The Making of a Media Empire

"The Making of a Television Empire"
from Paul Ginsborg's Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power, Patrimony


Also, from today's New York Times an article on the economic woes of leading French daily newspaper Le Monde. Please read the article for a good example of a major newspaper operating in a commercial context but organized according to very specific principles to safeguard values and principles that are not necessarily economic.

Le Monde Seeks a Financial Savior from the NYT June 2, 2010

+n.b. Apologies for the cancellation today. We will screen I Cento Passi on Monday so those who already have seen the film should definitely be in class tomorrow.

Public Service Broadcasting Systems

These are your reading for the first part of this week. Please concentrate your efforts on the concept of PSB (public service broadcasting), it's features, criteria and justifications.

from Humphreys, Mass Media and Media Policy in Western Europe
Chapter 3: Press Concentration in Western Europe
Chapter 4: European Public-Service Broadcasting System

Richard Collins, "'Ises' and 'Oughts': Public Service Broadcasting in Europe"
from Allen & Hill (eds), The Television Studies Reader (Routledge, 2004)



Around the issue of media regulation there is a big debate going on (mostly under the radar) concerning the concept of 'net neutrality' and the possibility of imposing specific rules on the internet and according to what aims and goals. Listen to this interview from NPR's Fresh Air program: Terri Gross interviews journalist Amy Schatz, who covers tech policy and the FCC for The Wall Street Journal. Schatz explains the conflicts between the FCC, Internet companies and telecommunications providers like Comcast and Verizon — and how their battle might determine what the future of the Internet will looks. This is a good place to think of how the decisions taken when organizing European broadcasting systems also determined the shape and look of what is in place today.

Link to audio podcast here. On this same page you can find, in a sidebar, links to a number of articles by Schatz covering the issue for the WSJ.
Link to interview transcript here.

European Society, Culture and Media

from Humphreys, Mass Media and Media Policy in Western Europe
Intro + Chapter 1: Press Freedom: The Free Market and the Development of the Modern Press
Chapter 2: Press Freedom and its Limits: The State, the Law and the Private Individual

from Williams, European Media Studies
Chapter 1: The European Media Landscape
Chapter 2: The Press in Europe

Film Theory: Postmodernism

To clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' this is Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" -- As you read it relate it to the screening of Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep and be prepared to discuss the film in terms of its postmodern qualities.

Documentary Film Study Guide

Here is the final exam study guide for the Documentary Film class. Very bare bones but I'm sure you'll find something useful in it. Exam format is the same as the midterm. Remember that it is cumulative and that there will be a question about Jon Else's Sing Faster. Find it here.

To alleviate exam crunch here's something for you all: Chuck Jones' What's Opera, Doc? (1957). Kill The Wabbit!

What's Opera Doc? | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com

Watch it on YouTube here.

Pop Music Study Guide

Here is the final exam study guide for Popular Music and Mass Culture. Very bare bones but I'm sure you'll find something useful in it. Exam format same as the midterm. Remember that it is cumulative. Find it here.

The Yes Men: Culture Jamming or Tactical Media

See the Rachel Maddow report on yet another wildly successful Yes Men hoax this time involving the US Chamber of Commerce and the revelation that the CoC was reversing its position on climate change policy and was promising to immediately cease lobbying against the Kerry-Boxer bill.The fake news conference was preceded by a fake on-line press release (Find that here.)

Note that the url to the press release is www.chamber-of-commerce.us while the real CoC website is at www.uschamber.com. Look around and you can see how The Yes Men operate in setting up fake corporate and government agency websites as part of their jamming tactics.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

More media repercussions. Here's FoxNews giving the news live on the air and then immediately retracting the story. Who said Fox does not fact-check?

Third Cinema, Third Theory?

Of all African film directors, Sembene is the first to confer value to images."
--Med Hondo

Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema
Med Hondo, What is Cinema for us?

If you are interested in reading a brief outline of the life, ideas and struggles of Ousmane Sembene: OUSMANE SEMBENE: THE LIFE OF A REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST


The assignment for your second and final paper will be handed out during class.

Documentary and Reality TV

Rodney King Video

Final article on the intersection of documentary film and Reality TV (Susan Murray, "I Think We Need A New Name For It: The Meeting of Documentary and Reality TV") here. Enjoy.

