Unknown Speaker 00:31 I guess we should start. There's someone in the near exam who has a watch. Could you let me know two things and a half hours when we're getting close to 330. Unknown Speaker 00:51 Needless to say, I did not choose this environment. People who are interested in communications and the life form and content of communications media affects people's sense of themselves are likely to be particularly turned off. But I have darkened auditorium with me suppose, where you can't see each other's faces. And everybody is facing me. We're also supposed to leave very ample discussion. I know this is something that is always expressed. And every feminist conference I have ever been to, for both the plenary sessions and the workshops, and we were all the best intentions in the world, it doesn't happen. I've stayed in more best intentions and hoping that it really will. And I'm going to try to discipline myself not to say everything I think, so that that can happen. If I can only find Unknown Speaker 02:07 this thing I can. Unknown Speaker 02:13 A colleague of mine at the Center for Research on Women at Stanford is also the wife of the dean of the Episcopal cathedral of San Francisco. And in that capacity, she knows a great man, a clergy in San Francisco. Two weeks ago, she ran into the female assistant rabbi of one of the reformed temples and got into this clergy family kind of conversation that we're likely to have. And towards the end, the rabbi asked my friend what was new with her daughter who is both a feminist and an actress, a struggling actress in New York, and she said, rather shamefacedly, well then she's got herself a regular job as an actress but but it's but it's on a soap opera. Oh, so the rabbi which soap opera? And she told her Ryan's Hope. The rabbi said, Oh, but that's one of mine. They discussed it for 100. But what character does she play on Ryan? So? And my friend said, If you close your Vaughn I tried making telling this anecdote without names, and it didn't come across funny. She plays Shavon to which the rabbi replied Shavon she's dead. Oh, wait, oh, no. She just gone away. So that's my epigraph. This discussion at Rabat says a soap opera female soap opera character. She's dead? No, she's just she's back. Unknown Speaker 04:11 I've been very much interested in the way that the women's movement in the last 12 to 14 years has related to the mass media. We saw evidences of it this morning from time to time in the in the plenary session, the kinds of references and assumptions that lay behind those references that inform the women's movement from its earliest days. I think that that heritage of media fatigue has affected the entire spectrum of progressive movements and the way we look at the media. The women's movement was the first movement to develop a really comprehensive critique of mass media. Prior to that what we had had in the way of recognition of the social function of the media and social content was isolated events that the NAACP picketing we revivals of Birth of a Nation. Pointing out correctly that that film contains vicious stereotypes and outright lies about black people, which encouraged, very explicitly encouraged racist violence. It was on that level of the social implications immediate. We only if you didn't dignify it by calling it a critique critique that talked about a more comprehensive level of the effective media came from the far right in the McCarthy period with its investigations of the film industry and the entertainment industry in general, where they made the most paranoid claims about the possible influence of this. So that nuance of a film insidiously inserted there by a communist or a fellow traveling actor or director. But all the parents when you read the the transcripts of those hearings, where they were investigating entertainers, are based on the assumption that the content of the mass media is in some way, extraordinarily fundamental to the continuation of the American way of life. As I said, this was based on a sort of paranoid notion about insidious mind control. It was not, perhaps to be dignified by the concept of a critique. But at this point, in the United States, as contrasted with Europe, there was not yet a left critique of the mass media and its relationship to to help people think the differences between the man the women's movement, and its early days. And these critiques were, first of all, the women's movement, talked about the media as to be sure as a carrier of stereotypes. Also, as about the media as a carrier of norms, which is a much subtler and more complex array of, of critique a level if we take in which you're talking about the media, not just telling you, like someone said this morning what women should be, but implying that this is, for instance, what women are, this is what the family is, this is what human life is about. And this is the borderline beyond which it doesn't happen to happen. The other major, major difference between the women's movement we take them and what preceded it, and what never, was that we perceive that as the media as having an influence on ourselves. That is, first of all, on the individuals self concept, the individual sense of the way things are and the way and what possible, what ways things might possibly be different. And we perceive ourselves as being among the individuals who when we were talking about that, it was not a question of talking about somebody out there, who was being manipulated into a mindless consumer of media information and theology, but rather that we perceived that we ourselves in our sense of who we were, what possibilities we had, had been influenced by by mass media. Unknown Speaker 09:07 There is some evidence in the before the present wave of the feminist movement in the publication of free dance the feminist mistake, feminists. Freudian slips, in which she she devotes what some people may regarded as an inordinate amount of space to giving evidence from women's magazines, the change of the concept of who could be a heroine, and what kinds of information is appropriate for stories. That was her field. And she wasn't making an exquisite claim that those short stories had had an effect on limit on creating the problem that has no name, they were part of a similar syndrome. And from that point on, there has there has existed this consciousness similarly The the, the new left out of which another phase of the early women's movement ping, how to critique of mass media based on notions of the culture of the spectacle and so forth, and yet also embraced the mass media embraced. In fact, the specter some at one aspect of its embrace the mass media, Jerry Rubin used to say you couldn't be a revolutionary, without, if you didn't have a TV. Abbie Hoffman pointed out I think, very conspicuously that, in Detroit during the riots that were white people calling up the TV stations to find out if there was rioting going on in their own neighborhood, in preference to let us say, looking out the window, and again, agreed that there was that was important in the, in the world, that that that situation existed, that there were people who, who regarded as that kind of source of information. Moreover, those of us who participated in the counterculture, and the new left of the 60s, had one form of mass media that we thought of, tended to think of, we analyzed it at all, as being kind of who was with rather than in conflict with our sense of outsider Ness in the mass culture, which was our music. And part of the feminist critique of mass media was a critique of rock music, the content of rock music, is, those of us in the early days were much less likely by 1969 letter said, to think of ourselves as living in the world where father knew best, and we already knew Father didn't know best. But it was more recently that we had begun to crawl out from under his thumb. And generally speaking, I would say that, for radiology, about the family, TV is clearly a crucial source. Whereas for radiology, about sexual, heterosexual relationships, what the norms are, and how those are supposed to be conducted music is, is a much more important source. So I think that part of the early feminist critique of mass media had to do with a sense of betrayal. That something that was a part of, however, much part of the mainstream