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The TurnWithin I 619
is the first decade of the twenty-first century. The homes of millions are
pulsating with some combination of advanced communication technolo-
gies: satellite dishes or cable TV, DVD and VCR players,desktop comput-
ers, laptops, modems, CD players, streaming video, cell phones, palm pilots,
instant messaging,voice mail. Supposedly we are now part of a "globalvillage":
all these technologies compose a new, electronic nervous system that radiates
out around the world, connecting people and cultures in unprecedented and
more intimate ways. A jolt to this nervous system in one part of world can now
be felt instantly halfway around the planet. Marshall McLuhan, who coined
the term "globalvillage"in 1964, argued that these new sensory linkages, these
"extensionsof man," were destined to bind the world together. But McLuhan's
assertion was not just about the flow of information. Embedded in it were
assumptions about the emergence of a new subject position, one enabled by
technology, in which people possessed (and welcomed) a more curious and
empathetic global awarenessof other cultures and people. "It is no longer pos-
sible," insisted McLuhan, "toadopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate
Westerner"because the new communications technologies have "heightened
human awarenessof responsibility to an intense degree."1
But if you were a resident of the United States in the early twenty-first cen-
tury, did television, with its technically enabled global reachand instantaneity,
hail you as a member of this so-called global village?Is the subject position this
webwork of satellites, videophones, cameras, and cables seeks to constitute a
globally empathetic one?After 9/11, when one would have expected the nightly
news programs to provide a greater focus on international news, attention to
the rest of the world was fleeting, with the exception of the war in Iraq.After a
precipitousdecline in celebrityand lifestyle news in the immediate aftermathof
the 9/1 1 catastrophe, a year later the percentagesof these stories in the nightly
news were back to where they had been pre-9/1 1. In 2004, despite the war,
the percentage of stories about foreign affairson the commercial nightly news
broadcastswas lower than it had been in 1997.2 In the print media, there has
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The Turn Within I 621
were likely to produce. And this, so far,has been true for McLuhans prediction
that communications technologies would create a global village.
American isolationism is nothing new, but it is striking that during this
particularperiod, when technological capabilities and geopolitical exigencies
should have interacted to expand America'sglobal vision, just the opposite oc-
curred. The turn within rests on four conditions: what I am calling the irony
of technology; the refining of narcissismand the economies of ethnocentrism,
both of which rely on narrativeand journalistic story telling conventions; and
the triumph of youth demographics. And while the turn within is a dominant
trend promoted and reinforcedby corporatemedia, it has not gone completely
uncontested, as this essay will later note.
I want to bring together several trends not usually discussed side by side:
the crisis in American journalism, particularlytelevision journalism and the
decline of the reporting of international news, the explosion in reality TV
shows in the immediate post-9/1 1 period, and the metastasizing of celebrity
culture. These trends put the lie to the supposed inevitability of faster, more
portable, less expensive communications technologies producing a global
village and the globally empathetic subjects who inhabit it. The relative ex-
pense of covering international stories and the ratings-drivenpush for "news
you can use" have exacerbated ethnocentrism and parochialism in the news;
the relative cheapness of producing unscripted television, in which everyday
people act out or compete with each other in apartments or boardrooms, has
exacerbatedthe self-scrutinizing narcissismof realityTV; and the comparable
cheapness and profitability of celebrity media have produced a glut of PR and
gossip that insist entertainment personalities are more important to focus on
than anything else.
There is a powerful and underappreciatedsynergy between these seemingly
disparate genres, between the ethnocentrism in the news and the narcissism
of so much entertainment media, that propels a further spiraling within in
American culture. By the spring of 2006 the realityTV boom was beginning
to attenuate as the networks in particularreturned to scripted programming,
yet it is worth noting the important ideological work reality TV did during
the immediate post-9/11 era. If television news, in particular,bears especial
responsibility for squandering its ability to enhance a global awarenessdespite
its ever-augmented capabilities to do so, reality TV, colonizing television as
it did between 2001 and 2005, insisted that the most productive way to use
communications technologies was to focus them on individual Americans in
confined and controlled spaces hermetically sealed from foreign peoples and
cultures.
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could result from the technology itself, it was hoped. So it is not surprising
that McLuhan began to enjoy a revived following in the 1990s.
