Consumer Culture and TV Programming or Old Dominion Industrial Commonwealth Coal Politics and Economy in Antebellum America

Consumer Culture and TV Programming

Author: Robin Andersen

To what extent does the advertising industry control what we see on TV? What is the political and cultural environment that provides for the phenomenon of the corporate shaping of the mass media?Robin Andersen addresses these questions, which ultimately intertwine with the very concept of democracy: How can citizens participate in political culture when the information they receive through their mass media is molded by corporate and commercial demands? She discusses and analyzes the impact of the consumer imperative on popular news and TV programs and talk shows, the psychology of consumer culture, the differing narratives of the 1992 presidential election, how representations of the Gulf War resembled advertisements, and the overall escalating commercial imperative of the mass media. Andersen has done a splendid job of accessibly presenting to mass audiences and students a subject of enormous gravity—the steady penetration of marketing and advertising strategies into the very fabric of both news and entertainment television.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
1	Advertising, Economics, and the Media	14
2	The Producers and Consumers of Nikes and Other Products...	51
3	Emotional Ties That Bind: Focus Groups, Psychoanalysis, and Consumer Culture	72
4	Postmodern Theory and Consumer Culture	92
5	Thirtysomething, Lifestyle Consumption, and Therapy	118
6	The Television Talk Show: From Democratic Potential to Pseudotherapy	146
	The Crisis of Information	146
	The Talk Show's Lost Potential	158
7	Cops on the Night Beat	174
	"Reality"-Based Police Shows, Urban Community, and Criminal (In)Justice	174
	Issues of Social Control: Voyeurism, Privacy, and the Culture of Surveillance	198
8	Advertising and the Persian Gulf War	211
9	Democratic Talk-Show Strategies and the Competing Narratives of the 1992 Presidential Election	225
	Conclusion: The Commercial Politics of Postmodern Television	252
	Notes	273
	Bibliography	283
	About the Book and Author	295
	Index	297

Read also Introducing Windows Server 2008 or The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America (Studies in Early American Economy and Society Series)

Author: Sean Patrick Adams

In 1796, famed engineer and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe toured the coal fields outside Richmond, Virginia, declaring enthusiastically, "Such a mine of Wealth exists, I believe, nowhere else!" With its abundant and accessible deposits, growing industries, and network of rivers and ports, Virginia stood poised to serve as the center of the young nation's coal trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Virginia's leadership in the American coal industry had completely unraveled while Pennsylvania, at first slow to exploit its vast reserves of anthracite and bituminous coal, had become the country's leading producer.

Sean Patrick Adams compares the political economies of coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, examining the divergent paths these two states took in developing their ample coal reserves during a critical period of American industrialization. In both cases, Adams finds, state economic policies played a major role. Virginia's failure to exploit the rich coal fields in the western part of the state can be traced to the legislature's overriding concern to protect and promote the interests of the agrarian, slaveholding elite of eastern Virginia. Pennsylvania's more factious legislature enthusiastically embraced a policy of economic growth that resulted in the construction of an extensive transportation network, a statewide geological survey, and support for private investment in its coal fields.

Using coal as a barometer of economic change, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth addresses longstanding questions about North-South economic divergence and the role of state government in Americanindustrial development, providing new insights for both political and economic historians of nineteenth-century America.