of the industry was nonetheless supposed to be an expression of ourselves in our own culture was also part of what convey that things about women in the culture. Now, in those early days, the women's movement didn't have task forces and organizations around media. As such, what we did was so much more, it was that in 1969, you're going to go out and talk to a group in the community about women's issues. Putting together a slideshow, showing women as a subtext object in a series of ads, and having a tape of a press of rock music, I'm not going to want to vocalize this by saying that it was anything implying that there was anything wrong with doing this. But we had a tendency to do usually this evidence, look at this. And it was immediately accepted evidence. Yeah, wow. These things are everywhere, in our culture, because they were everywhere in this thing called mass culture. Unknown Speaker 13:45 In fact, in over the 12 years, or so, that there has been a visible magic women's movement, we have to free the mass media, something in the way that the 19th century feminist movement has treated the church had had to treat the church that is, first of all, as a major carrier of video of social ideology, including damaging ideology about women. Secondly, as a purveyor of norms and rules about how things should be how things are and what degrees of change might possibly be permitted. Thirdly, as an institution in the society, an institution that has economic and as well as ideological hegemony, power structure and firstly, as an institute a thing that you can get into in various ways that you there are there various ways that you can try to change this thing. The approaches to the media have ranged from On lawsuits attempting to block the relicensing of particular TV and radio stations, to the attempt to create a counter media, a feminist media says a feminist set of media to take control of, of those means of communication and do something different from what the mass media do. Do, they tend to liberalize the content of what's in the mass media to an outright turning once back on the possibility of progressive change coming from the source and the only possible progress coming, some destructive critique of what goes on in this thing. So there are parallels to how you would treat religion, the possible range of approaches to religion from a feminist point of view. Now, what I want to do here today is examine what the original feminist critique of mass media was. To what extent there has been positive change in content of mass media, and to what extent any of that can be attributed explicitly to the feminist, the existence of a feminist critique, to what extent there has been negative change. And what the present first critique of mass media finally, what, how any of this relates to the critique of mass media from the new rife? And what kinds of ways both as scholars and as feminists, we can proceed to move with, with this with with our history, historic vision, and our new vision of the mass media to do something with that. Now, what I want to do is, say a very, very few things so that this can be opened up. Unknown Speaker 17:24 The original critique of the mass media, as I say, tended to lean on this business of stereotypes and norms. And particularly as they affected or were likely to affect Unknown Speaker 17:42 the attitudes of young girls and women about themselves. Needless to say, since mass media are genuinely mass, and they have an audience of both sexes, the fact that the same information or misinformation is being conveyed to boys and men, it is essential to what kind of society we're going to have. So that we talked about the stereotypes of women as stupid, as emotional, as well slidy as magical, as contrasted with rational. In 1971, during one week, I counted the figures with me, but I counted how many women could perform magic on television. This was the heyday of nanny and the professor and genie who came out of a bottle and the one who, who pitched her nose and her teenage daughter who was a, an animated cartoon on Saturday mornings. And so on, there were there were some 40 Odd examples of magic performed by women, and no examples that particular week of rational thought being performed, females, and so on. And a lot of this was, was was delightful and funny to notice, except that it was also chilling. in its in its totality. Moreover, we we have and I won't even have to spell out when and this is a sense of what the initial critique was of the mass media vision of what a family was, and how, how the family related to one another. The mass media vision of women's role in the labor force, which was primarily not in it, but to the extent that women were what kinds of work they did do and what kinds of what kinds of workloads they had. The mass media vision of the nature of heterosexual relationships, what could what should be what could be and what was supposedly for everybody this is I say, tending to be communicated a great deal more in music than, than, say television. But being definitely there a sense of content we could all undoubtedly say what, what the details and specifics of that were Unknown Speaker 20:23 know how much of this has changed. There has been changes. You may have noticed last week that the two eldest girls of the Brady Bunch has become the stars of their own new series. And they are the Brady brides. The Brady brides have to share having having just married have to share a house. They know they have two different apartments but they neither of them can afford at least by herself. A mortgage. You see downright economic reality here intervening here they live in. In this sort of extended family setup, both of the Brady brides How are are married young, married, childless women who are professionals, employed professionals. One of them is even an architect like her clone of a father 1015 years ago, this is this is different. The progressive are not a great many more women with female characters on television are employed showed as employed outside the home. A great many more television families for better or for worse, and possibly for both are headed by a single female. 15 years ago, single parent families with the exception of Lucy who had to be depicted as a widow, although everybody knew that she used to be married to Desi Arnaz, who was still alive and kicking. But Lucy the widow that could hit her on kind of all the almost all the other single parent families of which television has always had an extraordinary number, who had burnouts. I once was gonna guilty, it was really of saying and maybe they don't think there's anything very funny about a woman trying to raise her kids by herself. But, in fact, there's obviously a great deal more to it than that. They're also on television, and in films, and to some extent, in interesting ways in the world of music, particularly in country music, for instance, has been a new emphasis on the female star depictions of certain kinds of strength, I keep edging, even when I say the positive thing, certain kinds of strength, acceptable strength among female. Unknown Speaker 23:00 The limitations of this assignment, I would like to get into an discussion, the extent to which each of these developments along with other progressive developments and positive waters we can see are packaged in such a way as to denature the possible liberatory or revolutionary content. I've been meddling specifically how television fiction deals with integrates assimilates. And sometimes the nature's elements of social change. And I thought I was going to look at homosexuality as my issue for that. And of course, I'm still doing that, because it's extraordinary and fascinating. Although unfortunately, you have to look up almost exclusively male homosexuality, you can't there's not enough. Not aren't enough lesbians in mass media, lesbian characters in mass media to be able to make any generalizations about except that both in television and in confession magazines, lesbians are rich. I'm sure that everybody will be glad to hear. It is the one generalization that is absolutely almost universal. That is that lesbians are privileged and very often have what in the real world is male kinds of power over straight women. Lesbians also fall in love with straight women. The mass media, as