Nonetheless, while most scholars will not go all the way with his "medium
is the message"aphorism, some of us have argued that a medium that denies
sight to its audience, like radio, might cultivate a different sort of cognitive and
psychic engagement than would television, or e-mail, which privilegesprint but
denies tone of voice and facial cues to its users. Hence the rise of "soft-deter-
minism." And despite the rejection of many of McLuhan'sassertions, the term
"globalvillage"has become such a part of our collective common sense that it
seems everyone takes it for granted:of course all these new media have created
a smaller world and enhanced mutual knowledge and understanding.
I am suggesting that "the global village" is a myth, at least in the United
States. There is much evidence to refute, or at least to seriously undermine,
the teleological conceit that increasingly sophisticated media technologies
have led automatically to increased awareness of and sympathy for other
cultures. On the contrary, one could argue that the great irony of all these
media extensions- satellite transmission, cable, video technology, even the
Internet- is that they have, instead, promoted even more isolationist and
ethnocentric views. I am particularly interested here in exploring how these
communications technologies, or, more accurately, the uses they have been
put to, have enabled the turn within in the United States. Drawing from the
notion of "soft determinism," we can see how portability, miniaturization,
low cost, the proliferation of media outlets, and speed of transmission, which
indeed could have promoted the "extensionsof man," have instead led to the
"implosion of culture."
This leads us to one of the conditions on which the turn within rests: the
irony of technology. What does this mean? While each communication tech-
nology does have its own individual properties, especially regarding which
of the human senses it privileges and which ones it ignores, that can shape
the transmission and reception of content in particularways, the economic
and political system in which the device is embedded almost always trumps
technological possibilities and imperatives. And ideological structures trump
technological systems.
Thus, communications technologies can often have the exact opposite
consequences of what we think and hope they might be. The great irony of
our time is that just when a globe-encircling grid of communications systems
indeed makes it possible for Americans to see and learn more than ever about
the rest of the world, Americans have been more isolated and less informed
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626 I American Quarterly
about global politics. Two historical moments stand out as absolute exemplars
of this irony. The first is in the 1980s when the refinement of satellite, cable,
and video technology came together to make McLuhans "extensionsof man"
a technical reality but a corporate problem. The second was after 9/11 when
these "extensionsof man"were most needed but had their capabilitiesinverted.
As a result, our media are not telescopes, searching outward, as McLuhan
insisted. They have become microscopes, trained inside.
Of course there is an important caveat here- one does not want to substi-
tute technological determinism with economic determinism, nor with a linear
declension narrative.There has always been resistance to the one-to-many,
center-to-peripherymodel of communications preferredby U.S. media indus-
tries. Insurgent uses of communications technologies have existed at least since
the early days of wireless telegraphy, and historically such rebelliousness has
become most pronounced (and destabilizingof the status quo) when corporate
control has seemed most complete. Ham operators in the first two decades of
the twentieth century sought to use radio for lateral communication among
peers and groups in defiance of top-down efforts aimed at military and cor-
porate control of the airwaves. In the late 1960s, counterculture disc jockeys
disgusted by the hypercommercialism and banality of AM radio developed a
new format and ethos, "underground"or "progressive"radio on FM. Today,
bloggersseek to circumvent the gatekeepersof the mainstreammedia to convey
alternativeaccounts of a variety of events, and everydaypeople broadcasttheir
own videos online. Of course, these oppositional uses are then often quickly
co-opted for corporate gain: witness the transformation of great swaths of
the Web into strip malls and the co-optation of Napster by services such as
iTunes. So corporate definitions of how to use media technology are never
final, uncontested, or complete; they are, however, dominant.
Nor do I mean to idealize some allegedly mythic past in which the airwaves
were filled with rich, impartial, informative international news. Scholars as
diverse as Herbert Gans and Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky docu-
mented the ethnocentric, anticommunist filters that framed the news about
the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.10The point is
not to compare today with a nostalgic past that did not exist. The point is to
compare what the technology permits with how it is used. Let'srememberthat
in 1963, at the height of the civil rights movement, television news expanded
from fifteen to thirty minutes so more stories could be covered in more depth.
A comparable decision to expand the nightly network news in the wake of
9/11 did not occur.
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The high point in the irony of technology occurred not long after McLu-
han's death in 1980. Just as outward-reaching media technologies continued
to proliferate in the 1980s and beyond, the three broadcast networks, facing
competition from the cable networks and pressure to increase their profit
margins, spun off their news divisions from their entertainment divisions
(which had previously partially subsidized the news), insisted that news divi-
sions become profitable and support themselves, and, thus, downsized them.
