The 'Arab Terrorist' on American TV

One of the ideological assumptions found in the motion-picture-made-for-television genre is that an Arab is a terrorist. Although this has become a tired cliché, and the influence of any single film is limited there is a dangerous, cumulative effect in repeated stereotyping. Fixed images, left unchallenged, inform or ‘disinform’ the values and perceptions of individual citizens, even those in government service, for negative stereotypes do not exist in a vacuum. Viewers need to ask themselves who benefits when an entire culture is characterized as violent, cruel, blood-thirsty, and anti-American?

The growing diversity among American television networks during the 1980s was not translated into a diversity of Arab portraits and scenarios. Whether the product is Hostage Flight (NBC, 1985), Sword of Gideon (HBO, 1986), Under Siege (NBC, 1986), The Taking of Flight 847 (NBC, 1988), or Terrorist on Trial: The United States vs. Salim Ajami (CBS, 1988), the results are similar. Arabs are depicted in the images of Hitler’s SS and Attila’s hordes. The Arab lurks in the shadows with AK-47, bomb, or dagger in hand to seduce, beat, rape, and murder innocents. Summing up these diabolical others, a passenger in Hostage Flight says, "These bastards shot those people in cold blood. They think it's open season on Americans."

The message to American viewers on whom to love and whom to hate is hardly subtle. There can be only one reaction when viewers witness Muslim fanatics blowing up the White House and slaughtering Americans in Under Siege. There can be only one reaction when in Terrorist on Trial Ajami, a Palestinian Arab captured in Lebanon by an elite American military unit and brought to trial in the U.S., boasts of ordering the deaths of American women and children abroad. Sitting in the witness chair, Ajami states that if he possessed nuclear weapons, he would use them: "We will strike at them in their home country as well as overseas. Long live Palestine!"

To government officials, American soldiers, and the average citizen, Ajami is the symbol of the heartless fanatic opposed to peace. One of the protagonists in Terrorist on Trial explains that Palestinian Arabs prefer "to walk up to unarmed people and shoot them." An enraged American Marine slaps Ajami around in his cell because, "You don’t kill kids."

George Engund, the producer of Terrorist on Trial, has defended his work by saying, “In court (Ajami) is given his say - the first time a Palestinian has had such a forum on TV." Despite this assertion, the net effect of Terrorist on Trial is to perpetuate the tradition of dehumanized Arabs, particularly Palestinians opposing Israel, as grasping, greedy terrorists with severe mental problems. A journalist in the film feeds the myth by asserting that Arabs are more violent and more primitive than other people: "They are very clever; first thing they do is corrupt the language. They appeal to our sympathy by calling themselves guerrillas or freedom fighters. They’re not." Ajami's own defense attorney asks the jury to view him as "someone who might as well have been from another planet."

The film also includes scenes of shabby Arab-Americans who demonstrate in favor of Ajami, leaving viewers with the impression that the Arab-American community sympathizes with terrorists. A government official is outraged: "They’re marching for a man that murdered at least 20 or 30 people." These Arab-Americans are so hapless and un-educated that not one of them is capable of defending Ajami in court. That task falls to a liberal Jew who is a supporter of Israel but will defend the terrorist because, as a champion of civil rights he supports the "rule of law." A justice department official underscores the supposed lack of Arab-American legal talent by saying, "A fact is a fact. There are no qualified American-Arab attorneys to defend Ajami."

Under Siege had spread the mud on Arab-Americans even thicker. It focused on an Arab terrorist cell working out of the Detroit suburb, Dearborn, where in fact some 20,000 Americans of Arab descent lived at the time of its production, including a number of Lebanese Shi'ites. The story is pure fiction, the setting and the name of the terrorist group are not. This fact/fiction blur can only suggest that such cells may truly exist, and suspicion of such political activity may feed the assaults, bombings, and killings that have already afflicted various Arab-American communities and organizations.

The thrust of Under Siege is what it would be like if Arab terrorists, aided by their Arab-American brethren, launched attacks in the United States. The film begins with a stolen military truck being blown up in the middle of squads of young soldiers - more than 200 are killed. A White House oracle says, "They're Shi'ite terrorists... we all knew they would hit us at home." There follow sequences in which the terrorists, led by Abu Ladeen, strike at innocents throughout the country: on street corners, in restaurants, at airports and throughout the Capitol area. The FBI official charged with locating the terrorists orders his men to check out "every Middle East community... he’s got to have a safe home. There's a large Shi'ite community in the Detroit area." Super-imposed on the screen: Dearborn, Michigan, followed by shots of stores with Arabic names and signs with Arabic lettering.

Throughout Under Siege Iranians are interchangeable with Arabs, and the dialogue is racist. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Iran's ambassador, "People in your country are barbarians." The FBI director goes one better by telling an associate, "Those people"- Arabs - "are different from us. It's a whole different ball game. I mean the East and Middle East. These people have their own mentality. They have their own notion of what's right and what's wrong, what's worth living for and dying for. But we insist on dealing with them as if they're the same as us. We'd better wake up." Co-written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Bob Woodward, Under Siege conveys the warning that the Arabs are coming to terrorize the United States and Arab-Americans are going to help them.

What is so disquieting about such films is that they effectively portray Arabs and Arab-Americans as being at war with the United States. Nicholas Kadi, an Iraqi actor who has made his living playing terrorists, is uneasy about his work. As an Arab terrorist in The Last Precinct, Kadi says, he did "little talking and a lot of threatening looks, threatening gestures, threatening actors. Every time we'd spit. There are other kinds of Arabs in the world besides terrorists. I'd like to think that someday there will be an Arab role out there for me that would be an honest portrayal."

Clearly there are Arab terrorists and certainly terrorism is a legitimate theme for films. One could argue, however, that for all the television time spent on the subject, the theme of terrorism has never been seriously addressed, only exploited. No TV film remotely approaches the complexity of the terrorist bombings depicted in The Battle of Algiers or the kidnapping-execution in State of Siege. Moreover, the TV images are monochromatic. Viewers see Arabs only as perpetrators of violence, never as victims, especially not of the kind of state terrorism seen on the West Bank. There are no images of Arab arms being broken, Arab homes being blown up, Arab demonstrators shot dead. Nor are there many apolitical images. Viewers do not see the Arab mother singing to her child. They do not see an Arab doctor tending the ill, an Arab teacher giving a lesson in algebra, an Arab programmer working with a computer. An Arab man never embraces his wife. Families do not gather to go to mosque or church.

The sins of omission and commission in spite of network broadcast standards and executives charged with monitoring programs for images that denigrate entire communities. CBS-TV's Alice Henderson says, "There is no intent by CBS... to unfavorably stereotype individuals of any ethnic origin." ABC TV's Tom Kersey insists that, "One of the most sincere promises this department can make is the inclusion of minorities in positive portrayals in all of our programming." NBC-TV's Broadcast Standards manual states, "Television programs should reflect a wide range of roles for all people... and should endeavor to depict men, women, and children in a positive manner, keeping in mind the importance of dignity in every human being." As of 1988, when this article was written, network practice has yet to follow stated network policy.