contrasted with the West has been the I was going to look at homosexuality, but I found it didn't have any long range implications because the introduction of gay characters, or the issue of gayness at all into mass media is so recently that although it's changed, and it's very exciting and interesting, the ways in which it's changed since say 1972 That's not a very long way projection. I decided to take them out. I would have to take a lot less excited. issue which is to say divorce, where again, it was that was almost as taboo in the 50s, as homosexuality was in the very early 70s. But look at that, and how that kind of issue which also is extraordinarily close to both sex roles, and the nature of the family has changed and developed over time. And again, how is one of the clearest things you can say about it is that in all the particularly continuing series, where there are divorced characters, then that is, the exquisite message that they are communicating, whatever they can be sensitization messages about the family underneath that the outward message is a reiteration of the most reactionary ideology about the family. Family is still Central, merely definitions of family who changed. What we're being constantly told him one way or another what children of divorced families are told in two interview stories is we're a better family and a stronger family. Because we did this than we would have been had we stayed together, rather than offering any kind of exclusive challenge to the notion of the family, or that perhaps, or any kind of alternative. The idea is, it's better, but we're still a family. This happens in I've seen it occur in a situation comedies live one day at a time, as well as very strongly in soap operas, which are all about patriarchal families and fatherhood and the nature and who is whose father, being one of the major controlling issues on every single sofa plot all the way through. They're all about fatherhood, about three apples, families in all sorts of ways. And yet, nobody ever stays married to the same person for very long at all. Rose Gold seems rather plenty book, which has some very brilliant moments in it as well. Called the show and told her she has a an appendix in which she counts, divorces, and who used to be married to whom and various sofa classes fascinating. She just lists and lists and lists two pages. And if you're, if like most media critics, you also have some element of the media freak in you. It is, it is exciting to read this kind of thing. As I say, it's packaged, the whole notion of the prevalence of divorce is packaged in such a way as to make the possibility of redefining the family and empowering women, specifically women, but all of us to take over for ourselves, Unknown Speaker 27:58 those things and and really have those things that people are supposed to get out of the family. None of that is possible, despite the fact that all of a sudden divorce is is such a central issue. It's certainly the case with responses to both the women's movement and the gay movement. Because although some of the positive changes, I think have been positive changes that show you women in the labor force show you strong women should occasionally show strong relationship, positive relationships among women. And so on. The one thing that is almost always negatively depicted. And television fiction specifically, is the women's movement. Characters were explicitly defined as feminists are they're not ever explicitly called lesbians there, but they have the muddy ugliest stereotypes of of the Bulldog. There are cheaper kinds of ways of making fun of the women's movement as well and more belong to an organization called ca. C. O. W. Congress was something that that's what of women mod herself who was, at best a quasi sympathetic character. Was your archetypal muddle headed, feminist, towering physically and certainly vocally over over the male, and after all, not being so darn oppressed. We that's the important thing that she had a feminist ideology just as she had a bleeding heart liberal ideology in general. And there was no way of figuring out from most plots, although you saw such a sexist middle class society being represented there. what it was that more or any other feminist had to be upset about. With homosexuality, it's even worse, in a way because I don't remember ever seeing much depiction of the existence of a homosexual movement, all of a sudden, this has become not all of a sudden, suddenly over a very short period of time, however, an acceptable either issue to base a plot around, or even more interesting that a character family and interesting concept you will notice in in, say a television series will include a homosexual or homosexual couple. And that was basically, at its worst in comedy. Being gay is considered like being a member of an ethnic group. So it's an acceptable thing to be about comparison. That is, everybody has an ethnic identity. It's packaged as a cultural phenomenon. And then of course, just as with blacks, or Italian American, there's a friendly stereotype, a warm stereotype, but a whole set of stereotypes because how the new right do you recognize your gay person in your character family? You can recognize your black person more easily, but how do you recognize your Italian How do you recognize your Irish person? How do you recognize your redneck by the application of free services types? And certainly, homicide, homosexuality is exists in that form. So much for the positive. Or the other. There was another positive sign in a way in the mid 1960s, to play like, Lorraine Hansberry who was dying of sickle cell anemia, gave a description of American society as it if you if you knew it, only from watching television, which she was doing a great deal of issue. She's listed a whole series of very funny things about America is this, this, this and this if you only know from watching television she ended up with and there were no negros. And of course, at that time, it was true Having eliminated the most vicious stereotypes getting rid of a misunderstanding and Bueller, for a very long time, we had nothing. And then in 1968, with Diane Carroll playing Julia, Unknown Speaker 32:46 just around the time, though, there was beginning to be a fight feminist critique of the role of women, or depiction of women in mass media, including television, that came to be Julia, the nurse who lived in Scrivener that story, I say in my book, something about the dead husband was supposed to have been a soldier, right? Because he must have been a mercenary. But in fact, that was not even followed for a long time until well into the 70s by a series of black family, situation comedies, and but black characters in the dramas up in the police dramas. That is a change and it's a positive one, although again, the content of that. As contrasted with the presence of lashes is something that has to be examined seriously. As to negative signs. They're the sexual revolution content that was in the print mass media. When we began this critique in the late 60s, the cosmopolitan girl has moved into television. It was much more explicit stuff about heterosexual freedom within certain carefully defined limits. about accepting and indeed embracing the notion of women as sex objects. There were all these gigolo comedies there was Charlie's Angels. There is more because there was more sexuality without. Without analysis, attempt to understand what that's about. There was more. Everything that we had to say 10 or 15 years ago about why the sexual revolution wasn't turning out to be a revolution for us, is now there on television without an acknowledgement. That stuff is not to my mind, very Sexy either. It's not about any of the issues around finding a genuine sexual freedom. And connecting that up with other other aspects of the liberatory potential in our lives. None of those things seems to me to be answered or addressed. Maybe the fans would forget. There was a familiarization and immediate with the existence of movements for social change, almost always, in a negative sense. There is. And of course, this has been the focus of the new feminist critique, much more violence in general, and sanctioned violence against women, as the subject of almost all forms of mass media from films, and not only those rated