So, at the very same time- the early to mid-1980s - when the convergence
of new media technologies meant that the war in the Falklands, for example,
could be brought to viewers around the globe live via CNN - the broadcast
networks began cutting costs in their news divisions. All the networks scaled
back on international reporting and eliminated a host of foreign news bu-
reaus. International news was replaced by less expensive entertainment news,
mayhem news, lifestyle and other human-interest stories, celebrityjournalism,
and news about health and fitness. By 2000, new news segments devoted to
personal health, such as CBS's "Health Watch" and NBC's "Life Line" were
embedded news beats in the network news lineups. While those on the right
and the left continue to fight over whether the news is dominated by a liberal
or conservative bias, few have emphasized that the greatest bias in the news
today that emerged from these decisions is the narcissism bias.
Various studies of the news media have documented the turn within in
journalism. Between 1971 and 1982, foreign news in newspapers dropped
from 10.2 percent to 6 percent of what journalistscall the newshole.15In 1989,
only 2.6 percent of the nonadvertising space in ten leading U.S. newspapers
was devoted to international news. The percentages are dramatic as well in
the newsweeklies. In Time, international news dropped from 24 percent to
14 percent between 1985 and 1995, and in Newsweek from 22 percent to
12 percent during the same time period. In 1987 Timefeatured eleven cover
stories on international news; by 1997, that number had dropped to one.16
The decline seems even more precipitous in TV news. The time there devoted
to international news has, according to one study, dropped from 45 percent
in the 1970s to 13.5 percent by 1995, or, in other words, a whopping 70
percent fall off.17
In their critique of the news media, The News About the News, Leonard
Downie and Robert Kaiser,both top editors at the WashingtonPost,sat down
separatelywith PeterJennings, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw.They showed
each anchor a broadcast from his news show in the early 1980s, just as each
man had taken over as anchor. "This is amazing, truly amazing," they quote
Ratheras saying, responding to how few graphicsand how much international
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news the 1981 broadcast he saw contained. All three anchors affirmed that
they could never get that much international news in today.The networks had
cut back on international news by cutting bureausand foreign correspondents
that are deemed too expensive.18
Certainly there were some historical reasons for this. In the early 1970s,
the United States was still involved in Vietnam, still enmeshed in the cold
war, and those two factors alone could account for the increased coverage
back then. The cold war in particularprovided an ongoing, us-versus-them,
good-versus-evil story in which Vietnam and other international stories could
be framed. Likewise, in 1979, the Iranian hostage crisis "became one of the
most widely coveredstories in television history";it inauguratedNightline, and
Walter Cronkite, by then voted the most trusted man in America, closed every
broadcastwith an announcement of how many days the hostages had been in
captivity.19Its not surprising then, one might argue, that international news
coverage has dropped from such highs.
But certainly there'smore to it than this. And let's examine another set of
figurescollected afterthe events in the 1970s: "totalforeigncoverageon network
nightly news programshas declined precipitously,"from nearly 3,800 minutes
in 1989 to just over 1,800 minutes in 1996 at ABC (the leader)and from 3,350
minutes to 1,175 minutes at NBC.20 In 1988, ABC featured 1,158 foreign
bureau reports; by 1996, that was down to 577 reports. As media critics and
disappointed journalists themselves have pointed out, the ongoing press for
higher profits and lower costs continued to target international news coverage,
the most expensive news to gather despite the new technology. Given that, as
Garrick Utley reports, to send a correspondent and a production team plus
600 pounds of equipment to a new locale cost, in 1997, $3,000 a day plus
excess baggage fees, international coverage has come to be seen as an expend-
able expense. In addition, many network executives believed Americans were
completely uninterested in foreign news, so why bother?According to Mort
Zuckerman, editor in chief of U.S. News and WorldReport, and Maynard
Parkerof Newsweek,"featuringa foreign subject on the cover of the magazine
resultsin a 25 percent drop in newsstand sales."21Americans, the conventional
wisdom went, wanted "newsyou can use."
It wasn'tjust commercial pressuresthat undercut the possibility for a global
village; the entrenched narrativeand filmic conventions of the network news
also, with some exceptions, worked against constituting an empathetic global
village subject. If ideological structures trump technological systems, one of
the main ways that they do so is through dominant storytelling practices.