Some individual professionals are keenly aware of the unfairness of the Arab image on American television and have worked for change. Producer Alan Rafkin has written, "When I see a Jew portrayed a Shylock, I want to cry. So I know how an Arab feels when he is described as a killer." Howard Rosenberg, Pulitzer Prize winning critic of the Los Angeles Times, has written, "One day there will be an American TV drama viewing Arabs through the eyes of Arabs. One day in the very distant future, probably - for Hollywood is a stubborn child clutching a Linus blanket when it comes to relinquishing such ragged stereotypes as the Arab who is bloodthirsty."

In a letter published in the newsletters of the Writer's Guild and Screen Actor's Guild, writer-producer Ted Flicker, identifying himself as an American Jew, wrote, "Arabs are portrayed as crazy billionaires, terrorists, devious voluptuaries, barbaric white slavers, etc., ad nauseam. Dear fellow writers, on behalf of my Arab cousins, I say to you, think before you write that Arab...  I think honor requires that we, the makers of our nation's myths, consider the plight of these people... and help get rid of the Arab stereotypes." Way back in 1951 comedian Milton Berle, at the height of his fame, said it very simply when he told fellow comedian Danny Thomas, "There is no room in this business for prejudice." No room, indeed.

[This essay was written by Jack Shaheen and originally published in Cineaste (Vol. 17, No. 1, 1989, pp. 10-12). It has been slightly edited for reprinting here. The images above are from the same article. Shaheen has gone on to become an internationally acclaimed media critic. He is the author of Reel Bad Arabs (2009) and is featured in the documentary film of the same name, which is available for viewing on YouTube. You can also watch a recent lecture featuring Shaheen speaking on a similar topic.]

The 'New Time Religion' of Advertising

One of North America's foremost media theorists, Sut Jhally is professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and founder and director of the Media Education Foundation. He has written numerous books and articles on advertising, social communications and cultural politics. In the following interview with Kalle Lasn and Nicholas Racz, conducted in the Vancouver offices of 'Adbusters' magazine in 1993, professor Jhally suggests that modern advertising has become a cultural force resembling a religion. He implicates this 'new time religion' in the culture of consumerism threatening to bring about environmental collapse on a planetary scale. The way out of this mess, he suggests, is to mount a 'reformation' in attitudes toward ourselves.

Adbusters Quarterly: You talk a great deal about advertising as religion. Please elaborate on that.

Sut Jhally: Advertising has increasingly come to provide answers to those same questions that religion often raises. How does the world work? Where do I fit in? What is a moral life? But I don't think advertising is a religion in the same way that Catholicism or Islam are religions. The religion of advertising operates at the level of the everyday. It's close to the kind of religious practice called fetishism that existed in West Africa, in which people believed in God but also worshipped magical spirits that populated the ordinary places in which they lived. Those spirits can influence, not the big problems, but the small problems. They can influence the question about how to get better, how to heal yourself and how to enhance your sexual, romantic and family lives. That's where advertising fits in. It creates a world in which goods come to play all kinds of magical roles in our daily interactions. The religion of advertising is based upon a magic in which goods instantly can cure us of all kinds of ailments, instantly make you more attractive or act as a love potion. Buying the right good can act as a sort of passport into a magical world of consumption, a magical world of style.

AQ: Which religion is more powerful?

SJ: I would say it's the religion of advertising. We pay lip service to these other religions, we may go to religious services for an hour or two a week, but they don't dominate our lives. We live in the media culture 24 hours a day. This other vision is pumped at us constantly from all the media. Advertising is so powerful because it recognizes the real things that people want, the things that make people feel: friendship, love, security, some kind of autonomy. Advertisers use our real desires, our need to belong, for identity, for love, for friendship. That's why those images are so powerful.

AQ: But most people don't believe that advertising has that kind of power.

SJ: I think North Americans live in the most powerful and most effective propaganda system in history. Especially in the United States, people really believe that the media are free. A propaganda system only works if people think that they're in a free system. So if you know you're in a propaganda system, it ceases to work, which is why the Soviet Union fell apart overnight.

AQ: You make it feel like an eminently solvable problem, that all we have to do is simply make our propaganda system apparent to more and more people.

SJ: Except that you have to have access to society, and those media channels are already monopolized.

AQ: Did this propaganda system, this new time religion, just creep up on us? How did it happen?

SJ: It happened as a result of struggle - people struggling to see who would control public space, who would control cultural institutions and the public airwaves. There was a battle in the U.S. in 1934, which resulted in the Federal Communications Act in which commercial interests got the best airwaves. The people with other visions of broadcasting - were shunted off into the salt mine. Now that was the the result of a battle, and it's a battle that in Europe still goes on.

AQ: How do we get back on track?

SJ: Through democratization of the media. The big problem we now have is monopoly control of the media. We live in a very sensitive media society where vast corporations control everything. And it's their interests that structure our vision. The way to fight that is to fight for access and argue for diversity. It was one in the 1930s, but we lost.

AQ: Hasn't this battle been fought since 1934?

SJ: No. And it's very difficult to fight in the U.S. because historically, it's tied to another issue, which is anti-communism. Freedom in the U.S. is tied up with the freedom from government. It's a very specific American notion. I've always been struck by that. Americans have a very narrow definition of freedom. They think that if you can be free from government then somehow you're free. There seems to be no way of conceiving that there might be other entities as well that could pose threats to freedom. I think what's required is an enjoining battle over what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution really means. The First Amendment is a very interesting document, because it links up three freedoms - freedom of beliefs, freedom of speech and freedom of action. This supposes that when different ideas are expressed, then consensus will automatically develop from this free exchange. That 'Congress shall make no laws...' is no longer enough. We need to realize that there are now other powerful ways to limit free expression and debate.

AQ: In the underground art circles there is already a powerful realization that our mass media, especially television, are not free.

SJ: But it's on the fringes. The key question is how to get this realization from the periphery into the mainstream.

AQ: So how do we do that? How do we see through this religion and catalyze a 'reformation'?

SJ: It's an important question, because I actually believe the survival of the human race is at stake. We're now coming to a stage in human history when that notion of unlimited growth can no longer go unquestioned. The physical limits of the planet are literally bursting at the seams and if we keep producing at this rate, the planet will destroy itself. What we need now is a vision of society that is not based upon ever increasing numbers of goods. The 'reformation' will be a questioning of the very nature of economic growth, the health of our society, what we want it to do and how to organize it. The growth ethic is about consumption. It says happiness is connected to the number of things a society produces and the number of things individuals have. But having said that, I don't know how to do it. We can talk and analyze the situation, but when it comes to constructing that new vision, I don't know how to do that. The advertising vision has mobilized people around a set of social relations in which they ultimately lose, but with which they identify very strongly. It provides answers to questions that they ask. For the first time in human history, huge numbers of individuals are able to experience and explore their own needs and wants. It's not just manipulation, and it's not just a question of showing people that they're being fooled. Unfortunately, what we don't have yet is an alternative vision, an alternative way of thinking about ourselves. I think for the future of the planet, we need to develop that alternative vision and mobilize people around it. That's the challenge.

