As Seen on TV: Health Policy Issues in TV's Medical Dramas

Explores how fictional television can shape public images about the state of our healthcare system and policy options for improving the delivery of care

Segmenting, Signalling and Tailoring: Probing the Dark Side of Target Marketing

Book description: Intense commercialism has been a perennial hallmark of the mass media ever since its inception and throughout the twentieth century the techniques and strategies of the dominant players in the world of media and advertising have become increasingly sophisticated, with the development of multinational media corporations and electronic media opportunities. Developments have been so rapid that scholars are only now beginning to come to terms with the full impact of media commercialization as a global phenomenon cutting across traditional cultural, economic, and social boundaries. Critical Studies in Media Commercialism brings together an impressive collection of essays that explore the growing complexity, range, and reach of media commercialism in today\u27s world. From the corporate conglomeration of today\u27s media giants to the effects of advertising on politics, society, and the individual, this collection provides a comprehensive and insightful critique of both the impact and the limits of media commercialism in the modern world

Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case

This chapter discusses the issue of physicians\u27 authority as seen in the film Dr. Kildare\u27s Strange Case (1940). The film centers on intern Jimmy Kildare (Lew Ayres), who learns the medical ropes in Blair Memorial Hospital, guided by Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore). The “strange case” of this film\u27s title begins when Gillespie assigns Kildare to work with Dr. Gregory Lane, a surgeon whose professional self-confidence has been crushed by a string of failed surgeries and resulting patient deaths. The chapter focuses on a scene where Lane confronts a patient with a skull fracture who refuses surgery; he ignores the patient\u27s wishes and goes on to perform the operation. The scene opens a space to discuss what a doctor\u27s authority is and how it has changed over the decades. Comparing past and present can generate a useful discussion about the contemporary nature of a doctor\u27s power in relation to his or her patients and the ethical boundaries of that power

Local Television: Producing Soft News

A reliance on prepackaged features and public relations sources, coupled with a desire for upbeat, visually interesting stories, results in a similarity of soft news across programs and stations, despite differing programming strategies

The Effects of Television on Children: What the Experts Believe

A national survey of mass media scholars was conducted to answer the question, What impact do you believe television has on children? The 486 scholars\u27 beliefs are provocative, indicate a disparity exists between published empirical reports and the personal beliefs held by scholars and suggests a research agenda for future mass communication research. Perhaps most interestingly, a negative relationship was observed between academic publication and perceived negative consequences of television

Audience Construction and Culture Production: Marketing Surveillance in the Digital Age

This study melds contextualist and resource dependence perspectives from industrial sociology to explore the implications that audience construction by marketing and media firms hold for the core assumptions that are shaping the emerging media system of the twenty-first century. Marketers, media, and the commercial research firms that work with them are constructing contemporary U.S. audiences as frenetic, self-concerned, attention-challenged, and willing to allow advertisers to track them in response to being rewarded or treated as special. This perspective, a response to challenges and opportunities they perceive from new digital interactive technologies, both leads to and provides rationalizations for a surveillance-based customization approach to the production of culture

Television Entertainment and the US Health-Care Debate

Some experts on the media say that entertainment can be more successful than news at providing insights into certain institutions, medicine being a good example. US television series that feature physicians as the central characters have been immensely popular. In the early series, dating back to the 1952 debut of City Hospital, the physician was an all-powerful hero working in a sparkling centre of healing, with medicine portrayed as a resource freely available to all. The programmes began to change in the 1970s. Plots centred more around the physicians\u27 personal problems than on the patients, but economic and health-policy issues were still rarely discussed adequately. In the end, what viewers come away with may lead them towards false expectations, and they may increasingly blame doctors for decisions that others make and enforce

Segment-Making and Society-Making Media: What Is a Good Balance?

From the introduction: In an increasingly number of societies, it is commonplace to talk about the movement away from a broadly shared media system to a much more fragmented media system. All agree that media organizations still have—and are expanding—the capability to lead a substantial percentage of earth’s humans to focus on particular events or ideas. The Beijing Olympics comes to mind. At the same time, though, most observers note that public electronic media also have the capacity to reach out to smaller and smaller segments of populations. Part of the reason relates to the large number cable and satellite channels available in many nations. They are often intended for one or another group, so that different parts of society gravitate to different channels. Recently, too, media companies have figured out how to target particular customized messages to individuals or small groups. So rather than reaching billions instantly with the same event, an organization can potentially reach billions instantly with message tailored distinctively to the segments (or niches) in which organization has placed them