News routines in most international stories lead to people in foreign countries
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At the same time that industry decisions were blunting the "globalvillage"
capabilitiesof communications technologies, other industrialimperativesbegan
to privilege their narcissisticand domestic surveillancecapabilities.Two domi-
nant media trends in the firstdecade of the twenty-firstcentury, the juggernaut
of reality TV between 2000 and 2005, and the explosion in celebrity-based
entertainment and journalism magnified the importance of personality, the
interpersonal,surveillanceof behaviorand the body, and an even more insistent
consumerism. Video technology made shows such as COPS, AmericasMost
Wanted,and Rescue911 inexpensiveto produce;AmericasFunniestHome Videos
made the viewer the producers. MTV's Real World,which premiered in 1991,
pioneered in using video technology to record the everyday interactions and
relationshipmelodramasof a small group of people. But the turning point came
in the summer of 2000, when Big Brotherand Survivorpremieredon American
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and its storytelling frameworksdo not stand alone, they operate in relation to
others that dominate in the media. As viewers, we learn who we are supposed
to identify with, and who we are supposed to distance ourselves from and see
as alien through both genres.
Unlike how we view the long shots of groups and crowds on the news,
consider how we meet the participants in most reality shows. Of course there
are the seemingly "real"group dynamic shots in the boardroom or jungle or
apartment. But then the different participantsare shot alone, sitting in a chair,
talking to the camera, telling us their reactions, their judgments, concerns.
They are subjects of their own lives, with inner lives. The structureof the show
invites us to empathize with them, judge them, or both.
Having said that, however, let's also consider what is meant to stand for a
rich inner life on realityTV. What do the participants in these shows ponder?
Who dissed whom, who didn't wash the dishes, who seems sincere, who took
responsibility and who shirked it, who has the hots for whom. "She'sthe party
girl- sister I never had," opines one young woman on The Real Worldwhile
another offers the bracing observation that "we'veall been put here for a rea-
son." The inner lives viewers get to see consist primarilyof banalities, shallow
personal bleatings about other people's behaviors. Inner life here consists of
reactions and attitudes, in which you don't have to really know much of any-
thing except how you feel. Inner life here is not occupied by concerns about
the environment, world hunger, politics, philosophy, or the meaning of life.
So, in the overall televisual experience, as we move between news and reality
TV, we are invited to distance ourselves from people abroad and, instead, to
insert ourselvesdeeply into the interpersonalrelationsof a group of preselected,
mostly young, mostly white people whose major concerns are staged as highly
narcissisticand vapid.
The point is not to single out reality TV as the latest and possibly worst
example of television schlock. Rather, by exploding on the scene when it did,
between 2000 and 2005, and by insisting through its televisual and narrative
conventions that portable, barely noticeable cameras are best deployed, and
most effectively reveal the richness of human experience, when trained on
preselectedpeople in confined, often domestic spaces, realityTV served as the
validating pivot for the turn within in the news and elsewhere. The preferred
discourse of the whole genre is one that celebrates a determined isolationism,
a luxuriant self-absorption. It was the discourse of realityTV in particularthat
legitimated, after the initial aftermathof 9/1 1, a preferencefor the microscopic
rather than the telescopic properties of communications technologies.
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The turn within has not gone uncontested, nor is it a uniform turn. A
2002 poll conducted by the Pew ResearchCenter for the People and the Press
reported that 63 percent of respondents felt it was very important for the news
to cover foreign events and that interest in international news, especially the
Middle East, had increased since 2000. For college graduates, international
news had become a top news subject.26The business press, whose readers
require international news and information, provides this service to its audi-
ence. Blogs by soldiers in Iraq, freelancejournalists, and academics challenge
the superficiality or official line proffered by the network news. Especially
in the run-up to the U.S. -led invasion of Iraq, and during the occupation
and insurgency, e-mail Listservs have offered reports and commentary from
international news sources, and BBC.com reported a major increase in hits
from U.S. readers.The upstart network CurrentTV featuresstories by young
people using small digital video camerasto cover everydaylife in Iraq,danger-
ous methods of transport used by illegal immigrants into the United States,
and the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
Thus, the turn within has contributed, at least for a subset of the U.S.
population, to a hegemonic crisis for the mainstream news media. It is held
in widespread disregard,with viewers on the right and the left perceiving bias,
and many feeling they are not getting accurate or complete information.27So
despite powerful industry imperatives, the life span and dominance of the
turn within remains unclear, especially given the ongoing threat of terrorism
and the rise of other economies, most notably those of India and China, and
other nuclear powers, that may cause the spotlight to shift.