[The foregoing was originally published as 'An Interview with Sut Jhally' in Adbusters: Journal of the Mental Environment, Vol. 2 No. 3, Winter 1993, pp. 22-25. Portions of the interview were excerpted from Media and Values, No. 57, Winter 1992. More at Sut Jhally's homepage and the Media Education Foundation.]

Nutritional Wisdom in a Korean TV Drama

Since its production in 2003, 'Dae Jang Geum' or 'Jewel in the Palace,' the 54 episode Korean TV drama, gained popularity around the world. Part of the 'Korean Wave' of TV dramas, it has been dubbed into several languages and has aired on TV in Japan and China, among other places. In 2007, millions of people in Iran watched a Farsi dubbed version on national TV. Unofficial  'fansubbing' has provided access to the series in countless languages, from Arabic to Tagalog. On the surface, the series tells the story of the first female physician who earned the special title of 'the Great' in the kingdom of Korea in the first half of the 16th century, dramatizing an era of Korean history in a way that makes it appealing to people who live in different parts of the world today. Although it focuses on how society and religious authorities were against the presence of a woman in high ranking positions, and includes the requisite love story for productions of this sort, an important aspect of the series is its emphasis on a traditional system of nutrition and medicine.

The first part of the story takes place in the royal kitchen and emphasizes cooking skills based on the health characteristics of food, along with the careful preparation and selection ingredients. This traditional medical knowledge and its relationship with food becomes clearer when Jang Geum begins to study medicine and eventually becomes the King's private doctor. Her success in medical practice is related to her background in food preparation and her artistry in combining them is demonstrated in numerous scenes, such as for example when she creates an edible form of medicinal garlic for one of her patients.

Another important aspect of the series is in the names and titles used for diseases and medicines, which are in the common language spoken and understood by everyone in Korean society (although if this carries over through the multiple translations would need to be investigated). Even though there were medical institutions and pharmacies, people of the day also learned about medicine and about finding and preparing medicinal herbs from the countryside and the mountains by themselves. Rather than separating people from medical knowledge, as the academic works in the field tend to do today by way of specialized jargon, the health system depicted in the series suggests that traditional Korean medical knowledge and nutritional wisdom was understood by ordinary people as well as by the specialized practitioners.

The series also emphasizes a method of disease diagnosis from the traditional health care system that looked first and foremost at diet and nutrition. In the climax of the series, for example, Jang Geum carefully investigates from where the special food for the ailing king had come, and through that she finds out that drinking milk from cows that drank water from a sulfuric lake introduced arsenic into the patient's body, which in turn lead to his chronic illness. On another occasion, when there was an epidemic in different parts of the kingdom, the cause was traced to a vegetable blight. These aspects of the series bring to mind such modern maladies related to food, such as mad cow disease and avian flu. The difference is, however, that with today's eating habits increasingly dominated by the giant food industries, identifying and solving health problems related to food has become politically and economically inviable, if curbing unhealthy food intake can be construed as a barrier to trade or economic growth and thus liable to litigation, as was seen the McLibel Trial.

The ordinary people depicted in 'Jewel in the Palace' understand what they eat, the herbs, spices, vegetables and other ingredients in their foods. In addition to identifying ingredients, cooking skills are also related to subsidiary issues such as the change of seasons and knowledge of local flora and fauna. Even though it is a historical drama, it depicts a traditional medicine and food culture that is still part of the East Asian life and culture today, in many cases side by side with the modern sciences, which can be considered as part of the rich culture of the past that every human being can enjoy in every era. The series and its immense popularity today gives pause for reflection on the socio-economic aspects of health and indirectly suggests that the medical and nutritional wisdom of the past remains relevant.

[This review is by Yusef Progler and was originally published in 2008 as a media report in the Journal of Research in Medical Sciences, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 41-42. It has been edited for reprinting here. The original article is available as a PDF at the JRMS website and there are dozens of clips from the series on YouTube.]

Satellite Television on the West Bank

Living under Israeli occupation in the summer of 1998 got to be quite boring at times, especially during lock downs and blockades such as those on the West Bank following a spate of bombings in Jerusalem. But have no fear, television is here to 'occupy' all your idle hours. In large Palestinian towns like Ramallah, most people who can afford it subscribe to one or another of the various satellite TV services. The oldest and most popular is 'ArabSat,' which offers about 20 channels of broadcasting from various Arab countries. ArabSat does not include Libya, Iraq, Morocco, or Qatar, but some of these can be seen on other, smaller satellite services. There are also European services with dozens of stations, including Turkey and, when it's not jammed, Iran.

In the 1970s, the Saudis quietly initiated ArabSat. No one really noticed, as satellite TV was still a novelty. But with cheaper dishes available, and privatization of the airwaves on the rise, satellite TV caught on big in the late 1980s and ArabSat expanded. In the early 1990s, King Fahd signed a lucrative deal with AT&T, giving the mega communications corporation exclusive rights to rewire his kingdom. The power of the Saudi-AT&T media nexus can be felt in various ways around the globe. For example, Saudi sponsored American Muslim organizations, such as the Islamic Information Service based in Southern California, have entered into partnerships with AT&T, enticing viewers of its weekly 'Islami' program to purchase the transnational conglomerate's services 'for the benefit of Islam' (the program, not the religion, one might guess).

While the Saudis one way or another have their hands in many of the offerings on ArabSat, they also weigh in with two channels of official state TV that often resort to state propaganda, as in, for example, their programming designed to deflect criticism of the kingdom's well-documented exploitation of guest workers. In one oft-repeated sequence in English, and no doubt intended for journalists who haven't taken the time to learn Arabic, a jubilant roving reporter asks a number of nervous looking guest workers from Turkey, South Asia and the Philippines questions like: 'Are you being treated well by your sponsor here in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?' 'Do you receive your wages on time from your employer in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?' 'How do you like living in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?' Saudi state TV also runs programming catering to its homesick American expatriates, including 1970s sitcoms and dramas, and the occasional rock concert. Of course, the giggling and singing is briefly but dutifully interrupted for the Saudi state televised prayers.

While some stations are clearly state run TV, the origins of others are not so clear. The slickly produced 'Future Television' (al-Mustaqbal) is thought by many people here to be owned by Lebanese Prime Minister and Saudi-made multi-billionaire Rafiq Hariri. Likewise, 'Arab Radio and Television' (ART) is believed to be owned by a Saudi businessman, while the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) is said to have links with Nabih Berri. But whatever their ultimate funding source, all three share a commonality: they are promoting an American consumerist way of life with an Arabic cultural gloss. In fact, ART, whose motto is 'on every satellite around the globe,' also has branches broadcasting to Arab Americans via various cable networks.

ART often features fashion shows, sometimes with French models and Arabic voice overs (folks on the West Bank chide LBC with the Arabic pun 'ilbisi,' the feminine imperative meaning 'get dressed'). Along with live music shows and MTV-style music videos, LBC features a host of American style game shows. However, Future Television is the most enticingly enigmatic of all. It often features lengthy interviews with Hariri and other movers and shakers in the region. Some of this programming is useful, but Future TV also has lots of American flash and glitz, including fashion shows, music videos, junk science and pop medical reports, and Arabic dubbed or subtitled American sitcoms. The contradictions of Future TV are highlighted by its advertising fare. For example, commercials for beer promoting carefree abandon on beaches can be followed by veiled women selling laundry detergent. Anything goes, one must suppose, in the corporate driven 'marketplace of ideas.'