X to television, police drama, much more television drama, is about police, about the police and law enforcement in one way than it was 10 or 11 years ago, doctors were in then law enforcement is in now. Let me look at them some cases, there were differences. Popular music has that same. At the same time, there have been changes in that aspect of the media that underlies all the rest of this, which is to say, the, the economic basis, the content, that not the content, but the form the the fact that the media are, among other things, an institution and a business, and advanced capitalist society. One of the things that's happened is that there's been a tremendous concentration of media, there is less competition than there was before. And book and magazine publishing, has increasingly tended to be swallowed up by the mass media networks. Whereas film, production has been swallowed up by multinational conglomerates that do all sorts of other things that have nothing to do even with communications. What happens when you have your books and your television programs produced by the same companies, I think has an extremely chilling effect on the existence of literacy on one on the one hand, and the range of the debate the possibilities for the development of ideas coming out in print. What happens when films are produced by conglomerates is not always it's not at all dissimilar? Unknown Speaker 37:49 How many times recently have you gone to an American movie and seen that it's a gulf and Western production? Both I mean, they that's oil. It's also movies that matters. When it's not called from Western trans America. Trans America has the largest and ugliest I skyscraper in San Francisco where I live, people always saying what do they do? And the answer was everything. And that's, again, the major effect that that has on the content, in addition to this generally chilling effect on the production of ideas, I think, has to do is most noticeable in television, where one cannot fail to observe the the, the prevalence, so what you could only call cloning, that programs are, as they say, spun off of one another. There is a great deal of caution before investments are made in China and impossible changes. Because there's been a bit of diversity because it does represent such a large investment. And we have to, you have to have good numbers on the reading. So you can sell your minutes of advertising time, which is what, of course is about the degree of caution and sameness that exists within an industry exquisitely devoted to change and difference, and newness is staggering. The new feminist critique, as I said, tends to concentrate on the equation of violence and sexuality, as it appears in all media, and specifically, of course in pornography or the invasion of various kinds of hard and soft core porn into different forms and levels of the mass media. At the same time, of course, the mass media around attack under attack by the new right. And I think this is something that when we think about how we deal with the mass murder Do we have to understand, because who is attacking sex and violence? In the popular mind is not feminists. It's the new right, and who gets results. It's the new right. And what the results they get is nothing more or less than censorship. That means that we have to think very hard, I think about the nature of what a feminist demand is. Which means that it has to our understanding has to be based on a very different analysis of what is wrong. Of course, we know that what they're saying that what is wrong is the depiction of any kind of sexuality at all. Their notion of what's wrong with that Brooke Shields commercial, which they in that way, got off the air, it goes into England has to do among other things, with the denying of any kind of sexuality to adolescence. Rather than the use of adolescent sexuality just so booting, the new guy attack is based on the assumption is, of course much more about sex representations of sex and sexuality than about violence. Their objections to violence are peculiar and varied. They vary one from the other, but they talk about sex and violence and they complain about sex. Essentially, they also tend to equate them rather than the other, I think, important aspect is that the new right and a certain portion of the American public that is otherwise in the right center is convinced that the nonfiction and fiction, exclusive fiction part aspects of the mass media and particularly electronic media are controlled by the left with the avenue critique in its refinements by the political and the, the ideological or churchy, new, right, is all based on the assumption that the media, but there was a book published in the 60s before this happened, late 60s called the left leaning antenna. That's the whole the whole. It's a bunch of Tommy Jews from New York, who control mass media, the television radio industry, it's commonly used in Hollywood who ran the rest of it, it is only is in their interests to report on the news only in a certain way to criticize the government and so on. It's the assumption, therefore, is that if our morals are falling apart, it's because it's a vulgarization of Senators already very well, if our morals are falling apart, it's because Rhoda was a heroine in the mid 70s, rather than the Mother and Father Knows Best rather than say, Donna read that in the transition from Donna Reed to mod. Something anti family, anti religious, and Unknown Speaker 43:30 very destructive to the American way of life occurred. So then when we try to understand assess what the nature of the change was, from Donna Reed to wrote a we take into account not only our position on that tank, which I think is the crucial thing to get our act together, but also this critique from the right, which however flippy it is, and that's correct rest of our data, we also have to understand that it has power over the content of what is in those media. For 1968, has been based on the assumption that what you see is what you end quote, get that we recognized, I think correctly in ourselves and in our contemporaries, the personal social influences and media. But, and the difference between the women's movement of women a feminist critique and say, either a traditional or a new Marxist critique of media is precisely that the feminist movement always said, always identified explicitly with the audience. We didn't say those people out there being manipulated. We said, this happened to me. I saw myself in there although collectively nonetheless, we've always discounted the ways in which the media may have been resisted by us, at least we have resisted the ways in which we transformed what we saw in the media to use them in our own lives in a positive way, or at least in a in a way that kept us going. And I think we've always underestimated the way people who are not consciously political use the media, that assimilation is only one possible response. The other possible responses are transformation and resistance. And that we that a great deal more empirical study has to be done of how people respond to the experience of media, how they use it, specifically, with the caution, that I have become concerned about in recent years, particularly, that we do assume a certain kind of autonomy on the part on the part of the members of the audience, and what we do what you do about children as part of the TV audience, we're the mass media and I don't think TV I work on TV a lot, it really is the whole the whole media audience, to what extent children are capable of using media in the various ranges of ways including resistance. We also do need to study the role increasing the role of the industry and events, capitalists society, and how that how that socio economic role affects the content of what is immediate, what the media are, and what is and what is possible in the way of change within it. Okay. There is public okay, we didn't have we recorded. All right, we have an hour and some. So I would like to open it up, I'd like to see some extent to that structure about the old critique. And the the ways in which that critique is outdated, the ways in which it's confirmed or, and so on, and what the nature is, what's going on now. But otherwise, it's until it gets oppressive to discussion, I wish people would say who they are Yeah. Know