Televising 9/11 and Its Aftermath: The Framing of George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Politics of Good and Evil

For most of the four days following 9/11, TV viewers around the world were mesmerised by unthinkable images. Television brought home to Americans especially the polarising effects of the post-Cold War world, including the backlash of Islamic fundamentalism and the imminent threat of future terrorist attacks. A formulaic narrative quickly emerged; ordinary police and firefighters took the lead as America’s national heroes, while Osama bin Laden and the rest of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rose up as villains. On September 12, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush gave voice to this mythic small-screen storyline as “a monumental struggle of good and evil.” This chapter considers the ways in which television portrayed the major events of September 11 and its aftermath. It examines Bush’s main televised responses and the ways his administration’s faith-based foreign policies were initially framed on TV. Bush’s evangelical Christian background is examined, as is his subsequent political vision for waging war on terrorism. Finally, representative telecasts, broader programming patterns, and general viewing trends during the first six months following the attacks are surveyed and summarised, as are the longer-term consequences of framing the global media event of September 11 in terms of good and evil

Updating the Standard for the Next Generation of Electronic Media Historians

Broadcasting as a field of study is at least 75 years old. Part of the discipline’s folklore has it that Edward R. Murrow took the first radio announcing class ever offered in the U.S. at the then Washington State College in 1928. “It was called community drama, in order to qualify as an academic course,” explained Alexander Kendrick, one of “Murrow’s boys” and the initial biographer of the legendary newsman (Kendrick, 1969, p. 100). Whether this offering was really a historical first is beside the point; what is important for our purposes is that Murrow’s formative educational experience in broadcasting was tellingly pre-professional in orientation, thus setting the appropriate example for the literally tens of thousands of students who followed in his fabled footsteps over the next half-century

Falling Man and Man Men

Mad Men’s opening credit sequence is full of obvious and hidden clues as to what this series is all about. The program is a stylistic hybrid merging elements of Hollywood movies and television programs from the late 1950s along with TV’s contemporaneous “quality” dramas of today. For example, the debt Matt Weiner and his creative team owes to Hitchcock is immediately apparent in this sequence with its pastiche of Saul Bass’s title work from Veritgo (the optical disorientation), North by Northwest (the iconography of the Manhattan skyline), and Psycho (the foreboding strings à la Bernard Herrmann). The use of a protagonist in black silhouette even suggests the 1955-1965 television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where the producer-director steps right into a black silhouetted profile of himself during the opening credits of that show

The Multiplex: The Modern American Motion Picture Theatre as Message

Gary Edgerton\u27s contribution to Hark, Ina R. Exhibition, the Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2001

A Visit to the Imaginary Landscape of Harrison, Texas: The Filmed Stories of Horton Foote

Gary Edgerton\u27s contribution to Film Literature Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1

Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age

From Ken Burns’s documentaries to historical dramas such as Roots, from A&E’s Biography series to CNN, television has become the primary source for historical information for tens of millions of Americans today. Why has television become such a respected authority? What falsehoods enter our collective memory as truths? How is one to know what is real and what is imagined—or ignored—by producers, directors, or writers? Gary Edgerton and Peter Rollins have collected a group of essays that answer these and many other questions. The contributors examine the full spectrum of historical genres, but also institutions such as the History Channel and production histories of such series as The Jack Benny Show, which ran for fifteen years. The authors explore the tensions between popular history and professional history, and the tendency of some academics to declare the past “off limits” to nonscholars. Several of them point to the tendency for television histories to embed current concerns and priorities within the past, as in such popular shows as Quantum Leap and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The result is an insightful portrayal of the power television possesses to influence our culture. Winner of the 2001 Ray and Pat Browne Award for Outstanding Textbook given by the Popular Culture Association Offers much food for thought in this highly visual age. —Alliance (OH) Review As an example of well-reasoned, original research, Television Histories makes an important contribution to the study of the medium. —Anthony Slide, Classic Images This book is even more timely and provocative because much of the material discussed is being rebroadcast now that digital television is opening even more new channels. —Choice An engrossing collection that slides the thorny subject of television, history, and memory under a microscope. . . . Digs deep into a contemporary phenomenon, and its many conclusions are right on target. —Film & History Helps those of us who care about history think more clearly about how television can shape historical thinking among our friends, neighbors, and students. —Florida Historical Quarterly Television Histories, a pioneer work, weaves an inspired and informed interdisciplinary analysis of television and history. The chapters are enlightening, readable, and entertaining; the editors and the authors have produced a work that enriches and strengthens the study of film and history. —Michael Schoenecke The stuff serious thinkers in a media age should read, mark and remember. —Rockland (ME) Courier-Gazette An insightful and important addition to the literature that sheds light on an often controversial subject for professional historians. —Southern Historian Most of the essays are likely to be of considerable value to any attentive student of television. —Television Quarterly Working from the thesis that people learn about history through television more than any other medium, Edgerton and Rollins look at what TV subliminally teaches us by what is shows and does not show. —Varietyhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_film_and_media_studies/1020/thumbnail.jp

