NCJ Number
173835
Date Published
1997
Length
328 pages
Annotation
This is a book about the interplay between television news, racial identity, and social change.
Abstract
The book is a case study of the 1992 Los Angeles þriots.þ It attempts to determine the degree to which news media depicted a privileged view of events; how race affected media depictions of events and audience members' understandings of them; and conditions under which audience understandings of the depictions might constitute acts of resistance, contributions to efforts aimed at social change. This empirical analysis of audience reception develops a theoretical framework from which to examine the interaction of media and race in the process of determining meaning in events. The book contains audience ethnographies for each of 15 study groups from within Latino-identified, black-identified, and white-identified populations. It considers ethnographic and experimental findings in terms of concerns with racial subjectivity and debates about media power and audience resistance. The book argues that "raced ways of thinking" shaped reception experience for informants, and considers the social significance of these findings by analyzing the relationship between ways that informants find meaning in events and informant resistance. Further, the book suggests that findings of this study hold promise for documenting some of the ways race shapes the reception experience and how this experience, in turn, influences the construction and reproduction of racial subjectivities. Figures, tables, appendixes, notes, references, index