In this era in which the word globalization is used so constantly, and
profligately,and is linked to an automatic assumption that communications
technologies undergird the shrinking of the world, we need to address the
scopic capabilities of these devices, and analyze which political and economic
structuresencourage their microscopic versus their telescopic capabilities.This
calls, in part, for more policy analysis on our parts, more attention to political
economy, more linking of textual analysis with that political economy. And
the way state-corporatesystems interact with scopic technologies changes over
time, so historicizing these relationships is key.
For example, wars, colonial and postcolonial relations, economic relation-
ships, geographic proximity and form of government, from autocratic to neo-
liberal, all influence different societies to different degrees regardingwhether
the lenses of their communications systems will zoom out and let the world
in or zoom in and keep it at bay. In the United States, wars that involved large
sectors of the population, from the Civil War to World War II and the Vietnam
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Notes
1. Marshall McLuhan, UnderstandingMedia: The Extensionsof Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 19-20.
2. "The State of the News Media 2005," Project for Excellence in Journalism, online at Journalism.org
(accessed July 11,2006).
3. Survey available at www.nationaleeoeraphic.com/eeosurvey (accessed July 1 1, 2006).
4. David T. Z. Mindich, Tuned Out: WhyAmericans Under 40 Don't Follow the News (New York:Oxford
University Press, 2005).
5. The classic article here is Robert L. Heilbroner's "Do Machines Make History?" Technologyand Culture
8 (July 1967): 335-45.
6. Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith, "Introduction," in Does TechnologyDrive History?ed. Leo Marx
and Marrit Roe Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), xi.
7. Marx and Smith, "Introduction," xiv.
8. The flagship book here is TheSocial Constructionof TechnologicalSystems:New Directionsin the Sociology
and History of Technology,ed. Wiebe Bijker,Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1989).
9. Brian Winston, Media, Technology,and Society:A Historyfrom the Telegraphto the Internet (New York:
Routledge, 1998).
10. Herbert Gans, Deciding What'sNews (New York:Vintage Books, 1979); Edward S. Herman and Noam
Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
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11. Robert Stam, "Television News and Its Spectator," in Film and Theory,ed. Robert Stam and Toby
Miller (New York: Blackwell, 2000).
12. Susan J. Douglas, "Camouflaging Reality with Faux News, Clever Decoys," In These Times, February
13-19, 1991.
13. Garrick Utley, "The Shrinking of Foreign News," ForeignAffairs, March-April 1997, 4.
14. S. Elizabeth Bird, "Taking It Personally:SupermarketTabloids after September 1 1," in JournalismAfter
September11, ed. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allen (New York:Routledge, 2002), 145. See also Michael
Traugott and Ted Brader, "Explaining 9/11" in Framing Terrorism:The News Media, the Government,
and the Public, ed. Pippa Norris, Montague Kern, and Marion Just (New York: Routledge, 2003).
15. James F. Hoge, "Foreign News: Who Gives a Damn?" CJR, November-December 1997. The news-
hole is the amount of time or space devoted to reporting the news, as opposed to the entire paper or
broadcast, which also includes advertising.
16. W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion (New York: Longman, 2003), 14-15.
17. Hoge, "Foreign News."
18. Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, The News About the News (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2002), 111.
19. Melanie McAlister, Epic Encounters:Culture, Media, and U.S. Interestsin the Middle East, 1945-2000
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 198.
20. Utley, "The Shrinking of Foreign News," 2.
21. Hoge, "Foreign News."
22. Gans, Deciding What'sNews, 35-37.
23. Bennett, News, 34-35.
24. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, eds., Reality TV: Remaking TelevisionCulture (New York: New
York University Press, 2004), 3-4.
25. I am grateful to Amanda Lotz for this point.
26. "Public s News Habits Little Changed by September 1 1," Pew Research Center for the People and the
Press, online at people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=156 (accessed July 11, 2006).
27. See the Pew Center's Study, Media: More Voices,Less Credibility, at http://people-press.org/commen-
tary/display.php3?AnalysisID=105 (accessed July 11, 2006).
28. Thomas J. Misa, "Retrieving Sociotechnical Change from Technological Determinism," in Does
TechnologyDrive History?td. Marx and Smith, 1 15-41 .
29. Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephoneto 1940 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994).
30. See Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004).
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