what I said, I wish I wish I had said that. And I wish it corresponding to a reality. There is of course, alternative media, developed by feminists in in music, and branches of progressive radio, filmmaking, and so on. But what I thought more of was the ways in which people resist the message of the media that they are exposed to in the mass media. And not only feminists but the mass audience. What exactly are those shows Unknown Speaker 48:43 what other people like to speak to the social? I think it's more that the particular thing that gets me is that when divorce is justified, and explained, it's always in on the basis when it will be divorced with our children. It's on the basis of strengthening the family. strengthening those values and relationships on which the traditional family is supposed to be best. The notion being that a family is in fact a series of relationships rather than a material institution within which those relationships occur. So that a bad marriage is a bad series of relationships and what we do by getting rid of daddy. Which, as I say, objectively I have no quarrel with is is to strengthen those things that are good about the family. Rather than saying we're making a new kind of thing here, and that there are possible new kinds of things that that human beings can make. When you think about A program like one day at a time, which is about a divorced woman raising adolescent daughters by herself. That situation has an extraordinary range of potential about relationships among women and new kinds of things that could be happening. That is. And I think that program fulfill potential that I didn't even know it had. Its initial in its initial season, nonetheless, it is very strong on reiterating the value explicitly the value that the family is, it's what's important. And I think even more, and so probably, where there aren't any families, where it's all a tissue of serial monogamy with cheating on the side. And at the same time, we are constantly the explicit message, whatever underlies it, is that the family is important. And marriage and keeping the family together is important and realistic. And most trustworthy human relationships exist within the context of the Unknown Speaker 51:17 lesson. My name sounds on graduate student, I do work on women's magazines, and Unknown Speaker 51:29 I really liked what you said about the humans critique, of course, there wasn't so many trends towards both the subject themselves. You're talking about foreign content, and then only talking about content? Precisely because I think that we need to be rigorous about always talking about the formal structure of any given entertainment, and especially in relation to advertising, that we can never talk about a soap opera, except as it leads to a specific series of ads. Unknown Speaker 52:10 Would you say something more about that? No, I think you're absolutely right. And correct me to what I did. But would you say something specific about soap opera and and Unknown Speaker 52:20 I have to confess, I don't watch a Unknown Speaker 52:25 terrible thing to say. Unknown Speaker 52:30 I need to I think the other thing is that we can't generalize too much, we have to be very careful about generalizing. But we have to understand that it's a six reason class segmented market. And that in fact, cable TV, sort of the newest adventure in the entertainment industry, and or the marketing industry enables it to be that much more segmented. And she was really doing the film care home market research about what your audience is going to look for these and have exactly the work in terms of their entertainment desires, and what will be most effective. In terms of hypothetically in relation, so, because I really don't watch them, because I'm busy. I think that a set of expectations are a set of never fulfilled within the formal narrative of the soap opera, and our effects are filled with the very condensed narrative of the average. And so, all those sort of delayed desires are finally sort of encountered and resolved within the Unknown Speaker 53:35 certainly the fan the complete family, in the perhaps transformed hip patriarchal family, but with the woman in the home, and they and, and with, with continuity of the family exist in those in those soap opera ads, which are of course selling domestic products, so Unknown Speaker 53:58 discontinuously that is, continues there. And Unknown Speaker 54:05 one of the things that generally interesting about television form is the fact that you are expected to be able everybody whatever their level of intelligence is better be trained to be able to understand a several ring surfaces narrative that way that the basic narrative of a half hour program takes 24 minutes, there's six minutes for commercials and each and each commercial, Greg may have more than one commercial. So that you're being told especially the stories and you're expected to be able to to understand the conflict resolution over which which product gets your dishes brighter, at the same time that you are concentrating on the longest story of whether the daughter who ran away from one day at a time is going to get back and it will this is this is this this continuity is taken for granted except that Sesame Street trains you helps you learn how to do it One of the brilliant pieces of that, brother. And as I say, brother, Frankie Goldstein, is about this ministry. And the way it teaches you to be Italian. Unknown Speaker 55:11 American totally off the wall. But isn't that one of the seductive aspects of a soap opera to the woman watching in that it parallels to some degree the rhythm of her life, much more than watching a carefully plotted drama, that she would have to attend to a half an hour an hour that would allow her the opportunity to unfold in terms of feeling and intellect and arrive at some kind of new idea or image or vision. Unknown Speaker 55:48 Certainly the the pace also accommodates the fact that many people don't, women don't get to sit and watch it continuously, but are literally in and out of, or doing some other kind of domestic service like that anyway. And what happens, I think, typically is that a woman will have one show that she calls my story. That's the one that the language of drug addiction is used. And word soap opera is not used by people who watch them a lot. But story is, with the content of the word story is to the people who call it that I'm not absolutely certain. But how much fiction is acknowledged in a story. But it's my story. That one is the one I watch. And people use the language that I got hooked on that one. And then they watch other ones intermittently as they come to us they do Unknown Speaker 56:40 the best to watch recovery or retire. Now, Unknown Speaker 56:46 do you have any statistics? Unknown Speaker 56:48 Well, the thing is, it's not so much who watches it, but to whom they're addressed. I wish I would do this at the other end of the week, I'm going to be watching them tape Ryan's Hope, and I hope to speak to people make line so. But the point is that retired people don't buy those products in the that are advertised in anything like the amounts that people in what in the US for ages from 18 to 49. Do and they are for trains Unknown Speaker 57:26 because they're doing the great fantasy Media Watch influencing programs. Unknown Speaker 57:31 Sure. The point is that the Gray Panthers have to do that precisely because the people who run the media have incredible contempt for all people. And one of the reasons they do is because they don't buy as much as people with growing families. Older people don't have to buy as much in the way of these domestic products and their, their brand loyalties tend to be more fixed and also discarded by the culture. Sure, so that the effect in those domestic things the younger woman always knows better than the older woman, the mother or the mother in law, except when the product is the only one where the old fashioned way is considered the better way. But whereas the the mother and the mother in law can never possibly know, from 45 years of cleaning a floor, what cleans the floor, she hasn't kept up with technological advance. The new product might actually clean the floor better, I don't know. But the point is that she that there was incredible contempt