the most problematic and debased genre since the early 1970s when the second TV station, CTV (1969), and the third, CTS (1971), were established and used serial drama to compete for profi t. Accusations directed at the poverty of its quality and the vulgarity of the audiences have characterized mainstream criticisms and constructions of Taiyu serial dramas as problems from the 1970s to the present. This chapter investigates not only the how and what but also the why of this problem-construction, as an attempt to understand the power mechanisms at work in struggling for hegemonic control. It charts two historical moments – the 1970s and from the 1990s to the present – when language has played a signifi cant role in the articulations of serial dramas as problems and explores the changing political, economic and cultural forces that situate them as problems worthy of discussion. I argue that the history of this problem-making demonstrates the centrality of Chinese culture in political domination through cultural means, with ethnic/class politics playing a central role in the maintenance of a hierarchical social order. In the 1970s, Chinese culture was used to create ethnic/class divisions within Taiwan while simultaneously creating the illusion of a symbolic whole under the name of the Republic of China. However, since the 1990s, and intensifying after the 2000s, with the entanglement of democratization and neoliberalization in Taiwan and the rise of China, the ethnic/class tension is not just complicated by confl icted national identifi cations and Chinese culturepromoted by both the KMT Party’s Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, but also for unifi cation purposes. While democratization, which involved the search for Taiwanese identity, led to the rise of Taiyu-based Hsiangtu drama, the neoliberal defi nition of culture as economic resource, which consecrates Chinese culture through capital investment, facilitates this unifi cation process while creating further ethnic/class/national identity divisions within Taiwan. The result is a disparaging of Taiyu-based culture in general and, in particular, Taiyu serial drama as a problem to be reformed.

Korea was the fifteenth country in the world to start television broadcasting when it first launched in Seoul in 1956. Since then, the structure, content and policies concerning Korean television have continuously transformed, due largely to changing contextual circumstances such as wide-ranging socio-political democratization and the rise of the neoliberal global economic system and digital technologies. Up until the 1980s, the oligopolistic structure of the two public broadcasting networks  – Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) and Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC)  – dominated the broadcasting market. However the landscape has dramatically changed since the early 1990s, with 11 newly launched commercial terrestrial broadcasting channels (including Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS) in December 1991) and 153 cable channels when the multichannel television era began (Jin 2005 : 1). A digital satellite television system called Skylife was launched in March 2002, and airs 176 channels at the time of writing. Such changes stem from the shift in the domestic political climate where liberalization and privatization were promoted in assertively practiced neoliberal reform movement in the early 1980s, as well as changes in the global cultural industry environments based largely on globalization and the development of digital technologies. This chapter explores democratization, transnationalization and digitalization, three active factors within Korean television broadcasting by analysing changes and shifts in popular music programmes.

In 1980, Hong Kong’s commercial Television Broadcast Limited (TVB) television drama The Bund ( 上海滩 ) was popularly received in the city as well as in South-East Asia and the broader Chinese diaspora. Set in the cosmopolitan treaty port of Shanghai in the 1920s, The Bund revolves around the violent ascent of a coolie (Ray Lui) and a disillusioned student activist (Chow Yun-Fat) to become prominent mobsters. Not only were two sequels made within that year, but this historical gangster drama has been repeatedly resurrected in television dramas and fi lms, including Chow’s redux, The Last Tycoon ( 大上海 ), three decades later in 2012. From karaoke lounges to social media sites, theme songs of The Bund remain popular more than three decades after the dramas were screened . With music composed by Joseph Koo, lyrics by Wong Jim and sung by Frances Yip, the main and supplementary theme songs refl ected the intimate role of the Hong Kong-based contemporary Cantonese popular music, or Canto-pop, in cultivating a more memorable and enduring televisual culture. With the smooth synchronization of Koo’s classical music with the undulating pitch of Yip, the song articulates the unpredictable tribulations of the changing fortunes in the treaty-port of Shanghai in the interwar years. To a certain extent, it is also a narrative that reminds viewers in Hong Kong and beyond of similar socio-political and historical predicaments.

"Though the television industry in China is enormous, fewer people are watching television screens. In this groundbreaking study, Michael Keene shows how television content is changing, how the Chinese government is responding to the challenges presented by digital media, and how businesses are brokering alliances in both traditional and new media sectors. Keane outlines the process of making content in China, focusing on regulatory institutions, ownership, censorship, programmes and channels, copygright, formats and the role of media bases. Spanning a wide variety of genres, the book examines four models of content internationalisation: licensing of programmes, formats, co-productions and online media. Written in an accessible style by one of the world's leading experts on China's media, this book explores how streamed online content is impacting on the state's control of ideas and management of the traditional broadcasting sector. This is the authoritative text for scholars, students, businesses and policy makers wanting to understand how the rapid evolution of Chinese media aligns with the nation's soft power initiatives"--Back cover.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of media and change in postcolonial Malaysia, a South-East Asian nation of 29  million multicultural people, with a focus on the role of television in the nation’s transformation following independence from British rule in 1957. Despite having inherited the basic democratic institutions of the British political tradition, Malaysia continues to debate the transition from soft authoritarianism to democracy (Means 1996 :  103). Since 1957, Malaysia has been led by a single political party, the Barisan Nasional (BN). While the BN is a coalition of three major ethnic-based political groups, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), it is, in effect, a symbol of Malay-Muslim supremacy (Ketuanan Melayu). UMNO, the dominant group within the party, has, since its formation, aspired to uphold Malay culture as national culture and Islam as the offi cial religion for the country. From the fi rst general elections in 1959 until the 2008 general elections, the BN held two-thirds of the 222 seats in the Dewan Rakyat (House of Representatives). Malaysian media scholar Karthigesu ( 1987 , 1994 ) contends this was largely due to the role of public television, which was launched and promoted by government itself, broadcasting in its colonial service model. In fact, the arrival of state television in 1963 coincided with the formation of the Federation of Malaysia (Moten and Mokhtar 2013 ). In this chapter I argue that television has been pivotal in shaping and transforming the political and cultural landscape of Malaysia as the medium evolved from a strictly national to a loosely global and then fluidly trans-local orientation. While television fi rst enabled the BN to hold its two-thirds majority and build the nation premised on Malay supremacy policies, it subsequently played a part in weakening the BN’s grip over the multiethnic electorate as the UMNO Ketuanan Melayu ideology, layered deep beneath the powdered face of television, surfaced in the digital media era.