CNN is everywhere in Mideast satellite land; it is the 'voice of America' of the corporate video age, with specially edited programming for various target markets. As communications conglomerates fall into line with governments, there becomes no need for separate official outlets. On the West Bank, people are treated to CNN International, which has colonized most of the satellite services. CNN is also a major force in preparing the way for the consumer culture that long ago enveloped its American homeland. For example, it runs advertisements that equate corporate advertising with individual 'freedom of speech.' But this kind of free speech is only available to the mega-wealthy corporations who seek to benefit from the global consumer culture they are promoting; it's freedom of the press only for those who own one, as some one once quipped. It should not be confused with the kind of freedom of speech associated with, for example, political freedom or the right of free access to information. The implicit censorship of ArabSat, on which CNN appears, is obvious, for example, in its refusal to air Iranian broadcasts.

In fact, with all the stupefying diversity of information age programming, there are some glaring omissions. Iranian broadcasts are generally censored from most services, and all news from Iran is filtered through the Western or Arab news agencies. Even the Arab stations do their share of filtering Iran's news. For example, when Syrian president Hafez al-Asad visited Iran in July of 1998, he met with outgoing Iranian president Rafsanjani, incoming president Khatami, and the leader of the revolution, Seyyed Khamane'i. There were several live broadcasts of the various press conferences from the visit, but despite the Iranians supplying an Arabic/Persian translator, the Syrian TV stations used voice-overs with their own translation, and some of the interviews were heavily edited. At the same time, while Iranian broadcasts, including religious programming, are carefully filtered from all satellite services, Gulf Arab stations broadcast official news and Wahhabi doctrine in Persian nightly.

News on the Gulf oil sheikhdom stations is generic and always begins with the innocuous doings of each respective headman. In fact, most follow a simple script: 'His Majesty (fill in the blank) received a communication from His Excellency (fill in the blank) to which he responded in kind,' or 'His Excellency (fill in the blank) opened a new (fill in the blank) to cheers of admiration from his loyal people,' or some such other claptrap. However, despite the annoying and slavish praise of kings, sultans and emirs, the news is ironically somewhat better than in the USA, especially on international reporting. Even CNN seems to take itself a bit more seriously in the region, less they come to look bad on the 'Arab street.' Occasionally, for example, Syrian TV will show an American diplomat in an embarrassing moment, being asked real (as opposed to staged) questions and half-heartedly defending another indefensible Israeli policy. United Nations oriented news, non-existent in the US, also pops up occasionally on various ArabSat stations. But all this is faint praise for the regional satellite fare, since Americans are among the most propagandized people on the planet, and anything in contrast will likely seem more informative.

Satellite movie channels are also available on the West Bank, often featuring film festivals of Hollywood's latest. In the summer of 1998, purportedly to commemorate a visit by American actor Robert De Niro to Ramallah, the Satellite Movie channel ran a festival of his films for its pay-per-view customers. According to folks in Ramallah, De Niro is a friend of the Palestinians, though Americans would never know it as such stories are strictly circumscribed in the American corporate media. This is probably because Americans live in a Hollywood and advertising dreamworld, looking toward actors as role models (they even elected one president in the 1980s); if word got out that De Niro came to Ramallah and sat down for a hearty Palestinian meal of malfoof and mutton with his friends on the West Bank, perhaps the media moguls would fear that such 'rogue stars' might awaken Americans to question the uniformly pro-Zionist party line of most corporate media discourse.

Another mainstay of the American TV industry making its way to the region is the proliferation of credit card driven, shop at home programming. Numerous infomercials and program length paid advertising spots, many of them straight off of American TV overdubbed with Arabic dialogue, offer anything from the latest home fitness contraptions to an array of kitchen implements and cosmetics products. A new wave of locally produced infomercial programming is coming out of Egypt and Lebanon, but they are virtual clones of the American originals. And the result is the same - milk consumers twenty bucks at a time for stuff they can live without.

Taken as a whole, the Mideast satellite TV fare doesn't say much for the 'information revolution' that is supposed to revolutionize global communications; the majority of what one finds is the same old infotainment, morally questionable diversion, and cyber-consumption of the mainstream corporate American and European media. And despite its potential to put information in the hands of 'the masses' (or at least that small percent of humanity who actually have access to computers and internet connections), the internet is little better. According to a tally at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which monitors daily global internet traffic, the largest volume of internet activity to date in the summer of 1998 is the transmission and receipt of pornography and erotica. The folks at ArabSat and its cohorts don't yet allow porno on their television stations; the French tried to introduce some soft-core, but the station was soon cut from the ArabSat lineup. For now, Israeli TV remains the only outlet for this most popular of all 'information' on the Euro-American paved superhighway. Perhaps there is a revolution on the way, then, one which will be fueled by an increasingly arrogant media apparatus that promotes a disdainfully narrow lifestyle of greed, frivolity, corruption, and individualized self-gratification in a region where one would hope people may know better.

[This is a slightly edited version of an article by J. Progler that was originally published in Third World Resurgence (Vol. 90-91, October 1998)].

TV and the Irreproducibility of Reality

Time for a swim. I ease myself down from the rocks into the chilly water, feeling the mud between my toes. I stand for a minute, aware of the line on my calves between the cold of water and warmth of sun, and then dive in a taut stretch. I can feel the water rushing past my head, smoothing back my hair. As I stroke out to the middle, I'm conscious of the strength and pull of my shoulder blades. I haul myself out onto a rock in the middle of the pond, and sit there dripping. A breeze comes up, and lifts the hairs on my back, each one giving a nearly imperceptible tug at my skin. Under hand and thigh I can feel the roughness and the hardness of the rock. If I listen, I can hear the birds singing from several trees around the shore, and a frog now and again, and from the outlet stream a few hundred yards away a faint burbling - always changing and always the same. If I listen without concentrating, it's mainly the wind that I hear, a steady slight pressure on the leaves. I can see a hundred things - the sun reflects off the ripples from my passage and casts a moving line of shadow and sparkle on the rocks that rise up at the water's edge. I can smell the water. I can taste the water too - not the neutral beverage you drink because there's nothing in the fridge, but wet, rich, complete. As it drops into the corner of my mouth there's the slightest tang of salt from the trail sweat in the afternoon. I can feel my weight - feel it disappear as I slip into the water, feel it cling to me again as I drag myself back onto the rock.

TV restricts the use of our senses - that's one of the ways it robs us of information. It asks us to use our eyes and ears, and only our eyes and ears. If it is doing it's job 'correctly,' you lose consciousness of your body, at least until a sort of achy torpor begins to assert itself, and maybe after some hours a dull headache, and of course the insatiable hunger that you never really notice but that somehow demands a constant stream of chips and soda. If you cut of your nose to spite your face, or for any other reason, it wouldn't impair your ability to watch television. You could make these same objection about other media, too - about writing, maybe. You can't smell words on a page. But you can summon a sense of smell. I hope the first paragraph of this essay, however dimly, triggered your sense memory; it is not, I think, reproducible on television.