expressed in those in those things. More or less, Unknown Speaker 58:37 there are hundreds of 1000s of people that don't watch them even when they have access to them because they're so negative. Unknown Speaker 58:43 That's one of the one of the forms of resistance, by the way, is not watching. That's not necessarily gonna make it you it's the to some extent the approach of the ostrich depends what else you're doing. Unknown Speaker 59:04 And as a sociality knows, that this desire theory, and not just description. I'm not tuned into communications research very much, but I was just listening as you were talking. And I got the impression that you have you end up with this like cultural hegemony kind of thing you end up with, like you says, the spouse is more of the same institutions and ideology, and it's always white, male norms that come across their interpretations of society. And then you spoke about multinationals, and I was thinking about this as an example of this. He said there was cloned TV programs like play off one another and look at that in parallel, parallel to the third world people. You know, when they go in, it's always very slow and steady because regardless of the country, the government and then you start talking about the history of the church Engine kind of women presented, you know, down the road or whatever. And I was wondering, from an organizational point of view, like I'm in the belief system that the people who write and produce these programs talk from their social location in the largest social studies. It's the only ones that are put into the TV into the programs. And I was wondering if anybody knows of any research done from an organizational organizational viewpoint, that there's changes in people over the years is there like real changes of people who sit in these positions of power as far as who gets to put work as far as what goes on TV? The production of the sociological Unknown Speaker 1:00:51 one way? That could be I don't know the answer, I, one place one could find the answer with the organization of women who are media workers. Most of their effort has been based on trying to get women into decision making positions, not necessarily for to do anything there that we would be interested in seeing them do. But that's, I think it does depend on the on the organization. But one aspect then of the social description of the individuals has to do with their sense, of course, certainly want you to want to another place you see it is who comes out in front of the microphone and tells you the news. And the difference over the last 10 years of what color and what sex they are around the country, on the local level is is, is interesting. But again, the question of what content that has, meaning it has is something very different. Unknown Speaker 1:02:01 I don't feel very well informed about this. But in the recent issue of the cellphone news, Brian Winston, in his TV column was commenting on history. What is the history. And I had, I've only watched it once. And I have very mixed feelings about what I have to say is not important. But you mentioned Well, not really isn't at the stage with me. But he mentioned the producer hellscape foods, it's a woman. And that she also was involved in two other programs, which seemed also the, in some way breaking out of some stereotypes. And you might want to get a hold of that. I wish I could be more specific. But he's a very, very sharp critic. Unknown Speaker 1:02:50 You know, when you ask that question, all I could think of was how the, the 1974 revolution in Portugal came about through the military, because the social basis of the officer class cast had changed in Portugal, because in order to keep down, keep hold of the colonies in Africa, they had to increase the size of the army. And I had to admit a whole lot of people from essentially lower middle class and upper working class backgrounds to the officer cast. And those people eventually created the coup. This is an extraordinary simplification of what happened in Portugal. But the thing is that the I suspect that the need to maintain an ideological hegemony doesn't mean the same. And who gets into the into positions of power in the mass media. Unknown Speaker 1:03:44 I wasn't, when I first decided what workshop I was going to choose. I realized, as I said, here that I had a particular idea of what media meant. And part of it came from my contact with it. I'm a medical student, and I didn't have time to watch television. So I read the newspaper a lot. And one thing I realized from what you've talked about is that I can analyze things that are written because I have the time to reread them. But one thing that's very potent is that television, particularly, particularly news programs on television, is that there is no fixed form that you can examine. I'm mystified by how you can analyze television programs. Here you go for Where is there a fixed record of who has the access to information that's on media, I can go to the library and find back pages of newspapers, but I can't recapture that ad that I saw with that program that I remember it or discuss it with anyone else because it was just that a moment. Unknown Speaker 1:04:52 You can't if you're a student of it, but you can't. You can't waive it at your friend in the middle of an argument. Unknown Speaker 1:05:00 I can't even Yeah, as an outsider to media study, know what access there is to libraries records Unknown Speaker 1:05:11 in this very city there is. There's the the Paley Museum, which is, has got all that stuff. There's the Library of Congress in Washington is Vanderbilt University, which has all the news broadcasts for dating back from now on. But for some of them several years back now Unknown Speaker 1:05:29 one of the points that I'm making those two points, a large part of the audience doesn't ever analyze, or have the opportunity to analyze what they see, because there is no way that they can never integrate what they've seen or analyze it, there is no fixed form. So I was wondering, Unknown Speaker 1:05:50 what that fits in with what you said about, about the necessity of talking about the relationship of the form to the influence on people. And that's the, the fact that it takes place through time, and then disappears, is an important aspect of that. And put your hand up, what do you want to? Unknown Speaker 1:06:14 I was thinking about this question, too. I linked it to my experiences, changes in media that happened at around the election. And I realized I was very frustrated, not to have certain kinds of left analysis of media that will tell me exactly the history of that shift. And the way we talked about it, is different terms. How did the Cold War rhetoric react so fast? Where did the words come from? What literally, and you know, as an English professor, like I was trying to figure it out? Was it memory was it instructions? Did were there changes in the staff? I really wanted that moment, there was some left media analyst to, to explain to demystify such a massive shift. Because the shifts you're talking about are, I think, probably happened over time. And it's probably harder to identify what staff people moved into what positions that we made a certain kind of shift possible, but not Unknown Speaker 1:07:18 Yeah, or not. Not only that, though, it's that the ideology of the mass media about social change is that it's a fact of nature. Not that it's something that has contradictions and struggles in it. And of course, the media themselves are regarded as almost as phenomena of nature in the society at present. One of the difficulties in talking to undergraduate students very often that media is set to learn to look critically at the phenomenon with all the difficulties that you were talking about, of how to how do you how do you learn to look critically at it begins with the assumption that it's something that to criticize, which which we have and not everybody does. And that's that, that within television, for instance, change those that that aspect of social change that they have decided to accept and integrate and package for us is then not comment. But it's not commented on. The Mickey Mouse Club has been revived, revived. It's no less significant than the regular regular letting being the president. Again, Mouse club now has black