The Essential HBO Reader

The founding of Home Box Office in the early 1970s was a harbinger of the innovations that transformed television as an industry and a technology in the decades that followed. HBO quickly became synonymous with subscription television and became the leading force in cable programming. Having interests in television, motion picture, and home video industries was crucial to its success. HBO diversified into original television and movie production, home video sales, and international distribution as these once-separate entertainment sectors began converging into a global entertainment industry in the mid-1980s. HBO has grown from a domestic movie channel to an international cable-and-satellite network with a presence in over seventy countries. It is now a full-service content provider with a distinctive brand of original programming and landmark shows such as The Sopranos and Sex and the City. The network is widely recognized for its award-winning, innovative and provocative programming, including dramatic series such as Six Feet Under and The Wire, miniseries such as Band of Brothers and Angels in America, comedies such as Curb Your Enthusiasm and Def Comedy Jam, sports shows such as Inside the NFL and Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, documentary series such as Taxi Cab Confessions and Autopsy, and six Oscar-winning documentaries between 1999 and 2004. In The Essential HBO Reader, editors Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones bring together an accomplished group of scholars to explain how HBO’s programming transformed the world of cable television and how the network continues to shape popular culture and the television industry. Now, after more than three and a half decades, HBO has won acclaim in four distinct programming areas—drama, comedy, sports, and documentaries—emerging as TV’s gold standard for its breakout series and specials. The Essential HBO Reader provides a comprehensive and compelling examination of HBO’s development into the prototypical entertainment corporation of the twenty-first century. Describes the complexities and ambiguities of the channel, its history, its unique business model, and its individual programs. Gary Edgerton and Jeffrey Jones have assembled a dream team of television scholars, some of whom have been paying attention to HBO since its debut in 1972. There are a lot of essay collections about television out there these days --Robert J. Thompson Director, Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture Sy This is a splendid collection of scholarship and critical thinking. The authors have managed to tame and corral a very important aspect of American media history and yet allowed it to remain daring and unconventional. --Terry Lindvall, author of Surprised by Laughter: The Comic World of C. S. Lewis In the ever-expanding universe of cable, satellite and digital broadcasting, the authors explore how HBO fights to remain the frontrunner in innovative programming. Essential reading! --Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, author of At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and Coeditors Edgerton and Jones have added a critical component to the study of television and American culture. The result is a fascinating book that is indeed essential reading for anyone with an interest in media history. --Mary Ann Watson, author of Defining Visions: Television and the American Experi Comprehensive and informative on a topic that deserves to be analyzed in-depth. HBO really did write an important new chapter in television history and has not received the scholarly attention that is its due. --Michael T. Marsden, coeditor of In the Eye of the Beholder: Critical Perspectives “An important assessment of the original programming HBO has created in the past few decades—how these programs are derived and what impact they have had. Recommended.”—Choice Because Edgerton and Jones offer such a thorough treatment of HBO\u27s programming, their volume is a useful addition to a growing number of books about American television in the \u27post-network\u27 era. --American Studieshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_popular_culture/1014/thumbnail.jp

Chalk, Talk, and Videotape: Utilizing Ken Burns’s Television Histories in the Classroom

Gary Edgerton\u27s contribution to OAH Magazine of History (Summer 2002) 16 (4): 16-22

Film Language and the Persistence of Racial Stereotyping in The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

Gary Edgerton\u27s contribution to the Journal of Contemporary Thought, Vol. 7