Even the senses that TV caters to, sight and hearing, it limits. It rarely provides a vista, not unless the Goodyear blimp is on hand. (My family gathered around the TV each New Year's Day for the opening seconds of the Rose Bowl coverage because the camera would briefly pan around the Los Angeles mountains where we once lived.) Its instinct is for the close-up. In the three or four years between the time I stopped watching TV and the time I began this project, the camera had tightened in dramatically on people's faces, especially during commercials - a man would be selling  you financial services and you cold count the worry lines around his eyes. But this tight shot demands one center of attention. If you're shooting Nova, you can get a nifty shot of an ant mating, but you can't, say, lie on your stomach and observe one square foot of ground. Here's a big spidery thing waving back and forth on improbably legs, and a line of ants, and the wind dropping needles from the bottom bough of a small pine. TV can't deal with faint noise, either; even 'background' music is in the foreground, and only one sound at a time is permitted. When people shout, the decibel level doesn't really rise much - you knew Crazy Eddie was screaming because of his hand gestures, not his volume, which was certainly a blessing, but it all contributes to the sense of living in a muffled, shrunken world.

TV chops away perspective, too. On the mountain, even if your eye is drawn to something in particular, your peripheral vision fills in all sorts of detail, constantly. When you watch TV your peripheral vision ceases to function - you stare at the screen like a pitcher staring at the catcher's mitt. You no longer even notice the set - the frame, the knobs, the antenna (if you're still backward enough to need an antenna). Your vision is cut down to maybe 10 degrees of the horizon - on a large screen maybe 15 degrees. What we see, we see sharply - the images have been edited so that peripheral vision is unnecessary. In the Cosby living room there is a staircase, and in front of it a sofa, and the family is sitting on the sofa. No one is off in the corner making faces - it's fantastically stripped down, uncomplicated, and as a consequence whoever is in the foreground assumes vaster importance than he'd be granted under an open sky.

Any art, of course, does this to one degree or another - the artist wants you to focus on something he or she has chosen, picked out from the world. But the experience of watching, say, a play in the theater differs vastly from the experience of watching a television drama. The curtain comes up and down, lights shift on and off, the volume goes up and down - if you are sitting front row left you may see action quite different from what you would fifteen seats to the right or thirty behind. Most of all, you can choose what to watch. There is more than the eye can take in, far more. You may spend the whole scene looking at what the TV director would call the reaction shot, or you may let yourself get caught up in the background. Sometimes the actors come right out among you - they may touch you. In any case, your absorption is of an entirely different character. Movies move in the direction of television, but even they have much more periphery - even on HDTV  with Dolby stereo it's hard to imagine a television epic, a spectacle. No one's ever shot a scene for television with a case of thousands.

Or consider the difference between watching a baseball game on TV and watching one at the park. Technology enriches the TV version with close-up and slow motion and instant replay, but at a great price. It deprives you of the enormous perspective available to anyone in the stadium, the incredible choice of what to look at. TV looks at pretty women on occasion but never at the fight in the stands or the man selling beer or the outfielder hitching his pants. TV filters out most of the familiar sound of the ballpark, too - the sourceless, undifferentiated babble that comes from forty thousand people talking, laughing, rustling sacks of popcorn, a sound that the crack of the bat breaks so cleanly through, refocusing everyone's attention. TV systems are planning to introduce new interactive technology that that will allow you to select between, say, three or four camera angles during the course of a game. But this sort of choice only underlines how much TV amputates your senses. What is there at a circus that can't be topped by a hundred spectacles a night on television? And yet circuses survive - what TV picture can compete with the humid excitement? And three rings! A delicious overload of the senses, starved on television's visual Pritikin regimen. Still, the time may be coming when this overload seems like too much - when we prefer our baseball on TV. When it begins to seem more real on TV. At the beginning of And So It Goes, Linda Ellerbee's book about her TV career, she recalls a conversation with colleagues about whether her new show should be live or on tape. Her son Josh overheard the argument and interrupted: 'This is live,' he said. 'You , me, everybody in this room. This is live. That, Mom,' he said pointing to the box, 'that's television.'

During the 1990-91 war in the Persian Gulf, people said we were seeing things as they happened, live, with gut-wrenching immediacy. In truth, we were seeing what television was able to show us - the lights of tracer fire flashing over Baghdad were in some way impressive, but if I'd been told they were a laser show commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Iraqi electric utility I'd have nodded my head. The shudder, the concussion, the dust, the smell, all the things that even a moderately competent writer would express, TV can't. Most of all, the confusion - the camera and the small screen can't cope with confusion because they search relentlessly for a center, a focus. 'Does TV "bring the war into your living room"?' asked Mark Crispin Miller in his book Boxed-In. 'In fact, the experience is fundamentally absurd. Most obviously there is an incongruity of scale, the radical disjunction of locations. While a war is among the biggest things that can ever happen to a nation or a person, devastating families, blasting away the roofs and walls, we see it compressed and miniaturized on a sturdy little piece of furniture, which stands and shines at the very center of our household.' If you wanted even the slightest sense of what the war in Iraq was like, how it felt, you'd be far better off hiring someone to come at some random hour in the night and toss a brick through your window.

[Bill McKibben watched every minute of American TV programming available on nearly 100 cable channels in Fairfax, Virginia, over a 24-hour period in May 1990 and compared that to spending 24-hours camping out on a mountain. He wrote about the experience in The Age of Missing Information (Plume Books, 1992), from which this essay is extracted (pp. 188-193).]

Child Development in the Media Age

In 'Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood,' educational theorists Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg assemble a collection of essays on children and the commodification of identity. They bring together a number of contemporary scholars of education, psychology and sociology into an interdisciplinary study of children’s popular culture and its implications for schooling and child development. Steinberg and Kincheloe introduce the essays with a chapter entitled ‘No More Secrets: Kinderculture, Information Saturation, and the Postmodern Childhood.’ The basic premise in their introduction is that the ‘information age’ has radically altered childhood, especially in the US but also in places adopting the American way of life, to the point that even the most basic assumptions underlying education and psychology are hopelessly outdated.

Much of modern schooling is premised on the belief that children can be initiated into the adult world through rationally constructed 'stages of development,' with parents and teachers controlling access to the adult world. But television, computers and much of social life in modern consumer societies blurs the distinctions upon which this premise is built. In the postmodern media world, children are often more familiar with adult subjects – even traditionally taboo topics like sex and drugs – than many adults. Parents and teachers in particular still often treat children as essentially protected from the ‘real world,’ even though that world is laid open for all to see by way of the increasingly pervasive electronic media technologies. With an ironic twist on a 1960s idiom, Steinberg and Kincheloe suggest that ‘the revolution... has been televised, brought to you and your children in vivid Technicolor.’

