The Politics of American Media

Booker, K., From Box Office to Ballot Box: The American Political Film Account

• p160 ‘tendency in the american national pysche towards violent and hatred of the other’
• Americans as ‘saviours of the vietnamese people’
• The Green Beret ‘depicts the war in Vietnam as a simple, good vs evil struggle of good guy Americans against bad-guy Americans’
• p161 ‘Films made after the end of the war had come to grips with the fact that this American victory did not occur’
• ‘most American films had… glorified war’

Dimaggio, A. When Media Goes to War: Hegemonic Discourse, public opinion and the limits of dissent

• p12 New York Times committed to “ democracy protection”
• p165 ‘opposition to the United States is common in the Muslim world’
• p166 ‘ the field of media stdies focuses too heavily on the United States and Europe
• p168 ‘ corporate media ownership is inherently undemocratic
• p171 ‘western corporations are assaulting the cultural autonomy of poorer states

Kellner, D.,  Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan*(http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)

• p1 ‘the rise and decline of 60s radicalism, the failure of liberalism, and the rise of the New Right in the 1970s; and the triumph and hegemony of the right in the 1980s’
• 1960s ‘film transcoded the discourse of the anti war, new left students’
• “New Hollywood” eg Bonnie and Clyde
• ‘Hollywood film, like U.S Society, should be seen as a contested terrain… struggle of representation over how to construct a social world and everyday life’
• Conservative films: star wars, rocky, superman, close encounters of the third kind

Kellner D., Media Spectacle http://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/MEDIA118/celebrity+culture/Book_media+spectacle_douglas+kellner.pdf

• p vii ‘Media culture excels in creating Megaspectacles of sporting events, world conflicts, entertainement breaking news,’
• p3 ‘capitalist society seperates ’art from life’