and Hispanic kids on it used to have only white kids. Nobody explains to us in any way Oh, since you can also see revivals as the original. How come? What happened? How come there are now it's just now properly integrated? And they all sound the same, but some of them are black? or Hispanic? Unknown Speaker 1:08:52 Well, the question I was asking maybe there's a lead and maybe there was a change in the code. But I would like to know is did did any Carter Democrats get fired? And who fired and, and and who hired the other people? And I mean, that's a that's a question. I don't know the answer to it Unknown Speaker 1:09:13 doesn't lead and doesn't follow. Unknown Speaker 1:09:14 And maybe the Carter Democrat is a person who would a kind of a kind of watered down liberalism did that to the Mickey Mouse Club, what will happen to the next level of understanding how it goes on? I even hard to get it to demystify it for me, I find it very, you know, visible a blank wall there, which is the surface of the media. And I really understand where the decisions come from. And I understand that the President and his parents, I do understand more about how what comes to me than I do about how that Cold War rhetoric suddenly appeared. You know, in its in its old form, just like waiting Unknown Speaker 1:10:00 So the thing is, I think it was latent rather than that then revived. Unknown Speaker 1:10:06 That was was puzzling mean issue of how to get a grip on the immediate one issue is the analysis and how do we prepare for it? But then another issue is technology. Why is it not? I mean, there is a technology for getting a hold of it, which is Betamax. And this is not something that I would have always thought about much You said this semester when I saw it, maybe projects to my class and festival, but I asked them to look at movies, you're looking at soap operas, or whatever. And they said, Well, if we look at movies, and we look at movies on television, and I said, Well, I don't look at TV movies, but if there are other movies that are shown, so well do we have to watch the movies at the time that they're shown and I said very maximum working class students will have access to this technology and so it's a sort of simple simple thing, but in terms of the record, in terms of possibly making a record and then having something to look at by means of which you could begin to work towards an analysis there is a technology although most of us are familiar with. Unknown Speaker 1:11:19 i Some people may have heard me say to the woman from audiovisual who was here at the beginning, when I asked for videos where machine to show a videotape the Garner Women's Center, imply that I was trying to set up the space shuttle and I had a feel I wanted to show you a film called Glamour girls with 1942. As I have it on the on, which is a piece of which you can see in the film will oftentimes with Rosie the Riveter, but it's a great movie. It's 10 minutes long. It's wonderful government propaganda film, but it I have it only on videotape. Okay, now there's a million people want to talk. Unknown Speaker 1:11:58 I want to know one thing. And then as we get Unknown Speaker 1:12:06 through control of the Unknown Speaker 1:12:08 media, it just boggles my mind. For the longest time, why do we give over the word proline? Which makes this definition? Unknown Speaker 1:12:22 Oh, what are some small majority? Unknown Speaker 1:12:25 All of these things we accept and use Aircel? I've heard that no, the majority, I feel that we're the majority. And I don't see why we fall into that trap. So they wind up with all that sounds so right. And we sound so long. And if I could get that answer that happy, I don't even care about having my own TV program. Particularly because I think that's a basis for thinking and acting. In other words, I want you to walk with a laugh and drafted on and something saying I am pro life, they kind of beat to death. But still, I would like to know what the thinking is for people. If some people could respond to that. I don't know myself. None of I have a specific response. Unknown Speaker 1:13:16 There was a very interesting moment here. Tuesday luncheon series on the corner students it's an interesting. Anyway, she spoke about a very, very sophisticated co opting of those terms from the feminist movement before the the AMO minority agreement emerged. And one of the things she talked about was that they are using a sophisticated analyst analysis of media, stereotypes of buzzwords that that pick up on a certain tone and that can be used not only to identify an entire group of people, but they can immediately point out their symbols and their ideology and in reverse what they actually are, in terms of what most Unknown Speaker 1:14:03 people so would it be effect is it really my question for us to just move buttons and say, We are the majority Unknown Speaker 1:14:12 it says tomorrow but it simply says the Moral Majority is neither a bumper sticker to the point is there are certain of those things that many of them that they have control or there were a few that don't actually get what but as you say it's a sophisticated series of techniques to fulfill various things that they don't spread the spring full blown from the head of Jerry fellow. Unknown Speaker 1:14:41 I'd like to say that it's not only a sophisticated, subconscious answer to your questions at all of us. It sounds terribly, say no, the best advantage we just all be very, very conscious of the way we use them and say the so called or something of that sort, I mean, really, the words as they come in as all time, Unknown Speaker 1:15:06 and stop and look at him in Unknown Speaker 1:15:09 question and raise an eyebrow or something that's very Unknown Speaker 1:15:14 consistent, but you'd be surprised how it shifts. And all of a sudden, they stop and Unknown Speaker 1:15:19 they start looking at words a little bit more consciously. That's really I just stepped in. And I really wanted to comment on I was interested Unknown Speaker 1:15:30 enough to talk about newspapers, or movies. And I'm wondering if that's indicative of the relatively minor role in play on the whole across the Unknown Speaker 1:15:41 the other point I wanted to ask about is, is there a kind of resistance that can be done with youngsters, I gather, there are some programs that are beginning or some school programs that are beginning to teach children who were critical about television ads, and so forth, is that maybe an error to where a lot can be done, it's not completely divorced from wise person, if logical analysis can overcome some of these or or bring out some of these very subtle stereotypes and norms. And so these are some of the constraints. Unknown Speaker 1:16:20 And so the first thing about not mentioning, I cut out a whole lot about movies in the interest of being able to have discussion, I think, interesting changes. And interesting notions about limits of change, how they can be seen from movies, not only movies about women, look at all the all of a sudden we have working women and working explosively working class women in Hollywood movies, organizing things. What's, what's positive about that? And where are the limitations? What, what doesn't happen? And why does it happen? And how much of that is the cloning effect. But I think it is relatively less important. Know what goes on in Hollywood, how it films than what goes on and television because of the size of the audience. And the phenomenology of television as a medium is that one of the formal aspects, if you will, of television is the fact that people see it. The vast majority of times in their homes, that you're watching stories about the family, surrounded, typically by your family. That's why I talked about transformation, the way people use it in their lives, the way it affects your interactions in your own family, that we the television, more than any other art form, the high culture of popular culture, tells us stories about people working. And people watch television as one of the ways of reproducing their labor power to be able to go back to work. That is, that affects the content, not only what they give us, but what we get out of it. And that all of that is important. It's for that reason that I concentrate on television, but it's also why it's the