The authors outline their thesis that it is the mega-media corporations who are constructing and benefiting from the postmodern child: ‘Using fantasy and desire, corporate functionaries have created a perspective on late-twentieth-century culture that melds with business ideologies and free-market values. The worldviews produced by corporate advertisers to some degree always let children know that the most exciting things life can provide are produced by your friends in corporate America. The economics lesson is powerful when it is repeated hundreds of thousands of times.’ As an antidote to this corporate indoctrination, Steinberg and Kincheloe recommend a form of ‘media literacy’ for parents and teachers, with the goal of exposing ‘the corporate curriculum and its social and political effects.’ The rest of the book is this thesis put into practice, with essays on various aspects of the corporate constructed childhood (or what they term as ‘kinderculture’), from film and television to magazines and video games.

Professor of education Henry Giroux contributes a chapter asking, ‘Are Disney Movies Good for Your Kids?’ His inquiry into the global entertainment corporation was sparked by watching Disney movies with his own children. Like most parents, Giroux assumed that Disney films were relatively harmless entertainment. But by watching more carefully, he noticed that Disney reproduces many of the more racist and sexist beliefs and practices of modern American society. Giroux’s analysis is sophisticated, and he is careful not to fall into the trap of the American Christian Right, who see all sorts of (often ridiculous) conspiracies in Disney features. Rather, Giroux believes that, due to its power as a cultural icon, Disney ought to be taken seriously by scholars and its productions critically analyzed. After analytically viewing some Disney films of the day, such as ‘The Little Mermaid,’ ‘Aladdin,’ ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ ‘The Lion King,’ and others, Giroux concludes that ‘cultural workers and educators need to insert the political and pedagogical back into the discourse of entertainment.’ He also suggests that parents and educators make Disney accountable for what it produces, citing the example of Muslim and Arab organizations in the US who protested and succeeded in getting Disney to modify some of its racist caricatures in the animated feature film, ‘Aladdin.’

Like Giroux, educational psychologist Eleanor Blair Hilty takes a cue from her own child’s television viewing habits and provides a critical reading of two popular educational television programs, ‘Barney’ and ‘Sesame Street.’ Concerned about the unexamined perception among parents and teachers that such programs are somehow ‘educationally valuable,’ she found that a major problem with shows like ‘Sesame Street’ is that they promote passive learning. Hilty extends her discussion of educational television by suggesting that parents and teachers ought to engage the current debates on public TV by asking ‘whether public television is functioning for the public good,’ and identifying ‘who determines the goodness and worth of these programs.’

Media scholar Douglas Kellner weighs in with an essay on a popular Music Television (MTV) series of the 1990s, ‘Beavis and Butt-head,’ which continues to air on some MTV clones in Asia. Noticing that his students made frequent reference to the series, Kellner watched every episode for two years, from its premiere in 1993 until 1995. His analysis, versions of which have appeared in a number of books and journals (most notably his 1995 book Media Culture), is erudite and wide-ranging. Like many other authors in Kinderculture, Kellner is careful not to write off popular culture as unworthy of scholarly study. While he sees ‘Beavis and Butt-head’ as a metaphor for the downward mobility of American middle class white youth, Kellner also succeeds in identifying both the reactionary and subversive elements of the series. For example, under all the bathroom humor and adolescent hooliganism of the series, Kellner finds some wry critiques of many of the more repressive and irrational aspects of American society. But at the same time, ‘Beavis and Butt-head’ also reproduces some of the most dangerous sexist and racist attitudes of contemporary American society. To pass beyond this analytic juncture, Kellner utilizes a method which seeks to find a third way of reading corporate media productions, complementing and complicating the ‘dominant paradigms [that] either theorize media effects as direct and manipulative or privilege the role of the audience in constructing meaning.’

The chapters in Kinderculture continue with similar analytical readings of other popular children’s media fare, with chapters on such diverse topics as video games and interactive media, ‘Mighty Morphin Power Rangers’ (as an example of what the author of that chapter calls ‘the aesthetics of phallo-militaristic justice’), horror fiction (in particular the ‘Goosebumps’ series of stories), children’s magazines, trading cards and ‘Barbie’ dolls. Each essay contributes a piece to the creation of a clearer picture of corporate America as an increasingly powerful force in constructing contemporary childhood. Taken as a whole, Kinderculture reveals a third force in the media that joins (and even undermines) the traditional sites of child development in families and schools.

These connections are perhaps most apparent in the last chapter, featuring Kincheloe’s essay on the global junk food conglomerate, McDonald’s. Recalling his own childhood, Kincheloe reflects on how his family was in a sense programmed by McDonald’s ‘regulation of customer behavior’ through its carefully designed facilities and exceedingly enticing advertising. In reading McDonald’s advertising, Kincheloe concludes that the ‘greatest irony of these ads is that even as they isolate the family from any economic connections they promote the commodification of family life.’ This final chapter also includes some concluding remarks in which Kincheloe suggests that the main purpose of Kinderculture is to expose the machinations of power involved in shaping culture and consciousness:

'Few Americans think in terms of how power interests in the larger society regulate populations to bring about desired behaviors. In America and other Western societies political domination shifted decades ago from police or military forces to the use of cultural messages. Such communications are designed to win the approval or consent of citizens for the actions taken by power elites. The contributors to this book in their own particular ways are involved in efforts to expose the specifics of this process of cultural domination.'

Upon first glance, it may seem that Kinderculture might only be relevant to American parents and educators. But with global media networks invading every corner of the planet, American culture is in many ways becoming global culture. This is of concern to peoples throughout the Third World, wherever they may live. Disney films, or television series like ‘Sesame Street,’ ‘Barney’ and ‘Power Rangers’ (which actually originated in Japan) are translated into dozens of languages throughout Asia. McDonald’s has set up franchises in most major cities throughout the Third World. Many satellite TV stations worldwide air MTV (or one of its clones like Star TV in Asia). American media conglomerates are among the largest publishers of textbooks and educational materials worldwide (which besides contributing to the hegemony of Western knowledge also maintains English as a global language). Barbie dolls are marketed throughout Asia and Africa (in appropriately ‘multicultural’ versions). The list could go on but the conclusion is clear: Kinderculture is going global fast. While some parents and consumer groups have quite admirably concerned themselves with the overtly racist aspects of American media culture, there is much less activity toward trying to understand some of the more subtle indoctrinating forces at work on their consciousness. This useful collection of essays will likely provide much needed insight into the more insidious (but no less damaging) aspects of the American-directed corporate construction of childhood. This, in turn, may enable activists and teachers throughout the Third World to develop an array of locally-grounded individual and collective initiatives and responses to what can only be seen as a pervasive affront to human dignity and intelligence.

From the Book
Page 26: What often inhibits understanding of the pedagogical power of popular culture in general and kinderculture in particular involve the society’s failure to recognize that power plays an exaggerated role in the shaping of personal experiences. This relationship is so apparent that it is often lost in its obviousness. Power produces images of the world and the people who inhabit it that make meaning for those who receive the images. The films, books, video games, and TV shows of kinderculture shape the way white children, for example, understand the poor and racially marginalized – and in turn how they a white people come to recognize their own privilege. Language patterns connect with this production of images to reinforce power’s influence, its ability to provide the context in which children encounter the world. The advent of electronic hyperreality has revolutionized the ways knowledge is produced in ths culture and the ways children come to learn about the world. Parents and educators need to appreciate the nature of this revolution and its role in identity formation. Simple condemnation of kinderculture accompanied by calls for censorship is insufficient; equally ineffective is a policy of benign neglect. Concerned individuals should begin with an attempt to understand these dynamics in all their complexity and ambiguity, followed by an effort to involved themselves in the public conversation about them. In this context adults may come to appreciate the fact that postmodern children’s confusion and identity disorientation may be a reasonable reaction to the incongruity between kinderculture’s and schooling’s positioning of children.

