Page 311 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

300 Notes

82 A curious anecdote relevant to our discussions here is that when television
broadcasting did arrive in Fiji in 1995 there were already a number of televi-
sion sets there, supplied – along with VCRs and tapes – by Australian
supporters of a US televangelism ministry.
83 For a complete account of this project, including an extensive discussion of the
methodology also used here, see Hoover et al. (2004).
84 Geertz (1973), p. 90.

2 From medium to meaning
1 “Reception” as a term of art in media and cultural studies refers to the
processes, practices, and contexts wherein people consume and use media.
2 Habermas (1989). There has been, of course, a vibrant debate over Habermas’s
work, particularly in relation to questions of who was or is included in discur-
sive civil society rooted in such reception. Cf. Fraser (1993).
3 Nord (2004), Underwood (2002).
4 Moore (1995). See also McDannell (1998) and Morgan (1998).
5 De Tocqueville (2000). See also Bellah (1986).
6 This distinction continues to be seen in such things as the separate “lists” of
book sales kept by the publishing industry. Even though “religious” books
have been among the best-sellers in volume, they don’t appear on the New
York Times’s best-seller list, but on a separate “religious” list.
7 Fischer (1994).
8 For a synthetic recent account, see Schudson and Tifft (2005).
9 Ibid., pp. 22–3.
10 Thompson, John B. (1995) The Media and Modernity, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, in particular Chapter 1.
11 See Promey (1996) and Rosenthal (2001), for more complete discussions of
these debates within American Protestantism (discussed further below). Two
prominent streams of thought are represented by Bennett (1993), a moralist
reading of contemporary culture, including media, and Robert Putnam (1996),
who contends that the content and cultural location of much of television is
counter-productive to social and civic engagement. NB, as well, that the so-
called “Leavisite” approach to culture, against which contemporary cultural
studies lodges itself, conceives of such “popular” media and “popular” culture
as something to be overcome by “high” or “refined” culture.
12 Advertisers of course became directly and unabashedly involved in the production
of early broadcasting, for example, a situation that only came to an end with the
“quiz show scandals” of the 1950s (for a complete discussion, see Barnouw
1990). Others argue persuasively that the commercial basis of American media,
far from freeing those media from influence, integrate them into structures of
dominant economic influence. See McChesney (1995) and Alterman (2003).
13 McChesney (1995). This was also a trend in British broadcasting and in other
“public service” systems as well.
14 For an account of this phenomenon in youth-oriented marketing, see
Goodman, Barak and Dretzin, Rachel, PBS Frontline Video “The Merchants of
Cool,” WGBH, 2001.
15 Popular history and popular discourse recognizes, for example, the role of
William Randolph Hearst and his newspapers in the Spanish–American War.
See Sloan et al. (1989). See also Schudson and Tifft (2005), pp. 20–4.
16 So named because of the formation in the years 1930 to 1965 of a scholarly
project devoted to social theory and research that was based at the Institute for
Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. Major figures in this