most pervasive mass medium, I think newspapers specifically are increasingly less important because there are fewer of them, and fewer people who who regularly read a newspaper at all. And far fewer, far less competition among newspapers, in even in major cities, much less in smaller places. It's however, I mean, I don't mean to dismiss the print media at all. And particularly, not only newspapers, but mass circulation magazines, women's magazines, confession magazines, and popular literature. The whole new genre of popular literature addressed to women or conveying information about women, or both, and all of which have to be looked at about children. I would love to hear what other people have to say about children and resistance to media. I have a profound personal commitment to this. One of the ironies of my presence here is that if I weren't here talking about resisting needy women resisting media and the contradictions around that, which is what the dialectics in my title are back, I would be home, struggling against the fact that they have fixed the television set in my son's nursery school. After 14 month I thought it didn't work, but they didn't use it. Turned out they didn't have the money to fix it. They fixed it in every afternoon. I watched Sesame Street. And I have we had been very clearly informed that we are the only parents who object that we are the only parents who object and that the I don't know if this is true, we are told and we've been made to feel as if we are All members have some extremely peculiar sect that doesn't, you know, with the way the Jehovah's Witnesses were treated when I was in school, you know, because they didn't stand up and salute the flag. And, and this is in a radical, explicitly cross cultural, interracial progressive childcare center. So anybody has any idea? I mean, I think that does, Unknown Speaker 1:20:33 to some extent classes. And I think one of the, one of the ways in which you tried to productively use television was to help it alleviate the fact that they were doing two to three jobs all at the same time, and that this would take care of the child is loving our kids in front of the TV. And, and so there are lots of reasons why other people who see it happening in a daycare center childcare center, aren't going to resist because it's what they do. For large amounts of time, and that I think, we can simply dismiss women on the right, who are attracted to some of the Moral Majority arguments against TV, because what they're coping with is the fact that they know they have to entrust their children to TV, they just can't proceed with their lives otherwise, and that they don't want. Knowing that essentially, they're helpless to control what their kids are being exposed to. And that they have lots of good reasons to want to resist some of the kind of blatant kids sexuality and violence that the kids are being exposed to starting at age three, etc. And that they don't have the time to sit down. I mean, I think that we do need to use QTR and Betamax, we do need to have with kids. And we've ourselves classes in how to watch TV as in how to read a book, and learn how to develop a vocabulary of analysis and how to critique what we're watching. For that for lots of people, they don't have the time to do that, and their kids are watching it unchecked. Unknown Speaker 1:22:04 And in fact, being encouraged to. Unknown Speaker 1:22:08 It's true, how children are affected by children. And it's very important, I think, for parents, and for outsiders to be aware to preschool in general, is still malleable. Unknown Speaker 1:22:19 And that's what I can't Unknown Speaker 1:22:24 afford to avoid. And they come in and we said we're gonna make a name for the group, and it's Superman, that friend superheroes. But as soon as you offer them alternatives, the next thing and it doesn't take long for that to be out of you. What I feel is that children are still in that in the state that they offer them viable alternative and creativity that as as they get older and exposed to television, it's going to affect them. But we have to remember that it's going to be difficult to affect the changes of programming and television, or work the channels around us how we have an influence on what you what you offer to a child that kind of combat. Unknown Speaker 1:23:05 We just want to address the issue of editorial policy and and how it's affected by economic sanctions against the various patients because they're used to the commercials. There must be a Unknown Speaker 1:23:20 policy shift. Well, we can see it in the fact that these that the new right and particularly when it is new, right, is able to talk about their power over media, meaning the power of protests mean with if you don't withdraw this, we won't watch it. Watch television, no, which means that you can sell your time on the basis of how many people are going to be exposed to the commercial, not for the necessarily for the CALVIN KLEIN JEANS, but for the other ones with the dishwashing product or the or the perfume or the automobile with the or the long distance telephone call. So there is that kind of pressure functioning otherwise, there were all kinds. There's a big literature on mass media and specifically on television as a business. Ranging from Les Brown, to Herbert Schiller, specifically discussing the economic aspects and how you know how cases some of them have funny stories. You know, that in the 50s in a program about the concentration camps, they couldn't say that the Nazis used gas because there was a gas company or utility companies sponsoring that one is he was also in Woody Allen's films of France. The they were lots and lots of kids. People can't be shown sick people. People can't be shown smoking the cigarette on cigarette one when they were tobacco company sponsoring thing that people can't smoke. Look to the right people can ever cough, smoke a cigarette, it was a whole, a whole range of things like that. There is what's documentation of that, in terms of the other factor that I've been bringing up the question of changes, and where they you know, where they happen and where they stop, have specific relationships of economic pressures on the industry, to what kinds of changes you can represent and not, but how Norman Lear got to include a homosexual couple on hotel Baltimore. back six years ago or so was by showing the network the statistics on the average income of gay male couples, as an audience that was not being explicitly addressed at all. And it's not because you were going to sell them gay products in the interstices between the stories and adobo, but the fact that gay people buy things, that they live in apartments and have houses, and that if you have two working male adults in your household, in fact, no children. In fact, you could do a certain degree of a luxury consumption. Network. I don't know there are other people better qualified to speak to that than I am. Unknown Speaker 1:26:35 In relationship to the Brooke Shields, and I spoke to a vice president NBC and she told me that they took their is or because people started to write in, they were not people who were seemingly from the so called Moral Majority, but they were people who had read Ellen Goodmans column who had read some of the feminist columns. And this is very exciting. Unknown Speaker 1:27:00 They their ability Unknown Speaker 1:27:01 to say these are terrible, and take them off. So that I think maybe there is an interconnection between what happens on television, and I'm from New Directions for women, which is a feminist newspaper. And, you know, we are constantly trying to raise consciousness can give people the right folks to write in and say, We protest. And they do listen, I mean, that's the point, that the, this woman from NBC that they are responsive to people writing in, it seems that the Moral Majority, we don't. Unknown Speaker 1:27:36 Now there are reasons why we don't some of it is that in that a lot of our critique is so general, that to write in over one thing. I mean, it's hard even to put it into words postcard. And also that it is it does have to do with our sense, some of which is accurate, and some of which may be exaggerated about ideological hegemony and hegemony hegemony, actual power, what kinds of effects influence we can have