Further Reading
Consumers Association of Penang, How TV Affects Your Child’s Development (2007).
Steve D. Derne, Globalization on the Ground: New Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India (Sage Publications, 2008).
Ariel Dorfman, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (International General, 1984).
Henry Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Rowman Littlefield, 2001).
John de Graaf, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2005).
Linda Haas, From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture (Indiana University Press, 1995).
Donaldo Macedo, Media Literacy: A Reader (Peter Lang Publishing, 2007).
Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (Vintage Random House, 1994).
Eugene Provenzo, Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo (Harvard University Press, 1994).
Usha Rodrigues, Youth, Media and Culture in the Asia Pacific Region (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).
Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Scribner, 2005).
Shirley R. Steinberg, Christotainment: Selling Jesus through Popular Culture (Westview Press, 2009).

[Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood was first published by Westview Press in 1997, with a 2nd edition appearing in 2004 and a third edition due out in 2011. This review is extracted and slightly edited from Books for Critical Consciousness by J. Progler (Penang, Malaysia: Citizens International, 2010), and it is dedicated to the memory of the late Joe L. Kincheloe (1950-2008). Shirley Steinberg is currently the director of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy.]

Television as a Selling Machine

In 1922, an American farmer and electronics tinkerer by the name of Philo T. Farnsworth invented a scanning device that would lead to the development of television. Farnsworth’s ‘image dissector’ solved many of the problems faced by European and American technicians who sought a way to electronically transmit images, and control of Farnsworth’s invention would chart the course of television development. In 1939, Farnsworth licensed his device to American media mogul David Sarnoff of RCA. At the time, TV was a novelty but by the late 1950s it had grown into a powerful form of mass communications. When later asked what he thought about how his invention had progressed, Farnsworth, who died in obscurity in 1971, said he refused to watch TV and expressed disgust at its crass commercialization and the manipulation of the medium by the advertising industry. During Farnsworth’s lifetime, creeping commercialization came to infect every aspect of TV, and consumerism had become a way of life for most Americans, and increasingly the world over.

This relationship between consumerism and television is examined by Robin Andersen in Consumer Culture and TV Programming (Westview Press, 1995). Setting the stage for much subsequent research, Andersen addresses questions about the extent to which the advertising industry controls and shapes television, and the cultural environment that permits corporations to manipulate public perception. She sums up a key dimension of the relationship she seeks to reveal: ‘It is to say... that in selling commercial time to advertisers to sell products, broadcasters are also selling a product – their audiences.’ In other words, in the world of TV broadcasting, the product is the audience, or more specifically, carefully segmented parts of the broader audience for television. By way of sophisticated marketing surveys, advertisers and broadcasters profile audiences which are then targeted with specifically designed campaigns aimed at particular demographic segments of the audience. These profiled audience segments are then bought and sold like any other commodity in the American economy, except that most Americans do not realize that their attention spans and viewing habits are being traded for high profits.

In the first three chapters, Andersen provides some necessary background on the broadcasting and advertising industries. Especially useful is chapter Three, ‘Emotional Ties That Bind: Focus Groups, Psychoanalysis, and Consumer Culture.’ Andersen uncovers an army of smug technocrats with PhDs in psychology who are mobilized by the advertising and broadcast industries to define, profile, segment and target audiences according to viewing and consuming habits. Most of the data is gathered directly from consumers, by way of focus group studies, questionnaires and other social science research methods. Based on the way that these academics talk about audiences much of this process appears to be quite guileful and it is a wonder that Americans are not out in the streets to protest the way they are cajoled and manipulated by advertising, whether to sell personal hygiene products or the latest political figurehead.

Toward her goal of offering a general model to help explain the discourse of advertising, Andersen looks at how product campaigns are developed. For example, an advertising campaign for a male baldness treatment ‘evokes feelings of regret, anxiety, and frustration by depicting an unpleasant childhood memory’ and then ‘promises relief from such long-held disappointments’ by offering the product as a form of ‘psychic healing.’ She concludes that this ‘pseudotherapeutic discourse, common to many advertisements, promises emotional comfort through the use of products that are inherently incapable of providing such comfort.’ Once this technique has become widespread, it creates a sort of generalized psychic climate through media that has a power and influence beyond the success or failure of any particular product campaign. In the overall view of TV advertisers, Americans appear to be a miserable lot, suffering from baldness, bad breath, body odor, obesity, indigestion, headaches and hemorrhoids, and also from a host of emotional anxieties and psychological disorders, for which a vast array of products is offered as relief. But, as Andersen notes, from a sociological perspective ‘the product and its functional qualities are irrelevant.’ Rather, it is the linkages that are important: ‘Keying into psychic desires, needs, frustrations, and anxieties, and then tying those feelings to products, has become the strategy of choice for an industry always searching for the most effective mode of persuasion.’

Part of Andersen’s work is also to detect changes in advertising strategies. In the early days of advertising, the product features were primarily promoted, but as advertising become more sophisticated the emotional and psychological linkages became increasingly important. Ongoing marketing research throughout the 1980s developed what has come be known as the ‘soft sell’ as a preferred mode of persuasion for advertisers whose products would otherwise be virtually indistinguishable on the basis of their function alone. In elaborating on how these linkages between products and emotions are made in the industry, Andersen exposes the specialists working behind the scenes: ‘Anthropologists and psychologists employed by ad agencies spend hundreds of hours probing their subject to determine the hidden desires that motivate behavior.’ For example, researchers at Saatchi and Saatchi, one of the largest global advertising firms, ‘strive to find ways to connect cigarettes with relaxation and to associate fast food with a feeling of safety.’ Such insidious connections have become standard fare in advertising, that has almost taken on a therapeutic function in the society. Although her generally materialist analysis overlooks the spiritual dimensions of culture, Andersen suggests that the:

lack of resources and of meaningful mental health care has left a void in American life. And many people have no means of learning the discursive and emotional strategies necessary to achieve emotional and personal fulfillment. It is no wonder that, given the great need for psychological assistance but with so few providers of those services to the general public, the media in the 1980s became the main forum for expressing such needs. The discourse of therapy is now particularly pervasive on television, where talk shows, dramatic series, and advertising language have capitalized on human dissatisfaction and picked up the mantle dropped by the therapeutic profession.