I Need That Record

ONE WEEK ONLY on Pitchfork.TV: Pitchfork TV will be streaming for one week only the documentary 'I Need That Record, a film released on Record Store Day this year concentrating on the decline of record stores. A part from the nostalgia factor this is a very good starting point to think through the issues that the music industry and popular music cultures have encountered in the past 15 years. The sections concerning the consequences of the 1996 Telecommunications Act signed by Bill Clinton as well as the post-Napster environment will allow you to complement the readings. Watch it NOW before it's taken off the site. The clip embedded below is the 'Telecom Act' bit. Find the entire film divided in chapters here.

The Democratic Right To Know

McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Ver. 4.0)

James Boyle from The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
Link above is for the whole book which Boyle made available through the Creative Commons License. You should read Chapter 6: I Got A Mashup.
If you don't want to download the whole book you can find a link to the annotatable online version of the chapter here.

Matt Mason - We Invented The Remix

Henry Jenkins - Interactive Audiences? The 'Collective Intelligence' of Media Fans

Aoki, Boyle and Jenkins - Bound By Law?
This is a comic book on copyright. Don't be fooled by it's form: it's a great read and I strongly encourage you to read at least the first 15 pages.
You can also find it free on-line from its publisher --crazy, huh?-- Duke University and The Center for the Study of the Public Domain in a variety of formats. You can also 'remix' it and you're encouraged to translate it. It's all here.

From The Cultural Resistance Reader: please have the articles in Section Seven read. The following articles from Section 8 are also required: Jordan on 'Reclaim the Streets'; Jason Grote on 'Revered Billy' and Ricardo Dominguez's 'Electronic Disturbance'

Bonus:

This is an old post from the blog where you can find a link to download Girl Talk's latest work, Feed The Animals.

Bonus reading for those interested in reading more on Jamaican music:
Dick Hebdige - from Cut'N'Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music

The Problem of Speaking for Others

Linda Alcoff, The Problem of Speaking for Others

Sheila Petty, Silence and Its Opposite: Expressions of Race in Tongues Untied

Julia Lesage, Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics


Jack Waters, Truth or Dare/Paris is Burning: Truth or Realness (from Jump Cut, no. 37, July 1992, pp. 72-73)

As promised, here's the article on This Is Spinal Tap and the satire on masculinity:
Carl Plantinga, Gender, Power, and a Cucumber: Satirizing Masculinity in This Is Spinal Tap

From Jack C. Ellis & Betsy McLane's A New History of Documentary Film
English-Language Documentary in the 1980s: Video Arrives
English-Language Documentary in the 1990s and Beyond: Reality Bytes

(Almost) Final Readings for Pop Music

Assuming that at this point you are (basically) all done with the Garofalo textbook, here are the reading assignments up to the end of the semester:

On 'co-optation':
Thomas Frank's "Commodify Your Dissent" here.

On Jamaican Music:
from Dick Hebdige, Cut'n'Mix here.

On Gender:
Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, "Rock and Sexuality"
Simon Frith, "Afterthoughts
"Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"
Find these articles here as a single PDF file.



On 'sub-cultures':
Here are the Dick Hebdige chapters from Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Refer back to the Punk: Attitude film screening.


On sampling, mash-ups and the 'postmodern turn':
Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold"
E Ann Kaplan, "A Postmodern Play of the Signifier?"
Negativland, "from Wired: Negativland Interviews U2's The Edge"

Also, to clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' please help yourself --in case you have not encountered it in your other studies-- to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"

There will be two further articles specifically on hip-hop culture and post-Napster music industry.

Feminist Film Theory

To accompany Welles' The Lady From Shanghai as well as Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle:

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
You can also find it in html format here.

Roger & Me: Ethics, Mixed Modes & Documentaphobia

Three articles to accompany your reflections on the formal and ethical aspects of Roger & Me including Pauline Kael's notorious trashing of Moore.

Pauline Kael, Melodrama/Cartoon/Mess from The New Yorker
Miles Orvell, Documentary Film and the Power of Interrogation
Matthew Bernstein, Documentaphobia and Mixed Modes: Michael Moore's Roger & Me