Subsequent chapters cover specific instances of programming content geared toward selling products. Of particular interest is the fairly recent phenomenon of ‘product placement.’ Not satisfied to simply interrupt programs with advertising spots, sponsors have sought ways to weave products into plot lines, a practice which became pervasive in the 1990s and which is completely commonplace today. A vast middle-man industry has emerged that previews television scripts for potential product references, and solicits advertisers to pay for having their products featured. When a celebrity drinks a certain brand of soft drink, or drives a particular style of automobile, this is all presented by design and through contractual obligations. Each product appearing in a TV program, and also more recently in Hollywood movies, is there because of sophisticated negotiations and careful planning, even down to how many seconds or from what viewpoint the product will be visible. While junk food and trendy items turn up frequently in situation comedies, the scripts for dramatic programs frequently sell hi-tech products, such as computers, mobile phones and automobiles. This process is absolutely insidious and done with the utmost care to convince consumers that product placement simply makes programming more true to ‘real life.’ But perhaps in believing this to be true avid television viewers have become unable to distinguish between real life and fantasy, and the advertising industries, collaborating with broadcasters, have constructed this public perception.

In addition to the more obvious incidents of product placement, advertising intervenes in programming in other subtle and indirect ways. For instance, it is important to sponsors that television programs provide the ‘proper atmosphere’ for their product messages. One cornerstone of the consumer edifice is the notion that all problems are individual problems, and that they are therefore subject to individual choices and remedies. In this way, individualism – rather than social solidarity – is absolutely necessary for the survival of a consumer-based society. At the same time, this is a false sense of individuality. The contradictory message of most advertising is to construct a sense of individual identity through consumer choices, but which amounts to buying product like millions of other consumers who also want to express their sense of individuality through the commodities they purchase. Personal identity is intertwined with product consciousness to such a degree that American youths pay for the ‘privilege’ of wearing logos on their clothing as a marker of status and personal style.

In addition to fostering a contradictory sense of individualism, another advertising mainstay is its reliance on an artificial sense of ‘family values.’ Andersen suggests that:

for American culture, as everyday life is ruptured from the political context, the family has become the site of struggle for meaning that embodies all the contradictions of the discourse of persuasion. Presented as Utopian fantasy, it is simultaneously the source of all dysfunction. Even if pleasure is to be found within its confines in the present, family structures of the past are responsible for our dysfunction... As the flashpoint of our culture, family life backs us into a corner, trapping us in a search for happiness within a fantasy built from fragments of the shattered dreams of our childhood.

These shattered dreams are exploited by television talk shows, especially those in which ordinary people bear their souls in front of an audience and often with a pop psychologist urging them on, which have in many ways become public forms of psycho-therapy. In a chapter on ‘The Television Talk Show: From Democratic Potential to Pseudo Therapy,’ Andersen shows that any potential for talk shows in contributing to meaningful public discourse and creating social spaces for dialog and discussion is lost in the rush for ratings and advertising revenues. Initially conceived for stars and celebrities to brag about their latest accomplishments, talk shows in the 1980s and 1990s also became forums for people to vent their personal tragedies disconnected from social, political or economic realities. In the final analysis, as Andersen suggests,

talk shows – like advertising and entertainment programming – address real needs but do not fulfill those needs. Talk shows respond to the need for a public forum on issues of common concern, but, like traditional news formats, they fail to connect personal experience with the larger socioeconomic context. Therefore, they cannot help individuals understand their own lives in relation to the social, political and economic forces that shape them. The TV therapist has come to replace the expert (or political official) as the voice of wisdom. Talk shows speak with a therapeutic language that examines only a privatized landscape of human experience, further rupturing individual needs from collective solutions. Instead of understanding and knowledge, television talk offers its viewers the voyeuristic pleasure of gazing into the private lives of society’s victims. In essence, television’s therapeutic discourse prevents the public from understanding social issues and participating in the answers to social problems.

After chapters on ‘Reality-based Police Shows,’ ‘Privacy and the Culture of Surveillance,’ and ‘Advertising the Persian Gulf War,’ Andersen returns to the talk show format and its relationship to the 1992 US presidential elections that brought Bill Clinton to power. The same problems with the therapeutic format persist: ‘The discourse of TV therapy is now so pervasive that it penetrates the formulation and definition of public problems. And politicians have learned to stay within its parameters. For instance, the amount of time taken up with the talk-show testimonial style left Clinton no time to answer the question about drugs in broader political terms. In effect, the talk show strategy allowed him to avoid relating the problem of drugs either to social or economic issues such as unemployment, poverty, and rage or to substantive policy proposals.’ It is in this way that Andersen has suggested that the methods and techniques initially developed to sell commodities have now become major anti-social and anti-political forces in American society, which is even more apparent as political campaigns since 1992 have further devolved into personality contests devoid of actual social substance.

Although somewhat dated by today’s standards, Consumer Culture and TV Programming remains an engaging and provocative work. Readers will no doubt enjoy Andersen’s discussion of programming content, but the real value of her work is in identifying the therapeutic nature of television in a dysfunctional society and in offering a way to think about advertising as a contentious social force. Advertising and programming have become intertwined in ways that insure big profits for corporations while excluding citizen-consumers from participating in meaningful public discourse. Television and consumer culture work together to ease the burdens of living in a consumer society and a pseudo-democracy, while simultaneously contributing to and perpetuating the severe social, political, cultural and economic problems that plague modern industrial civilization. For that reason alone, this book should be essential reading for students, teachers and activists alike, particularly those living in areas where American-style commercial TV programming is becoming pervasive. What was once perhaps a particular pathology of American society has now become global, to the extent that the assumptions, methods and techniques of advertising have transgressed national borders and boundaries, creating a sort of transnational consumer society. Andersen also provides insights that can inform decisions that many NGOs might face regarding the role of television in their social and political activities. Discussions of television that focus only on using the medium for broadcasting an overt message of some sort, or to insist on avoiding only the morally questionable programming content, miss the real influence of television on society. Because television has constructed a framework for situating social problems, duties, behaviors and opinions within a limited framework, this volume can help concerned activists and teachers avoid the self-deceptive ruse of taking the discursive conventions of advertising and television at face value. This work may inspire local discussions that will take the general analysis offered by Andersen on the American context and apply it globally to other local contexts, especially in those places where the media have taken the sharp turn toward consumerism.

Further Reading
Antonio V. Menendez Alarcon, Power and Television in Latin America: The Dominican Case (Greenwood, 1992).
Michael H. Anderson, Madison Avenue in Asia: Politics and Transnational Advertising (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984).
Arthur Asa Berger, Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Impact on American Character and Society (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).
Consumers Association of Penang, Beyond Consumer Culture: Other Possibilities, Potentials and Practices (2007).
Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Harvard University Asia Center, 2004).
S.M. Mohamed Idris, Malaysian Consumers and Development (Consumers Association of Penang, 1986).
Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2002).
Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (Picador, 2002).
Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information (Random House, 2006).
Neil Postman, How to Watch TV News: Revised Edition (Penguin, 2008).
Alissa Quart, Branded: The Buying and Selling of Our Teenagers (Basic Books, 2004).
Juliet Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (Scribner, 2004).
Peter Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (Routledge, 2001).
Rob Turnock, Television and Consumer Culture: Britain and the Transformation of Modernity (I.B. Tauris, 2007).

[This review is extracted and slightly edited from Books for Critical Consciousness by J. Progler (Penang, Malaysia: Citizens International, 2010). Robin Andersen's book A Century of Media, A Century of War (Peter Lang, 2006) won the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award for 2007.]